So I was a day one supporter of NMS and I got possibly my best game yet going. On XBOX Series S, I was originally on PS4. Love the better graphics!

I’m in Euclid, in the Xicorr system on a paradise moon called Rawa. Contrary to the hellhole it “rotates around of”, Rawa is lush, peaceful, inhabitated only by three different species of birds, is in a Vykeen system and has an economy based around ore-processing. And that’s good, because I love mining. So after visiting every planet and moon in Xicorr, I made Rawa my home once I’m invited to build a base.

And then it gets better.

I find a nice Vykeen settlement. It has a trade terminal, a blueprints / component seller and a landing pad. AND, and what looks like a very promising cobalt mine within sight. Again, love that shit. So I build myself a nice little 3×3 wood shack with some basic amenities, use the Vykeen outpost’s landing pad as mine (Shouldn’t they have a problem with that?). Called it Ranesota, which is what the game called that region. And then I go mine. And mine and mine and mine. Deeper and deeper. No end to those caves, just chockfull of cobalt. I get around 5M units worth of Cobalt out of there in total, totally cleaned the place.

So I go back to my shack, and I build a teleporter because I’ll want to comeback here easilly right. I want to research Solar Panels to power my Teleporter or whatever you call that gate, so I go on the hunt for salvaged data. I find a very minor settlement with a grumpy Vykeen inside and nothing else about 500u East…. and i get the silly idea to build a TUNNEL to his place. So I lineup my ship’s icon and I start digging. And digging. And digging. A long-ass time. After popping out in the open a couple times and having to dig down to keep going, I finally pop out behind Ranesota. That’s my tunnel, that’s INFRASTRUCTURE. I build a path with boulders leading to the entrance and a gate around the hole.

Haven’t found the buried modules I wanted to, so I start walking west this time. And I catch many modules, many knowledge stones…….. and I keep going, I figure I should get a lot of these to build my stuff and understand what my neighbors are saying… then my scanner / analysis visor spots a “Minor Settlement”. Figured, might as well go check it out…. 1000u out. Heh, my planet has no weather to speak of, always sunny and nice… let’s go….

I find it….. Trade terminal, a blueprints / component seller and a landing pad. Nice, that means another base. And I realise I’m now 15 minutes away from Ranesota, so this works for me. Build another shack. Call it Haller after a nearby region that was called Haller’s Last Stand……. Call my ship to the landing pad for no apparent reason……. and I decide I’m hopping on it going home and building a tunnel between Ranesota and Haller. They are 15 minutes apart.

So I line up the Haller icon and I start digging. I pop out a bunch of time, keep digging down and then back up always lining up with Haller…. eventually I pop out, and I try to dig down….. and it won’t dig. I’m on the bedrock. So I look around where I am… this is ANOTHER magnificient COBALT MINE just like I love em. I’m 5 minutes away from Ranesota and 9 minutes away from Haller in this closed pocket with no other (apparent, so far) entry point than my tunnel.

I’ve already hauled for a million units’ worth of Cobalt from it back to my ore-loving neighbors in Ranesota and it’s still pretty full. I’ve made another HUGE gate around the entry point to this tunnel…………

I mean.. the SCOPE of this game. You can start doing your own thing outside the narrative of the game completely and it just feeds you and keeps you going. This is amazing!

Now my fear is of course, Frontiers comes and buries all my digging and changes my paradise to a toxic hell, I hope not.

So, inspired by a couple posts I saw about doing this expedition the “hard way” on its original run, I decided to give it a try.

First issue is by avoiding the early dieing milestone, I don’t have the hermetic seal plans. On the other hand, you can buy seals from any minor settlement, so I repaired the manipulator off the bat and started tunneling. Got lucky and stumbled into a cave early on so I milked it for every bit of cobalt it had to make a full stack of Ion batteries. After that I tunneled to my ship, since it was near a monolith POI, and started heading north.

The trick here is that POIs such as minor settlements tend to line up in North-South lines on planets, so going directly north from a known POI increases my chances of finding one. The prep plus the run took a good few hours probably, but I got my seal, and I’d already repaired the launch thrusters before I left the ship so I could call it in on the landing pad and finish the repairs. Hard Part 1 done!

Second issue is the “build a base on an infested world” milestone. Since I didn’t die early, no base computer plans. However, all planets(I think?) have what’s known as “wild base computers” – pre-placed base computers anyone can claim. The kicker is that you can find these using the commercial maps from the space station – they count as a Shelter slot. So, I went and grabbed a whole bunch of nav data from hopping between POIs with save points over on a more hospitable world, grabbed a bunch of maps, then headed to the nearest infested world.

I actually had to go get a second set of maps once, as it kept finding other Shelters first that I had to clear, and I had to mark all the other types of waypoints without clearing them to eliminate them from the selection. Once I found one though(which has a purple base icon like other player bases), I laid down my base and checked off that milestone. Hard part 2 done!

(Quick note here: If you don’t plan to keep the save, delete your base after getting the milestone, or at least once you’ve finished the expedition. If you delete a “wild” base it restores the wild base computer so someone else can use it. There’s still only a limited number of these per planet so be considerate!)

Everything else is no different from a normal run of this expedition, and while I haven’t actually finished it yet, from what I read on those other posts when you finish the final milestone it “kills” you so you still get credit for that leftover milestone back in part 1 without any extra effort. I don’t expect that part to have changed, given it’s plot-relevant.

Main reason I haven’t finished it yet, though the finish line is in sight? I want to get all my memory fragments upgraded, so going to see how far along we get those first. If I want to keep this save around later, having a full set of high end gear would be nice.

One tip in general I’d like to add: one of the anchor planets(or systems at least) has beetles. Tame one! Since they fly, they’re perfect to ride across some of the crazy vertical terrain in this expedition without risking any fall damage. Plus, you can summon them anywhere and don’t have to plop down a geobay or fuel it up(other than via life support). This made some of the regular stuff so much simpler without having to go mole-man(which in itself doesn’t help as much when you have a deep valley to cross).