This is an unpopular opinion by me. It’s OK if you don’t agree. Please be civil in the comments. Also I’m on mobile so apologies for any strange formatting.

TLDR: We should not actively ignore griefers, we should instead think and talk about why and how bases are getting griefed, and how Hello Games could implement systems to better prevent it in the future.

The problem: Popular and iconic bases within player groups are getting griefed because of an exploit. Defending your base is next to impossible due to the way PVP and base building is currently implemented.

Possible solutions:

“Captian Obvious: Bug Fixes!”: Make it known to Hello Games that the base griefing exploit is a real and tangible issue that needs to be addressed as soon as possible. Build permissions should be set to OWNER ONLY by default to help noob players.

“Sorry, we’re closed!”: Allow Base Owners to “Lockdown” their base, preventing any players from entering “locked” doors. Exiting should still be possible to avoid players getting locked in cages, another form of griefing. One way doors? “Emergency escape” hatch?

“Sorry, no multi-tool building allowed inside!”: For larger or “tourism” based builds, allow base owners to place “zones” where your Multi Tool Build Menu is inaccessible (Pressing up on the D-pad doesn’t open anything), like in Space Stations or the Anomaly, and building anything is impossible. Basically like a spectator mode but you can still mine rocks if you need resources. This one does not prevent the Terrain Manipulator grief, maybe disable the terrain manipulator while in range too? I dunno!

“PVP overhaul or update”: Personally, I don’t want fully realized PvP in NMS. It leads to toxic behavior and bullying in sandbox games like this. (Think ARK survival evolved alpha clans for example). Instead have PVP damage disabled by default, and allow players to enable it if they want to duke it out for fun with their friends.

Do you have any ideas? Please share them below. Remember this is a discussion thread, please keep it civil. Thank you for reading!

a meme I made to try to keep things light hearted

I applaud the complexity of the base, the time and materials it must have taken to build it, and the assholery level required to want to do it in the first place.

I also enjoy the fact that you clearly wasted hours of your life building it, because it takes less time to get it out of my way than it does to punch in the glyphs to the portal you unsuccessfully tried to block… but then I guess “failure” is a defining feature for you, isn’t it.

Keep up the good work. Looking forward to encountering and removing the next one I see.

I have survived over 500 hours in PermaDeath by rigidly adhering to a few standard rules. With the latest expedition many new players are coming to PD, and I think these standards will ease some frustrations.

1. Bugs. Many avoid PD for this reason alone. But I have never seen any bug that instantly kills. That isn’t what’s happening. Unless a bug pops up that stops you from opening the menu and reloading your last save, a death caused by a bug is partially your fault. Should be an easy choice to lose a little progress vs your whole save. The moment something bugs and you fall through the floor for example, pause, reload last save. Saved.

2. Don’t end your play session saving in a hazardous environment. Only end your play saving in a 100% safe place. Space Station is best.

3. NEVER leave your character unattended, no matter how safe your setting is. Even if you’re just going to the bathroom real quick. It is not worth the risk. Reloading your save takes less time than starting from the beginning. Nuff said.

4. Play with a wired interface if possible. If all you have is wireless, you need to stay on top of your charge. Set a reminder alarm. All it takes is one disconnect while near a predator or monstrosity, and it’s curtains for you.

5. Do not play while impaired in any way. One slip of judgement is unacceptably risky in space exploration.

6. Avoid planetary hostile threats at all costs until you have at least 3 S class exosuit shield upgrades, preferably 6.

7. Avoid extreme terrain environments and heights until you have an least 3 S class movement upgrades, preferably 6, and the jetpack recharge tech.

8. Avoid pirates until you have at least 3 S class starship shield upgrades and a stack of sodium nitrate or starshield batteries. You can call in a freighter or the anomaly to escape any scans.

9. Friends don’t let friends use plasma launchers and geology cannons in PermaDeath. This one is unfortunate, but until the self-harm it inflicts is nerfed, they’re far too dangerous. I’d rather spend a bit more time dealing with grouped targets, than risk death.

10. Whispering eggs have lured many travelers to their end with nought but the promise of a few measley nanites. Not worth it. The only time you should willingly engage the monstrosities is when a mission demands it, and even then DO NOT LEAVE THE ROOFTOP!

11. Never depart without checking your supplies. Oxygen, Ion Batteries, Sodium/Sodium Nitrate, Tritium, Condensed Carbon, Warp Cells, Launch Fuel, are all things you should never run out of.

12. If you’re not sure if something is lethal, assume it is. I should do more testing with a dummy profile to determine all lethal threats. I can’t find much info pertaining to what can kill you. I know lightning and meteors can hurt you, but how threatening they are I cant say for sure. That leads to the next rule.

13. STAY OUT OF EXTREME STORMS! If all you can manage is digging a hole and waiting it out, do it. Don’t attempt enduring them until your exosuit tech is fully upgraded. And don’t attempt it at all in extreme wind events, those twisters are particularly lethal even late game.

14. Rocket boots are dangerous! They can cause a lot of unintentional forward jetpack boosts. Best to upgrade jetpack tanks and exosuit shields before using them. You’ve been warned.

15. Be extremely cautious when using glitches. Especially aboard your freighter. Always weigh the rewards of a glitch against your entire save.

16. Do not engage sentinels without nearby cover. You need a fast escape in case something goes awry. Any building or base with rooms will do.

Those are all the tips that come to mind atm.

In PermaDeath you have to take things more seriously. Every decision could be life and death for your traveler. Immerse yourself and remember every choice can lose you everything. I think the game is most thrilling with those stakes and it really forces an immersive perspective. PermaDeath is the closest experience to what exploring the cosmos would be like for us. So I encourage people to try it. I realize its not for everyone, but once you get used to the risk, things will become a nice blend of relaxing beauty and thrilling danger.

Safe Travels.

So yesterday u/Viloneo made This post suggesting No Mans Sky ditch the current noise based generation for a more hand crafted template based procedural generation approach. While I appreciate the enthusiasm for addressing the issues with proc gen in the game I don’t think this approach would really work unfortunately. After commenting there that I thought it wasn’t likely to be the fix they imagined it to be and getting a response I went to reply and ended up writing a lot more than I had intended to.

I’m a game developer and while I’ve never done anything quite on the scale of NMS I have implemented a lot of different types of procedural generation (I can provide links if you’d like but I’m not here for self promo I just love this game :3 ) and while templates can work great (here’s a great interactive walkthrough of how Spelunky generates with templates) they have some major downsides such as making grid structures more obvious and massively increasing dev time.

(If I have some time I might see if I can add some diagrams into this post if people are interested)

I’m curious about how this suggestions practicality so I’m going to do some math and see how it might work out in detail.

Part One. Setting up our example area:So you want a chunk full of randomised patterns and you likely want minimal repeats, lets say you’re working in a 32×32 km area and each template defines a 1×1 km chunk of templated terrain using noise to add some degree of variation. That’ll be 1024 chunks to be filled in. Lets be generous and say we can get away with repeating the same structure 8 times across that and hoping the noise will differentiate things enough that they won’t be noticeably the same (this is likely to break down regularly and create very noticeably similar results) we’ll need a total of 1024÷8 or 128 unique chunks to fill in that area.

Part Two. The logistics of designing templates:so lets think reasonably about how long it would take to create these templates. For a 1km² area I’ve spent multiple days in the past to create maps with the unity terrain system. However this only deals in height values without the possibility for caves or overhang that the NMS terrain allows (I believe it uses marching cubes). One positive way in which this isn’t entirely comparable is that creating a template isn’t necessarily filling in every single detail just laying out the rough forms of the landscape. We can assume that the talented team at Hello games could make a tool suited to this workflow(I’m not going to guess how long making the tool would take but if it’s being used on a massive scale you want a pretty robust tool built from scratch) allowing the designer to define the landforms and areas where certain detail objects will be placed (eg. where forest goes). With this tool we can say the developer will take maybe half a day to make one template and another half to test it in engine with all the different biomes it can appear in and make any necessary tweaks (there’s 11 major biomes in the game so I think this is a fair if not generous estimate). So for just this 32km² chunk with templates possibly repeating 8 times within it that makes it 128 days worth of work. This can obviously be split up between a team but it will still cost the same amount in wages.

Part Three. Stitching the seams:Cool so now we have a relatively varied 32km² area of template based generation. But hang on how are we even blending these chunks together. We don’t want the edge of one chunk to just be a massive wall against the edge of the next. One thing we can do is to apply them to a larger height map and make sure all their edges are flat and line up this means the edges inherit the height from the heightmap but would need to be relatively featureless. Now the edges have less detail which is a problem because if you play enough you’ll likely start noticing the chunk grid, so maybe we should try to define a set of rules about which chunks can go together? We could use something cool and cutting edge like Wave Function Collapse (it’s really cool you should definitely read up on it here’s a neat open source implementation) well okay now we have a consistent level of detail across everything. But hang on I’m playing our new template based NMS with chunks that match up nicely but what’s that?! I’ve seen roughly that sort of mountain beside roughly that sort of lake 5 times while exploring this one planet? Hmm turns out there’s a sacrifice you have to make if you’re going to take an approach where certain chunks can go beside each other and others cant. each chunk now has a limited amount of other chunks it can actually appear beside and the reoccurrence of these patterns of chunks beside each other will become much more noticeable than if any chunk can go beside any other.In the end I don’t quite know what the best solution for this would be but remember every piece of hand designed content can take a lot more time to develop than you might expect so it’s unlikely merging the edges by hand is the right way to go.

Part Four. 32km² would be a very small planet:Lets assume we get over our chunk boundary issues and we have a lovely 32km² area of procedural generation with only minimal repeats and some variation applied to the repeats. now we need to fill 18 quintillion plus planets with this stuff. I did some searching and found this post about estimating the sizes of planets in NMS. For the planet they use in the example they get a total area of 478,000,000,000m² or 478,000,000km². That’s a lot bigger than 32 if we take our current set of 128 chunks we’ll have roughly 3,734,375 repeated occurrences of each chunk. Even if we can scale up and produce 512 unique chunks that’s still about 933,593.75 repeats on this single planet. In practice I suspect even a really good implementation of a template system for No Mans Sky would lead to a very similar level of infinite variations on the same thing as the current system does.

Some unfortunate side effects could also be:

1. It would likely eliminate the current possibility that the noise and other structures used to generate the existing planets have of creating super rare combinations of features that are nearly unpredictable.
2. Larger form features such as the curved trenches that form on some planets would be very hard to keep around.
3. More than likely this would have big performance overheads.

In conclusion while I also want improved variation to the generation I can’t say I think templates are the right approach and I’m going to wait and be patient and try to make the most out of the current generation while it lasts. If it is ever replaced I’m sure there’ll even be people going back to previous versions of the game to revisit it just like people do with pathfinder nowadays.

If you made it this far I hope you enjoyed what I was saying and maybe learned a thing or two. I’d love to write a bit more about topics like this so I’ll keep an eye on discussions of the proc gen going forward.

TLDR:Planets big, templates small. You need a lot of templates to fill a planet with minimal repeats and matching up the edges of templates in a natural way is a major task.

edit: fixed some weird wording.