I was on an icy extreme weather planet fighting a sentinel pillar. I didnt have a cold weather protection tech and just quickly jamming an ion battery into my hazard protection every 30 seconds or so. It was tedious but I had to fight this pillar for a mission. Eventually an extreme storm rolled in, which was problematic but luckily the last bot, the mech, was almost dead. I took down the mech and headed over to the console.

Standing at the console, I then see WARNING: EXTREME WIND EVENT Huh I get slowly pushed up against the pillar, and am unable to extract myself I blink Then I am flailing in a white void. No ground in sight. Very concerned for my safety, I look up. And realize I am on the edge of space. Then, some random jerk wad in a space ship starts trying to shoot me out of the sky He lands a few laser shots on me and that’s where I begin to panic. Now there really wasn’t much I could do in my panic, and luckily I was calm enough to save my jetpack for when I inevitably returned to the ground. So I watched helplessly as I was buffeted by strong winds and being attacked by spaceships. Eventually, after what felt like an agonizingly long time, I began to see flickering flames of damaged machinery through the fog and saw the ground getting closer. I sparingly used my jetpack to slow and eventually reach the ground relatively unharmed. Immediately, I try to call my starship in, but the ground here was very uneven.

Then, a few seconds after having landed, a new message appears. WARNING: EXTREME ELECTROMAGNETIC EVENT Before I have a chance to process this new warning, the world erupts in lightning. Panic level rises more and I desperately try to get to flatter ground.

Then a direct strike. Completely ahnnilating my shields and leaving me with two health cores. At this point my panic has reached its apex. I began floundering desperately trying to call my ship in, spamming left click and looking everywhere.

I did manage to get my ship called in. I hopped in, and immediately left the planet. Critically wounded, tech broken, but alive. After taking a moment to calm down and make sure the planet I landed on wasn’t a portal to oblivion, I realized: I never finished my mission at the sentinel pillar. Steeling myself for what was to come, I went back, but it was entirely uneventful. Mission complete, I left the planet. Hopefully, never to return.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get a clip of this whole ordeal, which I greatly regret. It was truly the craziest chain of events that happened to me.

I am IN LOVE with the low-orbit frigates flying over top of me. It never ceases to stop me in my tracks and jumping into my ship and flying next to one just makes me happy. It makes me feel like there’s an actual “world” going on around me, like the game is more “alive”. That addition brings me back to when the visuals for weather changed to being able to see a storm growing over us as we hear the “Warning: Incoming storm” and the first time I saw clouds building up I just stopped and watched it happen.

So. What other relativley small changes could Hello Games add to make our beloved space sim feel more Alive?

A bit of a vague title, but the truth nonetheless. I got in to No Man’s Sky somewhat late; a couple of expansions dropped, the tide already turned. No Man’s Sky was seen as a decent game, lots was achieved after launch.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun! The first couple of hours were mesmerizing, and I was excited to see what was to come. Fast forward about 50-60 hours, and I was already kind of done with the game. I was earning millions of units with an Activated Indium farm, something that was recommended to me by the many YouTube ‘guide’ videos surrounding this game. I had reloaded a Freighter battle almost 50 times and achieved a Capital S-Class Freighter. I had a massive farm that I used for nanites. I was maxing out my inventory and I finished building somewhat of a base.

Now what? That was the question I had, and it never really went away. Somehow I felt as if I didn’t really ‘complete’ the game, but I also no longer had a goal to work towards. I was earning an absurd amount of units, with nothing to really spend it on. I no longer had any motivation to engage in the vast majority of the systems the game had laid out, because why would I? The rewards gained from exploration were not worth it, I wouldn’t gain anything from it.

I briefly played on both a hardcore and a permadeath save, but after getting the associated achievements, I realized that the changes these game modes provided were not the changes I was looking for. If anything, they seemed detrimental somehow; on top of not having a goal once I set up a few farms somewhere, I now also had to fight a limited inventory system for naught but a level of tedium. If this was No Man’s Sky but difficult, I realized that I did not desire ‘difficulty’ in this game.

I stopped having fun, so I stopped playing.

Then, some time later, I realized that I messed up. I realized that No Man’s Sky, for all of its faults, is not meant to be min/maxed, at least, not for me. I hopped into the game again, determined to go against what I normally do in games like these. This time, I did not rush any sort of farm for mass units and nanites. I did not hop around systems to find the perfect S-Class Freighter. I did not look up any ship catalogues, or teleporter coordinates for valuable exotics or multi-tools. I even started roleplaying my traveler a little bit.

Man, what a world of difference. Suddenly, I find myself having something to work towards constantly. No longer do I skip over 90% of the content in the game because it’s ‘not valuable enough’. I get excited when I find a cool treasure that’s worth a lot of units, or when I find a crashed freighter somewhere. It’s fun to scour planets and systems alike for valuable targets, resources, and settlements.

This might sound totally obvious to a lot of you, but I can’t begin to tell you the epiphany I had when I started playing the game like this. This is what No Man’s Sky is meant to be. It’s not a space economy simulator, it’s a space exploration game. And though that is apparent everywhere in the game, it somehow took me over a year to realize that.

So to all of you who got bored with the game due to a lack of goals, or because making money/nanites etc. is ‘too easy’, try a different approach. Maybe you shouldn’t go for an Activated Indium farm. Maybe it’s best to delete that generous gift from some player in the Anomaly that’s worth millions upon millions. I’ve learned that when I try to game No Man’s Sky, I simply end up gaming myself out of tens, if not hundreds of hours of fun.

See you Space Cowboys…