What I mean is that I want to be able to take plants that I’ve scanned from other planets and apply them to my base. If I can scale them, all the better.

While we’re at let me breed plants to get neat variations like I can with my pets.

I would also love a “planter” base building part. Literally a wooden crate full of soil I can add plants to. Something I can scale, I would like to be able to have free reign of the depth in which I put the plants into the planter, as opposed to having it all just sit on the top of the soil, so I can make more dynamic plant arrangements.

Would any of this excite anyone else?

The conversation about tech slots and activated Indium has really sidelined just how great a job they’ve done with the Switch port.

There’s definitely some roon for improvement with the UI, touch screen integration, and expansion of custom game settings, but goddamn, the game feels really smooth considering its “only” 30fps.

And while there’s obvious graphical compromises to make this miracle port possible, its not nearly as compromised as I’d expected, and it packs in a surprising amount of detail. I notice distance objects tend to blur a little when you’re on the move, but when you come to a full stop the details sharpen up pretty quick, there’s obviously some clever ‘hierarchy’ the game has to determine what needs to look clear and what can be subordinated in a given frame. The results won’t be as flattering in a side by side with high end PCs, but it does a great job of giving your brain enough details to fill in any gaps subconsciously.

And some nice shading and lighting techniques are preserved from the main consoles /PC build, especially that sun-kissed translucent effect that massive funghi tend to have when the sun’s hitting the right angle.

The work they’ve done in previous updates on the overall scale of the world and its relative asset sizing translates well to the small screen, giving the impression of inhabiting these massive planets with imposing mountains, dense woodlands, and intimidating cave networks that feel easy to get lost in without a terrain manipulator as a last ditch “fuck outta here” measure. For a handheld game, the world it presents feels bigger than it has any right to be on such a dinky platform.

And the autosave system clearly seems designed with the Switch’s pick-up-put-down gameplay ethos. I don’t think I’ve made a single manual save since starting up a new save post-4.0. (Constructed save points still do double duty as permanent nav markers, so nothing is really lost here.) And with the new custom game parameters you can opt in to useful features that reduce the moment to moment busywork that might otherwise feel laborious in context of the ’20 minute loop’ that Switch lends itself to by its portable nature.

All in all, I’ve been playing since 2016 launch, and this is the most significant platform-driven update I’ve played since PSVR. (And we’ve still got the second-generation VR update to come!)

To be frank, I’ve often felt like I often preferred the ‘idea’ of No Man’s Sky and what it represents as a sandbox experience, rather than the more mundane reality of actually playing it. Maybe it’s the long boot times on PS4, but I often felt like the friction points of the grinding loop kept me from sinking into more substantive play sessions, and as a result I’d usually just derp around until my launch thrusters ran out, then not be bothered to go refuel, and so my playthrough would just fizzle out.

Now it’s on handheld, and it’s got custom game modifiers to tailor the moment to moment gameplay, I’ve found a sweet spot where I’m actually focused on doing the story, heading to galactic core, etc, and not getting bogged down in minutiae every time my mining laser or launch thruster runs out, nor getting slowed down by sprint being tied to life support systems. The pace of my moment to moment gameplay finally lines up with the spacefaring fantasy I picture in my head when I think about what No Man’s Sky represents.

So yeah, I think that’s pretty cool. 😊

Experimental 12/10

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• A new difficulty setting has been added which allows players to lock themselves out of any further difficulty settings changes. Once enabled, this action is permanent.

• The strength of starship specialisation bonuses have been increased, so that higher-grade ships receive greater inherent bonuses to their stats. This scales steeply with both class and ship specialisation, so that eg the Explorer class ships will have significantly further warp ranges.

• As well as damage, shield and warp bonuses, starships now also have an inherent agility-based stat, which benefits all maneuverability upgrades in the same way as the other specialisation stats affect their relevant upgrades.

• Stat bonuses on procedural jetpack upgrades have been increased.

• Stat bonuses on procedural hazard protection upgrades have been increased.

• Stat bonuses on procedural pulse engine upgrades have been increased.

• Stat bonuses on procedural hyperdrive upgrades have been increased.

• The drop rate of Spawning Sacs retrieved by the living frigate from fleet expeditions has been increased.

• Significantly reduced the likelihood of incoming damage to break a piece of technology while the Exosuit shields are charged.

• Fixed a number of issues where different popups would take the same scrolling input.

• Fixed an issue that prevented changing tabs in the freighter inventory while hovering over an empty slot.

• Fixed an issue that caused critically damaged Hazard Protection to appear to become recharged and functional when sitting in the starship.

• Hazard Protection now notes on the HUD when it is critically damaged.

• When reporting a base, the owner’s name is now more clearly displayed in the UI.

• Fixed an issue that caused missions to fail to recognise when Exocraft technology was correctly charged.

• Fixed an issue that caused some items (such as projectile ammunition) to build the wrong amount when first crafted.

• Fixed an issue that allowed players to salvage their only operational starship.

• Fixed an issue that could strand players on the space station if they managed to dock with a broken pulse engine.

• Fixed an issue that could leave some players floating in space when reloading their save.

• Fixed an issue that prevented players with very large inventories from seeing all their items when transferring to another inventory, such as a storage container.

• Fixed a number of clashes between changing inventory tabs and changing stack sizes.

• Fixed an issue that could cause some newly acquired inventory items to be visually missing from the main inventory.

• The “Starting Slots” difficulty setting now adds additional inventory slots as well as additional companion and squadron slots.

• The visual quality of stars has been improved when using TAA and FSR 2.0.

• The visual effects for the final Atlas Station of the Artemis path have been improved.

• Fixed a network matchmaking issue.

• Fixed an Xbox Series S/X crash related to the file system.

• Fixed a PlayStation 5 crash.

• Fixed an inventory-related crash that could occur when loading the game.

• Fixed a memory-related crash on PlayStation 5.

• Fixed a crashed related to the recipe page within the information portal.

So… I had the chance to play several hours of the new update yesterday, here are my thoughts.

Some context: My main save is on survival with several hundred hours in, I had maxed out my exosuit, main ship, a second ship, multitool and the freighter with hard-to-get X-class rolls on maneuverability, jump range, shields, S-class freighter 250ly upgrades and all corresponding other S-class freighter upgrades.

I initially was taken aback by only being able to utilize half of many of my hard-earned upgrades. And then I played. I started my save back when I didn’t know anything about NMS and wanted it to be harder.

After making good progress and playing several hundred hours on this save, my progress felt stale, I didn’t feel the urge to log in and do stuff… I had seen a great part of all the variety in planets, building felt horrible with the stack size of 1000 and inventory management was a pain with juggling all the upgrades, the amount of silver to spend on freighter rooms was a pain.

Now that 4.0 is here, I logged in and the first thing I did was change the stack size to 9999. And then mourned my slower ship, less exosuit shield, poured some 400M in upgrading some multitool slots and saw my money drop to below 1B since… well forever.

And then it hit me. Exitement started running through my brain, seeing that ship costs had increased, money was spent faster and I can work towards a great deal more inventory space.

And ohhhh boy is it more, I can stack upgrades now, my whole upgrade “cargo” ship reduced to like 4 stacks.

And then I saw that the fleet freighter upgrades finally work completely. And every system I went to I worked on increasing my exosuit inventory slots, bought a lot of items to sell later, jumped in some dog fights and saw my exosuit get wrecked and my ship get wrecked as I couldn’t solo everything as easily as before, I needed to repair a lot of modules and the quicksilver and multitool slot rewards felt hard earned and worth it and trading feels worth it now again and running around getting more exosuit slots…

And I was really surprised. I thought YES YES YES this is great give me more of it!!

And then I thought about the “lost” ugrades – and it hit me. They are not lost. They are in my inventory ready to be installed again – when I have enough technology space, or, and here comes the kicker: in another ship.

Now I need less upgrades per ship to max it out – and – fights are more clutch, more important, there is a strong incentive in having multiple weapon systems to cycle through, dodging is more important and face-tanking a bad idea.

After just one day and several hours I came to the conclusion that the update is actually great. My biggest fear was that my fighter would feel like a turtle, but because of the law of diminishing returns it sure felt slower – but not as much as I had feared.

And that is a drawback I am totally willing to make for the benefits I already discussed.

Now you might be thinking that there are a lot of updates that are now useless, namely freighter and exosuit upgrades which you can’t put in another ship or multitool.

You are totally right. But then I thought about the community aspect of the game – and the second I am sure we will never be able to put them in again I will head to the anomaly with a smile on my face and drop them off to somebody who needs them more, or give them away here (if that is possible, still haven’t tested it).

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The update put back the survival in my survival save, got rid of my main annoyance (the stack size), gave me trading back, something to do, the fun to build more without stupid inventory restrictions and with more ressources to gather while I’m out and about because I can just store them.

So my ship is a little slower and my jetpack a little emptier – well now there is space for some of them ?-upgrades with jetpack capacity and all the more reason to bump around in a few of my other ships.

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I really do think I gained a lot and lost next to nothing, even though I am probably one of the people who lost most with this update. And there will surely be updates which will introduce different ways to improve our ships again to former glory.

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Thanks for reading, I hope this viewpoint may take some of the frustration away that some people seem to be having and I was afraid of having when logging back in.

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Have a great day, fellow interloper!