I have been playing since 2016 when it came out, but the realization didn’t hit me until today. There’s so much beauty in the game. The universe of this game created itself. Every flora, fauna, behavior of living creatures, the terrain, the cave systems, the oceans, the trees, almost everything if not everything, was generated by an engine. Not even the developers know what everything in NMS is. This is nothing new, of course, but with the added fact that there are 255 galaxies and 18 quintillion worlds in this game still puts me in awe. The people who did the math said it would take about 500 billion+ years to explore every galaxy, star system, planet, anomaly, and space station in the game.

You will never explore all of NMS. Your children will never explore all of NMS, nor your great grandchildren, nor your great-grandchildren’s great-grandchildren’s great-grandchildren and so on. If the game manages to live on for thousands of years and years to come (it likely won’t but for argument sake let’s say it does), it will likely still not be fully explored and people who find old bases (As it will likely be easier to find old player bases) from these previous and close following years will be as abandoned and relic like as the already implemented ruins we find on planets that we didn’t build. The visuals are insane. Warping into a new start system and seeing the sun (or suns!) with their glow and shine reflecting off the corners of solar system gets me every time. The faint glow of distant stars and the color of your star system are miraculous to see, even if you have been playing this game for about 6 years.

The music is another thing altogether, sometimes it sounds sad, sometimes it sounds fast and action packed, but for the most part there’s a common theme; loneliness and solitude in a vast universe. The music is the perfect mix between sad, ominous, and nostalgic that perfectly makes you realize: “Damn. I’m alone here in this void.” Of course Hello Games implemented ways to see other players and do missions with them, but just the normal feel of the game still makes you feel lonely. It’s great, and 65daysofstatic couldn’t have done a better job.

No Man’s Sky is not just a space exploration game, it’s an infinite feeling mysterious space exploration flight simulator survival economy trading game, with a great soundtrack, a overarching story that gives you an existential crisis, and a redemption story better than Avatar: The last Airbender.

Wrote this as a comment to answer someone’s question, figured it could use it’s own post.

There is no pattern for ship spawning, there are set parts it uses to build random ships just like all the other ships, someone built a list of parts, when you’re on the galaxy map looking at a system, some systems say “water” if there’s a planet with water in the system, but there’s a new type of system that is corrupted and it says dissonant where the water should be, and won’t say water even if there is.

Make sure you have an advanced mining laser and keep an exocraft summoning station in your pocket too (which you should always do anyway, drop it, summon, pick back up, can then summon that or those crafts from all over that system without dropping it again), preferably one that can summon a fully boosted nomad with an advanced mining laser installed.

When you warp to those dissonant systems one of the planets will say it has corrupted sentinels listed with the minerals when you scan it. That planet will have a specific interceptor ship that will spawn on it, unless it is a dead planet or a lush planet (lush planets are currently broken). There may be several of that ship on the planet but they will all be exactly the same except it’s class can be different so you can hunt for higher class ships on that planet if need be. Most planets seem to have an average of 3 but i’ve seen some with only 1 and some with quite a few.

There are a couple ways to find those ships, you can land on the ground, pick a fight with sentinels, win all 5 rounds and it will find a shard for you to fly to, that’s the ship. You can also pick a fight with the sentinels and then jump in your ship and do a space battle and beat the dreadnaught on round 5 (you don’t have to kill the other ships on round 5, just the big one) and it will give you an AI thing you can use to search for shards which are the ships.

There are also some purple towers you can fly or drive around and shoot. (do not stand close to them when they blow up, it will instakill you or your rover). Those drop mirrors, which is a thing you’ll need and should collect lots of, but some of them drop Echo Locators, if you’re in a rover and maybe have the right scanner installed the tower will tell you what it will drop when you get close. Those echo locators will find a camp, at the camp it has a computer with a math puzzle, solve the puzzles and if gives you the choice to unlock the gun and find shards, you can do both. The gun has 2 options, either a pistol or a rifle, far as i’ve seen there aren’t various models of it. If it’s a class you want you can take the weapon but if you don’t like which one it is you can usually save and reload and it will switch to the other type or try dropping a save point, then flying off and saving and reloading on another planet and flying back to your save to see if it’s changed, you can try every planet in the system just like regular multitools the box defines the class it will be but what planet or space station you last loaded on defines what weapon it is. Then head off to the shard to find your ship.

Once you’re at a ship you just rip it’s brain out, use the brain in your inventory to get directed to a small monolith, go there, do some shock therapy on the brain and bring it back to the ship, insert it with the other parts (which you should collect lots of when you can, they’re needed for everything interceptor related, healing and fueling), and you have a free ship, that’s worth quite a bit of money to sell.

To get tons of shards and mirrors and quite a few echo locators, find a corrupted dead or airless planet that is fairly flat and barren and ride your nomad around scanning and you can find lots of shards and towers. you can do that on any corrupted planet but it’s way faster when there’s not other crap to deal with and go around. Build a base there, name it something to remind you what it’s for.

When you get to a dissonant system you can quickly use a echo locator to find out if that system actually has ships, if it’s jammed there are no ships, just leave unless it’s a dead planet you can use for farming.

Lush planets aren’t corrupted on normal difficulty but they are in survival and permadeath but they are broken and don’t have crystals on them. If you find a sentinel and go through the fights you get nothing for it, and picking a fight and trying to drag it into space results in nothing happening when you get in your ship. So currently no corrupted lush homes.

Let me know if I have any wrong information or if I should add anything. I’m in a lot of pain always so i have a hard time thinking.