Playing multiplayer sessions has injected a fresh boost into my NMS playthrough, I’m now having regular weekly sessions with a friend in the next town over and we’ll often talk though the week about the plan for the next session.

During our last session, my friend was getting tired of flying his ship, but wanted to keep shooting pirates in system. I prefer to fly the ships and don’t have much patience with space combat in this game. So suddenly the idea of the two seater ships enters the conversation – wouldn’t it be cool if that was a thing? After all, we’re usually flying around together making mischief but the idea of a dedicated gunner holds some merit in the context of the multiplayer experience. Maybe this could be possible with something that amounts to a bomber class vessel?

Despite being a Day One player, with several hundred hours on the game (and all expeditions) I never attempted a Permadeath run.

My first day one “clear” was on hard difficulty and, depite the game being very basic at the time, it was challenging and never unfair. I almost always played normal during the years.

I have to confess that the harder difficulty settings of Permadeath is a lot more fun. I don’t mind about the fear of losing the save (I died 7 jumps from the core because I fell down a cliff) both all the balance setting that Permadeath implies. It was about the fact that despite a normal game, the event density (and their variety) is higher even if the difficulty is not so much challenging.

Being chased if you have valuables in the ship is fun, encountering lots of bounties is fun (you can never be sure they will evade or come after you), there’s more variety in fauna attitude towards the player and so on. Having the system patrol ships or the freighter fleets doing something useful is fun. Almost every jump lets you have an event. I completely forgot, for example, that pirates may attempt ground raids. It was so rare in normal difficulty that I was suprised to have 3 raids in a very short game (about 15 jumps, including a black hole hop that brought me at about 4K LY from the core).

The only mildly frustrating element is the material scarcity and the inventory limits (but is mangeable if you know the game very well).

Maybe the only part that is unfair is the starting tutorial. It has the same dilated timing of the normal run but in PD you don’t have time to lose: usually the starting planet is just a deathtrap you struggle to survive due to resource scarcity or very harsh environment. When you regain player agency and can plan your next move carefully and choose the risks when going afterresources in the next planet, everything becomes fun again.

I’m the only one that was surprised by how the permadeath difficulty settings makes the game more enjoyable?

…is Vortex Cubes as base decorations.

I’m 100% serious. A very small, simple request. I want to be able to place Vortex Cubes all over my bases.

Why? For all my fellow Day 1 players, you remember back when the game launched in 2016 when Vortex Cubes ruled the entire economy pretty much? If you found a planet with Vortex Cubes, you hit the jackpot, and you stayed there and grabbed all that you possibly could to turn in at trading posts to buy a new starship. Sometimes, they even looked like this on planets.

Vortex Cubes also were used to craft one of the hyperdrive upgrades before NEXT dropped if memory serves.

Now? They’re barely worth anything. They can’t be crafted, can’t be cooked, or refined, they don’t even drop Tetracobalt anymore. They’re just used for selling to make a very small amount of units.

The way I see it, just add them as base decorations at least to let us build cool stuff with them.

Just my two cents. Call it nostalgia for NMS 2016 if you must, but seeing Vortex Cubes in game always takes me back. I just want to be able to actually DO something with them again. What do you all think?

I think the most interesting / fun expeditions are the ones that don’t just devolve into glorified scavenger hunts. This expedition in particular has been the most egregious example of them all, even moreso than the xenobiology (or was it exobiology?). I gave up shortly after the first milestone and resorted to guides because 2/3 of the milestones after that require landing on every random planet you come across and hoping you find something.

And even those guides just boil down to “find a portal, enter these coordinates.” Really engaging gameplay, lemme tell ya. Sorry I don’t have 100 hours over 6 weeks to find everything on my own Hello Games, but don’t worry, with every expedition I’m slightly less inclined to come back for the next expedition or touch my main save…