I will preface this by saying if we had the option between single/multi-biomes and some of you played with and actually liked the multi-biomes, then that’s perfectly fine – it’s all subjective, and just because I know I wouldn’t like it doesn’t mean you wouldn’t, too. My view is from the fact that we DON’T have multi-biomes, and I believe that the majority of people that think they’d want multi-biomes on planets would actually have less enjoyment if they ever got their wish, and here’s why.

Have you ever tried flying around a planet in NMS? I’m not talking about circumnavigating it, I mean flying over rougly every square mile of the planet. And if you actually have, did you ever do it a second time? My guess is that 99% of people are going to say “no” to at least one of those questions. So why is that? Because these planets are large, and doing so would take wayyyy too much time.

I don’t know about you, but I spend more than enough time on individual planets as it is, and if I knew that each planet could have multiple biomes, as an explorer-type gamer, I would want to see each of those biomes because… well, what if one of them is reaalllly cool? That is why most of us go visit a planet, in regular NMS, right? To see what it is offering? After visiting hundreds of planets, I still want to check out almost every planet I come across, even if I only give a planet a few seconds to form my opinion of “eh, this one isn’t very special/new”.

And that’s my main point – with how big planets are, checking out multiple biomes on each one would guarantee adding a bunch of waiting as we pulse over to the next biome. Let’s do some numbers here: Let’s say you have a solar system with 3 planets. In normal NMS, you’d dip into a planet, explore as much as you want, leave, and then pulse to the next planet. That’s gonna be about 3 breaks in between. In the hypothetical multi-biome NMS, if each planet has 2 biomes, then each solar system gets 6 breaks total. 3 biomes would have 9 breaks total, and so on.

TL;DR Abstracting planets into single biomes instead of pursuing realism makes NMS more digestible and fun, because it allows us to immediately judge within seconds of visiting a planet whether we want to spend more time on that planet. If multiple biomes were added, then more than a few minutes of waiting would have to be invested into searching a planet before we even could make the decision that “yep, there’s nothing interesting here, let’s go check the next planet”. And not only would it slow us down in how much time we have to invest in each planet, it would then multiplicatively increase the amount of time spent in each solar system, which is the opposite of the point of the game. They didn’t give us quintillions of planets to explore because they wanted us to spend all our time in each solar system. All that said… if they could give us the option for how many biomes could appear on a planet, then everyone could be happy, and I have no problem if there are some of you that would enjoy what I described above.

So…I finally got the nudge I needed from one-too-many people saying “but the wall of text is just TL;DR!”

So…I made my first Tutorial video instead.

https://youtu.be/BZtf1BujkgY

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Including the original Wall-o’-Text for posterity.

Step 1: Get both the Economy & Conflict scanners from the Anomaly’s Ship-Tech vendor. You’ll need a Walker-Brain for the Conflict Scanner.

Step2: In GalaxyMap, sort by Conflict, and choose the red stars. THEN you’re looking for the stars with the pirate symbol (that’s the skull). Travel to that system. You’ll want a bunch of those systems (15-20).

Go to Pirate Systems.

Buy Banned Goods from the vendor on the far-left if you’re looking at it from the Teleporter (under the yellow junked ship).

Buy tech & weapons packages from same dealer (not the next dealer over that sells ‘em for nanites).

Go to a NON pirate system by cycling through one of your bases (you can’t go directly to a Non-Pirate space station from a Pirate system or vise/versa). Sell off the Banned Goods immediately, don’t just fly around with that stuff (a system Scan will get you popped & chased by sentinel ships).

Open all the tech & weapon packages. Sell those to one of the Tech Dealers across on the other platform for nanites.

Lather/rinse/repeat.

Hit a few Freighters IN THE PIRATE SYSTEMS ONLY for more banned goods to sell, to keep your $$$ headed north…so you can keep buying those tech packages. Don’t hit the free-floating Cargo Pods or you lose Standing with whatever Race is dominant in that system.

Develop a LIST of Pirate systems & hit them regularly, they’ll regenerate their inventory for you to buy again about every 30 minutes to an hour. I’ve got 20 in my list. It takes me 30-45 minutes to go through the whole list & nets me about 50k Nanites per rotation.

I keep track of which ones I’ve done by going through the whole list of pirate systems (while in pirate systems, ONLY Non-Pirate systems will say “unavailable” something to that effect), then cycling back to sell off.

That keeps them in order so I can go back for another run later.