After hundreds of hours in Normal and Survival modes doing the usual money-making and base-building, I decided to try playing the game a different way, what I’m calling scavenger mode in my first Permadeath save.

The main idea is that I will not be doing anything to make money, I will not be buying any items through galactic trade terminals, and I will not be purchasing upgrades from vendors at space stations. I will acquire nearly everything in the wild: mainly by mining and finding things on planets. I can also acquire materials by robbing freighters and sentinel depots, or fighting sentinels or pirates. New ships cannot be bought. They must be obtained by finding crashed or sunken starships and either fixing them up or scrapping them for their upgrades. New multi-tools also cannot be bought. They must be found in the wild, such as in crashed ships or given to me by NPCs.

I have allowed myself to use nanites to buy blueprints at the Anomaly because some of the really useful blueprints are nearly impossible to find in the wild or through the storyline. The only thing I’ve spent units on is exosuit storage slots, although I’ve also acquired many of my slots by finding and fixing drop pods. Essential items such as life support gel and ion batteries must be crafted. I may allow myself to do occasional Nexus missions for difficult to find and uncraftable items like wiring looms.

So far, I’ve been doing pretty well for myself. I have:

1. A nice B-class hopper explorer that I found and fixed up, along with another B-class explorer and hauler that I may fix up as well.

2. After many hours of getting by with my starter multi-tool, an NPC inside a building gave me a new B-class pistol with 21 slots. It was heavily damaged of course, but I’ve been able to fix every damaged piece except for two now.

3. I finally was gifted a decent freighter after a pirate battle: B-class with 30 slots. Just what I needed after struggling to manage materials in my limited exosuit and ship storage.

4. Mostly, I’ve maintained a savings of less than 1 million units. I’m now up to 5 million but only because I scrapped some found ships for their upgrades.

I’ve been spending most of my time on hot planets because I found an S-class heat protection in some damaged machinery. I’m letting the things that I find dictate to some extent the paths that I take in the game.

For Experienced Players

A lot of new players are coming into the game and I’m noticing in a few help threads that many of us may have forgotten what the most recent new player experience is like. So as a reminder for us experienced folks, until they do the second step in Alone Amidst The Stars (which begins RIGHT after the tutorial, if they chose to do it) the anomaly is totally unavailable to them. Even if you skip the tutorial and you have your ship, multi tool, and warp cores ready to craft, the anomaly still requires you to complete the first two major steps of Alone Amidst The Stars before the anomaly becomes an option on the quick bar. Many players may not do this immediately, so consider this before answering questions for new players and try to help guide them keeping this into account.

For New Players

Welcome to NMS! If you hear anyone talk about the Anomaly, it’s an extremely vital core game mechanic that is explained within 10 minutes of starting the main story quest, which is always visible at the top of your “log” when you pause the game. You are 100% free to play the game how you like, in any order, with no consequences, but with that said I highly recommend doing at least the first few steps. It will be called “Alone Amidst The Stars” once the tutorial is complete, and until then it will be called “Awakenings” which is the tutorial.

The main story is highly recommended, both for what you unlock by doing it, as well as the story which is shockingly good. Like, really quite good. That’s my opinion anyway, but objectively unlocking the Anomaly is just straight up super important.

Anyway, I hope you’re enjoying the game. Please ask any questions you have on this subreddit, people here are great and there are a lot of solutions to problems based on how you like to play the game. Happy star hopping.

I’m tired of going the wrong direction because I’ve drifted off center east or west. I just spent 10 minutes going in circles trying to get to a specific location because I keep losing east and west. As if the storms blocking view and making the ground load slower weren’t bad enough. Thank God for the sentinel ships that hover giving the ground more time to load.