Hi,

Not a dig at the game, 100 hours for the price I paid for this game a few months after release is absolutely a bargain in terms of price per hour entertainment. I believe I paid £6 after the initial scathing reviews tanked nms sales, but I believed in the developers statement that they would bring the game closer to their vision, and they have exceeded that.

Now I have started and stopped playing nms over the years, a few weeks ago I finally gave it the focus it deserves, and by coincidence this was just after autophage expansion dropped.

So I’ve done most assigned quests (except call of the deep), I have a decent sentinel ship, an s class exotic, a living ship, and a couple of others.

I’ve built a functional base, I have a full squadron, a full frigate compliment, a decent super capital ship, a fully built settlement and around a billion space bucks that I can’t spend.

My modules allow me to survive anywhere and kill anything the game throws at me with little challenge, I’ve seen all planet types and have a few interesting pets.

Everything that has seemed interesting to me to do has been done, all that is left is to grind for slightly better things that don’t actually matter. And that isn’t fun.

I doubt it’s an especially hot take, but nms is a huge game with unlimited scope with very little to do. There is no end game, there is no reason to get 10% better to defeat a mission or quest. There is no actual depth to anything. Literally all of the available activities could be expanded upon to give a better sense of achievement and depth.

Why can’t my settlement grow into a city?

Why can’t ships be fully modular allowing my own designs? (within reason).

Why can’t I go on missions with my frigates?

Why can’t I engage other freighters / systems with my fleet?

Literally every activity is endless in scope but limited in its execution, there is no need for money, better mods, better shops or weapons. You don’t need a base for any reason, and exploration gains nothing.

But it does take 100 hours to get to this point and that is value for money, but anything further is grinding for the sake of grinding, which I acknowledge some people do still enjoy, but for people like me who have had their fill of grindy games, it’s not good enough.

So, nms, thank you for your time, and you have improved so much, I hope one day you become the game you should be, because you have the foundation already, you just need a little extra push, and I can’t wait for it.

Added “Guide” in title for those that search new player guides.

• Six biggest for me were:

  • Punch jumping – Sprint then melee then jetpack and you will got mostly forward with your jetpack.
  • You can buy a backpack slot on every station, but also on the anomaly in every system. So when you get to a new system go to that system’s station and buy a exosuit slot, then call in the anomaly in that system, go to the back where the people sell upgrades and blueprints and buy another exosuit slot on the anomaly.
  • When you start the game in survival or Permadeath the ship is directly in front of you. (in case you just keep dying in the beginning which happened to me a lot) so you can just sprint to the ship and jump in and not die from the planet’s hazards.
  • You can buy a recipe from the anomaly for starship that will “recharge” your lift booster with fuel while you are running around on the planet’s surface. In this way you don’t need to make starship fuel anymore and can “call in” your space ship to your location without worry that it ran out of fuel. For me I just scan, run to new thing, dig it up, etc. When I’m full call in ship, sort inventory etc.
  • Ion Battery / Life support Gel. Instead of making these, sell the cobalt you would have used to make Ion Batteries at a station and you can afford to buy these. These are a game changer in the sense that you no longer have to worry about finding sodium etc, when you explore you can just pop a battery. Combined with lift-jets thing above I can run around on the surface until I run out of inventory without worry.

• Medium refiner recipes that make more of a thing if you add oxygen :

  • 1 Oxygen + 1salt = 5 choline
  • 2Oxygen + 1condensed carbon = 6 condensed carbon.
  • 2Oxygen + 1chlorine = 6 chlorine
  • etc ; https://nomanssky.fandom.com/wiki/Oxygen

• You can put silica dust in a refiner and get “glass” you do not need frost wart to get it.

• You can make most plants in a medium refiner even if you did not find a planet that has that plant, e.g. Dioxite x2 + Oxygen x1 = 1 frost crystal. Just by the dioxite from a space station.

• The “space fight danger level” is often very wrong. E.g. pirate danger level “severe” or whatever. If you have 1 star ship shield battery or sodium or sodium nitrate you can win most 1v1 or 4v1 fights with just 1 shield recharge.

So… I had the chance to play several hours of the new update yesterday, here are my thoughts.

Some context: My main save is on survival with several hundred hours in, I had maxed out my exosuit, main ship, a second ship, multitool and the freighter with hard-to-get X-class rolls on maneuverability, jump range, shields, S-class freighter 250ly upgrades and all corresponding other S-class freighter upgrades.

I initially was taken aback by only being able to utilize half of many of my hard-earned upgrades. And then I played. I started my save back when I didn’t know anything about NMS and wanted it to be harder.

After making good progress and playing several hundred hours on this save, my progress felt stale, I didn’t feel the urge to log in and do stuff… I had seen a great part of all the variety in planets, building felt horrible with the stack size of 1000 and inventory management was a pain with juggling all the upgrades, the amount of silver to spend on freighter rooms was a pain.

Now that 4.0 is here, I logged in and the first thing I did was change the stack size to 9999. And then mourned my slower ship, less exosuit shield, poured some 400M in upgrading some multitool slots and saw my money drop to below 1B since… well forever.

And then it hit me. Exitement started running through my brain, seeing that ship costs had increased, money was spent faster and I can work towards a great deal more inventory space.

And ohhhh boy is it more, I can stack upgrades now, my whole upgrade “cargo” ship reduced to like 4 stacks.

And then I saw that the fleet freighter upgrades finally work completely. And every system I went to I worked on increasing my exosuit inventory slots, bought a lot of items to sell later, jumped in some dog fights and saw my exosuit get wrecked and my ship get wrecked as I couldn’t solo everything as easily as before, I needed to repair a lot of modules and the quicksilver and multitool slot rewards felt hard earned and worth it and trading feels worth it now again and running around getting more exosuit slots…

And I was really surprised. I thought YES YES YES this is great give me more of it!!

And then I thought about the “lost” ugrades – and it hit me. They are not lost. They are in my inventory ready to be installed again – when I have enough technology space, or, and here comes the kicker: in another ship.

Now I need less upgrades per ship to max it out – and – fights are more clutch, more important, there is a strong incentive in having multiple weapon systems to cycle through, dodging is more important and face-tanking a bad idea.

After just one day and several hours I came to the conclusion that the update is actually great. My biggest fear was that my fighter would feel like a turtle, but because of the law of diminishing returns it sure felt slower – but not as much as I had feared.

And that is a drawback I am totally willing to make for the benefits I already discussed.

Now you might be thinking that there are a lot of updates that are now useless, namely freighter and exosuit upgrades which you can’t put in another ship or multitool.

You are totally right. But then I thought about the community aspect of the game – and the second I am sure we will never be able to put them in again I will head to the anomaly with a smile on my face and drop them off to somebody who needs them more, or give them away here (if that is possible, still haven’t tested it).

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The update put back the survival in my survival save, got rid of my main annoyance (the stack size), gave me trading back, something to do, the fun to build more without stupid inventory restrictions and with more ressources to gather while I’m out and about because I can just store them.

So my ship is a little slower and my jetpack a little emptier – well now there is space for some of them ?-upgrades with jetpack capacity and all the more reason to bump around in a few of my other ships.

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I really do think I gained a lot and lost next to nothing, even though I am probably one of the people who lost most with this update. And there will surely be updates which will introduce different ways to improve our ships again to former glory.

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Thanks for reading, I hope this viewpoint may take some of the frustration away that some people seem to be having and I was afraid of having when logging back in.

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Have a great day, fellow interloper!