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!

Honestly, I’m 100% fine with the inventory change. My only complaint is PLEASE LET ME PUT THE INVENTORIES ON TWO PAGES. SCROLLING IS A NIGHTMARE ON CONSOLE.

That’s all. Otherwise, pretty decent update. Looking forward to the next one.

I read all of the hate, waited a couple of days, and then held my nose and dove in. I station jumped to get more suit tech slots and am mostly back to where I was. My ships took a pretty big hit. I paid and scraped for more slots and am adding trails and bobbleheads to my favorite ship but they’ll never be as OP as they were before. Still fairly invincible though. I shifted from AI to stasis device farming for money a while ago so all good there.

Overall my biggest complaint is still the lack of procedural diversity, an inventory sort button, and listing the galaxy on the discoveries tab/screenshots. I do like the larger stacks and inventories and some of the visual updates. Overall, pretty solid meh. Mostly I just really appreciate the HG team for sticking with this game and continuing to do all this without charging for it.

What would you like to see in the next update?

I’m just some random doofus who wants to add his two cents.

I grinded myself into a supergod with upgrades both in my tech and regular inventory using only my cargo and freightor inventory to house my items with two activated indium mines to source me effectively with infinite money. It felt like i had reached a gameplay dead end with nothing more to do. I built absurd things, walked across every kind of world they offer. The whole thing was turning stale for me. Less an adventure and more of a meditative drifter simulator. Still great and profound imo, but just stale.

When i jumped back in, after the update, my entire set up was a disgusting mess both in my suit inventory and my ship inventory as well. After an hour or two of sorting the mess out, i settled on a chosen setup. It was a bummer to have been nerfed, but i also think it was fun hunting for it all anyways. You knew, journey vs destination. That’s just me. If you disagree, that’s fine. I love you anyways.

I switched it from normal difficulty to a survival difficulty and ran some quicksilver missions and once more found myself feeling vulnerable to the elements and it really did breath a fresh sense of life into the game for me. Space battles had stakes again and storms were once again terrifying since i could no longer hide behind 3 layers of hazard protection.

Also nerfing the activated indium was a great move too IMO, because after bankrupting myself on shipspace slots (my goodness those are expensive) i find myself really appreciating once again the currency systems with running trade routes, building circuit boards, being a space pirate, and selling settlement production. I have a deep joy in being a space trader and the update made it feel like a meaningful challange again.

What makes it work so well for me is that they allow me to do it that way. My joy is not everyone else’s joy and it feels to me that they tried to account for that in the difficulty slides.

I get the frustration for the minmax nerfs and i appreciate the expression of frustration. Alot of hours were put into the grind and i get how it feels like a massive stab in the back. However, i doubt HG actually did this in bad faith. I’m sure they’re working on a way to account for it and fix it. No doubt, they see the backlash.

The thing is, I’ve never seen a franchise do something like this before, in the sense that they built a game then spend the next 6 years building heavily unto itself. In a way, it feels like HG is flying blind through a model entirely of their own creation and mistakes can and will be made. In the past they have been made. Outlaws hit players with entirely too many pirate attacks, then they fixed it. Endurance lacked ramps in freighters and they eventually added them in. People wanted space whales. We got space whales. They’re listening, and I’m sure they’ll find a way to make it right.

I see what they tried to do, and they fell on their face for a lot of people, but there’s no doubt in my mind they’ll pick themselves back up and take care of you. I have faith in them.