🌌 No Man's Sky

No Man's Sky is a space exploration and survival game set in an infinite procedurally generated universe. Since it came out in 2016 I've spent lots of time exploring its galaxies, over different eras as the game has updated to include more features and new things to see.

NMS stuff I've put elsewhere on the internet:

My NMS travelogue on Mastodon, started in October 2018

NMS page on my website, showcasing a selection of bases I've built

My random portal glyph generator, aka Planet of the Day

Bases

Portal glyphs and planetary coordinates for bases I've constructed. All bases are in the PC platform universe and, unless otherwise noted in [brackets], in Euclid Galaxy.

Normal Mode - Public

These bases have all been uploaded and you should be able to visit them. I've hidden a bronze diplo statue somewhere in each one, if you fancy a treasure hunt for its own sake.

 glyphs       planet coordinates    base name
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2096FF649CDE |  -12.16, +85.81  | Watauga IX (original home planet)
30F9030B7641 |  +20.25, +1.56   | Wild Kingdom
300FFE936E6D |  -17.10, -96.57  | Neo Pescadero
1021F9556C30 |  +48.03, -113.73 | New Arcadia
109A039BAE4B |  +12.91, +38.86  | Pilgrim Star Visitor Center
4174026BF17F |  -72.09, -91.33  | Rainbow Farm
310502C5CA1D |  -22.50, +179.69 | The Cave
100CFF649CDE |  +22.97, -174.14 | Locimitel-Mad Sequ II (birthworld)
60A704F6599D |  +37.37, -26.12  | House on the Rock
1229FAB8D53C |   -8.91, -50.48  | Bodacious Beta Quadrant BBQ Deck
31CA039A627E |  -41.23, -93.37  | Hercules Monochrome Adapter
612FFA556C2F |   -7.86, -86.42  | Bob's Starbase
50EAFA556C2E |   -1.54, +104.92 | Chihiro's House
2166087FECAE |  -34.21, -10.81  | The Fade
3085F92A164D |   +2.50, -110.30 | Lush Candy Savannah II (Rundhak Taha)
50B402DBA953 |  +89.12, +20.56  | EGG Viewing Platform
30F1FEC8E4A7 |  -40.27, +98.09  | Wreck of the Ebayas-Akka Spirit [Elkupalos Galaxy]
3063FA000006 |  -21.20, -129.98 | Isdoraijung Cherry Bubblegum Lakehouse [Isdoraijung Galaxy]
60ECFB004005 |  +38.56, -54.46  | Rewmanawa Doomed Jade Vaporwave [Rewmanawa Galaxy]
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Normal Mode - Private

I haven't uploaded these bases so you won't be able to see them, but all the locations on these planets are interesting, and you're welcome to settle nearby.

 glyphs       planet coordinates    base name
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10FB030B7641 |  +17.12, +162.59 | New Akkala
212DF9556C31 |  -40.61, +122.45 | Portal Base 1
3056FD6FC061 |   +2.89, +113.20 | Yoshi's Island 2
10EE01062922 |  +49.16, +34.31  | La Rose Noire
1052F9555C30 |  +38.39, -14.07  | Mt. Loper
61F9F9556C31 |  -27.89, -6.90   | Sutro Mining Base
121A01693CB1 |   +4.29, -137.55 | Haunted River Canyon
20C6FBFFC005 |  +29.96, +41.78  | Honeycomb Hideout
509CFBFFE006 |   +3.55, -119.87 | An Edge
402701496E8F |  +61.03, +11.85  | Lavender Eissentam Resort [Eissentam Galaxy]
119502FFBFFA |  +18.86, -25.62  | Oddballs of Hilbert Dimension [Hilbert Dimension]
30BDFF6CC1C9 |  +11.65, -88.47  | Calypso Static Mines [Calypso Galaxy]
114D77EFA2F2 |  +22.44, -65.40  | Selidor
20A6FF008FFD |  -12.05, +65.33  | Eissentam Core [Eissentam Galaxy]
40B4039A52EB |  +27.27, -178.10 | Lonesome Aptarkaba Mooncave [Aptarkaba Galaxy]
607F00004007 |  -49.93, -76.73  | Hesperius Core Bonezone [Hesperius Dimension]
309FFF004007 |  -40.45, -15.42  | Hyades Core Dreamland [Hyades Galaxy]
4019FBFFBFFC |  +37.85, -132.02 | Ickjamatew Core Crashsite [Ickjamatew Galaxy]
30A502A3AC08 |  -11.64, -121.17 | Budullangr Forgotten Temple [Budullangr Galaxy]
11A804FFBFFB |  -31.02, +130.01 | Ogtialabi Cabin in the Woods [Ogtialabi Galaxy]
503BFB005004 |  +19.27, +43.74  | Sudzerbal Marsh Treehouse [Sudzerbal Galaxy]
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Creative Mode - Public

These two bases got a bit of attention in the gaming press when I posted about them publicly.

 glyphs       planet coordinates    base name
----------------------------------------------------------------------
400306C6A5DD |  +47.66, -143.93 | Nueva Pacifica Grah'co Bell
101706C6A5DD |  -30.87, +163.00 | Doom E1M1
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Things I've Done in NMS

• Traveled to the Galactic Hub in Euclid
• Checked out a bunch of peoples' bases
• Traveled to "The Fade" (edge of any galaxy)
• Visited the Pilgrim Star and built a little museum there
• Explored an Abandoned star system
• Visited a Galaxy Donuts location
• Rediscovered my old home planet and my old starting planet after the NEXT universe wipe
• Built bases that recreate real world locations, favorite fictional & videogame locations
• Built an underwater circuit board farm
• Built an activated indium farm on an extreme storm planet
• Got an S-class ship of each type
• Got 100% discoveries (animals, plants, minerals) on one planet of each biome type
• Finished the story in Normal, Survival, and Permadeath
• Became fluent in all languages
• Maxed standing with all races and guilds
• Maxed all "discovery" milestones
• Found an S-class exotic multitool
• Amassed a frigate fleet with an S-class frigate of each type
• Circumnavigated a planet by exocraft
• Found and traveled to the part of Euclid galaxy where recorded discoveries were most sparse (ie "the most remote location")
• Catalogued all the different kinds of procedural terrain formations
• Visited all 12 types of "weird" planet and scanned their unique lifeforms
• Found every major visual archetype of "mega exotic" planet
• Discovered a planet with diplos
• Cooked a large majority of the types of cooking dishes
• Did sick jumps with exocraft on a low-gravity dead world
• Explored the area where a planetary ring intersects a moon
• Salvaged some ships from the ocean floor
• Created a museum of glitch artifacts
• Found all the types of space encounters
• Used the Black Hole Suns site + data to travel to a distant galactic location using black holes (before the Origins update removed portal interference, heh)
• Explored some underwater ruins
• Survived a drop from an orbital frigate down to a planet's surface
• Created a "planet of the day" portal glyph generator and visited 16 random planets in 16 days
• Traveled as far as Sudzerbal, the 30th galaxy
• Left an "easter egg hunt" challenge in each of my publicly uploaded bases

Feature Proposals

Over the years I've posted a few thoughts on the NMS subreddit about stuff I'd like to see added to the game.

"Rebirth" update concepts

Galaxy Reset

• Bite the bullet and reset the universe to enable the "more interesting and surprising terrain gen" overhaul lots of people have been asking for lately, taking the best aspects of past updates (eg Foundation era weird terrain features) and keeping stuff the current gen does well (eg cave systems).
• All platforms share a single universe now, ie all clients talk to the same discovery server. No more not being able to visit a cool PS4 base from PC and vice versa. (If you're already rebooting the universe, might as well do this too!)
• Much wider variation in planet colors: ice planets can now have non-blue skies, toxic worlds can occasionally be bright pink or burnt orange, nighttime skies of any biome can be a variety of deep dark colors instead of always the same dark blue. Reintroduce the wilder planet colors of the Pathfinder era, but weight the randomness so that truly wild planets are fairly rare.
• Greater variation in planetary water levels - some planets now really can be almost entirely oceanic, and some planets can now be mostly land with large intra-continental seas.
• Moons can now have water. Being smaller bodies, they'll never be as deep as the deepest non-moon oceans, but they can have water and all the benefits that brings.
• All planet generation parameters get progressively wilder - colors, terrain, flora/fauna/minerals, ships, random events - as you get closer to the center of a galaxy, including extreme climates. A totally un-upgraded player landing on a particularly extreme planet near the center of the galaxy might melt within seconds of stepping out of their ship. But that's also where the really jaw-dropping strangeness lies.
• Likewise, planet generation parameters could also get weirder within ~30kly of the rim of every galaxy - aka The Fade - to give players a reason to go there. Maybe certain threats, like monstrosities and abyssal horrors, are way more common out at the Fade as well?
• Major planet and system generation factors should vary significantly between galaxies. There should be particular combinations of things in Eissentam you simply can't see in Euclid. The tuning factors for the current 4 general categories of galaxy (normal, harsh, lush, dead) should be more unevenly distributed so that each galaxy is more its own unique combination of factors, rather than one of four familiar styles.

Underground Adventures

• Add generated "dungeon"-like buildings accessible via a long (think Metroid) elevator that punches through the planet's voxel terrain bedrock layer into the effectively-infinite space beneath.
• Existing buildings (Abandoned Buildings, Manufacturing Facilities, etc) can now sometimes contain one of these elevator entrances + dungeons.
• Layouts made of something like the prefab NPC base chunks, and fill em with hostiles (sentinels?), treasure, and story fragments.
• Improve underground visual flora/fauna/color variation, the way Abyss did for underwater stuff.
• More new classes of interactive things (threats, treasures, artifacts) to find in caves.
• Greatly increase limits for terrain edits stored in savegame data so that players experience surprise terrain regeneration far less frequently.
• "Elevator top/bottom/shaft" base building parts so bases can feature substantial deep-underground spaces.

Exploration Rewards

• Some kind of cool bonus for visiting all the planets in a system.
• Super bonus for scanning all unique things (minerals, planets, creatures) in a system.

** Scanner tech that helps you track down the last few unique scans on a given planet. This was datamined a long time ago, so if the feature is viable, ship it finally!

• Player-built "teleporter rings" let players create webring-like networks that make it easier for everyone to visit more cool stuff people have built:

** A new, special type of teleporter you could build in your base that only traveled to a single, explicitly-defined-by-you destination.

** This destination would be chosen from the list of bases you've visited - another base of yours, a friend's base, or just a cool base you've found.

** That base in turn might have its own "links", and so players could hop from one to the next, visiting a series of bases curated by an increasingly broad slice of their social horizon.

** Players with multiple far-flung bases could also use these to create a hub connecting all of their creations.

** If it's a useful restriction, traveling through one of these special teleporters could confer the same kinds of restrictions as portal travel.

Survival Journey Quests

• Repeatable, opt-in player goals that force you to "rough it" on a planet surface for an extended period, without your ship and certain equipment.

** Maybe you'd start off much like you do with a new game, with some critical suit / multitool tech broken that you must fix.

** Regaining the use of your exocraft and ship would involve making a journey of some meaningful distance (several thousands of units per leg) across the planet surface to find certain buildings or buried tech. These long journeys would truly test your survival skills.

** See my post on "Cooking 2.0" from last year for thoughts on how to make cooking cooler, more expressive, and more like you're "living off the land" making tough choices about resources. These improvements would plug in to this journey gameplay especially nicely.

** Idea is to bring in some of the fun of various current self-imposed play style restrictions that people have shared on here, and force you to really get to know a given planet as you make your way across it. I've made some long trips across planets and it's been fun even though it seems like it'd be tedious.

Player Movement

• Exosuit Skiing Tech that enables "Tribes"-style momentum-based sliding up and down slopes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uj9DfMAGuGk (but not nearly as fast). This would make longer on-foot + jetpack journeys very fun without invalidating the usefulness of the exocrafts.

BONUS: All this would pave the way for the game's final update, summer 2021's No Man's Sky Eternity:

• New ~8 hour story epilogue that gives some final closure to the Artemis and Atlas storylines, and culminates in the death and rebirth of the Atlas, as the thread of fate is severed and HG hands the game off to the long term care of its community.
• Release of the discovery server source code, so that communities of players can host their own universes if they want, and people can still continue a shared universe somewhere even if HG someday has to pull the plug on their server.
• Personal wish #1: Native Linux port of the game (the game already runs beautifully with Steam Proton, but native is always nicer)
• Personal wish #2: Promise to release the game's source code after another 5 years, the way id Software did with Doom and Quake, granting the game true immortality.
• A TV on every starbase showing a hilarious Gek cooking show featuring the voice talents of Werner Herzog, for some reason.

Food & Cooking System Improvements

My proposals for how to make cooking in NMS cooler

Food Benefits

• Massively diversify the benefits of consuming food so it's more like Zelda Breath of the Wild: eating peppery food buffs your heat resistance, eating something derived from impulse beans buffs your move speed, etc. More refined versions of these foods grant better and/or longer buffs. Hook up any remotely reasonable game variable to this system, eg jetpack burn & recharge, life support drain rate, mining yields, scanner range, etc etc. Could be a lot of programming work but the NEXT upgrade system probably already parametrized a lot.

** Not sure how to fictionalize many of those but NMS has never struggled with that too much :]

** Display all current active buffs (and their remaining durations) somewhere on the exosuit inventory screen, using something like a colored icons + text.

** Make biome-specific protection buffs derived from biome-native ingredients so you can feel like you're "living off the land", eg harvesting peppers on an extreme hot world and cooking them every so often to buff your heat resistance as you run around collecting storm crystals.

** Display these benefits in the descriptions of each food, using the same colored icon system.

** Buffs from different dishes should stack, so you have some incentive to cook a wider variety of foods for greater buff totals vs a low buff from a single type you might have a lot of - much of the joy of the system is discovering the wide variety of dishes.

** Food buffs should stack with or multiply suit upgrades within sensible limits obviously. It would be interesting if tuning worked out such that early to mid game, players could use food to get equivalent-to-S-class-generated-upgrade performance, for limited periods, via food.

Kronus

• Turn the Kronus dish submission into an inventory transfer (like base storage lockers) you submit to rather than the current dialog choice of 3 randomly chosen foods from your suit+ship inventory. If you're carrying a lot of ingredients in your suit and/or ship, it's a pain to see those in the 3 menu slots instead of the thing you actually want to submit. This is probably the single most frustrating thing about cooking in the game at the moment.
• Don't allow submission of unprocessed ingredients; many of Kronus' dialog lines don't make as much sense for something you gathered but didn't cook.
• Increase the upper end of nanite rewards from Kronus, but repeat rewards from the exact same type of dish quickly hit diminishing returns so you're encouraged to cook a variety of things instead of a single huge stack of a high value food.

Misc

• Give NPCs quests where they're craving a particular dish! More refined dishes = greater rewards.
• Description text for refined foods should mention what ingredient(s) they're made from; it's easy to end up with pockets full of food you forget how exactly to make more of.
• Expand the cooker storage from 12(?) to 20-30 so it can store a stack of pretty much all of the "basic" ingredients. Right now players pay a high exosuit storage cost for easy access to a reasonable range of ingredients, discouraging many from exploring the system further.