One of my “gaming goals” for January was to keep up my weekly Fairy Fencer F and No Man’s Sky sessions. Thursday night was No Man’s Sky night and since last night was the last Thursday in January I’ve hit that goal.

But I think I’m now done for a while. I felt like the Foundation Update really injected some nice new gameplay into No Man’s Sky and it kept me entertained for a while but now I’m growing frustrated. There’s one particular material (Rigogen) that I’ve been searching for during my last 3 sessions and no luck. I know it’s an underwater plant. So step 1 is to find a planet with oceans. I feel like maybe one in 5 planets I discover has oceans. Then the ocean has to be deep, I think. I’ve only found 2 planets (since I started looking for Rigogen) with deep oceans. And of course there has to be plant life underwater, and both the deep oceans I’ve found have been devoid of plant life. Nor have I ever seen Rigogen on the galactic trade system.

Part of the problem, I’m sure, is that I’m only playing once a week so “3 sessions” is 3 weeks for me. Basically I’ve spent most of January looking for this stuff. 🙂

I have a few other goals; I wanted to upgrade my warp engine and spiff up my ship. I have a list of materials I need to do that but I haven’t found any of them either. In fact I feel like my last few sessions have mostly been finding the same planet over and over. Different climate sure. But same materials. If you want Emeril or Iridium, I know of a dozen planets full of the stuff.

So time to push No Man’s Sky to the back burner again. I’ll revisit it either when the next big update comes out, or after enough time that the thrill of entering a planet’s atmosphere for the first time returns again. It’s all become too routine for me right now and is feeling more like a chore than fun. That’s a clear sign it’s time for a break.

It has been a crappy week here at Dragonchasers HQ. One of those weeks where every piece of tech you touch decides to go belly up. My main PC is down, my laptop is acting weird and my Linux box suddenly started crashing. Ergo no blog posts for the last few days.

By yesterday evening I decided it was time to step away from it all and enjoy No Man’s Sky since I skipped No Man’s Thursday last week. Of course the first order of business was remembering what I was in the middle of. Now that I have a base and some employees that’s easier than it used to be. I just ask them what it was they wanted.

You could certainly call these tasks fetch quests but in a game as open as NMS I actually appreciate having some specific things I need to do. Each of my employees needs a different exotic element, and none of them was available in my home system. So off I went in search of.

I wound up in a system that had been discovered by someone else back in August but ~gasp~ that person had discovered the system but not the planets inside it. Must’ve been one of those people determined to ‘finish’ NMS as soon as possible. His or her loss, I’ll be happy to collect the credits from discovering these planets and better yet one of them was a snow biome (I named it Christmas Village) that had the Coryzagen my armorer needed to cure a disease he’d contracted.

Of course before I went to collect that I had to save a Freighter that was under attack, then docked and drank rum with the captain and got some flush rewards (well ok, pretty minor rewards). I don’t know why these pirates keep picking fights with me. I guess they can’t see the 100 hash marks on the side of my ship until it is too late.

Christmas Village was a lovely little planet and gathering up the Coryzagen was a pleasant enough task. Next I needed Candensium and that, I’d been told, I could find on radiated planets. Luckily enough there was one of those in this same system and I’d already crafted the Haz-Mat Gloves I’d need to collect it. Still this was a tough challenge as my exo-suit was not set up well to fend off radiation. I had to recharge pretty frequently, and then a radiation storm hit and things just got ridiculous. I nearly died. I can’t recall the last time I died in No Man’s Sky, but it’s been a while. In the end I got back to my ship and hung out until the storm blew itself out. Then I quickly gathered the materials I needed and hit the skies again.

There were a few more planets to visit in this system; I couldn’t just leave any undiscovered. A few more space battles, a few gathering excursions and it was getting late. I zipped off to the system’s space station and teleported back home. I LOVE teleporting home since the galactic map is so damned confusing. Knowing I can just jump back to base from any space station means I can just roam around star systems without worrying about getting lost.

The end result of my trouble was a new ship weapon blueprint, and I learned to make non-ferrous plates which I need for circuit boards. Circuit boards I need in order to make automated mining systems. Of course getting the blueprints is one thing; now I have to gather materials again. That’ll be next week’s goal.

I’ve declared Thursday nights to be No Man’s Sky night at Pete’s Gaming Imperium, at least until I get bored of it. So far the Foundation Update is keeping me entertained.

I’m still working on my base. Last night I added a farm and a couple of storage lockers. The lockers are pretty small. Only 5 slots per. Hmph.

To do farming, first you build a console, then you find a Gek to run it. I was in a Vykeen system so had to go in search of a Gek employee. Fortunately for me, the next system was Gek. Of course while I was there I had to scope things out. It was a smallish system but it intrigued me. The first planet had toxic rain, so bleh. It did have a “base starter” on it though. The second planet was a low atmosphere planet which (for reasons only Sean Murray understands) means it has a lot of mineral resources. There was plutonium everywhere, there were clumps of those ‘flowers’ that give up isotopes, and huge chunks of iridium and other minerals. Just to cap things off, Sentinel presence was low. A nice place to gather resources but who wants to warp between systems for that? Well the third planet was a desert-style planet with lots of succulents, so-far non-threatening wildlife and pretty chill sentinels. Not the perfect planet but it was next door to that “mining planet.”

Thanks to Aywren I knew it was possible to build a base on this planet but at first I missed one key step. I built a signal array but every time I asked it to search for a habitable base, it pointed to the one on the first planet I’d visited. Finally I realized what I was doing wrong. I had never actually gone to that base. So I jump in my ship, fly across the system (stopping to kill some pirates on the way), find the base on the other planet, step inside to trigger that I’d found it. Then back in the ship, back across the system…fight more pirates along the way…and back to the desert planet. Then I built another signal array (way easier than trying to find the first one) and I searched for a habitable base and bam, one is found about a half hour away. Just a few seconds via ship.

So I head there and claim my new home and start rebuilding. Of course I lost some materials — you only get ‘most’ of the materials back when you move your base. I had enough to build the rooms I needed and re-position all the terminals (at which point my employees suddenly re-appeared, not that I’m complaining) but could only build one vault. *grumble*

Oh so I was talking about farming (I’m actually writing this at 1 am which maybe isn’t the best time for blogging). To do farming you build the console and hire a Gek to run it. Then you build hydroponic stations and from there you can plant things that the Gek gives you ‘seeds’ for. The seeds are basically blueprints. You still need materials to place the plants. I only had materials for two hydroponic stations and one plant. I have to go caving to find that exotic material you find in caves… Terium maybe? Again, 1 am. Anyway there’s an exotic material that I’ve always found in caves so I need to go get more of that. I find a smallish cave near my base and scored enough terium to make the Voltaic Cells I needed to build a second storage vault, but not enough to plant another plant. And that was all for the night so I never even got to see how long it takes for a plant to produce results!

In the meantime my construction guy is to the point where he’s giving me things like blueprints for decals, so I guess I have all the main building bits done. My armorer needs me to get him some medicine from a snowy biome and the scientist is always sending me off to check out radio signals and such. I feel like I’m probably pretty close to the end of the ‘how to build a base’ quest line, but we’ll see.

Here’s a view of my base from a nearby cliff. It’s still pretty sparse on the outside. I have schematics for all kinds of decorative flourishes but I’m still working on the functional stuff and I’m not sure I want to decorate until I know I’m settled in. This is my third base location so far.

Anyway, I’m real happy with the Foundation Update. I’m not one of the No Man’s Sky haters. I had a lot of fun when it came out, until something new and shiny distracted me. Now the Foundation Update has sucked me in again. I can’t wait to see what’s next.