Hello! Hopefully this post belongs here – I did my best to tag it properly, but if the mods feel that this kind of post doesn’t fit the nature of this sub, that’s cool too. This is “Part 1” of my journey of playing through No Man’s Sky. I am a recently recovering addict (lots of questionable life choices), and one of the things that helps make things easier for me is playing video games. I bounced around from game to game for a while, before a youtube video popped up on my feed, talking about No Man’s Sky. I purchased the game at launch, but, like many people, I was severely underwhelmed with the game. I had been following along with the development ever since, and have now and again thought about picking up the game again. I decided that this was the perfect excuse that I needed to finally do a full play-through of No Man’s Sky. So, here I am! My therapist suggested that I keep a journal while I work on recovery, and while I never could really find anything to write about my own life, I decided that I want to try and journal about my experiences playing No Man’s Sky! My goal is to play the game every day for the next while, and try to have different experiences each time, to help distract my brain during my recovery. Then, at the end of each play session, I’ll journal about what I did. I also figured, “why the hell not? Let’s put it on reddit!” in the hope that some make-believe internet peer pressure would help keep me honest.

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To be clear: this is just me uploading my journals of my adventures in No Man’s Sky. My goal here is to try and talk about my adventures in the game in (hopefully) interesting ways. If for some reason anybody finds this to be any kind of interesting and decides to comment, tips and tricks and general advice is always appreciated! (But no story spoilers, please!) If you have any stories that you want to share about your own adventures in-game, I would love to hear them also! Disclaimer: I am not incredibly well-experienced with this game. I know a bit, and the game has been helpful, but I’m not super hip to all of the crazy efficient mining strats or the best way to trade goods or anything like that. (and again mods if this post doesn’t belong here you can just delete, I’ll keep journaling anyhow, maybe post them somewhere else. No biggie.)

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Today actually starts off with a bit of a short entry. I really wanted to get my first session in tonight, but the game had to do some updating, and my internet isn’t the best. I finally started playing around 1am my time, and got in around a solid 40 minutes before I felt like it was time for bed. Hopefully, I will be able to get in a more complete experience tomorrow. FYI, this playthrough is occurring on normal mode, as I want to go for a more conventionally casual experience.

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I started on a planet called Winthalc Omega, a dusty, irradiated world, where orange sand blows on the horizon and strange, tentacled lifeforms grow out of the surface, like the world is some sort of cancerous prison for an eldritch god. I promptly went to work trying to survive, gathering resources to repair my hazard protection and following a mysterious signal to my ship. As I sat in the ruined cockpit, I took some time to add my own personal touch to tho it. After a brief moment of thought, I renamed my ship the Akabane 3000, after one of my more favorite anime characters.

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The next order of business was gathering some resources to repair my ship, and exploring the area. I found a crashed satellite nearby my ship, and when I interacted with it, it sent out a mysterious signal. Very nifty! I spent the rest of the session gathering resources. Crafted some sort of metal plate, so I’m halfway there to repairing my ship! (Sorta kinda.) I also took some time to take some screenshots! (See above.) Got some of the environment and the local flora and fauna – I think that the walking creatures look like mini-cuthulus, so maybe I’ll rename them something in that theme. I also found some cool blue crystals, which I thought looked really nice against the landscape. I also noticed that the sands turn more dark blue at night, which provided a cool contrast to the hot, radioactive sands of the daytime. I finished my day as the planet turned to night, sitting in my ship and staring out into the boundless sky. I finally decided on a name for the planet before logging off: “Az Kaban,” after the prison from the Harry Potter series, both due to my own personal headcanon about the planet’s creatures (see above), and because it was a place that I desperately wanted to get the hell off of. The screenshots I took are attached to this post, all taken pre-name change.

That’s all for today, folks! Stay tuned for my next adventure, I’m looking forward to getting off of this planet and starting to explore the solar system! Thank you so much for taking the time to read this, if you have. Honestly, I don’t really expect very many people to read this, but that’s fine. This was surprisingly more helpful to do than I thought that it would be, so I guess there’s my motivation to come back! Assuming this doesn’t get deleted, there will probably be another installment in the next day or so, we’ll see how it works out.

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First Moments on the planet

A shot of the horizon

Ghot G’yotglorb, amirite? (Seriously tho what is this thing?)

Di-Hydrogen, I think? Pretty anyhow

The ground sprouts tentacles

Az Kaban at night. (Pre-name change)

I play on Switch and this might be a Switch-specific bug, but wanted to post a warning to others just in case: I spent 20+ hours over a couple of weeks save-scumming for an S class pirate freighter. After dozens of space battles and a disheartening number of C classes, I finally found an S class. I went up to the captain to claim the ship, elected to transfer the base from my current freighter to my sweet new S class pirate freighter…and the game crashed. Restore point and autosave were from prior to defeating the freighter and it had changed to a C class when I reloaded and tried again.

It was pretty damn devastating…

So I dismantled my current freighter base and as a test I tried claiming the next pirate freighter I encountered (C class…of course), and sure enough I had no problem when I chose to claim the freighter and said “no” to transferring my existing base.

Like I said, maybe it’s only a Switch problem but pretty horrible if you encounter it. Especially since my base isn’t all that special so if I knew the bug existed, I gladly would’ve ditched my existing base.

Importantly in my test I accidentally left a couple materials from dismantling my freighter base in the core freighter storage, so I got an additional warning about the freighter inventory before the base transfer question. So out of paranoia I’m leaving 1 carbon in my freighter inventory so the next time I find an S class, I’ll be replicating the exact scenario where it didn’t crash. But my guess is the inventory warning doesn’t matter.

FWIW I have reported the bug on ZenDesk, not the most critical bug but pretty frustrating for people in my situation.

Someone posted a sub saying “HG, please charge us for the next update!”.

It got downvoted. We all love NMS and one of the thing that drives that is the devs’ passion and commitment to the community. Sean said in an interview “maybe we’re just terrible at business”.

They are a small team though, and I’m sure they do need our support here and there. Here’s what you can do:

• Buy their other games (Joe Danger, Last Campfire)
• Buy copies on other platforms
• Buy NMS as a gift for friends (especially whilst it’s on sale right now)
• Spread the word
• Keep the love

I’m about the buy Joe Danger myself for my phone now, and I will always be loyal to HG for their amazing passion and commitment. Their next game will surely be in my game library the moment it hits the shelves, and whatever this update is, some people will be happy and other won’t… can’t please everyone all the time. But, personally, I love this game and this community and I am one satisfied Interloper. Keep up the good work, HG!