Hey all! I last played No Man’s Sky when the Next update was fresh. Back then I had a lot of free time to put into the game, but it always felt like it was a game that you could play casually and still have fun.

Nowadays grad school has stolen the majority of my free time, and most of my regular games are so overwhelmingly large it never feels like I can play for an hour or two per day and still have a decent time. That being said, I’m looking for a new main game that’s more compatible with my hell schedule. Is NMS a game that could fit that bill, or should I continue my search? Thanks in advance for your time and consideration!! 💚

I’ve been playing Breath of the Wild lately (maybe I’ll actually finish it this time) and noticing how much more rewarding it is to gather ingredients and experiment with different recipes for cooking. The buffs you get just make it so much more worth the effort. In No Man’s Sky, out of hundreds of recipes, there are only really a handful of “buffs”. Most of them just replenish small amounts of hazard protection or life support, something which you can do easily and with better results without cooking. And don’t even get me started on how ridiculous Cronus is.

It’s clear that Hello Games put a lot of work into this feature so I think a proper upgrade to make it more worthwhile is in order. Here are some examples of various temporary buffs that can be added to cooking recipes:

Immunity to various hazards, with different recipes for each hazard type and varying durations.

Reduce the rate of stamina, hazard protection, jetpack, or life support depletion

Sentinels ignore you

predators ignore you

Increase mining beam yields

Increase total health/shield

Increase the chance of rare fauna spawning when dropped on the ground

Increase movement speed

Add your ideas in the comments

In addition to new buffs from consuming recipes and feeding fauna, we should be able to grow edible plants and raise noncompanion livestock in our bases. Some recipes might be a bit OP if we can just grow the ingredients so they might require rare ingredients that we need to go hunting for or take a high risk to obtain. But in general, adding new buffs and letting us grow more ingredients would, in my opinion, make cooking a more worthwhile endeavor in No Man’s Sky. What do you guys think?

I didn’t expect the plot of this game to capture my attention as it did, but it touches upon one of my favourite phylosophical topics. This game is very hard of phylosophy of existentialism and Nietzchean nihilism. It quite literally tackless the idea of death of god. But if Nietzche meant it in metaphorical way, on a sense of how one can find meaning in life where there’s no god, but No Man’s Sky takes a more literal approach. God is quite literally dying and you are faced with the idea of your own mortality and finality of the universe. Also, we find out that Altals is an AI that simulates the world, thus mirroring Nietzschean idea of ‘dead god’. We are not some beings created by a divine master with a plan, we are here just because we happened to be here. But in the case of Travellers, they were actually created by a diety with a plan, but their existance in the end is meaningless in a similiar way, because they’re nothing more than simulations in the mind of a dying machine. Here’s where the idea of Nietzschean ‘overhuman’ and nihilism comes in. The core idea of nihilism is belief in no god and the finality of your existance, it’s directed towards accepting the fact that you won’t be here for an eternity and that you should make peace with nothing that may come after. The ‘overhuman’ of Nietzsche is an individual that is capable of setting their own goals and morals, deciding for themselves what they should do with their life in the face of absense of a higher divine purpose. The main question of phylosophy of overhuman is how can one be happy in the world where there’s no higher purpose and no life after death? How one can fight against existential terror that comes with understanding of you own mortality? Even Atlas faces their own finality and are terrified of it. This is the core idea of No Man’s Sky and it is fascinating!