Me:
Do you know the game, no man’s sky?

ChatGPT:
Yes, “No Man’s Sky” is a well-known video game developed by the British studio Hello Games. It was first released in 2016 and is available on various platforms such as PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. The game is famous for its massive, procedurally generated universe, which includes over 18 quintillion planets, each with its own unique environment, flora, and fauna.

The core gameplay involves exploration, survival, combat, and trading as players journey through the universe. Players can upgrade their ships, suits, and weapons as they discover different planets and interact with various alien species. The game was initially met with mixed reviews due to the lack of promised features, but it has since seen numerous updates and expansions that have significantly improved the experience and added new content, such as base building, multiplayer, and improved story elements.

As of my last update in April 2023, “No Man’s Sky” continues to be a game that evolves, with Hello Games regularly releasing updates to enhance the game and keep the community engaged.

Me:
how many stars in that game?

ChatGPT:
In “No Man’s Sky,” the number of stars corresponds with the number of planetary systems players can explore. The game is built around a procedural generation system that allows for over 18 quintillion planets, which means there are nearly as many stars since each star typically hosts at least one planet.

This near-infinite number of stars and planets is one of the most prominent features of the game, as it provides a practically unlimited space for exploration. The number is so large that players collectively have only discovered a small fraction of what the game has to offer, and it would take many lifetimes to visit every star system in the game personally.

The 18 quintillion figure comes from the 64-bit seeding algorithm used to procedurally generate the game’s universe. It’s a number that is often cited to give an idea of the scale of the game’s universe, even though it’s not expected that every single star or planet will be visited by players.

Me:
How long would it take one person (given they are immortal) to visit every star system in the game?

ChatGPT:
To estimate how long it would take one person to visit every star system in “No Man’s Sky,” we would need to make several assumptions. Let’s say for simplicity:

• Each visit to a star system is very brief, just a flyby, taking about 1 minute on average (this is an extremely conservative estimate considering that even the fastest possible visit would likely take much longer due to loading times and the need to travel between stars).
• The player is engaged in this task 24 hours a day, without taking any breaks.

Given these assumptions:

1 minute per star system × 18 quintillion star systems (18 × 10^18 star systems)

= 18 × 10^18 minutes

Now, let’s convert the total minutes to years, knowing there are 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, and 365 days in a year (ignoring leap years for simplicity):

18 × 10^18 minutes ÷ 60 minutes/hour ÷ 24 hours/day ÷ 365 days/year

= 18 × 10^18 ÷ (60 × 24 × 365)

≈ 18 × 10^18 ÷ 525,600

≈ 34.2 × 10^12 years

So, it would take approximately 34.2 trillion years for one immortal person to visit every star system in the game, assuming one minute per visit with no breaks. This time frame is several orders of magnitude longer than the current age of the universe, which is about 13.8 billion years.

Me:
What if the entirety of humanity were to participate and map each system, how long would it take to map every star system?

ChatGPT:
To estimate the time it would take for the entire human population to map every star system in “No Man’s Sky,” we’ll need to continue with the assumption that it takes about 1 minute to map each system. The current global population is approximately 8 billion people. For simplicity, we’ll use this number for our calculation.

Let’s continue from the previous calculation, where we determined that it would take approximately 34.2 trillion years for one person to visit each of the 18 quintillion star systems, provided they spent one minute per visit.

Now, we’ll divide that number by the current human population:

34.2 trillion years / 8 billion people = 4.275 million years per person

This is a rough estimate and assumes that every single person on the planet could and would dedicate their time to mapping star systems in “No Man’s Sky” non-stop, without accounting for the vast differences in access to technology, interest in participation, or any other logistical concerns.

In reality, the time it would take could be considerably longer due to many factors, including game mechanics that may limit how quickly star systems can be mapped, the fact that not everyone has the game or the necessary equipment to play it, and the reality that people would need to spend the vast majority of their time doing things other than playing the game.

It’s also worth noting that the actual gameplay mechanics of “No Man’s Sky” would not allow for such an organized and simultaneous mapping effort. There are in-game limitations to consider, such as travel time between stars, loading times, and the actual activities required to consider a system “mapped.” The process of discovery, documentation, and travel within the game is much more complex and time-consuming than a simple one-minute flyby would suggest.

I’ve been role-playing as, basically what we are, a cartographer/curator but I’ve begun using my extreme rudimentary design and build skills to create little “temples” on certain planets.

As a cartographer of sorts I’ve also been renaming planets and systems to reflect their qualities but have been using Google Translate to name then in Greek, Latin, German, or Esparanto.

My settlement is a small group of believers/worshippers that sprung up around one of these temples which helps keep me motivated to stay involved in its operation.

Im what ways do you like to keep this game fresh?

I just researched and it seems that No Man’s Sky offers no rewards for killing other players. I just read that you can’t loot other player’s graves or get loot from their ships.

I just bought the game cause I was really, really hyped. I went to a featured base cause hey, it’s featured and it looks amazing!

I spend all my credits that I got from scrapping a couple A-Class ships I found into 150 navigational data (in order to find more ships to scrap) and a bunch of resources to build a base and upgrade my gear. I had no weapons other than the mining beam, and no shields.

I enter the base.

I see a player. I look at them. I prepare to do the hand waving emote. He kills me before I can do it. Chat says I died due to multi-tool combat.

No biggie, I can just grab my items from my grave.

The player searches for me at spawn. Kills me again. Then skedaddles out of there with their ship.

I grab my second grave. No items. I look for my first grave, the one that’s supposed to have my items in it. Not there. There’s random terrain there now. Did they add terrain in to de-spawn my grave? My entire inventory, gone.

Now I don’t even have 50 ferrite dust to repair my now broken multi-tool.

And according to a Google search, this player gained nothing from this.

Why does No Man’s Sky have PvP against everyone enabled by default without telling the players, with the possibility to lose your entire inventory, even though no one gains anything from it?

It just seems like No Man’s Sky is encouraging spawn-sniping and griefing for annoying-new-player’s sake. This is such a bizarre design decision!

I also play WoW and engage in world PvP, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, and even this game which does reward you from PvP has the following features:

1. Rewards for PvP. PvP isn’t guaranteed to be just in order to anger you.

2. Reward the winner, don’t delete the entire inventory of the loser.

3. PvP is disabled by default, and it’s an opt-in feature because not everyone likes PvP and when you are in PvP your player yells “For the Horde!”/”For the Alliance!” so that you very clearly know when PvP is on. You also get an in-game icon when PvP is on so that you know that hey, you could get attacked at any moment.

4. Since the game was built with PvP in mind, there are certain rules for when and how you can or can’t enable and disable PvP so that you can’t just disable it if you feel like you’re losing.

No Man’s Sky has none of these things, in fact has the opposite, and it just seems like they added PvP just cause, without giving much thought about the actual gameplay aspect and experience of PvP.

Isn’t it bizarre? Opt-out, inventory wipe, non-notified, un-asked for PvP.

As a new player, I shouldn’t have to google how to disable PvP, or whether or not the game has PvP, or whether or not you lose your items, and even worse, I shouldn’t have to discover the answer to these questions without even googling it, because it makes the game less enjoyable.

Don’t get me wrong things have been fixed and stability has improved in one place and crashed in another. If you are also seeing the game crash you are not alone.

Last time I tried to play a Expedition the glitches and crashes forced me to abandon it. The ships glitched all over so fast they could not be tracked with eyes or targeting scanners. Too many locks ups, too many glitches and bugs.

I used to see an issue where from the moment the game started I would have 48hrs to play. The more intense the activity or graphics the shorter the play time got. If I had a fight with sentinels I might have 15-20 min play time. Then Crash.

I fully rebuilt my PS4. Installed new fan, power supply, thermal pads and thermal grease. New Samsung SSD. I know the SSD wasn’t the fix because I still got crashes, but the issue seemed to go away when I installed the power supply. So I wasn’t sure if that was power stability issue or a code issue. But always got those codes that blamed the crash in a 3rd party HDD. -which honestly smacks of cheat programing that directly coded to register locations in the HDD cache chip.

So for a time the game has been stable. Have been able to leave it run for a week and no issues. Though I haven been fairly inactive since the rebuild.

—

Expedition: Singularity

I rarely have issues in space or space stations, or even classic worlds.

But Expedition destination worlds, with Dissonance and gravity storms… I have had the ship (code) crash, wont land, acts like it’s in space, spins 360, read outs become glitched and read weird. Game freezes or drops to error screen.

Initially the game just locked up. Might get 5-10 min on a Dissonance world, per login. Until I left the planet. But they fixed something so now it doesn’t lockup, it does go to a blue screen. Just landing at the destination and then locating the camp on foot is a nightmare then and now. Too many crashes.But annoyingly the game requires you to fight sentinels to collect materials, and this is guaranteed to decrease playable time. This compounded by the fact that you must hunt Quads that can go invisible, jump around inside the ground and prefer to spend all their time behind the player, or inside a rock where they are invincible, jumping out just long enough to break a shield. So of not game crash then game over. Thank goodness they added the quick saves.

Just had the game lockup 2 min into a login, on a space station. Crashed last night while trying to find a place to buy glass. It’s not yet part of my skills to make it. So I have to buy a few chunks. Game crashed after several warps. It did pretty good all things considered. Logged in this morning, took about two min to launch and load the game. Started at the Warp Gate on the space station. Checked the trade terminal. Warped to another station. I kid you not, maybe 2 min of game play, and it crashed in transit.

—

Unstable is the only way to describe the game play:

Other games do crash randomly. But, of all my games, all 140 some I have collected, only NMS crashes like this. I must have over 200 reports logged with Sony for this game alone, and at least 3 directly with Hello Games for persistent crashing, including singularity.

—

ohh and because I know it will be mentioned:

no rebuilding the database on PS4 will not resolve any of this. Please do that until every time you reboot and the game will still crash.

—

The Storm has Subsided!

Edit: trying to warp to Zahmanum XV Prime causes crash to blue screen. <– definite bug (WARP)

Edit: Disabling all multiplayer stuff fixes most of the crashing in Dissonant worlds and I have no idea why other than something in memory is being over loaded. Other players edits still show up, just not the players. <– definite bug (Dissonance/Gravity Storm & Multiplayer defaults)

Since identifying these two bugs I am almost finish with the Expedition finally. There have been crashes, but far and few compared to every 2-10 min.