I know the 20,000 per save, and 3,000 per base is a technical limitation to stop devices that are running weaker hardware from having FPS nightmares – but why.

It’s quite possible to optimize an engine to allow such a limitation from not being an issue – whether that be rendering logic, or performance logic, or LOD management. It will take time, but it’s quite honestly the most important NMS update I think they could ever do – for one reason alone.

It allows the game to evolve past the size of the NMS development team.

NMS is fairly empty at this point in time, and even the factions that exist have “official planets”, but they’re not really cities. Imagine heading to a player faction’s capital city – and being able to see a city the size of Coruscant. Players have already shown strong indication of collaborative base building, management, etc. as mechanics that they do outside of the game.

Imagine stumbling onto a player settlement, or even starting your own with a couple friends. It would massively change the dynamic of the game. NMS is a game that is considered “a mile wide, but an inch deep”, but this sort of player created content generation allows players to create their own depth. Paradise planets become far less consistent, when one of them may have a massive player landmark that they generated for others. A pit stop, or a giant Gekk Statue.

I want that more than diverse planets, or another update that adds content. Still do those things, but open the flood gates for players first. That way we’re not stuck waiting for content and putting the NMS team on the clock. The team can generate content in collaboration with the community – indirectly or directly.

I’ll close with a personal story. When I started playing this game with a friend of mine, we heard of the Galactic Hub – and their capital planet. At this time, we didn’t know about the build limit and having not wanting to ruin the surprise; we didn’t look up any photos. It became our goal to journey to what be this massive player created city. Eventually we made it; and it was just…underwhelming. We completely estimated picking up shop and moving to the Galactic Hub in the city; and building and adding to it. Maybe found our own settlement. Unfortunately we had to pad our expectations. The gameplay loop broke for us; what was the point? We saw the planet types, and we mined the resources; but we couldn’t exactly build with these resources. Once we hit our limit we were done.

Imagine it was different.