No Man's Sky came out in 2016 to somewhat mixed reviews and I enjoyed it then even if it didn't live up to all its promises. It didn't hold my attention for a particularly long time but I did go back to it once or twice before putting it down in favor of other titles. Now in 2024, No Man's Sky update Worlds Part 1, is up and running and it's brought some good stuff with it. I'm a guy who hadn't played NMS since 2018 so I was curious about how I'd feel picking up where I left off so long ago.

It's Been A While

In 2018 I had created a new character when the addition of capital ships was put in place. About a hundred hours of exploration in and understandably things were feeling repetitive. I wasn't really making progress and the best way I could figure to move forward was just finding my way to the center of galaxies and moving to a new one. I did have some significant upgrades to my character and my star ship but I was just losing interest even after finally getting some story lines started. So with the release of Worlds, I found myself curious about what has happened since I put it down six years prior. I reinstalled and and started playing and out of the gate I noticed things not only looked way better but the game runs much better. Not all is a sunny break from the incessant storms on virtually every new world I discover though. What I'm saying is that despite its many improvements over the years this game is still loaded with weirdly bad design.

It's Daunting, But At Least It's Still Full Of Problems

I had no idea how to play this game any more. All the menus and inventories feel different and not remembering where I had left off or what I was doing... It's an info dump as a returning player. I spent a couple of hours just roaming my freighter to figure out what the hell was going on. I noticed that all of my star ships except my primary were broken. This appears to have been an old persistent bug and as far as I can tell it doesn't happen any more. I scrapped them all for whatever units I could get and then it struck me that this scrapping ships thing wasn't even something I could do when I stopped playing in 2018. At least as far as I can remember, I can't seem to find any reliable information on when the option was added. Then I realized all the space stations have a different but standard layout along with much clearer options than before. I set myself on the task of trading navigation data for planetary maps and searching for distress signals so I could begin making some money by scrapping crashed ships. In this way I was able to re-learn how to play the game while I made some units. As I went along though I began noticing some things that made me quizzical and even fairly frustrated.

Exocraft - WTF Are These Things For?

I had never made any of the exocraft before and I didn't know how to do so now. Quest lines eventually got me there and I made all of them except the Nomad. I have to say that I feel like they're almost all completely useless for anything but extra storage space. Not just useless, but in fact a hindrance. They control like shit, the camera angles are awful, they take a ton of upgrades to become even moderately helpful and they do almost nothing that you can't do on foot. The exceptions are the Nautilon and the Minotaur.

The Nautilon is a submarine and even though it's not very fast it can scan for distress signals, submerged buildings, crashed freighters and ancient ruins right from the cockpit. That's a gold mine and it's only limited by needing a planet with an ocean.

The Minotaur is terrible as an exocraft for travel. It's extremely slow and it's not very good at navigating anything but modest terrains. I do have to give it some credit as a bot companion that will fight for you and hold your stuff while you're not piloting it. Just be aware that you'll constantly be repairing broken parts as it soaks up damage from anything above basic sentinel forces. It's also not possible to set the Minotaur in a passive or defensive mode. It will move and stop with you but if it deems something a threat, you're now in combat whether you like it or not.

The fact is that all the Exocraft suffer from a lack of usefulness in one major way -- You can't just call them to you whenever you like as you can with your star ships. Okay, that's not specifically true. There's a construction unit that once placed claims to be able to summon any exocraft from wherever, whenever as long as you have one built somewhere already. The problem is that it's broken and at least for now it doesn't work. Once placed the only interaction you have is to pick it back up again. Instead you'll have to build a new "geobay", a bespoke base for each of your exocraft, each taking a specific set of resources, and summon that particular craft with that geobay. Then you can delete the bay in the construction editor to get the resources back. As an upgrade it's possible to research a room for your freighter that will allow players to summon exocraft from any system their capital ship also resides as long as they have built it once already. But, this is still an unnecessary limitation and even it doesn't work every time with every craft as it claims to do.

Why can't we just summon the exocraft from a list like we do our ships? It makes no sense. 

On The Subject of Freighters

Why can't we just buy a new capital ship and have our current freighter base copied over? 

I'm still using my old class B capital ship from six years ago. I'd love an upgrade. I have twenty bulkhead modules to add space and I don't want to waste them on a class B ship. Running across new purchasable freighters is common. They're not even that expensive in relative terms. The problem is that if you just buy a new freighter and swap it out the only thing that will automatically transfer is the current freighter inventory and your star ship collection. That means all your rooms, your storage units and their contents, your resources spent on making those rooms, upgrades etc. are just deleted. This includes the old freighter itself so there's no going back if you decide you've changed your mind. Start over.

The process to change your freighter without losing the greater majority of your things is this:

First - You'll need to find one you like. This generally happens while jumping into a new system and coming across a conflict with pirates attacking a civilian fleet. Every five jumps you'll see this. When you successfully defend the fleet you'll be invited aboard the lead freighter with the option to buy or get paid instead. You can also find fleets jumping into a system at random and you can fly near them to check if they're able to be boarded. Or if you manage to defeat a pirate capital ship you'll have the option to buy and use it.

Let's say you find an upgrade, or just even one you like better than what you've got right now. In the case of being invited aboard after a pirate attack what you'll want to do is just look at the comparison and if this is the freighter for you, just leave. Don't choose any dialogue options. Similarly if you randomly come across a freighter just talk to the captain and "offer to buy" then you can compare without committing. Or in the case of taking over a pirate freighter, you'll have an option to seize the ship. But don't be fooled, you're still buying it. Again though, just leave.

And as an important note: Be aware that if you log out or if your game crashes that freighter will be gone when you come back next session.

Second - You've left the freighter you wish to purchase. Now you'll fly back to your current freighter or call it to your location, don't leave the star system or the potential new freighter will leave. You'll board your current freighter and systematically, manually delete your base in the construction editor. Every hallway, door, room and unit including your full storage units. It's scary. Don't worry though, everything is still there and your progress is saved.

Don't forget to check every tab. Old capital ships like mine have outdated storage tabs that were segregated to specific item types. That tab is now labeled simply with a diamond and bizarrely you can't access it by clicking on it. But there's stuff in there that you want and need. The best way to find it is to go to your refiner and pull those items out that way one at a time. However, you'll need to know what you're looking for. Alternatively you can change this in the editor if you're comfortable with that kind of thing.

Third - Once you're sure you've got everything it's time to go back to the freighter you plan to purchase. Make your way to the captain and buy the capital ship. Now you'll need to rebuild everything you had in your old capital ship. All your NPC's will still be there and your progress and research is still current and saved. All your storage units will have all their inventory and be accessible again. You'll need to replant your farming trays if you had any.

This takes a long time and is probably the most inconvenient way I could think of to handle buying a new capital ship. Hello Games, please just let us buy a new freighter and have our base copy over. If we're buying a ship with less inventory space give us a warning about a manual transfer of initial inventory. Perhaps make a temporary tab for that overflow inventory to go that is only accessible for item removal and once emptied the overflow tab itself gets removed. I'm not a game developer, maybe your game engine can't do this? I don't know, but there has to be a better way.

And as a follow-up question -- Why are we limited to nine star ships in our collection? There are only nine bays on our capital ships but it's not like they're always populated. When we summon our ships, no matter where from, we just choose from a list. Being limited to nine star ships just feels completely unnecessary.

Frigate Expeditions Are Still A Pain

Don't misunderstand. I like the ability to send a bunch of support ships out on a mission that brings me passive income and items. I do this every time I log in if the option is available. But the question I have here is this -- Why can't we create temporary frigate upgrades and frigate fuel from expedition menu?

See, when you select an expedition there's a mission time of anywhere from roughly five and up to twenty four real time hours to complete. The time counter stays on while you're not playing, don't worry too much about that. The issue is that each frigate you select takes a fuel total based on the distance they'll travel. You must select the maximum amount of frigates available for an expedition. Once they're all selected you'll see how much fuel is required to start the expedition below. Don't have 650 tons of frigate fuel? Well, you'll have to cancel the expedition and then drop into your inventory to be able create enough. Then select the expedition you want again and reassign the ships. Be sure it's the same mission and the same ships, because a different line up will almost certainly change the fuel cost total and that could potentially make you cancel again. Now that you're properly lined out don't forget your upgrades to help maximize that many hours long mission you're about to commit to. Don't have any built? Cancel the expedition etc. etc.

Worth noting here is that obtaining and adding support class ships to your expeditions can drastically help with frigate fuel costs.

Just give us an option to create the modules in the spaces you provide for placing them just like we can in our inventory slots. And give us the option to create more fuel on the "fuel required" or "launch" button. 

Finally, Refining...

Why in the entire Euclid Galaxy does refining materials take time? What's the point?

Here's my example. Let's say you've been saving all the junk slimes you're finding everywhere to refine down to runaway mould. Why the hell would you even want that? Well, it refines down to nanites which are a hugely important currency. You need tens of thousands of units of Runaway Mould to refine to receive a helpful amount of nanites. This can be found on planets as a gatherable resource, but it's fairly rare. Hence the slimes.

There are three types of slimes: Residual Goop refines to Viscous Fluids refines to Living Slime and finally that will yield the Runaway Mould. The problem here is that the refiner will take its sweet-ass time refining materials down. Say you've got 500 Residual Goop and let's say you put them in the refiner and hit start. Now just hang out for roughly five minutes while it refines down to the next level and repeat that process again, and one more time to get the mould. Now let's say you've just added your 500 new Runaway Mould to complete your maximum stack of 9,999 and you want to make nanites from that stack. That takes an additional twenty minutes. Also, not for nothing, but look at that refiner. It has three input slots but if you try to put more than one stack of the same item in those slots the refiner doesn't know what to do any more. So just loading that up and walking away for an hour isn't an option. You have to do this multiple times, one stack at a time.

This whole process is a ridiculous time sink and it makes no sense beyond making players wait around for a result. When we repair tech in our star ships we just click and the item required is used. Blamzo, it's repaird. It doesn't take 35 minutes to apply 50 pure ferrite and a di-hyrdogen jelly to fix our broken launch thrusters. This is not a mobile game with manufactured timers yelling at us to spend money to speed things up. It's not an MMO with an easily ruined player economy. Just let us click to refine our items, give us what we came for and stop the downtime for no reason nonsense.

And for those who say - What's the issue? You can always run around your base and do other stuff while the refiner is running.

Sure I can. This is true. But, guess what? I can also run around my base and do other stuff after having instantly refined my materials at no negative impact to my experience.

Complaints Aside

Okay I get it. I sound like a whining whiner who whines... a lot. I have actually quite liked jumping back into NMS. I've put in an easy hundred hours since picking it back up and I've enjoyed a lot of improvements once I figured out how to play again. For instance, there was a time when it was possible to be stranded on a planet because of a broken ship or empty launch thrusters etc. if that world didn't contain any of the resources needed for repairs or creating launch fuel. Thankfully this really seems to no longer be a thing. As well as the addition (and I'm assuming this is a long ago addition) of teleporters on all space stations allowing players to move freely between anywhere else with a portal including returning to a capital ship regardless. I'm enjoying the Space Anomaly missions and collectibles but I will say I haven't tried any of the Expeditions yet. I'll get there. Or maybe I won't. Who knows? The explorable derelict freighters are a cool addition. They're not incredibly exciting but one can pick up some valuable materials pretty easily there. In any case, it's still a pleasant experience to just jump to a star system and explore planets. Especially anomalous worlds with quirky light filters or weird flora and fauna. And the graphical updates keep things feeling pretty modern.

I can't really see No Man's Sky holding my sustained attention for a super long period of time but it's definitely gone through some positive evolution in the time since its release in 2016. It still doesn't hold up to its original promises, E.G. running water, but never has the game felt more complete than now. And props to Hello Games for releasing the updates freely. I just feel like the issues I mention above warrant fixes. And look, there's something for everyone but not everyone likes the same something. I'm not a huge fan of the pyramid of survival and crafting in games like this, but I also feel like it comes with the territory and I play with all that stuff on for now. I'll continue playing at least until something else catches my eye and maybe some day I'll even start a new character. Maybe I'll even do that in creative mode so I can just focus on the narratives. There are game modes for everyone after all. One of the most important things to point out is that there's no wrong way to No Man's Sky. As long as you're having fun with it, more power to you.