If you can see through the cloud of hype and rage that the internet has generated around No Man's Sky and you have dreamt of exploring strange new worlds, then you might find a lot to enjoy, but where do you start? Helpful tips abound below fellow explorer!
Keep an eye out for our No Man's Sky Review in Issue 13 of Niche: Treat Your Geek!
Planet Scanners and Building Types
Looking for things to do or aiming for something specific? Then keep an eye out for stumpy little planet scanning doohickies, they have an orange beam of light shooting out the top and require Bypass Chips. Accessing one of these will give you four options of building types to scan for and you can use them as many times as you like, provided you have enough chips.
See the breakdown below:
Monolith – Alien Monolith or Plaque – good for learning languages
Colonial Outpost – Manufacturing Plant or Operations Centre – home to new blueprints (including rare atlas passes in ops centres)
Transmission- Transmission Tower, Observatory or Beacon, eventually leads to crashed ships, alien ruins, or an outpost with a sentient species.
Shelter – Shelter or Drop pod – basic building to hide from the elements or a place to upgrade your suit inventory – for a price.
Be Prepared
Before setting out on an adventure be sure to pack appropriately. Once you’ve repaired your ship you will probably be looking to set out and explore but it’s a good idea to be prepared. If you’re sticking on the planet try to keep hold of a stack of zinc or titanium to replenish your hazard protection should you need it. You’ll also need to power your life support and multitool so take a stack of oxide, carbon is easy to find but plutonium is much more efficient. This should leave space for anything rare or valuable. You mostly won't need to carry carbon or iron as they can be found pretty much anywhere. If you’re heading into space always have a ship slot full of plutonium and one of thamium9 to make sure you can power your engines, if you can’t find thamium planetside it’s abundant in asteroids. You should also have enough to recharge your weapons and it’s a good idea to have a stack of zinc/iron/titanium to replenish your shield (which you’ll need to do manually) if you get attacked. Once you have charged one of your systems make a note to collect more of the required resource and stay topped up. Warp cells are handy to have but I try to avoid using them all at once in case I find a ship I want to swap to so that I don't waste any engine charge.
The Atlas Path (no spoilers)
If you want to add a bit of story and guidance to your adventure then keep an eye out for some of the wreckage when you first start, there’s a sizeable orb with a red ooze inside it, you’ll know you found the right one when it asks you to follow it.
Flying in Atmosphere
Once you’ve located a
place of interest you’ll be able to see how far away it is or at
least how long it will take to reach at your current speed, which can be a
little confusing as you might think things are getting further away
as you slow down.
This is particularly obvious when you first enter
the atmosphere as your ship travels much faster in space even with
basic engines (that’s physics for you). If anything is around
5 minutes away at full boost you might want to consider climbing into
orbit to gain speed and then accelerate towards the ground, don’t
worry you won’t crash, the game won't let you.
If you’re heading somewhere even further
away then head up until you can activate the pulse drive, I’d
recommend aiming a little above the marker you're aiming for so that you don’t get
any planetary interference until you are directly above your target.
It takes a little skill to judge that point as the marker will
disappear below you but pull it off and you’ll feel like an ace
pilot.
Jetpacking Across the Universe
At first the jetpack
feels a little lame, a short boost directly up doesn’t help out
much, but there are two tricks you can use to get more out of it.
Firstly if you want to get higher, scale a large cliff or resource
pillar, move as close as possible and walk into the wall, then boost
the jetpack, keep the button held in. You’ll make it to the top
because the game seems to recognise that wall as a floor and your
jetpack recharges as you climb, you’ll get much higher than just
boosting through the air.
The second tip is harder to master but will
really speed up your exploration, start sprinting then hit the
melee attack (R1 on PS4) and immediately activate the jetpack, if you have a
clear run you’ll boost forward, gliding through the air much faster
than sprinting. It seems the momentum behind your punch carries you
forward, not sure on the physics of that one but it's a welcome boost.
A Place for Everything
To make your resource gathering more efficient and enjoyable you’ll need to keep an eye on your inventory. Luckily once you can't carry any more you can hit the Triangle button to send items to your ship.
A little hint, each slot in your ship holds 500 units, your suit slots only hold 250. To maximise your usage, only send resources to your ship once you have over 250 units of it. For things like warp cells and the green trading items, I like to keep them on me to free up the larger ship slots.
If you need to recharge equipment pick from your least useful resource or one you have a smaller amount of so that it frees up a slot sooner (of course keep hold of the materials you are saving for upgrades). Sending items to your ship is very useful but be careful, I’ve lost count of the times I’ve sent things back only to need them seconds later (stupid radioactive storms).
Boom!
Once you get the grenade upgrade, install it. Not so useful for combat but great at breaking down reinforced doors, mining 300 Iron in seconds or for breaking out of caves.
Like a Leaf on the Wind
There’s not been many games with space flight for the last one or two console generations but I do not remember them being as skittish and sensitive as in No Man's Sky. You might find things much easier if you turn down the flight control sensitivity in the options. I have mine set to 30 and now I can actually shoot things.
If you still find your ship to be uncontrollable it might be because you’re travelling so fast, hit the brakes, make sure distant stars look like dots and not streaks, and try again. Unless you want to feel like an ace pilot pulling off risky high speed manoeuvres…
Ain't no need to watch where I'm goin'
I'd also recommend that once you get to your second system, check the map and hit square on your first system, this should help you see how far you've come and make it back if you ever want to... in the current version of the game it's pretty difficult to back track
On-Screen Tips
You may feel a little lost at first, particularly trying to discover, install and fuel your warp drive as you may have to go to the space station and back to the planet a few times without that being particularly clear. Keep an eye on the bottom right of your screen for tips on where to go next.
All Da Elementz
Resources come in 5 major groups, Oxide, Isotope, Silicate, Neutral, Precious. You’ll learn how to find them as you play, possibly needing to rely on plant life for your first planet, like I did.
Isotopes – Carbon; most plants, trees, mushrooms, Thamium9; Orange flowers or most small asteroids, Plutonium; red crystals, sometimes found in/near caves.
Oxides – Zinc; yellow flowers, Iron; pretty much everywhere, Titanium; yellow crystals, rare asteroids, sentinels.
Silicate – Platinum; blue flowers, Heridium, Chrysonite.
Neutral – Aluminium, Copper, Nickel, Gold, Emeril, Iridium
A bunch of the above elements appear as large mettallic lumps or pillars such as: Aluminium (silver crest), nickel (rounded column), Copper (tinted rounded column), Heridium (black obelisk bluish streaks), gold (giant gold nuggets), Emeril(similar to gold but slightly green). You can also find green crystal formations of Gold or Emeril.
Some elements are more likely to be found in certain environments, such as Chrysonite ( a blue crystal) on extreme cold planets, other exotic materials can only be found on extreme environment planets too.
There are items to find too, most come in various containers but things like Albumen Pearls, Gravitino Balls and Vortex Cubes require you press square to pick up, and they can’t be scanned, they also happen to summon sentinels, so be careful.
It's all Greek
Upgrade levels for equipment aren’t a simple “level 1” or “MKI”, instead we have Greek letters Sigma, Tau, Theta and Omega, which stand for higher level upgrades in that order, oddly not the order of the Greek alphabet. My Greek is a little rusty so it took me awhile to figure that out, mostly by looking at how expensive the upgrade is to build… but also internet, so helpful.
Check out part two for more! Or use the tags below to find our other NMS content.
Any questions, leave them below!
Yup the first big new addition to this update is base building. It was rumoured a while back and now it's here we can understand it more. You won't be tied down to one planet and you wont lose your home in the vast cosmos, space stations now have teleporters that lead you right back home. Stations are also now visited by a number of specialists that you can recruit to your base, which helps the stations feel a little more lived in.
Building is actually more intuitive than I expected with holographic templates that snap into place and build instantly if you have the right materials (more on that in a bit). Setting up you base requires you to first find an abandoned hub building and recruit a building specialist, this specialist and any future recruits you meet will then give you a few quests to get things going. I haven't been able to find out how many of these quests there are yet but a dose of structured content is welcome and might be just what a few players were looking for.
