Here's what stumbling into a lot of plaques, monoliths and ruins can teach you (or I think they taught me):

The Sentinels are comprised of mechanical (bio-mechanical?) constructs that show up on worlds all over the galaxy. They like things how they are, and are willing to enforce order with extreme predjudice. No one is really sure where they come from, or why they do what they do, but the primary difference between all the races is how they saw and responded to the Sentinels in the distant past. By the time you show up, it sure seems like everyone has settled down into a "this is just how things are" sort of mood.

The ancient Vy'keen saw the Sentinels as oppressors who had no right to tell them how to live and what they could and couldn't do. They went to war against the Sentinels led by Hirk, and managed to repel them for a time before the Sentinels returned en masse to teach the Vy'keen a lesson. If you are talking to an 8 foot tall demon looking thing, you've met a Vy'keen.

The ancient Gek were opportunistic warriors, who watched the Vy'keen fight the Sentinels, and then attacked when the strength of the Vy'keen had diminished. One of their first acts was the destruction of Korvax Prime and the enslavement of the Korvax race, but they eventually did big damage to the Vy'keen as well. Modern Gek are (apparently) peaceful and benevolent, but the Vy'keen hold a grudge and still want to blast them for their ancient treachery. If the alien you're talking to is shorter than you are, beaked and lizardy, it's a Gek.

The ancient Korvax saw the Sentinels as bringers of knowledge and order, and wanted very much to be on their side. They're big on Atlas. They are electro-mechanical life forms, so when one of them "dies" their "soul" joins the Korvax Convergence, and a new "soul" inhabits the body. Whether this leads to "reincarnation" or it's a "everyone gets one chance" thing, I haven't figured out. They were scattered to the wind when the Gek attacked, and currently have no home world. (If you talk to enough Gek, you'll eventually encounter a sythetiGek, an artificial Gek-Korvax spy. This implies the Korvax aren't over a grudge either). If the alien you're talking to would fit in at a Daft Punk concert, it's a Korvax.

What you are is unclear, but you're not a Vy'keen, a Gek or a Korvax, as your "internal monologue" will occasionally say things like "The life-form has never seen anything like me before!"

Based on what I can figure out, you are:

• Bipedal - based on foot-fall sounds
  
• Aerobic - based on getting out of breath and needing air
  
• Humanoid - all the aliens are humanoid, and you're able to use their ships, so...
  
• Average Height - You're taller than a Gek, shorter than Vy'keen or Korvax

You might be human, but I can't say for sure. The game talks about your arms, hands, feet, legs, head, helmet and other human-ish terms, but if Star Trek has taught me anything, it's that there are a lot of roughly human shaped aliens out there.

You'll wake up on a planet with access to three bits of equipment:

• Your exosuit
  
• Your ship
  
• Your multitool

All of these things can be upgraded, but to start with, they're all wimpy and underpowered. Your exosuit and ship will only be able to hold about as much inventory as a VW Golf, and you'll constantly be dealing with inventory management in the early stages of the game.

No Man's Sky is pretty lax when it comes to tutorials. Your ship is broken, and you need to fix it to get off the ground. Fixing it will take resources. You can scan the area around you with your multitool. The tutorial will guide you through a lot of this initial stuff, so finish that.

Your initial exosuit is really small and ill-prepared to fend off anything but the most mild of climates. There are some things you're going to want to do to take on the big ol' galaxy.

The exosuit is easy to expand if you have units. Units are the in-game cuirrency, and will primarily come from finding and selling artifacts, oxides, silicates and isotopes. You'll also find items in the world that give units when you interact with them, and some buildings and puzzles will reward you with units.

Once you have units, you need to find Drop Pods. This can be done by locating a signal scanner and searching for "Shelters." Shelters will turn up drop pods, but also trading posts (get more units!) and other buildings with more signal scanners. You can spot signal scanners by looking for an orange beam of light shooting into the sky.

When you find a Drop Pod, you'll have the opportunity to trade units for additional slots in your exosuit. Unlike your ship or multitool, adding space to the exosuit doesn't require trading modules or inventory, which is super nice. It does get expensive as you add more slots (they cost 10K units more each time), but it's easier to make units when you have more space to carry things.

The maximum size of the exosuit is 48 slots. Each slot can carry 250 "element units," but many constructed or "rare" items do not stack.

Your exosuit will allow you to install technology that can keep you alive in harsh conditions. There are seven ways that NMS will try to kill you on a planet (and sometimes will employ more than one at a time).

First: every planet drains life support, no matter what. Keep it charged with energy cells (which you can make from carbon once you have the formula) or isotopes like carbon, plutonium, and thamium9.

Second: there are environmental hazards.

• Heat - solved by installing a cooling network
  
• Cold - solved by installing a heating network
  
• Toxicity - solved by installing toxic filters
  
• Radiation - solved by installing radiation shielding

These also use fuel, but they use oxides like iron, titanium and zinc. You can also use shielding plates once you have the forumla.

There's some other "special" cases too:

• General shields - these soak up damage for you until they are depelted. They can be recharged with oxides or shield plates, and will regenerate over time very slowly.
  
• Air - this is only a concern if you're on a planet with bodies of liquid (can't always be water) and you decide to swim in that liquid. There are membranes to extend how long you'll last, and these are charged with oxides and shielding plates.

You'll also want to look into installing stamina and jet pack modules, as these allow you to run further and climb/fly higher.

When laying out your exosuit, try to put similar modules together. Your goal should be to get the colored borders on all the survival modules. This means they are boosting each other, further improving their performance.

First, talk to everybody. This will pose its own problem at first, and I'll have a section on that. If you can successfully converse with the aliens, many of them will give you schematics for exosuit, ship and multi-tool tech.

Second, go back to your signal scanner. Look for shelters to find abandoned buildings, which will give blueprints. Look for colonial outposts to find manufacturing and operations centers. These will also give you blueprints and recipes much of the time.

Third, attack sentinels. This isn't a great plan, but they do drop tech plans from time to time.

Fourth, interact with stuff. Damaged machinery (your scanner will show a blue diamond with a gear) also yields blueprints.

You'll find blueprints have different names. In many cases, you can look at the icon and see a "+3" or "+5" and that's enough to make a decision. Other times, you're on your own. Near as I can tell, the rankings go like this:

1. Sigma (better than nothing)
   
2. Tau (good)
   
3. Theta (better)
   
4. Omega (best)

Not every module has every ranking, or at least I haven't seen many Omegas so far.

You'll need a new piece of gear on your exosuite, the haz-mat gauntlets. You'll get this recipe from the scientist in your base, and it's needed to handle a number of plants and other resources. This does permanenly take up a slot in your exosuit.

Your multitool is your one and only way to really do anything on a planet. By default, it is a mining tool only, but with time and add-ons it can be a powerful weapon, a long range scanner and a grenade launcher.

The maximum number of slots on a multi-tool is 24.

Upgrading multi-tools is a pain in the keester, no joke. There's a few ways to find new multitools, so first get back to your signal scanner. and break out those bypass chips! In the Foundation Update, you can build your own signal boosters and use them forever without having to make bypass chips.

• Find monoliths - occasionally, one will reward you with a new multitool
  
• Find shelters - sometimes you'll get a trading depot (small structure with one landing pad) and it'll have a red muti-tool storage box you can interact with. This costs units (usually between 150K and 200K for a 24 slot tool)
  
• Find aliens - some of them will offer you the chance for a new multi-tool. You'll find them at trading posts, shelters, transmission towers and space stations

With options one and three, the thing that sucks is you don't know you're getting a multi-tool in advance. With option two, you can see the tool before you choose to buy it, and back out of the purchase to make some plans without losing the chance to get the tool.

Pro tip: If you're in a shelter and eyeing a tool upgrade, before you commit, disassemble as much of your current multi-tool as possible. This will return you a lot of resources that can be used to customize and upgrade your new tool immediately if you have the right recipes.

When you get a new multi-tool, it's almost certainly poorly organized. Like your exosuit or ship, there are bonuses to be had when similar modules are adjacent and show the colored borders. Once you get a tool you like with the 24 slots, take the time to rebuild and rearrange it so you're getting the most bang for your units.

This is especially apparent when you start paying attention to how much damage the plasma grenads do, how many rounds your boltcaster can hold, the range of your scanner and the amount of time you can keep the mining beam running.

These are, without a doubt, pretty useless in combat. Never, never install the "Homing Grenades" module, because then you will have literally no idea where the grenades are going. You can't even really suggest where they ought to go. Homing grenades are no bueno.

Update: When I wrote the stuff above, I was yet to encounter the AT-ST style "Walker" sentinels. I'd heard of them, and expected man-sized sentinels. They are NOT man-sized, they are really AT-ST sized (approximately 12 meters tall). Plasma grenades are GREAT if you manage to achieve a 5 star "Wanted" rating and need to get rid of one of these things!

So, what are they good for?

The best use for me is when gaining entry to Manufacturing Facilities and Operations Centers. These structures have reinforced doors to keep people (like you) out, and you have to coax them open. It's true that you can do this with the Boltcaster or even the Mining Beam if you have the combat modifiers installed, but both of these methods will alert sentinels. If you can take the door out in a single hit, however, the sentinels don't seem to notice. The grenades make this possible.

Originally posted by Mavadelo:

if I am correct the last patch should have removed the "blow door open with one grenade without alarming sentinels" . Breaking in should now warn them by default regardless of how powerfull your MT is

I tested, and Mavadelo is correct. You can still open the doors in one hit with the right grenades, and running inside will cause the Sentinels to eventually lose track of you and deactivate, but blasting the door off the hinges in a single hit is no longer a free pass.

They can also be used for things like "I'm out of shield fragments and I'm on a particularly unpleasant planet." You can make a cave and hide until a storm passes.

They can also be used to get out of a cave, if you're lost. The surface is above you somewhere! Keep blasting!

Previosuly in NMS, you could harvest pretty much anything in the universe with your multi-tool immediately. Upgrades affected how long it took, and how often you'd need to break to allow the multi-tool to cool down. This is no longer the case. You now need to unlock an advanced mining beam (recipe comes from the armouror you hire for your base) to be able to collect things like titanium and other crystalline elements. This is a tech upgrade in addition to your regular mining beam, so if you have a fully loaded multi-tool (like I did) you'll have to choose something to sacrifice to upgrade the mining beam.

...will almost always look like a hot mess unless you get really lucky.

As stated, your initial ship is an adorable little thing: it's a VW Golf in the world of Mad Max. You're gonna want to upgrade.

There's two types of upgrades, but I bet you can guess the first one is...

The maximum size of a starship is 48 slots. Ship slots can store 500 "element units" and, depending on how the game feels when you're playing, 100 of certain manufactured and rare items. Or one of them. It's sorta random. That means a ship slot is worth two exosuit slots.

There's two ways to get to 48 slots.

The One Percenter
Get a LOT of units. We're talking at least 48 MILLION units. Find a trading depot (the big structure with lots of landing pads) or a space station. Wait for a ship you like to show up. Buy it. Done!

Pros

• Everything on the ship is operational
  
• Once you have the units, it's the fastest path to an upgrade

Cons

• That's a lot of units
  
• The upgrades are probably placed haphazardly, so you'll need to tear some of them out and rebuild to maximize the bonuses

The Cheapskate
Get a pocket full of bypass chips and find a signal scanner (those things that shoot an orange beam into the sky). The Foundation Update seems to have done away with signal scanners! You can now build and place your own signal amplifiers, which don't require the bypass chips. You will need iron and other resources to build these, but they're reusable. Start searching for "transmissions." What you want are transmission towers: once you have a couple (or you're out of chips), head to them. Solve the puzzles, and you'll be rewarded with a distress signal. Distress signals mean new (to you) ships to hermit-crab your way into.

Pros

• Practically no units required!
  
• You'll usually get the chance to get a new multi-tool, some units, or other tech at the same time
  
• Chance to increase your standing

Cons

• Stuff is broken. The ship crashed, of course stuff is broken!
  
• You'll need resources and recipes to fix stuff

When you employ this method, there's a chance that the ship you find is larger. It seems to work out as about 50/30/20 that the ship is the same size/smaller/larger than what you're currently flying. That means you may fly out someplace and find a ship that's smaller than what you already have, or the same size, which sucks. But this leads to a pro-tip!

Pro Tip
If you find a downed ship, switch to it no matter what.

First, make sure your current ship is close by and you can find it without the aid of the "your starship" marker.

Second, make sure you empty as many exosuit slots as possible. Transfer everything you can to your current ship.

Third, use the "compare" option on the crashed ship, and switch to it. Dissassemble EVERYTHING. This is a great way to get rare (purple) elements. Pocket as much as you can.

Last, walk back to your old ship and use the "Compare" option to switch back to it. Unload your loot.

If you're upgrading, you can also use this sort of trick to move inventory over from your old ship.

Second Pro Tip
Don't fix the hyperdrive on a ship until you're absolutely sure you're going to warp in it. It's expensive to fix, and you don't want to repair and fuel a hyperdrive just to find a better ship crashed somewhere. Moving ships means losing fuel, and warp cells and the parts to fix hyperdrives are expensive, and you don't actually need a hyperdrive to explore a system.


It's highly likely that you'll get blown up by hostile ships at least once in NMS. Once you have a ship you think you'll stick with for a while, start beefing it up. Again, you want to stack related modules close to each other so they can boost each other. The modules can be expensive, costing rare items (vortex cubes, gravatino balls, aqua spheres) and rare elements, so this is only really worth it if you're committed to your ship for the long haul. Then you can show those pirates that they messed with the wrong Traveller! (Or destroy freighters for loot, your call)

I actually went through 4 48-slot ships before I found one I liked enough to start piling mods on.

Bases are a new thing! So is hiring freighters!

The big benefit to both these things seems to be "store more stuff." However, there are some other perks to having a base.

Starting a base in NMS doesn't cost anything, but you can't put your base any where. There are base "hubs" on different planets, which you can occasionally find by scanning a planet from space, or more likely in the course of flying/roaming around.

Where should I build?
Your base will be a "safe" space on any planet, just as any shelter or structure you find will typically protect you from whatever a planet will throw at you. As you unlock items on the "farming" tree, you'll have some plants that can only be planted in hydroponic bays or specific environments outdoors. Personally, I don't think it's worth the hastle of living on a toxic planet to be able to plant stuff outside, but to each their own.

For my choice, I found a base on a planet with sentinels that didn't seem to care too much. It gets cold, occasionally, but there's plenty of the basic resources around.

No matter where you build, you will eventually need to visit at least two other systems for staff.

You will need:

• Two Gek
  
• One Vy'keen
  
• One Korvax

You'll find these people on the stations in systems, loitering in the bar area. Everyone will always be more focused on their data pads than anything else. It's a very sad, anti-social bar. That means that wherever you built your base, you'll need to visit at least one system controlled by each of the other two factions to fully staff your base.

The first hire will be a Gek Construction Manager. You cannot hire the Gek until your base has a Construction Console. They will unlock a number of blueprints and give you missions to gather resources. Eventually they will tell you that your base needs a Scientist.

The Scientist will be a Korvax, and you'll need a Science Console built to hire this person. They will give you more tasks to gather resources and plants, and eventually need something so toxic that you need the Hazmat Gauntlets for your exo-suit. For those, says the Korvax, you'll need a Vy'keen armourer.

You can't hire the armourer until you have an appropriate station for them, and then they'll give you tasks as well. Eventually, they will get themselves poisoned (somehow? I never see them leave...) and you'll need a specific plant to heal them.

Near as I can tell, there is no time-limit on this. I ignored my Vy'keen for hours while I worked with my Farmer to unlock and then grow the plants I needed to heal the Vy'keen. If your armourer croaks, please let me know!

The farmer will become an option once you have a farming station and you've finished enough tasks for the scientist and construction manager.

Every single one of these people needs their own "room" so your base will have to expand up or out to accomadate them!

As previously mentioned, Sentinels have gotten mean in this update. That means that merrily landing on some planet to collect a dozen Graviton Spheres is no longer the carefree experience it used to be. Fortunately, with a farmer, you can grow them and other things.

A "round" room will hold 8 plant bays, and my farm ended up about 4 stories tall to provide enough bays to grow everything. I had 8 bays dedicated to growing the raw ingredients for glass for a while so I could add windows to everything, so I think you could fit a "grow everything" farm in less space. Once you've unlocked a plant, you can also grow it on your freighter because...that's also a thing?

It's not really yours, per se. You're more leasing it than anything. I actually didn't set out to "purchase" a freighter, but upon arriving at a system I was informed there were a number of ships being attacked by pirates. I destroyed the pirates and was told to dock with a freighter so I could be thanked (this was new)! Since I was already there, I decided to pay the 8M credits (or so) to be the new Captain. Yay!

Freighters have inventory space like your ship, so things stack. You can summon your freighter to any system and anywhere in that system with the menu option adjacent to the Galactic Map. Freighters also come with an area that allows for custom construction using the same controls as you would to build your base. The freighter is lacking in a stargate, which is sort of a bummer.

One of the structures you can build is a storage container. When you have a bunch of them together, they look like this:



You can only build TEN of these in THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE, though you can destroy them to relocate them. They each have 5 slots and work like ship slots (with stacking and stack size). I color coded mine so I could remember what was in them all. You can also build them on your freighter.

Wherever you put them, they aren't etherially available, by which I mean, when you're normally building things, the game allows you to pull from your ship inventory and exosuit inventory as one giant "pile o' stuff." Even if you're in the build area of your base, the game doesn't give two figs for what is in your storage units, so you may find NMS telling you you don't have the resources to build X until you access the right storage unit and transfer the resources into your inventory. You also can't access them remotely, so building them on a freighter is fine but you'll need to dock with the freighter to interact with them.

Your base hub will come stocked with a thing that is toally not a Stargate from Stargate. It's a round, swirly blue portal to ther star systems, and that is totally new and original!

Also, like the Stargate in SG-1, this one has no dialer. To use this device, land your ship at a station. Behind one of the Atlas Pass doors, you'll find a station gate. You can use it to travel to (and only to) your base. Then you can use the one on your base to travel back to the station.

Your ship travels with you (somehow) when you use the gates, so it'll always be close.

I had sort of hoped that I could go to stations and unlock their gates and then jump to any station I had unlocked, but it's not that cool.

The gate does, however, really reduce the need to ever relocate a base. It's an option, but I've never done it, and I'm not sure why I would.

You can actually bring up the build menus anywhere on any planet, but the options for hallways and rooms and the like will only be present inside a certain radius around your base hub.

Outside that radius, you can build signal boosters and save points. Signal boosters seem to have replaced the randomly places scanners that used to occur, so I'm not sure what purpose Bypass Chips serve anymore. It is nice to be able to save anywhere. The taller nodes work as save points, and I'd hoped they'd allow you to summon your ship...but they don't.

One of the more interesting (frustraing?) aspects of No Man's Sky is that there is no universal translator. You don't speak or understand any alien language at the start of the game, and this means you spend a lot of time looking at aliens with no idea what they're asking. We want to fix that.

There are four languages in the game.

Gek, Korvax, Vy'keen
These languages have multiple opportunities to learn. For Korvax and Gek, it's actually possible to find a friendly alien and lock them in a loop to learn the language. This will look something like this:

• You'll get a prompt that includes "ask for fuel." Take it
  
• You'll get a prompt that includes "ask for isotope." Take it
  
• You'll get a prompy that includes "recharge health" or "recharge shields." Pick whatever you want
  
• You'll get a prompt that includes "ask for a new word." Take it
  
• The cycle restarts

All you need is 20 units of carbon and a high-enough standing to prime this pump. You'll learn (by my reckoning) about 3 words per minute, so this isn't fast, but you could gain fluency from one alien with enough patience.

This loop doesn't work with Vy'keen because the prompts for "new word" and "isotope" come up at the same time. You can still use it a little, but it's less self-sustaining.

You can also learn words from alien artifacts and other structures, and from "least words" to "most words" they are:

• Knowledge Stones - One word
  
• Encyclopaedias - These occur in random structures and will give you one word
  
• Plaques - One word and some history
  
• Ruins - Two to four words and some history
  
• Some colonial outposts - this option isn't common, but sometimes you'll get the chance to learn 2 to 3 words from an outpost. This one can also be nice because it's the only time you'll get to learn words from a foreign race (eg, Korvax on a Vy'keen planet or Gek on a Korvax planet)
  
• Monoliths - usually have 3 to 4 knowledge stones around, plus one "alien" word and one Atlas word from the monolith itself
  
• Atlas Interfaces - Running around the landing platform and collecting glowing balls off the floor can yield words

Atlas
The only place to learn these words is monoliths.

I've managed to complete Gek and Vy'keen, and it appears the word lists aren't totally random when you're learning words. When you learn "nada" and "polo" you're in the home stretch, and probably about 10 words from knowing everything. When you gain fluency, further interaction with anything that might teach you a word will get you the "You learn nothing new" text. Based on some estimation, I'd say a language in NMS is about 400 330 words.

If you're wanting to learn languages fast, the best bet is to find a signal scanner and start searching for monoliths. You'll get ruins and plaques as well. Any time you land anywhere, scan the area and look for knowledge stones. Unless you're on a planet with a LOT of easily available plutonium, it's not really worth it to land just for knowledge stones, but if you're already landed scan frequently: they're not particularly rare. Otherwise, your best places to visit are monoliths and ruins where you'll pick up at least 3 words at a time.

Solving the puzzles at colonial outposts (manufacturing and operations centers) requires you to be able to read alien languages. Making monoliths happy gets you bonuses, tech and units, and also requires alien languages. Understanding what the aliens are asking of you, unsurprisingly, requires alien languages. You'll advance your game faster the more words you know, however it does seem possible to play the game without ever becoming fluent in any language.

Whenever you land on a new planet in No Man's Sky, take a moment to appreciate that this is all random numbers being worked out by your computer. It's sort of amazing.

Then those random numbers will try to kill you.


Anytime you land on a new planet, the game will give you some details about that world. This information concerns:

• Weather
  
• Sentinels
  
• Flora
  
• Fauna

Weather will define which of the environmental systems on your exosuit is about to get taxed. It might be acid rain (toxic), radioactive decay, blistering heat or freezing cold. Sometimes it's one thing in the day (blistering heat) and another at night (freezing cold).

Sentinels tells you just how happy the local robo-police are to have you on the planet. This can range from "none" to "high security" or (my personal favorite) "frenzied." It also tells you, indirectly, if there's anything interesting in the planet's resources. Worlds with angry sentinels are more likely to have rare items like vortex cubes, albumen pearls and gravitino balls and rare purple elements to collect. They're also more likely to attack you for doing nothing.

Pro Tip: Sentinels will scan and attack you IN YOUR SHIP if it's sitting on the ground. Do not jump in the cockpit and then go AFK on a high security planet without pausing, you will have a bad time.

Holy sheet, did this take me by surprise! Pre-update, it was no big deal to land on a planet with rare elements and scoop up dozens of valuables, blasting sentinels the whole way, and fly away laughing. Not any more! There are SPACE SENTINELS. Leaving a planet will not make the sentinels forget you, they will dispatch interceptors IN SPACE. I nearly lost my ship to Sentinels, and it was probably the most stressed/excited/anxious I've been playing NMS. So, if you've got a wanted level and want to lose it, find a shelter or something or prepare for combat!

Flora tells you how many plants, trees and flowers you're going to see. It doesn't really affect the game beyond "more scanned plants = more units." You'll also find certain resources like zinc and platinum more easily.

Fauna tells you if there's any animal life and how common it'll be. What it won't tell you is whether the planet is swarming with predators or prey, so keep your eyes open. If you can scan all the fauna on a planet, there's some big money (275K to 500K units) to be made.

If you miss the original prompt, you can find this information in the "Discoveries" section of the UI.

If any of the text is red when you land, you're on a world that will tax your exosuit, probably hurt, potentially make you rich, and definitely count towards the "Extreme Survival" journey milestone.

Pro Tip: I've seen some guides that say you need to spend all your time towards the Survival achievements in one go, ie: Land on Planet X, rack up 15 days, leave Planet X and land on Planet Y, have to start over at 0 and earn 15 days plus some to advance the Journey. This has not been my experience. Leaving the atmosphere means you're no longer in Extreme Conditions, so it will mean loitering on a planet surface, but I've been able to get the milestones across multiple planets. Also, "inside a shelter" is still "not leaving the atmospere" so if you want to cheese the milestones, you can just find a shelter and leave the game running while you go make dinner or something. Be warned: your life support is still draining, even in shelters, so don't leave it for a long time, or make sure you can hear the "Life Support Low" alarm.

"Gravity" doesn't seem to change from planet to planet, and while NMS cares about the "goldilocks zone" when determining the climate on a planet, there's no easy way to tell if the planet you're landing on is too hot, too cold or just right. (Would be nice if we could pull up a solar system map.) By some amazing coincidence (and probably because there's no solar system map) planets almost always seem to bunch up near the warp point in a system. So far I've never had to warp to the other side of a star to find planets.

Personally, I like small planets and moons because it seems to mess with the game's generation algorithms: you'll end up with buildings and artifacts really close together, so they can be a huge help to selling stuff, finding words and getting tech.

I have an idea for this section, but it's going to be a little sparse for now.

Shield Upgrades are a great idea if you ever get attacked in space. Pirates seem to struggle in atmosphere and can't enter space stations, so if you can keep your shields up long enough to boost your way into a planet's atmosphere or into a station, you can escape. They're also useful in combat. All of them have a +1 modifier on the icon, although they still have the sigma/tau/theta naming convention and each of them gets more expensive to craft.


Atlas Pass - You'll be given the Atlas Pass v1 recipe when you meet Nada and Polo for the first time, some time after you get to your first Atlas Interface. You only need to make one! A single pass can be re-used many times.

I've heard rumors that the Atlas Pass v2 and v3 are backwards compatible, so an Atlas Pass v3 can open ANY door. I haven't managed to get my hands on those recipes, so I can't say for sure. I've also heard that the v2 and v3 passes can drop very rarely from Operations Centers and maybe from Manufacturing Facilities. I've been searching for and blasting my way into as many as possible with no luck yet, so I can't confirm if it ever works. If that changes, I'll update this.

Myth Confirmed! You can get Atlas Pass v3 from the Operations Centers! You have to visit a LOT of Colonial Outposts, but the Atlas Pass v3 (and presumably v2) if you solve enough of those puzzles!



SwagLag adds that you can only get these blueprints from Korvax planets. I have to admit, I found my v3 blueprint on a Korvax planet. If anyone out there finds an Atlas Pass on a Gek or Vy'keen planet, please let me know!

Originally posted by monrdhil:

Got (my) Alpha Pass v2 from (a Gek) Operation Center. Still looking (for) v3, but I never landed on a Korvax planet yet.

In what is almost certainly a bug, there is some peculiarity in how the Atlas Passes operate.

• An Atlas Pass v3 can open any door, whether that door wants a v1, v2 or v3
  
• An Atlas Pass v3 cannot open debris canisters that ask for a v1. You must also have a v1 pass to successfully interact with debris canisters

I'm pretty sure that's going to change or is a bug, since it seems rather random.

Scanning all the species on a planet can lead to big money, but it's infuriatingly difficult to get that last missing species. Here's some stuff that helps me:

• Walk around - park your ship somewhere, pick a way point and walk there. Pick something 15 or 30 minutes away. When you get there, hope they have a landing point so you can summon your ship. Pull up your analysis visor as you walk, look for red dots. Red dots are unscanned life-forms, chase them down. You're also more likely to be attacked by predators while walking, and while this can hurt, it can mean a new species has found you.
  
• Shoot 'em down - you can scan dead things. Predators, birds, things in the ocean...kill first, then scan (though they've made the scanner more forgiving for aerial things than it used to be)
  
• Consider environments - If you're on a world with an ocean and fauna, there's probably fauna in the ocean. Go swimming. Likewise, look up occasionally. That last species might be flying around. Consider the underground: some animals only show up in caves.
  
• Consider time of day - Some critters are more common at night

As above, there's a lot of stuff you'll miss by flying over it. There's a journey milestone for walking, so at least consider it as a means of transport. Find a signal scanner, look for a colonial outpost. They almost always have a landing beacon. Find one that's 20, 30, 60 minutes away. Start walking. Investigate everything, scan often. You'll get lots of knowledge stones, resources, random loot, waypoints, the lot. When you arrive, make a bypass chip and summon your ship. If you're not walking at least a little, you're missing out on a lot of NMS.

Taking off in NMS can get expensive, especially if the planet you're on isn't rich in plutonium. Make sure to look for the landing beacons, landing pads and trading posts that will let you take off for free. Sometimes flying past a monolith to a settlement and walking there will be more cost effective, and walking is good for you (see above).

Or Damon does silly things to keep NMS interesting!


I decided to try and work out how big a planet was in NMS. I took this screenshot:


And decided to do MATH! (Terrible, awful, back-of-the-napkin MATH!)

Now, I don't remember a lot of trig (it was a long time ago) so I cheated and used an on-line calculator. Thanks, Internet!

What do we know from this picture?

The default "in-flight" view angle is 75° and I worked to get it so this planet just about spans the screen and the center of the screen is more-or-less the center-line of the planet. I know a line from my ship to the planet is 55223ks (whatever a "ks" is) but I'm going to use 55250 to make the math easier. So, I have a right triangle where:

• One side is 55,250 units long
  
• One angle is 90° degrees (if I cut the screen in half)
  
• Since I'm cutting the screen in half, the angle from my ship to the edge of the planet is 75/2 or 37.5°

With one side and two angles, we can solve for the traingle base. The base of the triangle is 72,000ks, which we multiply by two (since I cut the screen in half) to get a planet diameter of approximately 144,000ks.

Disclaimer: This is based on the assumption that the measurements that NMS gives you are to the planet's center or core, and not to the surface. If it's to the surface, then planets are going to be bigger than what is calculated here.

I go to Wolfram Alpha and ask for a sphere with a diameter of 144000 kilometers. Wolfram says that a sphere that size has a surface area of 6.5 * 10^10 kilometers².

I'm just human, so I have no idea how big that really is, so I run to Wiki and start comparing this to known planets.

• Earth is 5.1*10^8 kilometers². Nesikurey Suvan has 127 times more surface area than Earth.
  
• So let's go big: Jupiter's surface is 6.2*10^10km². Nesikurey Suvan is 1.04...something times larger than JUPITER!

So this planet (based on my crappy math) is abso-freakin'-lutely ginormous. To put this in perspective, the average human walking speed is around 5.0km an hour. To walk a great circle around Nesikurey Suvan, you'd need to cover about 452,000km. Your walk (if you don't detour, delay or stop) will take more than 90,000 hours! That's more than TEN YEARS!

Your ship is faster. In atmosphere, my ship seems to go about 220ks (which we're calling kilometers) a...hour? Let's say it's 220km/h. That's over 40 times faster than walking, so doing an "around the world flight" will only take about...90 DAYS!

Conclusion: NMS planets are mind-bogglingly yuuuuge.

So, a lot of people have been leaving comments like this:

Originally posted by Jono:

ctually the planets are kinda' tiny... like 1 / 20th the size of earth's moon tiny... there's some variation in sizes but not by much.

I get it! I really do! If you look at my math, one of my first assumptions is "Let's say 1KS equals 1KM." If a KS and a KM are equal, I think my math holds, and the planets are huge. If a KS is some other arbitrary length (as it almost certainly is) than the math is all bogus.

Originally posted by Anga Hakuna:

Just FYI ... a player who "walked" (jetpack run) around a planet took 40 ploaying hours.

Part of my travel time calculations were based on an average human walking speed of 5km/h. I don't have any metrics for the average speed of "jetpack running" since that's not a real thing, but it's obviously faster than walking.

But FINE! Let's re-run the numbers based on making the math fit the game play.

Simple brute-force says that for a planet to be circumnavigable on a great circle at 5.0km/h in 40 hours is...

5 * 40 = 200 km circumference and a diameter of about 63 kilometers. That means my poor planet just went POOF, since it is now too small to be considered a planet in our solar system. It puts it in an awkward space between Phobos (diameter of 22.2km) and Nereid (diameter of 340km). Assuming the same density as Earth (roughly) this planet would mass about 3.469*10^17 kg, about 0.0000058% of Earth. Really dirty math: that percentage of Earth's gravity (9.8 m/s²) is 0.0000005962 m/s². A decent fart would get you off the planet surface, so the new rule of NMS is "No beans!"

BUT THE NUMBERS ADD UP, SO YOU ALL SHOULD BE HAPPY NOW!

I have decided to make a go of flying into the star at the center of some system. I want some idea of how long this will take. I have a ship with three of the Pulse Engine upgrades stacked on it (there's a screenshot above somewhere).

Why the Pulse Engines and not the Hyperdrive? Because I'm pretty sure the Hyperdrive always takes the same amount of time regardless of distance. I need to test more, but this feels right. The Pulse Engines actually seem to have some fixed speed. Also, I can't use Hyperdrive to fly into a star.

So I started towards the star. Your ship helpfully tells you how far you've flown. I made the assumption that the Pulse Engines are not immediately at 100% speed, but they do not employ continuous accelteration (they have a top speed). I timed how long it took to get from 8,000,000ks to 9,000,000ks and it was 52.17 seconds.

Let's pause for a moment and once again say that ks and km are the same unit. How fast is this? It's around 20,000 km/s compared to:

• The SR-71 Blackbird reaches almost 1km/s
  
• The MM-104 Patriot missile maxes out at 1.4km/s
  
• Apollo 10 reached 11.1km/s (the fastest any human has ever gone)
  
• Voyager 1 is currently traveling about 17km/s

So the Pulse Engines are FAST! Unfortunately, space is BIG. Really big. Earth is about 1.504*10^8km from the Sun. If you had access to the NMS Pulse Engines in our Solar System, getting to the Sun from Earth would take a little more than 2 hours. That means I'd have time to engage the engines and then go watch Captain America, except I'll have to stop occasionally to harvest Thamium to power the engines, and you're pulled out of high-speed every few minutes because of hostile ships.

And that's assuming I can find a system with a G2 star (like our Sun) and the warp drops me off near a planet with liquid water (like Earth). Ideally, I'd get a system of hot, desolate planets, since the trip would only take about 40 minutes from a planet situated like Mercury.

Conclusion: Space is really big, and flying into a star will take some time.