Take some time to tour your current batch of star system’s freighters. Fly around, dock with them, and check out their “bases” – there are some really unique ideas in play for the procedurally-generated layouts. I found one last night that totally inspired me. I was actually kind of shocked. Way at the back of one of these bases I found a solitary ladder. It went up several floors, and ended in a single room with doors on all four sides. Outside? A massive exterior area, with walkways that let you look down through the windows into the freighter’s main bridge. It was really amazing.

I’ve also found NipNip grow rooms, and complete kitchen areas, with multiple cooking stations you can, um, “raid” for rare cooking ingredients.

This has now become one of my favorite things to do, usually right before I leave a star system for good, for the most part. Some really cool stuff lurking in NMS now in the distant, hidden places we kind of take for granted (system freighters).

Read a post by another traveller a few days back who completed the expedition without dying (apologies to you, Traveller, I’ve forgotten your name). I had actually started a new run of the expedition at that time anyway with the intent to see how much I could do before you HAD to die. Turns out… you don’t. But this post opened the possibility of completing the expedition without dying. Here’s how it went:

I started off by ignoring my ship. I decided I was going to try to find a crashed ship on foot or a trading post where I could buy one. As it happened, that wasn’t in the cards. I did a huge circle that took 10 hours on foot on the starting planet but was never fortunate enough to find either of those things. What I DID find, though was a minor settlement where I promptly bought a couple hermetic seals. I also bought the blueprint for the Advanced Mining Laser.

During my wanderings, I dug up a lot of buried tech modules and found a fair number of clusters of ancient data structures. These yielded some drop pod maps, which are actually reasonably valuable. I sold off both the the tech modules and maps at trade terminals (I found 3 or 4 in the wild). I also encountered a lot of curious deposits. Mined a few of those after installing the AML and refined into nanites while I waited for storms to blow over.

When I finally arrived at my ship, it was 10 hours in, I had about 12 million units and just over 5200 nanites. I’d also found a couple drop pods to add inventory slots and even got a few upgrades for the exosuit and ship from damaged machinery. I also learned 177 words and managed to bag a decent C class multitool with a lot more slots than the starting weapon.

After fixing the ship, I was in a position where I really just needed to make a base on an infested world as the only obstacle and then I was golden for all other milestones in the Expedition. What I did was I went to Uncharted red and green star systems to search for the proper world type (I purchased the drive blueprints on the Anomaly after I got my ship up and running).

I had grabbed maps for commercial buildings to use to search for a base computer in the wild (this is one of the things these charts can locate) and used those on the proper world when I finally found one (actually didn’t take too long. Maybe a dozen systems). Why uncharted? Well, that’s because the planets don’t have any buildings other than shelters and wild base computers. It took a grand total of 2 maps before I located a wild base computer. I flew in, landed, claimed it, and built a base. The game considered that good enough for the milestone.

Now I was all set. I just carried on from there and completed the expedition. I refused to die and did it without doing it on purpose. Dying was the only milestone I had left at the end, and turns out at the very end, the game kind of makes you ‘semi’ die, as it restarts you as if you’d died. But the key here is… you spawn in with all your stuff. You lose nothing. So you never really die at all, but the game gives you that milestone (which was the final unfinished one for me in this expedition) when you spawn in after the end.

Anyway, the grand total play time was about 15 hours. Obviously not the optimal way to play it, but it was a fun experiment and very satisfying.

Here’s some of the FAQ suggestions we received in our previous FAQ thread. Keep in mind that these are opinions from some of our valued OP’s and you may agree or disagree with some of these. We just ask that everyone remains respectful when replying to this thread and we look forward to your contribution! NMSTG Mod Team

You can also drop a quick tip!

Tip #1: Always try to be doing multiple things. Pick up the portable refiner so you can refine something from your inventory while exploring and mining.

Tip #2: Avoid multiplayer until unlocking the anomaly, can be stranded if not.

Tip #3: Exotic worlds only have 1 fauna so it’s easy to scan all of them.

Tip #4: Need glyphs? All 16 are on one planet here

Q- “I was on the Anomaly and a bunch of expensive stuff showed up in my inventory. What do I do with it? A:” Congrats! Another player has bestowed you with a gift. Most likely it is an item to sell for some quick and easy cash. Usually the item description will tell you what it is used for.

Q: “Help, I claimed a broken ship and now I can’t find my starter ship! Is it gone forever?” A:” If you merely selected to “claim” the broken ship and not “swap” it, then your old ship is still around. If you left it with launch fuel in the tank, you can summon it with the quick-menu. If it does not have fuel, it can be summoned on the Anomaly (once you unlock it), your freighter (once you acquire one).

Q- “Are crashed ships worth repairing?” A-” Unless it is an exotic, no. Scrap the ship at the space station, sell the items it gives you, and use those units to buy a better, working version of a ship in that system.

Q- “Any advice for new players?” A-“For new players, make sure you read the guide in-game. It’s an excellent beginner’s guide for traveling, learning about the alien races, building, and etc. Take a look over the catalogue of items too. Also, I’d strongly suggest mining a massive amount of carbon, oxygen, and sodium. These three items will be some of your most used and critical items in the game