No sarcasm – genuinely been having lots of fun. This is my first time in a harder difficulty/permadeath playthrough (I'm new to the game)

As soon as it spawned me in and I discovered how fast my hazard protection was dropping, and how little sodium I was getting from the plants, I was having that good kind of gaming stress fun. Spent 30 minutes meticulously gathering materials while ducking in and out of caves, reached my ship, realised I couldn't repair, and checked the milestones. Laughed at myself for wasting 30 minutes gathering all those resources and yeeted myself off a cliff

Was very quickly attacked by pirates, and since I didn't want to spend my precious sodium I was a little lax on repairing on my shields. Vesper Sail proceeded to get damaged, and needed Deuterium to repair. Since this was my source of launch thruster recharge and pulse drive efficiency, I was extremely amused at how I'd gone and made this harder for myself right off the bat. No worries, to the Anomaly to grab a medium refiner – wait, it cost 100 salvaged technologies??? Absolutely cackling at this curve ball, I got to work on gathering those. I'd got about 50 when I changed planets for a change of scenery, and got attacked by pirates again. They were nice enough to drop a repair kit this time

Quickly discovered S class upgrades costing 6k+ nanites from merchants, so I took my time exploring planets to scan all the animals. Flew around aggressive Sentinel planets checking for Pillars, to sneak up to them and disable the Sentinels before I went exploring. As soon as I got a Scatter Blaster and a couple of shield upgrades I was brave enough to fight them for the full 5 waves. All along I've been taking the time to gather and turn in Ancestral Memories and Liquid Sun to Polo – it was great to see the memory fragments upgrade to B class so far

Pirate attacks were still stressful, so I grabbed an economy scanner from the Anomaly, saved up several million units, then went and camped out in a pirate system to try and grab an S class Solar. Had terrible luck with S class spawns and was getting impatient, when a ridiculously adorable A class 7-winged Rasa spawned in, that was an upgrade in both tech and inventory slots, and within my price range. Grabbed it, upgraded it, went to hunt some pirates

I've genuinely enjoyed the expedition forcing me to take my time and avoid risks – being careful around hazardous plants, not angering Sentinels when I'm not in the position to fight them, and carefully avoiding the worm nests on infested planets. I've not been racing through and treating it like a checklist, which I kinda did with the previous two reduxes. Each upgrade has been worked for and felt super rewarding, and any good luck finds from buried caches or from memory fragments has been far more exciting

I've just made it to the 5th iteration with every milestone in the previous parts completed, and I've managed not to get myself killed so far. I'm looking forward to unlocking the scrambled milestones and seeing what I need to do, and ultimately completing the whole thing

I'm very inspired to start my own fresh permadeath playthrough after this!