Hey all! I last played No Man’s Sky when the Next update was fresh. Back then I had a lot of free time to put into the game, but it always felt like it was a game that you could play casually and still have fun.

Nowadays grad school has stolen the majority of my free time, and most of my regular games are so overwhelmingly large it never feels like I can play for an hour or two per day and still have a decent time. That being said, I’m looking for a new main game that’s more compatible with my hell schedule. Is NMS a game that could fit that bill, or should I continue my search? Thanks in advance for your time and consideration!! 💚

OK, apologies if this is a worn topic; I’m fairly new to the game and still discovering things.

Early on when I was learning my way around space stations, I found that room off the side of the technology merchants’ area, with a little hallway leading to a locked door that said “AltasPass v3 Required”. My interest was piqued. I eventually found the recipe for an AtlasPass v3 and saw that it needed Emeril. So I looked up Emeril and found that it can only be found on planets around green stars, and that required a special update to my ship’s hyperdrive. Now I was really interested! Something that takes that much work must have an interesting reward, right?

So I eventually got my hyperdrive upgraded, visited a green star, found an Emeril deposit on a planet, and mined it. Crafted my pass, and I was good to go.

The next station I visited, I ran straight to that door, opened it, and… WTF? A hydroponics garden? That’s it?

I felt a bit like Ralphie in A Christmas Story when he finally decoded his Ovaltine message. Is that really all there is to this room? Does the AtlasPass v3 have other uses?

No complaints here, it pushed me to explore a little more which is part of the point of this game. I just thought it was a little weird to have to go to so much trouble for such a pointless room.

So while I was really in the middle of a different mission last night, I came across an awesome planet. It had fish that flew around and created blue smoke clouds out of their butts. They were awesome. I scanned them, but did not add them to wonders or anything. Now I have time to go back, but can’t find that planet. I seem to be able to view everything I’ve encountered BUT fauna. I can only pick Wonders.

And I can’t sort systems by galaxy (which is idiotic), so I can’t just isolate THIS galaxy, which I’m more or less brand new to.

It seems that my only choice is to sort by all visited systems, and then go planet by planet by planet by planet. And when it reloads the list from hitting the down arrow to move to the next screen, I can’t tell if I’ve skipped to a new system, or it’s tree he last one I was looking thru.

Am I doing this wrong? Is there a place to view fauna like I can everything else?

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.

Idk who needs to hear this but pirate system farming is my favorite way to get 10’s of thousands of nanites pretty quickly. It’s not hard to net 50+k in an hour. You do need a Units bankroll but salvaging a couple Interceptors is more than enough to get started.

Any time I’m exploring the galaxy or searching for the coolest Interceptor in the universe I’ll stop at a pirate system every 3-5 warps to buy out the Suspicious Packet stock (tech and weaponry) and check out the local solar ships.

If I need a pile of nanites quickly to upgrade a ship or something I’ll hit up pirate systems back to back. I go to the station vendor and buy all the tech and weapon packets, and then go to one trade depot and buy them out too. Then warp to the next system and do it again. Once I have a stack or two of each packet I open them all up and sell them to an upgrade vendor.

One stack of 50 nets around 16-17k nanites. You can get a stack of each, tech and weaponry, in about 5-6 warps. It’s FREE REAL ESTATE!