No Mans Sky

[+-^CrossBow^-]

15 hours ago, zzip said:

Do you mean those 16-glyphs you need to collect and enter at the portals?    Those have been in the game since at least 1.3 (Atlas Rises),  they had a quest around it.

Yes those glyphs, but now they show the glyphs needed to reach the planets you have found in your Wonders section that was introduced about a year back. But in the past, it would only show the planet name and the stats on it. Now, it actually shows a small section of the glyphs needed to get to that planet you have added to your wonders and I'm pretty darn sure that is new since singularity or even possibly the Echos update itself?

 

 

[+-^CrossBow^-]

I started the Adrift expo last night. And I've a few good starter hints that I've not really seen talked about much else.

 

First you have to know that the game play mechanics have been altered in this expo a bit. None of the stations are inhabited, all the buildings you find are abandoned, etc... The expo requires having to scan lots of plants and animals so pretty much do that anytime you can. And don't forget that the plants that provide oxygen and sodium that always look pretty much the same on each planet, can all be scanned to count towards the milestones.

 

Resources are a bit scarce on the starting planet. You will find that Carbon is the one resource you will want to grab anytime you can. Along that would be oxygen. The plants of course will have some oxygen, but you also want to scan the rocks as some of the rocks have oxygen as their secondary resource. On the subject of mining in general, I actually don't use my multi-tool that much at first and instead punch the rocks etc. for those resources. Carbon is needed to fuel the multi-tool and since that resource is needed in so much other stuff in the beginning, I just found it easier to punch and leave the multi-tool alone to conserve my carbon usage. This is really handy in the caves for collecting cobalt for instance. 

 

You will also need quite a bit of copper in the beginning game as chromatic metal is needed for repairing your equipment which, is also a milestone requirement. The starter planet has quite a lot of copper to be found so grab a bunch of it while here.

 

There is also another resource that I think is new or unique to this expedition. On the starter planet in addition to copper, there are also spots known as 'Cursed Deposits' that you can mine. I went ahead and did this on one patch because it was pretty much right next to me where I spawned on the planet for the expedition start. I found out when I visited the first space station, that the cursed deposits could be sold for a very decent amount of money. Once I found this out, I mined a bit more and before I even left the starter system I already had over 3 million in credits.

 

The starter system only has two planets. The airless one you start on and the other that is essentially a radiation hell hole. I did land on this second planet but the radiation is so strong and storms are so frequent that you can't last long outside your ship. I will say that due to the storms, that storm crystals are everywhere to be found. But as that requires you to constantly be filling up your suit for protection from the radiation or lots of launch fuel that it might not be worth it to even visit that second planet. 

 

I'm at the point where I can finish up the first phase easily but also taking my time as some of the other later milestones can be taken care of on the starter planet as well so that is nice that so much can be accomplished on the starter planet.

 

[+-^CrossBow^-]

I'm still likely about the only person still playing NMS on the PS4 at this time, but the update for the new 5.0 was released yesterday and I've downloaded it and played it for several hours last night. So a few things...

 

The update for me was just under 19gb total. I recall it was 18.9xx GB in size so it took about 20min on my network to download and install. I need to check my total storage on my PS4, but I have a 2TB drive in it so space isn't usually an issue. Additionally, the updates in the past have actually overwritten the data so while it might be a 19GB update, it really doesn't take up anymore space on the drive than it did originally.

 

So.. let's talk about the good parts of this update for me so far:

- Pretty much everything seems to have received a visual update on all textures. There is more detail in rocks, plants, and even the ship panels than I recall seeing before. 

- All of my bases are still intact with this update with some caveats I will mention below

- Haven't had any crashes as yet since this update. (But I likely need to put in like a full days worth of playing to see if the memory leaks it has always suffered on PS4 are still present).

- Performance doesn't seem impacted too much although it does feel a little more sluggish in places when weather effects kick in. Elsewhere it seems to even possibly be smoother?

 

Now for the bad that I've encountered:

- While my bases are intact, a few of the planets those bases are on have different biomes now and other terrain changes due to change in biomes.

- The new water effects are NOT nearly as impressive looking on the PS4 update as I've seen from the PS5 and PC updates. This I expected given the much older hardware of the PS4 compared to modern systems.

- The new water has a bad habit on my setup to completely disappear after visiting a few worlds. In other words, it is there on one planet but if I leave the planet and come back, then the water is suddenly no longer present. Although the actual underwater plants, and environment is still there. But the water itself is completely gone. More over, the game will still act like the water if there when you enter those spots. So you basically look like you are floating in the air at that point but without any visual effect to let you know you are in water because again, it is completely missing. The water seems to stay gone unless I reload the game at that point. But yeah...after a few planets, the water just seems to disappear completely from being rendered.

- Some of the planets that I already had scanned all the animals will now show an extra animal or two that didn't have prior. Finding these extra animals and completing the fauna discoveries does NOT allow you to get the Nanites again. So it seems the game remembers you already scanned everything once before and got the nanites from it, but doesn't reset this when the new animals are added. Not that big a deal as I've more than enough nanites and credits in my default save now.

- Graphic Pop in seems to be worse than it was before and I'm sure that is due to the new enhanced textures and graphics in the game.

- New clouds are more realistic looking, but the moving through them isn't as impressive graphically as has been shown on more modern platforms. Again, not really surprised but just wanted to mention this.

 

Overall the new update has been okay and I do like the added details to textures and making the landscapes look more busy and vibrant. But at the same time, I'm not wild about the biomes being changed as they have. An example of this is that most of my bases were made due to expedition requirements. But a few of them I made because a specific area of the planet I was on visually had something cool and interesting to look at. One of my bases on a desert planet was called the Three Witches due to 3 large rock pillar formations that appeared next to each other on a plateau some distance from the base. Basically I made the base and arranged it that you could see this formation of natural stuff when walking about. Due to the change in the biomes, the plateau is still there, but the rock formations are completely gone now and there are more trees in this desert world than previously. As a result the name of the base doesn't make since as the formation is no longer present since those rock pillars aren't on the planet anymore.

 

Another base of mine was actually created on a planet that was labeled as a Ghost planet in the game. That is because the planet is devoid of any life, has boiling rain storms, and all of the trees on it were dead with grey landscape. I built a base here because of two other features on this planet that were really cool. Aside from it being essentially a dead large planet, it did have lots and lots of ancient bones and, it had a ton of storm crystals that would appear whenever the storms came. Best part was that the temp of the storms wasn't that extreme so you could easily run around and get bones and storm crystals without much risk of danger. With the update, the planet is still essentially dead, but now I have live trees on it and the color of the landscape was changed to green. I still have the ancient bones, but they aren't as numerous as they used to be, and while it still has the boiling rain storms, there are NO storm crystals anymore. And, the temperature has been jacked up now that when it rains it is well over 330F and you can't run around in the environment as much without always having to charge your hazard protection. Essentially the main reason I had the base here is no longer of any interest. 

 

There are a few game play additions that I've not messed with yet as I'm waiting for the new expedition to get released first to better understand how it will all fit together. So is the update worth it? Well, in my opinion not really since we do have a full graphical overall on the game, but I'm not that good with how the planets were changed so much a they were. I guess it is better than a full reset of the system as apparently was done in a much much earlier update years ago that ticked off a lot of folks. But still...

 

 

[zzip]

5 hours ago, -^CrossBow^- said:

- Haven't had any crashes as yet since this update. (But I likely need to put in like a full days worth of playing to see if the memory leaks it has always suffered on PS4 are still present).

I'm not brave enough to play a new NMS release until it has received a few patches.   I've seen too many reports of save file corruption, especially on major updates like this

 

5 hours ago, -^CrossBow^- said:

- Pretty much everything seems to have received a visual update on all textures. There is more detail in rocks, plants, and even the ship panels than I recall seeing before. 

- All of my bases are still intact with this update with some caveats I will mention below

It is hard to tell how extensively it changed from the trailers, except for the obvious water improvements.   I'm hoping for a lot more planet variety.   I feel like after the NEXT update, planets became too samey, although they have made some improvements over the years.    I miss the Pathfinder update era which could sometime generate really unique planet types that you just don't see anymore.

 

6 hours ago, -^CrossBow^- said:

Overall the new update has been okay and I do like the added details to textures and making the landscapes look more busy and vibrant. But at the same time, I'm not wild about the biomes being changed as they have. An example of this is that most of my bases were made due to expedition requirements. But a few of them I made because a specific area of the planet I was on visually had something cool and interesting to look at. One of my bases on a desert planet was called the Three Witches due to 3 large rock pillar formations that appeared next to each other on a plateau some distance from the base. Basically I made the base and arranged it that you could see this formation of natural stuff when walking about. Due to the change in the biomes, the plateau is still there, but the rock formations are completely gone now and there are more trees in this desert world than previously. As a result the name of the base doesn't make since as the formation is no longer present since those rock pillars aren't on the planet anymore.

Sometimes updates change planets, and whatever charm made you want to plant a base there is gone.   I'm OK with packing up a base and finding a new place to settle when that happens.

[+-^CrossBow^-]

So far I've not ran into any issues with saves not working on these updates. I was more shocked that it didn't crash like I've heard others complain about on the PC and PS5 side of things. The water isn't nearly as detailed as you have seen in the trailers on the PS4 version but again, I'm not surprised by that given the older hardware of the PS4. The fact that anything received such graphical overhauls on the PS4 to the level it did is really great!

 

And yeah I get it with the planets, but the thing is I'm not much for building bases normally, so when I happen to see something that looks pretty cool like a land feature and I want to build a base, it is because I was inspired to do so. Most of my bases honestly, were done by hijacking abandoned buildings so that I only have to throw in a few solar cells, a teleporter and a base computer and call it good. Oh, I also put in a landing pad so the ship doesn't end up in stange places or inside geometry like it has a tendency to do. But outside of that...not much for the base building aspects. I just like the bases to make it easier to move between Galaxies as I have small bases at each portal I've got that I use in each Galaxy to move to the next should I want to. 

 

Again, the changes I've seen have been minor compared to what I've heard complaints from others. One twitch streamer I was watching earlier complained that all of their sentinel ships they have, all have slight color changes with one having changed completely as a result of the update. And in some cases some parts on their sentinel ships were changes also. Almost like the update applies some level of standardization to the sentinel ship at a basic design level now. I only have one sentinel ship in my collection and it didn't change at all that I can tell. 

 

But I mean...really we are talking about a major update being applied to a game that is over 8 years old now?! And still free updates at that?! So for me I might not have care for this game when I first bought it on release day, but it is my favorite game on the PS4 that I play for sure at this point.

 

Hopefully the water issues I mentioned will get ironed out soon and I won't notice too many other changes to stuff going forward.

 

[+-^CrossBow^-]

Not sure how many folks in these forums still play No Man's Sky on the PS4, but I think what I'm about to post about is something present on all versions and platforms of the game and wasn't something I knew about until just last night. There is going to be alot of text on this, so skip to the TL:DR section if you don't care to hear the specifics of what happened and just want to learn what I found out that was new to me.

 

As you may or may not know, over the past few years Hello Games has released awesome updates to the game. Along with those update and especially those with new game play mechanics, came the Expeditions. These are timed story driven missions that are attached to each other. In each of the Expeditions, you have milestones that you complete along the way that you get rewards for. In order to get the main rewards that are offered in these Expeditions, you have to meet the conditions on each of the milestones along the way.

The latest Expedition has one major restriction in that you are allowed access to the Hyperdrive tech that you normally use to travel between different star systems in the game. Instead, you are forced to use what is known as the Portal network. The portals are ancient monolithic structures that you find on the various planets that when activated, allow you to travel from portal to portal within that same Galaxy of systems. A slight change was done in this current Expedition in that the portals are activated and used using specific items you have to craft along the way. Well... I had an interesting issue occur last night while playing that nearly made me think I was going to have to start the expedition all over and loosing about 6 hours of game play in the process.

 

When you travel from planet to planet, you use your Pulse engine to speed up the travel. Sometimes while using your pulse drive to travel to a different planet you will get interrupted by merchants that want to sell you stuff or derelict freighters that have pirates ready to come attack if you take their cargo etc. But you also sometimes have cool looking anomalies that appear. And this is what happened to me last night when playing the game where I was just over the halfway point in the expedition.

 

I was pulsing to the planet where my portal was marked for me to take to the next part of the game. But I was interrupted in my pulsing to that planet by an anomaly. One that I hadn't encountered before and I have nearly a 1000 hours total in the game at this point. The anomaly was something called an Ancient Gateway or Relic Gateway... It looked like a big X made out of asteroid chunks pieced together. In the center was what looked like a teleport portal, but it wasn't active. As I'd never seen this before I went in to take a closer look. And that is when the fun begin...

 

Turns out these anomaly gateways are in fact active and when I got too close, I was suddenly warped to an different star system that isn't part of the expedition?! And since we don't have access to the warp drive tech, I had NO easy way to get back. Now what you can do in a situation like this, is to visit the nearest space station in the system you are in, and use their teleporter on the station to go back to the space station that you should have visited in the previous system you were in. However, the catch here, is that the system I was last in on the expedition, didn't have a space station. So.... I had NO way to get back to the system I needed to be in to continue the expedition. 

 

I did find online where the actual portal codes for the planet systems we visit in the expedition were posted. So I was able to get back to the system I was in using that. However, that created a new and more frustrating issue. Because I used a standard portal to get back to where I was, the game scripting for the expedition appeared to have been broken at this point. Because when I did get back to the actual portal I was headed to originally, I found it already activated when I got there? And the pedestal was not coming up for me to interact with it normally. You can sometimes create restore points and reload the game to reset stuff like this, but it wasn't working for me at all. And I spent over 2 hours of trying various things to get the actual portal to work and respond properly as required by the expedition without success. Until I jumped on a NMS discord server and was told this trick I never knew about...

 

TL:DR -

 

So it turns out that if you visit a system that is over a certain distance away from your currently selected mission in the game that you have selected. The game will know this and tell you that your mission objective is in a distant system and to access the logs for options. When you then check your log to look at the mission, you are given the option to restart the mission in the current system you are in?! This means, that if you were to track down a specific pirate or in my case... trying to get to a specific portal to continue a story line, that the game will reset the parameters and allow you to do exactly that from the system you are now currently in. So by selecting this option, I was able to activate a new portal in the new distant system I was in, that then took me right where I would have gone had I been able to take the correct portal from the other system I came from. This is huge and something I wish I had known about long ago because there have been plenty of times where I literally spent hours warping back through systems to get back to a point where I missed something because I thought that is what I needed to do. I've been told his has been a feature in the game for some time, but I had not personally seen it for myself. And apparently it used to require you to be over 10,000 light years distance from your mission objective but was changed not too long ago, to only require you to be 4000 light years away now.

 

Needless to say, this saved me a bunch of time as I was >< this close to restarting the expedition all over and was NOT looking forward to getting back to the same spot to continue that took me about 6 hours to get to in the first place.

 

BTW...this is the thing I came across that started me down several hours of frustration last night. Only the one I came across wasn't glowing in the center and was completely see through like a teleporter without power.