This may or may not be good advice ‘cause although I’ve got 300 hours on my main save I am not a “good” or “optimum” player by any stretch. I think you should start with the Singularity expedition in expedition mode. There’s a lot of hand-holding as far as what to do next, where to go, and it keeps everything a bit more linear than a regular start does. Plus, theres the option to get one or more pretty good sentinel ships right away without too much difficulty. And at the end of the expedition it turns into just a “normal” save (or so I’m told). It’s what I’d do if I was just starting out today.

When I started myself I put in like 24 hours on a “relaxed” mode save just to sort of get the hang of things and the only noob guides I used was just searching up where to find particular resources, or early game farming methods once I felt like I had learned the ropes I started a “normal” mode save and haven’t really looked back.

We’re for sure in a high economic disparity universe. Like we’re the 1% of the 1% living in a hopepunk wonderland and then the crews of our frigates are indentured servants living in the grimdarkest grimdark. I read all those expedition debriefs and, well, I’m glad I’m not crew. I don’t know if that qualifies as a head-cannon or if it’s just an observation. We and all the other NPC’s we encounter are for sure extremely high net worth individuals though.

Alright, I sucked it up and watched some YouTube. Twitch I can sort of understand, it’s like playing a single player game with your friend after school in the ‘90’s. It’s their turn and you’re watching, planning what to try during your turn. YouTube is a 20 minute video, with ads, that’s buried a ten second sound-byte of useful information behind piles of trash and the worst speaking voice on Earth. And it’s always edited by someone who things mic-in and line-in are the same so ready your ears for the bleedening!

Robot fauna occur mainly (possibly only) on planets or moons in uncharted systems. It there are robot fauna on a planet, there are no organic fauna on that world and vice versa. The ion battery/creature pellets showing in your companion register identify the type of fauna, and will do so as soon as you land. There’s no need to actually find any fauna first.

I’d like to apologize for wasting your time if you read this and it’s all old-news & common-knowledge. I had no idea so thought I might as well post in the spirit of keeping the content flowing.

I buy a lot of stuff, like a new ship or multitoool, then I gotta upgrade it to max, which means spending a lot of credits to get a lot of nanites. Then I find a tool I like better and I need to rinse and repeat. Same situation with the fighters in my squadron, gotta max out a ship so I can swap it with theirs. Still, all of that only takes so much cash, so there’s an element of keeping a nice big round number in the bank as well. And I should say I’m not maintaining multiple farms, and never building on a scale that nets multimillions per hour. Part of that’s because I won’t make them big enough, and part of that is I only hit it once a day even if the turn around is every few hours. I got too much exploring (and not enough game time time) to zip back and cash in multiple times a day.

One thing I always hated about reddit was how insanely compartmentalized a given interest was into different subs. Post cute hamster pic? Sorry, this is the sub for brown Russian dwarf hamsters, you should have known that, six day ban! I personally would love it if there was one place for all things No Man’s Sky, yes it means searching for the relevant posts, and yes it means super old threads will be resurrected periodically, but it also means I can go to one place and just scroll and scroll ‘till I find something neat. So yeah, I vote for one hub to rule them all!

I've noticed that on some missions I'm getting multiple eggs and storage enhancements and this could just be down to most of my organic frigates being tier C at this point (but gradually they're getting better) the upgrades are also tending to be tier C. The few space encounters I've had snagged an S and an A (as well as a couple C's). It's certainly slower going compared to just buying upgrades, feels more satisfying though.

Playing on Switch I don't see other players ships at all but I do wonder, how popular are living ships, like I'm sure most folks have one but are they common "daily drivers" or are they more of a have it just to have it ship?

At least a couple times I’ve stood there and watched the counter run down and the door not open. When it’s happened I’ve just interacted with the terminal again, sometimes multiple times, and eventually whatever was delaying the door opening animation would catch up and it’d open.

Another great shot! Can I just ask, cause you seem like a bit of a planetary connoisseur, what’s the deal with colors?

Some planets seem to be “normal” red is red, blue is blue, and so on. Some planets seem like all of this or that color has been drained out; not like green is gray now, but like it’s all just been drained out. My purple ship is now blue, and the yellow on it is now the bleached out blond of an old, unsealed wooden deck that desperately needs a sand and a coat of stain. It’s wild.

As much of a spoiler as it is, I found out, as I know many did before me, that there’s a quick route to the center of any galaxy. No, it’s not looking up a portal address close to the center from someone who went before, it’s just spamming the first glyph at any portal. Apparently, in this golden age without portal interference, the first glyph will always drop you within a few thousand lightyears of the core. This actually made me feel more connected to the community. Playing on the Nintendo Switch I don’t get to run into players at the Nexus, so seeing all the communication stations around the portal at the other end of the jump was a fun reminder other players had gone before.

I’m gonna vote overdoing it. Like there’s putting some thought into it, and then there’s creating a system that’s going to require effort and maintenance to keep up. Certain things make total sense, tech you’re not using but want to hold on to makes sense. All the raw materials to craft your money-makers (stasis devices, portable reactors, and so on) make sense. Stuff you know you’ll need to build your next base/farm or whatever, makes sense. Storing by type I can even get behind, as soon as I saw the color-sequencing, sorry that crossed my line! Lol.

Crimson first ‘cause I had the parts. Then I thought if the other was harder to get (required drops from quads I think didn’t it?) it must be better so I reloaded my quicksave and went and got crystallized hearts or whatever it was so I could get both.

Lol, somehow that explanation makes it worse.

I appreciate the info, however, my post is just a tasteless joke.

Given that I'm on a Nintendo Switch I don't think I can get any gifts from other players. I may be wrong about that, I didn't even know Switch players could finally get Nexus missions until I started playing again a couple weeks ago. Still, I think it speaks well of the game, and the community of players it has attracted that a lot of the tips & tricks I see around include something like "hang around on the space anomaly to get generous gifts from other players".

More eggs though, that'd be your recommendation on something worth saving up for and spending that quicksilver on?

Thinking about it more, I think it’s maybe even bleaker. Forget the galaxy hopping for a moment. We have two modes of travel, portaling and faster than light warping. Lets say portaling is some sort of instant quantum entanglement something, but faster than light travel is going to have relativistic time dilation effects. Because we can still find the same people after a warp, everyone must be functionally immortal. Otherwise we’d have never see the same NPC twice, if we traveled by starship.

I saw the name Olonerovo when I was making the spreadsheet and decided that was the galaxy me. Would have taken ages and ages if I tried it before they got rid of portal interference! Finding out I could just spam the first glyph to get within a couple jumps of the core of any galaxy was a lifesaver.

Ha! Underwater, that’ll go a long way to keeping those dang domes from looking out of place. Nice thinking.

That's so cool! I've had so many planets where I can't get all the fauna because they have giant worms that go so quick or so rarely I never manage to scan in time. I'm going to have to portal on over and see if I can finally get one.

Yeah, some of the names that generate are just so amazing it’s hard to believe they were generated procedurally.

Oh! I just remembered the biggest surprise I had starting out. That rusted metal from containers refines into ferrite, and all the goo and slime refines into runaway mold which then refines into nanites! I sold so so much of that stuff thinking it was just junk before realizing I could have refined it into something useful. Really would have been helpful to know that early on when I was scrounging for nanites to buy technology upgrades.