Hi everyone,
I saw a post on here a couple weeks back asking about learning the languages, and the number of ‘???’ ones not seeming to go down. I figured I would spend a bit of time no-lifing this, and learn the complete languages of the 3 alien races. After a couple of nights of just running around paradise planets, taking my exocraft between Trading Posts, Archive buildings and alien monoliths, I now have them fully learned, and have discovered the following things-

1. While you are learning the languages, you will always have 32 ‘blanks’ (???). This number only starts to go down once you have less than 32 words to learn. This is a full ‘page’ of words.
2. The counts in the Guide and on the wiki are wrong. I don’t know if more words were added in updates or something, but there are about 200 extra per language.
3. Even after learning all words and getting to the point where Knowledge Stones give you the ‘Learned Nothing New’ message, conversations with aliens will still sometimes have words that you have not learned, and cannot learn.
4. While using Knowledge Stones, they go in ‘cycles’ through the alphabet, A-Z. The final word of each language is ‘video’.
5. Mystery Words are by far the most numerous. If more words have been added in later updates, it seems like they all fall under this category. When I was learning Vy’keen, I ran out of all other categories of words and still got a couple of hundred Mystery Words from alien NPCs.

Here are the updated Word Counts:

Gek- Guide says 784, but I found a total of 982.

Vy’keen- Guide says 802, but I found a total of 996.

Korvax- Guide says 776, but I found a total of 982.

I have not yet completed the Atlas words.

Anyway, thought this might help anyone trying to complete their alien vocabularies!

After almost 900 hours of play time I decided to start a new game in Survival Mode.

The wiki details are pretty sparse (https://nomanssky.fandom.com/wiki/Game_mode#Survival_mode) , but basically what I’ve seen comes down to a few changes:

1. You die you lose your carried stuff
2. Your inventory stacks are severely limited
3. Planet resources are further apart
4. Enemies have more health
5. (anecdotal) Planets are set up to kill you

One – This is reasonable, especially if you die (like I did) early in the game in space.

Two – This also includes the amount you can place in refiners. This is just annoying and time consuming. Nothing about this is harder or “survival”, just gets in the way. It makes the game much more boring, as you end up feeding the refiners constantly rather than setting them and coming back a little later.

Three – Again, more annoying and time-consuming but not harder. You can still find the resources you need, but takes more hunting to find the resource you need near enough to a power hotspot. More boring.

Four – Good. No objection. They may have increased the number of enemies (for pirate raids or Sentinels), but I don’t think that’s actually happened. Seems about the same. I think more enemies is a much greater risk than greater health, as they have an easier time targeting you while you’re focused on picking them off.

Five – This SEEMS to be the case but I may just have bad luck. Every single planet I’ve been on has had weather or environmental damage at play. However, I’ve only encountered one seriously aggressive predator (a very fast bonecat) in about 30 hours of play though.

Summary: I think Survival could use some work. Adding difficulty doesn’t have to come along with making the game slower or less enjoyable. There’s a few tweaks I’ve hinted at above that could improve playability and fun.

Change my mind 🙂