Huh, I don't know what I was expecting, but I thought outlaws would have at least some repeatable thing that gave more lore, like the sentinel towers and the like. It's more just like a shell of an idea of being a pirate. Hopefully they expand on it later.
Also I hope they reassess the living ship cooldown on quest steps. The 24hr wait after doing 10 minutes of collecting is completely unnecessary, and results in me just disconnecting my internet and changing my system time to get it done.
Well, anyway, if anyone hasn't done it yet, as of right now there is a bug preventing you from getting the final reward in the expedition, so prepare for that. I guess it's fixed on PC Experimental, but for some reason they haven't pushed the patch out yet, it's been sitting on experimental for a few days, which is longer than usual.
Also, just a tip, when you're landing at each phases anchor points, you should turn off multiplayer. There's been some folks who are not very kind (or maybe it's an accident, I don't know), hanging out at some of them with monstrosities actively spawned, and you could very well get killed as soon as you exit your ship, particularly if you're playing on a console or something where there might be a bit of lag when doing so.
Also also, the first thing you should do when you start the expedition is just die. Then treat the rest of the thing like a permadeath.
There's 6 weeks on the expedition (5 1/2 now I guess), so you might wait for the community stuff to complete so your modules are higher quality, but as of right now the community progress is going down, so hopefully that's a bug that's being fixed too.
I did it all on PC already, I'm going to wait till higher community progress to do it on PS5, to see if it makes much of a difference. Since I already have my survival and permadeath achievements on both systems, I may have done a bit of light duping to just max out my inventory spaces, because I don't personally enjoy the limited inventory hell those modes are, which made the expedition less tedious, for sure; but I barely even used any of the mods that I got, they just weren't really needed, so having more powerful mods should make it even easier? Honestly, when I did my permadeath runs to the center for the achievements, the biggest thing that would cause death or near death was overzealous jetpacking, as fall damage is substantially higher in permadeath mode, so just be careful with your jetpacking. Avoid sentinels until you unlock the minotaur bay, then use your mods from the expedition to get the cannon, then go nuts. Save the derelict freighter for last, or if you're not confident in your survival skills, maybe knock it out asap so that the rest of your run is mostly safe? You do you. Hopefully you get a security system freighter and not a swarm one.
EDIT: Also, you might not immediately notice, because it's not really used in the expedition, but you start with a freighter. I have no idea if it's a randomized class, or if everyone starts with C, but it's there either way. You can use it for additional storage, and all of the systems the expedition are in are yellow star systems so you can summon it anywhere. Don't bother trying to buy any of its upgrades though, the costs are increased just like module costs are, so you need like 50 components to get a single unlock, and it's not even remotely worth it. It's useful to summon in if you're being scanned by hostiles (the nexus works too), and you can build some storage rooms for even more storage.
Patch today apparently fixed the problem with not being able to complete the expedition and get the reward.
Not sure if they changed anything about the way the community progress is tabulated, nothing in the notes about it. I haven't checked to see if the numbers started going up again, or if they were still going down.
EDIT: it's going up, 11% into tier 3 now, so all modules are A rank at least.
Next is S, but after that is X, which is weird because while I suppose X mods have the chance of being technically better than S's, their stat ranges are so wildly large that odds are you will never get an X that is better than an S without intentionally gaming the module system to find ones that are better, so I honestly don't know why anyone would want the tier to shift to have them be X rank? I dunno.
Well, anyway, if anyone hasn't done it yet, as of right now there is a bug preventing you from getting the final reward in the expedition, so prepare for that. I guess it's fixed on PC Experimental, but for some reason they haven't pushed the patch out yet, it's been sitting on experimental for a few days, which is longer than usual.
Also, just a tip, when you're landing at each phases anchor points, you should turn off multiplayer. There's been some folks who are not very kind (or maybe it's an accident, I don't know), hanging out at some of them with monstrosities actively spawned, and you could very well get killed as soon as you exit your ship, particularly if you're playing on a console or something where there might be a bit of lag when doing so.
Also also, the first thing you should do when you start the expedition is just die. Then treat the rest of the thing like a permadeath.
There's 6 weeks on the expedition (5 1/2 now I guess), so you might wait for the community stuff to complete so your modules are higher quality, but as of right now the community progress is going down, so hopefully that's a bug that's being fixed too.
I did it all on PC already, I'm going to wait till higher community progress to do it on PS5, to see if it makes much of a difference. Since I already have my survival and permadeath achievements on both systems, I may have done a bit of light duping to just max out my inventory spaces, because I don't personally enjoy the limited inventory hell those modes are, which made the expedition less tedious, for sure; but I barely even used any of the mods that I got, they just weren't really needed, so having more powerful mods should make it even easier? Honestly, when I did my permadeath runs to the center for the achievements, the biggest thing that would cause death or near death was overzealous jetpacking, as fall damage is substantially higher in permadeath mode, so just be careful with your jetpacking. Avoid sentinels until you unlock the minotaur bay, then use your mods from the expedition to get the cannon, then go nuts. Save the derelict freighter for last, or if you're not confident in your survival skills, maybe knock it out asap so that the rest of your run is mostly safe? You do you. Hopefully you get a security system freighter and not a swarm one.
EDIT: Also, you might not immediately notice, because it's not really used in the expedition, but you start with a freighter. I have no idea if it's a randomized class, or if everyone starts with C, but it's there either way. You can use it for additional storage, and all of the systems the expedition are in are yellow star systems so you can summon it anywhere. Don't bother trying to buy any of its upgrades though, the costs are increased just like module costs are, so you need like 50 components to get a single unlock, and it's not even remotely worth it. It's useful to summon in if you're being scanned by hostiles (the nexus works too), and you can build some storage rooms for even more storage.
Patch today apparently fixed the problem with not being able to complete the expedition and get the reward.
Not sure if they changed anything about the way the community progress is tabulated, nothing in the notes about it. I haven't checked to see if the numbers started going up again, or if they were still going down.
EDIT: it's going up, 11% into tier 3 now, so all modules are A rank at least.
Next is S, but after that is X, which is weird because while I suppose X mods have the chance of being technically better than S's, their stat ranges are so wildly large that odds are you will never get an X that is better than an S without intentionally gaming the module system to find ones that are better, so I honestly don't know why anyone would want the tier to shift to have them be X rank? I dunno.
I came back to the game after several years to checkout the previous expedition and have turned that game into my primary save. I dipped a little into the new expedition on day 1 but figured I'd wait because I've been playing V Rising almost non-stop in my gaming time the past week for the community to come up with guides and strategies. I definitely should finish it before that last tier of mods is unlocked though as that would almost always be a step down from S or even A rank mods.
I've definitely circumvented some of the difficulty by pulling in a Twitch Reward ship for a lot more storage. No idea if that can be done again if I die but it is a much nicer to be in an A class ship than a C class one though I can see the Solar Sail's launch field recharging being useful in this expedition. I imagine that people aren't going to actively try and push the bar to that level but you have to do a milestone that adds to the bar and redo it if you die so it'll move just from that. I also heard but can't confirm that Nexus missions might contribute to it which means people doing them for a useful reward could also affect it.
I'm guessing if you outright delete your expedition save, you can get the twitch/expedition rewards again, but afaik, unlike a normal permadeath file, the file itself isn't actually deleted when you die in the expedition, it just resets everything as if it did, and at least according to one youtuber I watched a video for the other day, you can't reacquire the twitch rewards again if you die in the expedition. But again, I think that's because it doesn't actually delete your save and make a new one, like normal permadeath.
Yes you can. I’ve died twice, and the second time I had a couple hours (and a couple Twitch ships). I was able to redeem them again on the next “loop”
But…
There is an expedition death that doesn’t wipe everything, so maybe that’s what you saw them do?
I didn't see it, they just said it explicitly and I never checked for myself. If they're wrong, that's great, it should be even easier then; if you've done the twitch drops, or have the golden vector from the first expedition.
Having done the permadeath achievement, I was fairly confident I could do this expedition without too much fuss, so I went ahead and redeemed all my stuff after doing the first milestone death out of the gate. I figured I was taking a risk, but didn't really care, as even the extra cash I was getting from scrapping all those twitch ships was completely unnecessary to the expedition.
If I had to do it again, and I will, on PS5, I probably will just take one of the twitch haulers for the space (as there's little to no space combat required, if you use the nexus or your freighter to get around the hostile scans) and not bother with the scrapping and stuff. The whole expedition is actually super quick and probably one of the simplest they've had to complete, the only real issue is the "permadeath" and the inventory space, and if you're only building what you need and using the memories as you get them (or selling them), even that's not a big deal, if you can get over the habit of hoarding lots of resources.
Also, some might view it as an exploit, but if you autosave before using your memories, and you don't get ones you want, you can just reload. Personally, I took it as an opportunity to use weapons I don't normally use.
EDIT: actually, the one thing that kinda tripped me up was getting the storm crystals. All of the systems on the expedition route are yellow stars, and I didn't notice if any of them had planets with storm crystals (though all of the anchor planets I think had extreme storms, I never saw any crystals, but I also didn't look very hard), so I ended up having to dump a frankly silly amount of nanites to buy the upgraded hyperdrive to get to other color systems to get storm crystals. I never had any of the memories pop out any of the drives, maybe I was just unlucky. But I'm curious if anyone who did it found storm crystals in the expedition systems, and found it unnecessary to get the hyperdrive upgrades.
Yes you can. I’ve died twice, and the second time I had a couple hours (and a couple Twitch ships). I was able to redeem them again on the next “loop”
But…
There is an expedition death that doesn’t wipe everything, so maybe that’s what you saw them do?
Speaking of which, I've further messed with the intended difficulty by selling one of the Twitch drop ships that I wasn't going to be able to really use. It had less than ideal weapons and learning and building ones more to my liking just isn't happening in this Expedition.
I'm now making a dedicated effort to hit the anchor points to build bases so I can easily teleport to them if I die. I'll also do the memory resonator thing while I'm at it but other goals are going to wait. Right now it's space colonialism time.
I've also been led to believe that this will more quickly get me to the point where death doesn't reset the run so an added bonus if I hit all the anchor sites without dying.
Followup: Late last night I was working on some of the last story steps and remaining milestones of the expedition. I was steadily clearing a derelict freighter. Then a robot drones glitched/spawned through the freighter walls/ceilings and shot me to death while I couldn't retaliate. I was not happy about that one.
Having bases on all five anchor point planets is going to help get me back up and running at least.
EDIT: Getting kinda antsy pants to get the expedition done on the PS5, and the community progress is moving mighty slowly. I'll probably just go ahead and do it. What I actually want to do is get a "main" save going on the PS5, that I can play outside of expeditions, because after I got the game on PC, having had it previously on PS4, I never really went back to the Playstation version aside from some of the expeditions (didn't do 3 or 4 I think, hopefully they do a cycle through like they did last winter, when the Switch version releases), so the only save I have that isn't an expedition is of a file that is from the game before pretty much any major update and it uh...it isn't really playable! But I want to start a file and have access to the expedition rewards immediately.
Yes, your bases are all you keep, but this includes things you’ve built on your freighter.
One of the anchor planets does in fact have storm crystals on it. It also has aggressive sentinals.
Some wonderful person put a base on a sentinal pillar tho, with a minotaur station right out the front door. Deactivate sentinals, grab minotaurs aaand that’s that planet dealt with!
Yes, your bases are all you keep, but this includes things you’ve built on your freighter.
One of the anchor planets does in fact have storm crystals on it. It also has aggressive sentinals.
Some wonderful person put a base on a sentinal pillar tho, with a minotaur station right out the front door. Deactivate sentinals, grab minotaurs aaand that’s that planet dealt with!
Another thing that's helped this attempt go faster is taking advantage of bases people have since gone back and built up. I've grabbed a lot of carbon from bases with the standing planters set up. This is on top of how I've done the smuggling milestone by grabbing Nip from a player base and then teleporting to a space station to sell it if there isn't a trade terminal at the base. Not coincidentally, that's what my primary base in my main save file does for money.
I'm definitely seeing more RNG weirdness this go at it though. I've gotten several Exocraft memories that include multiple upgrades for the Minotaur engine but none have contained the Minotaur's gun yet.
Finished the expedition late last night. I'm glad it's done but honestly didn't enjoy it much after a while, especially after the reset due to an enemy glitching past a wall and shooting at me.
I had another death before that too where apparently the game registered a toxic storm as enemy starship fire and trying to take shelter in my ship, minotaur, and underground all failed to help. Luckily the game crashed before it could kick me back to the load screen so I didn't get reset and on reload it was a normal toxic storm again.
My biggest issue is that the anchor points are all on planets with extremely mountainous terrain and lots of large twisted flora and the game does not handle that well. The objective scanner is not built to take terrain height into account and the constant needing to land somewhere away from the actual objective you're after and then having to deal with inaccurate range readings got really tedious. For the third point, I think I tried to take a direct route and did some really janky mountain climbing by punching holes into a mountainside to jetpack into over and over again. There's so much surface that's too cluttered or uneven for a ship to land on that even after I switched to trying to guess what would be close and fly over it still took way too long.
My next biggest issue is that the expedition was a stark reminder that I hate sentinels and everything they are in terms of game design. They're basically the fun police and since so many of the major planets have large sentinel presence, there's a lot of waiting for them to go away so you can actually play the game and mine the many resources you need. The one planet with aggressive ones was worse of course and various parts of the game's interface are not designed to handle needing to quickly adjust to hostile sentinels and/or storms. When I was putting down a base computer and claiming the area, a sentinel had scanned me and started calling in help while I was waiting for the zoom out/zoom in animation to play. The last milestone I needed to do was to collect resources to donate to Polo 5 times and I had to do a lot of searching to find a planet where I could mine in relative peace without needing to constantly outwait sentinels or storms. Sentinel Pillars are a thing, but fighting enough of the boring floaty sentinels in the process of making a map drop just isn't enjoyable. The bulk of the sentinels just aren't interesting to fight and I never got the minotaur cannon to drop so it's also suicidal in this expedition.
Storms are another long standing annoyance of mine. Waiting them out just isn't fun as you often can't do much. And there are a lot of storms here. Normally the Minotaur and other exocraft can help but you may not get the modules to make the latter resist environmental hazards and the former isn't great on mountainous terrain. On some planets, I spent more time tunneling underground to still make some progress during a storm (or sentinel patrol) than I did on the surface.
My last major issue (there are a lot of minor ones I could go on about) is that the game is still lacking in the ability to tell a story. It was an issue in the previous one too but didn't jump out as much as I'd just returned to the game after years and years. It's clear the writers have some interesting ideas but never are able to fully convey them or make them pay off. In the base game, Derelict Freighters are a narrative mess as you get a weird mix of logs/records about some generic disaster with parasites and then what feels like historical journal entries from ancient space eras with no real sense they mesh together. For the last expedition, the game seemed to suggest you had a history with The Blighted but then the pirate band just disappears from the narrative entirely after a bit. For this expedition specifically
the fact that all the anchor planets are infested worlds felt like it was going somewhere and then never did. And that you have a derelict with story bits but then the generic disaster stuff on there too had even more of a narrative jumble than usual.
I really liked the idea of this expedition, but the execution was lacking in some big areas. Just making the anchor point planets not have terrain the game isn't really able to handle distances and landing on would have gone a long way to making it a fight against the elements and not the interface.
For anyone still thinking of doing it, you can take some heart in that it will be easier by the time you try it. Even taking a week of a break granted me a bunch of free inventory slots and modules from players progressing community goals.
I'll also throw out that the increased launch fuel costs in survival mode combined with the amount of landing and taking off you'll do mean you'll want to only use Explorer or Solar Sail ships for this. There's a crashed exotic ship on the starting planet you can look up but it's way too launch fuel hungry in this mode to comfortably use but makes for something great to scrap for money. Being able to just buy resources instead of waiting to mining them is a huge time saver. On my first real go at it, I lucked out and got a great hyperdrive upgrade from scrapping a ship and boosting the jump range well past 100 LY made progress much quicker afterwards as a huge amount of time was spent just warping to get to anchor point systems and you have a good chance of getting those from scrapping A and S class ships.
I did the expedition again on PS5 last night, didn't feel like waiting for higher community progress.
Knowing exactly what to do and where to go, it made it all the more trivial.
If nothing else it's been a good reminder why I don't bother with survival/permadeath outside of the achievements that I had to do them for.
Yeah, you might have to play a bit more carefully at the beginning, but once you get rolling with modules and upgrades, all the limitations just become tedious and don't add to the enjoyment or make it more challenging. The restriction on resources, again, at the start, forces some choices and inventory management, but once you get more slots and in particular a freighter, then it just becomes a matter of getting stuff out of your freighter because you'd be crazy to try to store stuff on you at 250 a stack when you can put them in the freighter at 1000. Particularly once you get the upgrade that lets you access your freighter inventory from anywhere in a system it is located in, you functionally have infinite inventory anyway, so the stack limitation, again, just becomes a tedious thing. Once you get a few shield upgrades you aren't really under a lot of threat of dying unless you're just playing lazy or jumping off mountains without jetpacking to slow your fall. The minotaur is so powerful now that even if you don't have many good mods on your exosuit, you can just get in the minotaur, throw a cannon on it, and you're again, functionally invincible. EDIT: Oh and the launch fuel situation on those modes is just idiotic. 2 launches per charge, I think you can get up to 4 with upgrades. Again, not challenging, just tedious.
Anyway, I'm sure there are people who like the modes, so it's fine its there. I don't really mind they made an expedition around it either. Maybe it'll spark some people to put some time into them outside of the expedition, or maybe it'll just remind them, like me, why they don't play the modes to begin with.
I was browsing my save files trying to figure out what is what now that you can have so many, and all of my expedition files are 5-7 hours, so it seems like they've aimed to make that the sweet spot in duration, which I think is fair enough. EDIT: Particularly since the earlier ones were like 20hours, at least the first one (I think? or maybe it was cartographers) The only times I've spent longer than necessary is when I've totally overthought them, or overprepared, wasting time getting good freighters, etc, when ultimately it doesn't matter for the expeditions, and I've never felt like I wanted to keep an expedition file to play as a main save.
I personally quite enjoy the story and the kind of existential vibe it's got, and how you can ignore it or get into it. I like the philosophical stuff and sometimes the occasional line is thrown in there that might get lost (or not even seen) to many, but to then just be able to get back into the universe and think about the question some. I certainly don't fault anyone who doesn't dig philosophy or even if they do, the sort of things the game introduces or suggests aren't their bag; the more I've gotten into philosophy as I get older, the more I learn that what makes for an interesting thought for one person might feel pedestrian or even pointless to another. Hell, even from the same philosopher, I super dig Beyond Good and Evil, but find a lot of Thus Spoke Zarathustra to be overwrought and masturbatory. But if nothing else, philosophy is inherently masturbatory, so it isn't strange that what works for one person doesn't for another.
Back on the game though, I would definitely say if you've been away from the game for a long time, or have just picked it up recently, this certainly isn't the best expedition to come back to. I could easily see a lot of it being excessively frustrating, or even confusing, if you hadn't put the amount of time into it, that I have, or others certainly. I've got 475 hours on PC, and I'm gonna guess about half that on Playstation, and I know there's people who have played way more than that. And I know there's people who can't comprehend how I've even played that much, if the game doesn't do it for them.
I will say that it was a super weird feeling last night when I was loading the game up and noticed the 2016 copyright date. It doesn't feel real that it's been that long since it was released, and even though I enjoyed it at launch, it has become abundantly clear at this point that, particularly relative to now, it was barely a game at launch.
KalnaurI See Rain . . .Centralia, WARegistered Userregular
Oh, is the recent expedition focusing on permadeath stuff? I was ever-so-mildly considering trying it out, but anything even mildly limiting isn't of interest to me.
I make art things! deviantART:Kalnaur ::: Origin: Kalnaur ::: UPlay: Kalnaur
Oh, is the recent expedition focusing on permadeath stuff? I was ever-so-mildly considering trying it out, but anything even mildly limiting isn't of interest to me.
It's an odd mix of 'normal' survival mode and permadeath. Not quite full permadeath as your save isn't deleted and you'll restart on the same planet each time though all your bases are intact so you can immediately port to any you've set up as checkpoints.
Well, all of the expeditions are somewhat limiting in one regard or another, but if you're not up for even risking dying and needing to start over, then yeah, pass. Though the end of expedition reward is pretty neat, if you care at all about frigates.
But there's a few things you can do to mitigate any potential frustration.
Namely use all the memories, and if you're really wanting to make sure you're well protected, save beforehand, and aim to get exosuit mods, specifically shields, and to a lesser degree movement/life support. Buy a lot of life support and ion packs, and a bunch of launch fuel to save you irritation later. Make a base immediately on the first anchor (and every anchor) to get the minotaur plans, as that will basically carry you through any on-planet dangers you might encounter the rest of the expedition. When you get some memories for exocraft, be sure to save and get at the very least the Minotaur Cannon and AI Unit.
Also, as soon as you spawn the first time, just get yourself killed immediately. As soon as you respawn, get some carbon, make some treats, find an aggressive creature and tame it. Then get some of the basics (carbon, di-hydrogen, ferrite, oxygen, sodium) on your way to your ship and basically, the rest of the expedition just follow the specific directions of each milestone.
Out of the gate, if you have expedition/twitch rewards to get a better ship, go with that. While the random solar ship you get might be neat, you're better off with more space and stuff, immediately, without worrying about inventory space memories, and just barreling through.
After that the real danger remaining is the derelict, and if you've gotten a couple shield modules and your weapon of choice for the multitool (I did it with the boltcaster on the PC without any mods, so it isn't life or death if you don't get something else), you should be good to go. Maybe a ice thermal mod too, but that's just for convenience.
Ignore the beacons that you get rewarded, that summon derelicts, as you don't need a beacon for the one that counts for the expedition, just wait until it shows up as a milestone (it's at the very end, you can't do it early afaik), and do it the way it tells you. Don't waste your time with checking bins or the notepads, just work your way through, and get the thing at the end. It seems that it's always the security bots, just be aware there's a couple rooms in the ship (side rooms with crates) where the bots can sometimes pop out of the walls, so don't go blazing into them. Also don't let your shield ever get out, if it gets low just hang out near a heater for a minute till it recharges before continuing.
The 4th Anchor planet has storm crystals, for sure, just summon your minotaur and go at it, and you will likely stumble upon an abandoned facility at some point to get the whispering eggs. Some people have built bases on the anchor worlds to assist with that, if you want to take some time to look at the base names, they usually indicate if they have something, and don't be afraid to take advantage of other players crap.
Again, minotaur always on the anchor worlds, you can ignore the weather and you're really in little to no danger of the sentinels or the monstrous spawns when you pick up the memories after each anchor point. Oh, yeah, when you pick up your memory, something always spawns, either monstrous things, sentinels, whatever. If you land your ship next to the memory, you can just hop in and ignore all of it, or get in the minotaur and blast them; minus the final one which I believe is the one that calls normal (not corrupt) sentinels, so you can't just fly away, but when I did it on PS5 the other night, I also got the sentinel kills on that anchor world, and shut down the sentinels beforehand, so none actually were summoned when I got the last memory.
If you don't want to bother finding an abandoned facility, on pretty much every anchor world, there are whispering eggs scattered about everywhere. You can always just grab them as you go. As far as I can tell, even if someone gives you storm crystals or the larval cores, it won't count toward the milestones (neither does buying them from an outlaw station, so don't bother with that).
The only thing that you won't necessarily get in the natural course of the expedition, is the black market goods from an outlaw station. I think there's outlaw stations along the route, if you don't get hyperdrive mods to skip them? But on the PS5 it was the last thing I had to do to complete it all, because I got hyperdrive mods and didn't ever have any "in-between" systems, to the anchor points. But none of the anchor systems are outlaw. Though I know on PC I never went out of my way to find an outlaw system, so there must have been some on the normal route.
I think it took 5 hours to do on the PS5, but honestly I did a lot of dorking around, even having that low of a time. I'm sure you could do it considerably faster if you focus and make sure you're getting the most helpful mods from memories. You don't need the vast majority of resources, for anything really. So don't worry about trying to hold everything. Make sure you've got your system recharge items, carbon, chromatic metal, a bit of cobalt, ferrite, the basics, and as you go along feed creatures and grab the stuff they give (you have to interact with them), and when you do the derelict shoot some of the growths for those things, and get some of the sun when you're instructed to. You only have to do 5 turnins total to complete the whole expedition, so if you don't care, don't worry about farming lots of the stuff. Heck, you can probably just bum some off people in the Anomaly if you don't care that much.
I know that's a lot of text, but it is definitely not that hard or complex. As I said in a previous post, aside from the "permadeath" aspect, this is probably one of the easiest expeditions overall, they've had. Probably there with the Mass Effect one in terms of being ultra straight forward, and if you just focus on the milestones and don't get distracted, I imagine someone could complete it in just a few hours pretty easily.
I know that's a lot of text, but it is definitely not that hard or complex. As I said in a previous post, aside from the "permadeath" aspect, this is probably one of the easiest expeditions overall, they've had. Probably there with the Mass Effect one in terms of being ultra straight forward, and if you just focus on the milestones and don't get distracted, I imagine someone could complete it in just a few hours pretty easily.
This is related to one gripe I have with the expedition: Despite the vaunted danger (and the derelict can be dangerous depending on which derelict you draw which depends on which system you summon one in), it ends up mostly being tedious and repetitive. Staying alive on one stormy planet isn't all that different from doing it on another and all the anchor points and their objectives are resolved in the exact same way.
The previous expedition varied things a bit between different major goals. Having one map piece be underwater and one on a crashed freighter varied things a little. Here it's all Infested hellholes all the time. Well, the last one wasn't as bad so it's 4 Infested hellholes and one heckhole.
For the derelict, you can actually do it on any one. Once you’re on that mission, you can just fly away from the one offered, and go do one people have posted that are “safe” (like, only the floaty jellyfish inside).
In any case, there’s basically a way to cheese nearly every dangerous thing you have to do, and most of them involve just going to other players’ bases.
Well, all of the expeditions are somewhat limiting in one regard or another, but if you're not up for even risking dying and needing to start over, then yeah, pass. Though the end of expedition reward is pretty neat, if you care at all about frigates.
I'm one of those people who even eschews rogue-lite games with progression unless I've researched them enough to know without a doubt that I won't mind playing them, and even then I'm commonly wrong. Losing resources/time/whatever because a game is set on punishing you for making mistakes has rarely been something I've ever been interested in, and any survival games I play I instantly work to mitigate any of the hunger and thirst and physical danger aspects first for exactly that reason.
I'm just not okay with having my time . . . wasted is how I'll put it, in having to start all over. I got enough of that in early Nintendo Mario games and I just don't ever have to deal with that utter frustration again.
I make art things! deviantART:Kalnaur ::: Origin: Kalnaur ::: UPlay: Kalnaur
For the derelict, you can actually do it on any one. Once you’re on that mission, you can just fly away from the one offered, and go do one people have posted that are “safe” (like, only the floaty jellyfish inside).
In any case, there’s basically a way to cheese nearly every dangerous thing you have to do, and most of them involve just going to other players’ bases.
It may not be the easiest, but the one in the 3rd Anchor Point system was recommended as a rogue AI derelict with very few drones and a pretty short path to hit all the terminals. The one in the 5th Anchor Point system also wasn't too bad either and only ended me due to a drone glitching through a wall. It had been pretty smooth going until then. Having that one be pretty tame is good as I imagine many players will end up hitting that one.
Well, all of the expeditions are somewhat limiting in one regard or another, but if you're not up for even risking dying and needing to start over, then yeah, pass. Though the end of expedition reward is pretty neat, if you care at all about frigates.
I'm one of those people who even eschews rogue-lite games with progression unless I've researched them enough to know without a doubt that I won't mind playing them, and even then I'm commonly wrong. Losing resources/time/whatever because a game is set on punishing you for making mistakes has rarely been something I've ever been interested in, and any survival games I play I instantly work to mitigate any of the hunger and thirst and physical danger aspects first for exactly that reason.
I'm just not okay with having my time . . . wasted is how I'll put it, in having to start all over. I got enough of that in early Nintendo Mario games and I just don't ever have to deal with that utter frustration again.
This one is odd as you get the base computer unlocked super early and so long as you put down base computers on major planets, you can bypass a lot of stuff if you die. On paper, you lose all your resources. In practice, most of your resource gathering was probably to get enough hyperdrive fuel to make multiple jumps to get to the important planets. I died really close to the end in my first real run but because I put down base computers, I got back to where I had been in terms of progress very quickly.
Based on years of discussion of games with you, I still think it won't be your cup of tea but the danger of death and losing progress is extremely overblown if you even half know what you're doing. I only came back to the game during the last expedition and otherwise had not played since around when they revamped the main quest and still only died due to a bugged enemy on my first run. Buying Ion Batteries and Life Support Gel en masse pretty much takes the environment dangers out of the equation. The most common cause of death in this expedition is likely jetpacking too aggressively given fall damage kicks in much faster in Survival mode. I just didn't think it was a very fun expedition regardless.
Switch version comes out October 7th, will have a physical version. More info: https://www.nomanssky.com/switch-update/
Switch version is single-player only, but has all the other updates
KalnaurI See Rain . . .Centralia, WARegistered Userregular
I don't think I've played this game ever with the online component on, or rather when they started it up I started the game, turned it off, and haven't turned it on since. The Anomaly is always a ghost town for me, which makes me happy.
I make art things! deviantART:Kalnaur ::: Origin: Kalnaur ::: UPlay: Kalnaur
Ahhh that's incredibly lame actually, as the only reason we wanted the Switch version is to play multiplayer easier, as my kids PCs are sorely underpowered.
I don't think I've played this game ever with the online component on, or rather when they started it up I started the game, turned it off, and haven't turned it on since. The Anomaly is always a ghost town for me, which makes me happy.
Unless you're playing with friends and doing missions/events together, the main benefit of the multiplayer parts of the game is being able to visit other people's bases and see communication markers and not so much actually doing anything with random strangers. There are some nexus missions that take too long to do solo, but you can just wait for different ones to pop up.
But almost all the S-Class ships in my hangar are from crashed ships that people found and then marked with a base or communication marker and a lot of the storage slots used to upgrade my ships has come from farming crashed haulers and scrapping them at a space station. At least 3 of my bases are to give myself and other people even easier access to some of those crashed ships.
I wonder, if they mean just no active multiplayer, or people in the nexus, but still have discoveries and bases/beacons/communication stations, or if straight up nothing that involves connecting to any servers, if every system is fist contact, no naming, etc?
I'll be curious to see to what extent it is solo. Or if they'll at least have the framework there if they can manage to get it working, or if there some switch hardware upgrade in the future. Interesting though that the wording on the site doesn't even hunt that it might get multiplayer at some point.
KalnaurI See Rain . . .Centralia, WARegistered Userregular
I mean, it'd probably require folks to have a Nintendo Online sub to get into any servers anyways, and maybe it was just too much of a hassle to get that into the game?
I make art things! deviantART:Kalnaur ::: Origin: Kalnaur ::: UPlay: Kalnaur
I mean, it'd probably require folks to have a Nintendo Online sub to get into any servers anyways, and maybe it was just too much of a hassle to get that into the game?
Yeah, Nintendo's online stuff is fucking dogshit and HG probably just couldn't be arsed to get their game working with Nintendo's fiddly bullshit
I don't get why that is controversial? It requires PS+ and Gold to play multiplayer on the other consoles, what makes it unusual if Nintendo requires the same?
I don't get why that is controversial? It requires PS+ and Gold to play multiplayer on the other consoles, what makes it unusual if Nintendo requires the same?
I honestly don't know. I was just saying that Nintendo has an online sub required for most online play or services and I wasn't sure if that was a stumbling block. I actually have a Nintendo Online sub and not a PS+ one because I do far more with the Nintendo one than I'd ever do with the PS+ one. If I really want to play online games with people, which is rare, I'm most likely to play on my PC, anyways.
I make art things! deviantART:Kalnaur ::: Origin: Kalnaur ::: UPlay: Kalnaur
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Dr. ChaosPost nuclear nuisanceRegistered Userregular
edited June 2022
Does the expedition have any interesting story or lore?
If so, only been playing NMS about a week but would like to try it before its over.
Not any more than any of the other expeditions really. There's some text here and there and on some items, but it is largely implied as moby dick meets groundhog day, and your imagination takes it from there.
ChessieChickenSoftware DevCaliforniaRegistered Usernew member
We need a Super Metroid remake on Switch.
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Nova_CI have the needThe need for speedRegistered Userregular
So, I was tagging along with my buddy who was doing some story stuff when I got the update that Sentinels were attacking my settlement. After a bit of me just killing some of the spawns that were part of my friend's missions I took off and headed to my settlement. As I started approaching my framerate went to hell. Which was odd, but not shockingly so - I get SUPER bad frame stuttering and nothing I've done has ever fixed it so I just live with it. It's mostly fine, just annoying.
Anyway, I landed and (very slowly) turned around to see the REAL problem with my framerate:
What the hell?
A moment late the little tracker popped up to say I had only 1290 Sentinels left to kill!
+3
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Dr. ChaosPost nuclear nuisanceRegistered Userregular
edited June 2022
So is there any way to actually deal with sentinels on an extreme planet?
Trying to build a base on one and these fuckers just seem to keep coming.
So is there any way to actually deal with sentinels on an extreme planet?
Trying to build a base on one and these fuckers just seem to keep coming.
Deal with as in make them stop coming after you on a sentinel extreme planet? Because if that's what you're asking then no. They'll keep spawning forever, and being aggressive, and sometimes even if you're in base parts, they might see you and try to aggro you.
I would fully suggest not even trying to exist for too long on an extreme sentinel planet. Make sure you have the ability to call your ship, scan any critters you need to, run like hell, keep moving, and then call the ship and GTFO. Screw aggressive sentinel planets to hell.
I make art things! deviantART:Kalnaur ::: Origin: Kalnaur ::: UPlay: Kalnaur
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Also I hope they reassess the living ship cooldown on quest steps. The 24hr wait after doing 10 minutes of collecting is completely unnecessary, and results in me just disconnecting my internet and changing my system time to get it done.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Huh.
Well, anyway, if anyone hasn't done it yet, as of right now there is a bug preventing you from getting the final reward in the expedition, so prepare for that. I guess it's fixed on PC Experimental, but for some reason they haven't pushed the patch out yet, it's been sitting on experimental for a few days, which is longer than usual.
Also, just a tip, when you're landing at each phases anchor points, you should turn off multiplayer. There's been some folks who are not very kind (or maybe it's an accident, I don't know), hanging out at some of them with monstrosities actively spawned, and you could very well get killed as soon as you exit your ship, particularly if you're playing on a console or something where there might be a bit of lag when doing so.
Also also, the first thing you should do when you start the expedition is just die. Then treat the rest of the thing like a permadeath.
There's 6 weeks on the expedition (5 1/2 now I guess), so you might wait for the community stuff to complete so your modules are higher quality, but as of right now the community progress is going down, so hopefully that's a bug that's being fixed too.
I did it all on PC already, I'm going to wait till higher community progress to do it on PS5, to see if it makes much of a difference. Since I already have my survival and permadeath achievements on both systems, I may have done a bit of light duping to just max out my inventory spaces, because I don't personally enjoy the limited inventory hell those modes are, which made the expedition less tedious, for sure; but I barely even used any of the mods that I got, they just weren't really needed, so having more powerful mods should make it even easier? Honestly, when I did my permadeath runs to the center for the achievements, the biggest thing that would cause death or near death was overzealous jetpacking, as fall damage is substantially higher in permadeath mode, so just be careful with your jetpacking. Avoid sentinels until you unlock the minotaur bay, then use your mods from the expedition to get the cannon, then go nuts. Save the derelict freighter for last, or if you're not confident in your survival skills, maybe knock it out asap so that the rest of your run is mostly safe? You do you. Hopefully you get a security system freighter and not a swarm one.
EDIT: Also, you might not immediately notice, because it's not really used in the expedition, but you start with a freighter. I have no idea if it's a randomized class, or if everyone starts with C, but it's there either way. You can use it for additional storage, and all of the systems the expedition are in are yellow star systems so you can summon it anywhere. Don't bother trying to buy any of its upgrades though, the costs are increased just like module costs are, so you need like 50 components to get a single unlock, and it's not even remotely worth it. It's useful to summon in if you're being scanned by hostiles (the nexus works too), and you can build some storage rooms for even more storage.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Not sure if they changed anything about the way the community progress is tabulated, nothing in the notes about it. I haven't checked to see if the numbers started going up again, or if they were still going down.
EDIT: it's going up, 11% into tier 3 now, so all modules are A rank at least.
Next is S, but after that is X, which is weird because while I suppose X mods have the chance of being technically better than S's, their stat ranges are so wildly large that odds are you will never get an X that is better than an S without intentionally gaming the module system to find ones that are better, so I honestly don't know why anyone would want the tier to shift to have them be X rank? I dunno.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
I came back to the game after several years to checkout the previous expedition and have turned that game into my primary save. I dipped a little into the new expedition on day 1 but figured I'd wait because I've been playing V Rising almost non-stop in my gaming time the past week for the community to come up with guides and strategies. I definitely should finish it before that last tier of mods is unlocked though as that would almost always be a step down from S or even A rank mods.
I've definitely circumvented some of the difficulty by pulling in a Twitch Reward ship for a lot more storage. No idea if that can be done again if I die but it is a much nicer to be in an A class ship than a C class one though I can see the Solar Sail's launch field recharging being useful in this expedition. I imagine that people aren't going to actively try and push the bar to that level but you have to do a milestone that adds to the bar and redo it if you die so it'll move just from that. I also heard but can't confirm that Nexus missions might contribute to it which means people doing them for a useful reward could also affect it.
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Twitch: akThera
Steam: Thera
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
But…
Twitch: akThera
Steam: Thera
I didn't see it, they just said it explicitly and I never checked for myself. If they're wrong, that's great, it should be even easier then; if you've done the twitch drops, or have the golden vector from the first expedition.
Having done the permadeath achievement, I was fairly confident I could do this expedition without too much fuss, so I went ahead and redeemed all my stuff after doing the first milestone death out of the gate. I figured I was taking a risk, but didn't really care, as even the extra cash I was getting from scrapping all those twitch ships was completely unnecessary to the expedition.
If I had to do it again, and I will, on PS5, I probably will just take one of the twitch haulers for the space (as there's little to no space combat required, if you use the nexus or your freighter to get around the hostile scans) and not bother with the scrapping and stuff. The whole expedition is actually super quick and probably one of the simplest they've had to complete, the only real issue is the "permadeath" and the inventory space, and if you're only building what you need and using the memories as you get them (or selling them), even that's not a big deal, if you can get over the habit of hoarding lots of resources.
Also, some might view it as an exploit, but if you autosave before using your memories, and you don't get ones you want, you can just reload. Personally, I took it as an opportunity to use weapons I don't normally use.
EDIT: actually, the one thing that kinda tripped me up was getting the storm crystals. All of the systems on the expedition route are yellow stars, and I didn't notice if any of them had planets with storm crystals (though all of the anchor planets I think had extreme storms, I never saw any crystals, but I also didn't look very hard), so I ended up having to dump a frankly silly amount of nanites to buy the upgraded hyperdrive to get to other color systems to get storm crystals. I never had any of the memories pop out any of the drives, maybe I was just unlucky. But I'm curious if anyone who did it found storm crystals in the expedition systems, and found it unnecessary to get the hyperdrive upgrades.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Speaking of which, I've further messed with the intended difficulty by selling one of the Twitch drop ships that I wasn't going to be able to really use. It had less than ideal weapons and learning and building ones more to my liking just isn't happening in this Expedition.
I'm now making a dedicated effort to hit the anchor points to build bases so I can easily teleport to them if I die. I'll also do the memory resonator thing while I'm at it but other goals are going to wait. Right now it's space colonialism time.
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Having bases on all five anchor point planets is going to help get me back up and running at least.
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Is that all you keep?
EDIT: Getting kinda antsy pants to get the expedition done on the PS5, and the community progress is moving mighty slowly. I'll probably just go ahead and do it. What I actually want to do is get a "main" save going on the PS5, that I can play outside of expeditions, because after I got the game on PC, having had it previously on PS4, I never really went back to the Playstation version aside from some of the expeditions (didn't do 3 or 4 I think, hopefully they do a cycle through like they did last winter, when the Switch version releases), so the only save I have that isn't an expedition is of a file that is from the game before pretty much any major update and it uh...it isn't really playable!
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
One of the anchor planets does in fact have storm crystals on it. It also has aggressive sentinals.
Some wonderful person put a base on a sentinal pillar tho, with a minotaur station right out the front door. Deactivate sentinals, grab minotaurs aaand that’s that planet dealt with!
Twitch: akThera
Steam: Thera
Another thing that's helped this attempt go faster is taking advantage of bases people have since gone back and built up. I've grabbed a lot of carbon from bases with the standing planters set up. This is on top of how I've done the smuggling milestone by grabbing Nip from a player base and then teleporting to a space station to sell it if there isn't a trade terminal at the base. Not coincidentally, that's what my primary base in my main save file does for money.
I'm definitely seeing more RNG weirdness this go at it though. I've gotten several Exocraft memories that include multiple upgrades for the Minotaur engine but none have contained the Minotaur's gun yet.
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Twitch: akThera
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I had another death before that too where apparently the game registered a toxic storm as enemy starship fire and trying to take shelter in my ship, minotaur, and underground all failed to help. Luckily the game crashed before it could kick me back to the load screen so I didn't get reset and on reload it was a normal toxic storm again.
My biggest issue is that the anchor points are all on planets with extremely mountainous terrain and lots of large twisted flora and the game does not handle that well. The objective scanner is not built to take terrain height into account and the constant needing to land somewhere away from the actual objective you're after and then having to deal with inaccurate range readings got really tedious. For the third point, I think I tried to take a direct route and did some really janky mountain climbing by punching holes into a mountainside to jetpack into over and over again. There's so much surface that's too cluttered or uneven for a ship to land on that even after I switched to trying to guess what would be close and fly over it still took way too long.
My next biggest issue is that the expedition was a stark reminder that I hate sentinels and everything they are in terms of game design. They're basically the fun police and since so many of the major planets have large sentinel presence, there's a lot of waiting for them to go away so you can actually play the game and mine the many resources you need. The one planet with aggressive ones was worse of course and various parts of the game's interface are not designed to handle needing to quickly adjust to hostile sentinels and/or storms. When I was putting down a base computer and claiming the area, a sentinel had scanned me and started calling in help while I was waiting for the zoom out/zoom in animation to play. The last milestone I needed to do was to collect resources to donate to Polo 5 times and I had to do a lot of searching to find a planet where I could mine in relative peace without needing to constantly outwait sentinels or storms. Sentinel Pillars are a thing, but fighting enough of the boring floaty sentinels in the process of making a map drop just isn't enjoyable. The bulk of the sentinels just aren't interesting to fight and I never got the minotaur cannon to drop so it's also suicidal in this expedition.
Storms are another long standing annoyance of mine. Waiting them out just isn't fun as you often can't do much. And there are a lot of storms here. Normally the Minotaur and other exocraft can help but you may not get the modules to make the latter resist environmental hazards and the former isn't great on mountainous terrain. On some planets, I spent more time tunneling underground to still make some progress during a storm (or sentinel patrol) than I did on the surface.
My last major issue (there are a lot of minor ones I could go on about) is that the game is still lacking in the ability to tell a story. It was an issue in the previous one too but didn't jump out as much as I'd just returned to the game after years and years. It's clear the writers have some interesting ideas but never are able to fully convey them or make them pay off. In the base game, Derelict Freighters are a narrative mess as you get a weird mix of logs/records about some generic disaster with parasites and then what feels like historical journal entries from ancient space eras with no real sense they mesh together. For the last expedition, the game seemed to suggest you had a history with The Blighted but then the pirate band just disappears from the narrative entirely after a bit. For this expedition specifically
I really liked the idea of this expedition, but the execution was lacking in some big areas. Just making the anchor point planets not have terrain the game isn't really able to handle distances and landing on would have gone a long way to making it a fight against the elements and not the interface.
For anyone still thinking of doing it, you can take some heart in that it will be easier by the time you try it. Even taking a week of a break granted me a bunch of free inventory slots and modules from players progressing community goals.
I'll also throw out that the increased launch fuel costs in survival mode combined with the amount of landing and taking off you'll do mean you'll want to only use Explorer or Solar Sail ships for this. There's a crashed exotic ship on the starting planet you can look up but it's way too launch fuel hungry in this mode to comfortably use but makes for something great to scrap for money. Being able to just buy resources instead of waiting to mining them is a huge time saver. On my first real go at it, I lucked out and got a great hyperdrive upgrade from scrapping a ship and boosting the jump range well past 100 LY made progress much quicker afterwards as a huge amount of time was spent just warping to get to anchor point systems and you have a good chance of getting those from scrapping A and S class ships.
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Knowing exactly what to do and where to go, it made it all the more trivial.
If nothing else it's been a good reminder why I don't bother with survival/permadeath outside of the achievements that I had to do them for.
Yeah, you might have to play a bit more carefully at the beginning, but once you get rolling with modules and upgrades, all the limitations just become tedious and don't add to the enjoyment or make it more challenging. The restriction on resources, again, at the start, forces some choices and inventory management, but once you get more slots and in particular a freighter, then it just becomes a matter of getting stuff out of your freighter because you'd be crazy to try to store stuff on you at 250 a stack when you can put them in the freighter at 1000. Particularly once you get the upgrade that lets you access your freighter inventory from anywhere in a system it is located in, you functionally have infinite inventory anyway, so the stack limitation, again, just becomes a tedious thing. Once you get a few shield upgrades you aren't really under a lot of threat of dying unless you're just playing lazy or jumping off mountains without jetpacking to slow your fall. The minotaur is so powerful now that even if you don't have many good mods on your exosuit, you can just get in the minotaur, throw a cannon on it, and you're again, functionally invincible. EDIT: Oh and the launch fuel situation on those modes is just idiotic. 2 launches per charge, I think you can get up to 4 with upgrades. Again, not challenging, just tedious.
Anyway, I'm sure there are people who like the modes, so it's fine its there. I don't really mind they made an expedition around it either. Maybe it'll spark some people to put some time into them outside of the expedition, or maybe it'll just remind them, like me, why they don't play the modes to begin with.
I was browsing my save files trying to figure out what is what now that you can have so many, and all of my expedition files are 5-7 hours, so it seems like they've aimed to make that the sweet spot in duration, which I think is fair enough. EDIT: Particularly since the earlier ones were like 20hours, at least the first one (I think? or maybe it was cartographers) The only times I've spent longer than necessary is when I've totally overthought them, or overprepared, wasting time getting good freighters, etc, when ultimately it doesn't matter for the expeditions, and I've never felt like I wanted to keep an expedition file to play as a main save.
I personally quite enjoy the story and the kind of existential vibe it's got, and how you can ignore it or get into it. I like the philosophical stuff and sometimes the occasional line is thrown in there that might get lost (or not even seen) to many, but to then just be able to get back into the universe and think about the question some. I certainly don't fault anyone who doesn't dig philosophy or even if they do, the sort of things the game introduces or suggests aren't their bag; the more I've gotten into philosophy as I get older, the more I learn that what makes for an interesting thought for one person might feel pedestrian or even pointless to another. Hell, even from the same philosopher, I super dig Beyond Good and Evil, but find a lot of Thus Spoke Zarathustra to be overwrought and masturbatory. But if nothing else, philosophy is inherently masturbatory, so it isn't strange that what works for one person doesn't for another.
Back on the game though, I would definitely say if you've been away from the game for a long time, or have just picked it up recently, this certainly isn't the best expedition to come back to. I could easily see a lot of it being excessively frustrating, or even confusing, if you hadn't put the amount of time into it, that I have, or others certainly. I've got 475 hours on PC, and I'm gonna guess about half that on Playstation, and I know there's people who have played way more than that. And I know there's people who can't comprehend how I've even played that much, if the game doesn't do it for them.
I will say that it was a super weird feeling last night when I was loading the game up and noticed the 2016 copyright date. It doesn't feel real that it's been that long since it was released, and even though I enjoyed it at launch, it has become abundantly clear at this point that, particularly relative to now, it was barely a game at launch.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
It's an odd mix of 'normal' survival mode and permadeath. Not quite full permadeath as your save isn't deleted and you'll restart on the same planet each time though all your bases are intact so you can immediately port to any you've set up as checkpoints.
It is definitely not up your alley though.
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But there's a few things you can do to mitigate any potential frustration.
Namely use all the memories, and if you're really wanting to make sure you're well protected, save beforehand, and aim to get exosuit mods, specifically shields, and to a lesser degree movement/life support. Buy a lot of life support and ion packs, and a bunch of launch fuel to save you irritation later. Make a base immediately on the first anchor (and every anchor) to get the minotaur plans, as that will basically carry you through any on-planet dangers you might encounter the rest of the expedition. When you get some memories for exocraft, be sure to save and get at the very least the Minotaur Cannon and AI Unit.
Also, as soon as you spawn the first time, just get yourself killed immediately. As soon as you respawn, get some carbon, make some treats, find an aggressive creature and tame it. Then get some of the basics (carbon, di-hydrogen, ferrite, oxygen, sodium) on your way to your ship and basically, the rest of the expedition just follow the specific directions of each milestone.
Out of the gate, if you have expedition/twitch rewards to get a better ship, go with that. While the random solar ship you get might be neat, you're better off with more space and stuff, immediately, without worrying about inventory space memories, and just barreling through.
After that the real danger remaining is the derelict, and if you've gotten a couple shield modules and your weapon of choice for the multitool (I did it with the boltcaster on the PC without any mods, so it isn't life or death if you don't get something else), you should be good to go. Maybe a ice thermal mod too, but that's just for convenience.
Ignore the beacons that you get rewarded, that summon derelicts, as you don't need a beacon for the one that counts for the expedition, just wait until it shows up as a milestone (it's at the very end, you can't do it early afaik), and do it the way it tells you. Don't waste your time with checking bins or the notepads, just work your way through, and get the thing at the end. It seems that it's always the security bots, just be aware there's a couple rooms in the ship (side rooms with crates) where the bots can sometimes pop out of the walls, so don't go blazing into them. Also don't let your shield ever get out, if it gets low just hang out near a heater for a minute till it recharges before continuing.
The 4th Anchor planet has storm crystals, for sure, just summon your minotaur and go at it, and you will likely stumble upon an abandoned facility at some point to get the whispering eggs. Some people have built bases on the anchor worlds to assist with that, if you want to take some time to look at the base names, they usually indicate if they have something, and don't be afraid to take advantage of other players crap.
Again, minotaur always on the anchor worlds, you can ignore the weather and you're really in little to no danger of the sentinels or the monstrous spawns when you pick up the memories after each anchor point. Oh, yeah, when you pick up your memory, something always spawns, either monstrous things, sentinels, whatever. If you land your ship next to the memory, you can just hop in and ignore all of it, or get in the minotaur and blast them; minus the final one which I believe is the one that calls normal (not corrupt) sentinels, so you can't just fly away, but when I did it on PS5 the other night, I also got the sentinel kills on that anchor world, and shut down the sentinels beforehand, so none actually were summoned when I got the last memory.
If you don't want to bother finding an abandoned facility, on pretty much every anchor world, there are whispering eggs scattered about everywhere. You can always just grab them as you go. As far as I can tell, even if someone gives you storm crystals or the larval cores, it won't count toward the milestones (neither does buying them from an outlaw station, so don't bother with that).
The only thing that you won't necessarily get in the natural course of the expedition, is the black market goods from an outlaw station. I think there's outlaw stations along the route, if you don't get hyperdrive mods to skip them? But on the PS5 it was the last thing I had to do to complete it all, because I got hyperdrive mods and didn't ever have any "in-between" systems, to the anchor points. But none of the anchor systems are outlaw. Though I know on PC I never went out of my way to find an outlaw system, so there must have been some on the normal route.
I think it took 5 hours to do on the PS5, but honestly I did a lot of dorking around, even having that low of a time. I'm sure you could do it considerably faster if you focus and make sure you're getting the most helpful mods from memories. You don't need the vast majority of resources, for anything really. So don't worry about trying to hold everything. Make sure you've got your system recharge items, carbon, chromatic metal, a bit of cobalt, ferrite, the basics, and as you go along feed creatures and grab the stuff they give (you have to interact with them), and when you do the derelict shoot some of the growths for those things, and get some of the sun when you're instructed to. You only have to do 5 turnins total to complete the whole expedition, so if you don't care, don't worry about farming lots of the stuff. Heck, you can probably just bum some off people in the Anomaly if you don't care that much.
I know that's a lot of text, but it is definitely not that hard or complex. As I said in a previous post, aside from the "permadeath" aspect, this is probably one of the easiest expeditions overall, they've had. Probably there with the Mass Effect one in terms of being ultra straight forward, and if you just focus on the milestones and don't get distracted, I imagine someone could complete it in just a few hours pretty easily.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
This is related to one gripe I have with the expedition: Despite the vaunted danger (and the derelict can be dangerous depending on which derelict you draw which depends on which system you summon one in), it ends up mostly being tedious and repetitive. Staying alive on one stormy planet isn't all that different from doing it on another and all the anchor points and their objectives are resolved in the exact same way.
The previous expedition varied things a bit between different major goals. Having one map piece be underwater and one on a crashed freighter varied things a little. Here it's all Infested hellholes all the time. Well, the last one wasn't as bad so it's 4 Infested hellholes and one heckhole.
Steam Profile
3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
In any case, there’s basically a way to cheese nearly every dangerous thing you have to do, and most of them involve just going to other players’ bases.
Twitch: akThera
Steam: Thera
I'm one of those people who even eschews rogue-lite games with progression unless I've researched them enough to know without a doubt that I won't mind playing them, and even then I'm commonly wrong. Losing resources/time/whatever because a game is set on punishing you for making mistakes has rarely been something I've ever been interested in, and any survival games I play I instantly work to mitigate any of the hunger and thirst and physical danger aspects first for exactly that reason.
I'm just not okay with having my time . . . wasted is how I'll put it, in having to start all over. I got enough of that in early Nintendo Mario games and I just don't ever have to deal with that utter frustration again.
It may not be the easiest, but the one in the 3rd Anchor Point system was recommended as a rogue AI derelict with very few drones and a pretty short path to hit all the terminals. The one in the 5th Anchor Point system also wasn't too bad either and only ended me due to a drone glitching through a wall. It had been pretty smooth going until then. Having that one be pretty tame is good as I imagine many players will end up hitting that one.
This one is odd as you get the base computer unlocked super early and so long as you put down base computers on major planets, you can bypass a lot of stuff if you die. On paper, you lose all your resources. In practice, most of your resource gathering was probably to get enough hyperdrive fuel to make multiple jumps to get to the important planets. I died really close to the end in my first real run but because I put down base computers, I got back to where I had been in terms of progress very quickly.
Based on years of discussion of games with you, I still think it won't be your cup of tea but the danger of death and losing progress is extremely overblown if you even half know what you're doing. I only came back to the game during the last expedition and otherwise had not played since around when they revamped the main quest and still only died due to a bugged enemy on my first run. Buying Ion Batteries and Life Support Gel en masse pretty much takes the environment dangers out of the equation. The most common cause of death in this expedition is likely jetpacking too aggressively given fall damage kicks in much faster in Survival mode. I just didn't think it was a very fun expedition regardless.
Steam Profile
3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
Switch version comes out October 7th, will have a physical version. More info: https://www.nomanssky.com/switch-update/
Switch version is single-player only, but has all the other updates
I'm curious is this means it's not Internet dependant, and how does the anomaly work now? Just an empty plaza with one ship on it?
Bummer.
Oh well, saves us some money I guess.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Unless you're playing with friends and doing missions/events together, the main benefit of the multiplayer parts of the game is being able to visit other people's bases and see communication markers and not so much actually doing anything with random strangers. There are some nexus missions that take too long to do solo, but you can just wait for different ones to pop up.
But almost all the S-Class ships in my hangar are from crashed ships that people found and then marked with a base or communication marker and a lot of the storage slots used to upgrade my ships has come from farming crashed haulers and scrapping them at a space station. At least 3 of my bases are to give myself and other people even easier access to some of those crashed ships.
Steam Profile
3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
I'll be curious to see to what extent it is solo. Or if they'll at least have the framework there if they can manage to get it working, or if there some switch hardware upgrade in the future. Interesting though that the wording on the site doesn't even hunt that it might get multiplayer at some point.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Yeah, Nintendo's online stuff is fucking dogshit and HG probably just couldn't be arsed to get their game working with Nintendo's fiddly bullshit
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
I honestly don't know. I was just saying that Nintendo has an online sub required for most online play or services and I wasn't sure if that was a stumbling block. I actually have a Nintendo Online sub and not a PS+ one because I do far more with the Nintendo one than I'd ever do with the PS+ one. If I really want to play online games with people, which is rare, I'm most likely to play on my PC, anyways.
If so, only been playing NMS about a week but would like to try it before its over.
I love groundhogs day shit.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Anyway, I landed and (very slowly) turned around to see the REAL problem with my framerate:
What the hell?
Trying to build a base on one and these fuckers just seem to keep coming.
Deal with as in make them stop coming after you on a sentinel extreme planet? Because if that's what you're asking then no. They'll keep spawning forever, and being aggressive, and sometimes even if you're in base parts, they might see you and try to aggro you.
I would fully suggest not even trying to exist for too long on an extreme sentinel planet. Make sure you have the ability to call your ship, scan any critters you need to, run like hell, keep moving, and then call the ship and GTFO. Screw aggressive sentinel planets to hell.