I’ve been role-playing as, basically what we are, a cartographer/curator but I’ve begun using my extreme rudimentary design and build skills to create little “temples” on certain planets.

As a cartographer of sorts I’ve also been renaming planets and systems to reflect their qualities but have been using Google Translate to name then in Greek, Latin, German, or Esparanto.

My settlement is a small group of believers/worshippers that sprung up around one of these temples which helps keep me motivated to stay involved in its operation.

Im what ways do you like to keep this game fresh?

Now that the final optional milestone is unlocked and patch 4.52 unbroke the expedition, the Omega Expedition is the ultimate quicksilver farm until it ends. You can easily get 6000 quicksilver in an hour or less. I was able to finish in 45 minutes by doing the following steps to avoid unnecessary backtracking and moving around.

1. Immediately scan six plants to get the Exobotany milestone and install the scanner upgrade. Scan as many fauna as you can see and various plants and minerals (focus on whatever your scanner upgrade is giving you a bonus for). In total, you need ~135K units to start for microprocessors and eventually another 250K to 300K for wiring looms.
2. Find your ship and repair it, collecting necessary resources along the way. Take off and head to the nearest ice planet. The ice planets have more things to scan compared to the other planets. Scan as many fauna as you can to try and get the Life In All Its Forms milestone and the second scanner upgrade.
3. Build your base to finish the next milestone and refine some chromatic metal from the copper you received.
4. Somewhere between the starting planet and your base planet, repair all but one each of the broken starship and multitool slots to get the Scavenger milestone. You will need the nanites in a minute. The magnetic ferrite and silver are the easiest ones to skip fixing since they are the hardest/most time consuming to get.
5. Before heading to the space station, install the hyperdrive and build one warp cell. Doing this while at your base ensures you have enough resources without having to backtrack.
6. Head to the space station and buy the microprocessors to finish the hyperdrive. While you’re here, buy 3 C-class hyperdrive upgrades (buy, save, reload) with the nanites from the Scanveger milestone. These will give you enough range to make every warp except the last one in a single go.
7. Go to Rendezvous 1-4 and get both the normal and optional milestones, keeping in mind the amount of units you need for wiring looms as you’re scanning.
8. Somewhere between Rendezvous 1 and 4, you need to find a Traveler grave, get the Indium Drive plans, and install it. The earliest you can do this is on the Rendezvous 1 space station. If you pick the correct option when talking to the Traveler, you should get enough nanites to ask where their grave is (reload if you pick the wrong option). Alternately, if you go into the Anomaly with the milestone selected, you can ask Polo where to find a Traveler.
9. Travel to Rendezvous 5 and finish the last two milestones. At this point, you should have 6000 quicksilver. Technically, you could finish the full set of milestones to get another 4000 or so quicksilver, but if all you want is the quicksilver it is much faster to just start a new save and go again.
10. Go to the Anomaly and buy whatever you want from the quicksilver vendor. These items can then be claimed on any other save you want.

Thinking of the big picture you probably will never be able to obtain the starship that you dream of ever in your lifetime. The common saying is that exploration is a core aspect of the game and the player should keep exploring to find the ship they want, but there is a very brutal catch…

The world of NMS consists of 256 Galaxies, all with their hundreds of systems, who also have their handful of planets, the NMS world is so huge that you probably wouldn’t even be able to comb through it all in your whole lifetime even if you explored 24/7 without going to the bathroom or eating.

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Now here is my point, I don’t intend to imply that HG should just allow us to build our own ship and make the whole exploring shtick useless, but atleast we should be able to work with something that is “good enough”. A Sentinel ship for instance, I find a good model with folding wings and belly horn but it has the ugly big wing stuck in its body? I should be able to remove it. I find a good one with the wrong colors? I should be able to change the paintjob.

No modifying the entire ship, but still be able to change a range of body parts and paint to better match what we want, I dont care if it would change it to C class or if it costed an unholy amount of Nanites, it would simply be another nice goal to chase at endgame.

If you can get by in the expedition without using the expansion slots for multitools, your exosuit, and your starship that you are awarded during the different phases of the expedition, you can take them back with you to your main save when the expedition is over, and use them on your main save.

Keep in mind that you can buy one exosuit expansion at the space station and one in the Anomaly in each system you visit during the expedition as well.

Also, despite the end-of-expedition bug that I managed to get around with the photo-mode fix, I really liked how I could take things back to my main save. It was also very satisfying to get a ton of units and nanites to carry over to your main save, not only for the other stuff in your inventories, but also your in-expedition accomplishments, even those not directly related to the expedition itself.

I sometimes feel that the HG devs don’t respect the players’ time with some of their design decisions, but this was the first time I felt like my time was well worth playing the expedition because it advanced my main save as well, and not just with cosmetics and cool building parts.