To start with this “rant”, I must say that I’m a big fan of No Mans Sky and its redemotion story. Its the game that I play when I want to chill and relax.

That being said, its time for Hello Games to add depth to its systems! There are so many great systems in game, but a lot of it seems pointless. Here are some examples about how things could connect with each other and gives a better sense of progression throughout the journey:

Food / recipes: there is a entire recipes system, with amazing combinations, common and rare. For what? A few seconds buffs that are useless and maybe some selling potential. This system could improve survival mechanics and companions. Meaningful buffs to better explore a hazard planet. Companions that can only be tamed with certain food and so on.

Settlements: neat concept, meaningless rewards. There could be resources that are only available through settlements. Settlements through different races could provide exclusive resources and cosmetics as you upgrade them. Like a resource needed for a ship or exosuit upgrade, for example.

Ships: resistance upgrades could be available so that you can enter “dense” atmosphere planets. Im not a space specialist (as you can see), but the idea is that some rare kind of planets could be “locked” until you have a specific upgrade equipped on your ship. Its the same concept of the hyperdrive upgrades so that you can travel to different colors stars.

Vehicles: Nautilus could be used to reach certain depth on seas, not possible swimming. Extremely hazard planets could only be explored with minotaurs, and so on.

Derelict Freighters: due to its hazard nature, could only be acessible with specific exosuit upgrade. It could provide exclusive resources too, like I said about settlements above.

Well, these are some of the ideas at the top of my head, but we could go on and on about this.

Any thoughts about it?

So other day I decided it was time to grow my fleet of living frigates. After using up my small supply of two (2) anomaly detectors, I realized that I actually had no idea where they came from. A little digging on the wiki told me that they “occasionally” drop from destroying asteroids. Well… that’s vague. So I shot out into my local system’s deep space and began blasting some asteroid fields. One hour later, no Anomaly Detectors. After a little more research around Reddit and the Steam forums, I realized that nobody really does know how to efficiently farm these things, just that they “occasionally” drop from asteroids. I saw some theories here and there, but none with some good, solid evidence- so I took it upon myself to produce some.

To test, I decided to spend 15 minutes in various system types destroying asteroid fields. The timer starts the moment I find an adequate asteroid field, and paused if there are any interruptions (hostile ships, cargo scans, etc.).

Before I get on with the results, let’s establish what we do know about Anomaly Detector drops. Their wiki page says they drop from asteroids, but looking into the page on “asteroids” gives us another vital piece of information: they only drop from “small” type asteroids. Not the large ones that break piece by piece, and NOT the crystal type asteroids (which is the primary asteroid type in my initial system).

So without further ado, here are the actual numbers for the 13 systems I tested in order of most Anomaly Detectors to least, including their star color, primary lifeform (if any), and whether or not they are dissonant:

• Blue “abandoned” system (Gek), dissonant- 10 Anomaly Detectors

• Red “uncharted” system, dissonant- 8 Anomaly Detectors

• Red “uncharted” system- 7 Anomaly Detectors

• Red Gek system, dissonant- 7 Anomaly Detectors

• Red Korvax system- 7 Anomaly Detectors

• Green Gek system- 7 Anomaly Detectors

• Green “uncharted” system, dissonant- 6 Anomaly Detectors

• Yellow Gek system- 5 Anomaly Detectors

• Blue Vy’keen system, dissonant- 4 Anomaly Detectors

• Blue Korvax system- 4 Anomaly Detectors

• Blue “uncharted” system, dissonant- 3 Anomaly Detectors

• Blue “uncharted” system- 2 Anomaly Detectors

• Blue “abandoned” system (Vy’keen), dissonant- 2 Anomaly Detectors

So, what do our most successful systems have in common?

… basically nothing. In fact, the #1 system has more in common with the bottom 3 than any of the other top 3. Between 1st, 2nd, and the 4-way tie for 3rd place, we have red, green, and blue systems; uninhabited, abandoned, and populated systems; dissonant and non-dissonant systems- a little bit of everything. With the information gathered, I’m very comfortable in saying that the system you search in does not matter at all. It’s all RNG.

So that’s it? All that time wasted to find out it doesn’t matter?

Well, not exactly. Knowing that the drop rate is unaffected by the system type allows us to focus on other areas to maximize our collection: Not all of those 15 minute testing periods were built the same. Multiple times, I accidentally hit NPC ships mining asteroids as well. System freighters would warp in, despawning the chunk of asteroid field I was currently harvesting. I even had a freighter distress signal interrupt me without warping. Of course, I stopped my timer for the sake of testing fairly, but it did add to the actual time spent mining. So while they may not drop more Anomaly Detectors, uncharted and abandoned systems wind up being more efficient for farming Anomaly Detectors, as you’ll experience fewer interruptions.

So after over 3 hours of mindless asteroid blasting, I can definitively provide the most efficient way to farm Anomaly Detectors:

• Step 1: Warp to an uncharted or abandoned system. Any system color will do.

• Step 2: Locate an asteroid field and verify that it does not contain any of the “crystal” type asteroids. If it does, repeat step 1.

• Step 3: Blast to your heart’s content! If you install a Cargo Scan Deflector, you should have next to no interruptions whatsoever!

Hopefully somebody out there finds this post useful. I know it was a lot of text for a rather underwhelming conclusion, but at this point I was too far in to not post my results. And even if it wasn’t super productive, it was fun doing some actual research on a relatively undocumented topic in the game.

Anyway, now I gotta go figure out what to do with 72 Anomaly Detectors.

Happy hunting, travellers!

Day 1 – Unknown distance from the center of the galaxy

Awoke on a toxic planet.

Ship’s crashed, but I don’t remember how. I don’t remember much of anything before that last jump. Everything’s gone.

Well, not everything…

Previous Log Entries:

• Day 1
• Day 2
• Day 6
• Days 9 & 10
• Day 16
• Day 27
• Day 38
• Day 47
• Day 59
• Day 67
• Day 75

(I thought for sure I’d get bored and abandon this. But I got into it. The early part was especially fun strategizing how I’d maximize the hyperdrive with limited tech slots. That first freighter battle nearly did me in since I pulled all the shield and weapon upgrades for more hyperdrive upgrades.

Eventually, I started to feel some my my character’s obsession. I’d take a break to eat, intending to pick it up again the next day. But I’d feel the pull to log back in and start jumping again. I actually finished the journey a couple days ago. I’ve just been waiting a bit between posts.

I got really lucky on the ship. Fairly early on, I found an S class explorer at a space station. It had a large number of tech slots already unlocked. It had three super-charged slots in a row together and the fourth was two rows beneath. I was able to load up on S and X class hyperdrive upgrades fairly quick and got it up to 2500 light years and +350% efficiency. I wish I’d saved the system glyphs as it made the journey so much faster.

Some “interesting” stats about the journey:

• Total jumps: 341
• Total systems discovered: 339 (only the last two were not “First Contact”)
• Total warp cells used: 105
• On-Foot Exploration: 14,014 – This surprised me, I thought it would be lower. I reckon most of this was running around space stations.
• Total freighter battles: 2 – And not one dreadnought battle. Another surprise. With all those jumps, I expected there to be more. I guess my play time on this save was too low for more. Most of the downed pirates were from a couple missions I did for flavor/variety and getting attacked flying to space stations.

Thank you to those that offered advice on how to make the journey faster. That wasn’t my goal with this journey, but this community has always been great about sharing tips and game info for new players (which I’m not, but I appreciate ya’ll anyway).

Anyway, I hope at least some of you enjoyed this. Thanks for riding along.)