As much of a spoiler as it is, I found out, as I know many did before me, that there’s a quick route to the center of any galaxy. No, it’s not looking up a portal address close to the center from someone who went before, it’s just spamming the first glyph at any portal. Apparently, in this golden age without portal interference, the first glyph will always drop you within a few thousand lightyears of the core. This actually made me feel more connected to the community. Playing on the Nintendo Switch I don’t get to run into players at the Nexus, so seeing all the communication stations around the portal at the other end of the jump was a fun reminder other players had gone before.
Whoa whoa whoa, I can craft spewing vents from sac venom and living slime?! Is this still a thing? Away from my game at the moment so I can’t try, but this seems like a way to just craft and craft until I get some sweet S class tech!
Well now I’m just overly concerned with the fact that I don’t know what color any of the beverages I drink that come in cans are. Is tomato juice even red? Who knows!? Truly a mystery for the ages which will never be solved.
I’m gonna vote overdoing it. Like there’s putting some thought into it, and then there’s creating a system that’s going to require effort and maintenance to keep up. Certain things make total sense, tech you’re not using but want to hold on to makes sense. All the raw materials to craft your money-makers (stasis devices, portable reactors, and so on) make sense. Stuff you know you’ll need to build your next base/farm or whatever, makes sense. Storing by type I can even get behind, as soon as I saw the color-sequencing, sorry that crossed my line! Lol.
So Tab, who’s whole deal was being artificially sweetened, is/was basically diet Coke? Lame.
Yellow Exotic
Revisited the planet from the bathysphere quest line, picked up a sunken ship and hung out at the station for a while to see if anything fun showed up before I scrapped it. Nothing extra special, but hey, if you like yellow…
Also what’s the deal, sorting by new is a bit depressing. Did everyone crawl back to Spez’s basement so soon?
Thanks for your reply, I think it really puts some things in perspective. If that 150 hour figure is accurate, and I don’t doubt that it is, it really changes the lens I’m looking through on what efforts one must go to to get an S class freighter, let alone one in your preferred make and model.
I know we collectively call it save scumming, but I’m not so sure it rises to that level. The first game I ever put any real time in was Nethack, where save scumming is reason enough for apostasy if not excommunication! I might not do it, but unlike with the folks doing it in Nethack, I won’t bring out my torch and pitchfork against anyone in this community.
I picked up an A class, and now when I’m hitting derelicts I’m fabricating bulkheads instead of tech. If I wasn’t on Switch, and multiplayer was a consideration, I think I could see my way to resetting for an S class. At this point my freighter is a platform for sending organic frigates out to get living ship upgrades. If a future update changes freighters in a big way, the way the recent update brought Nexus missions to Switch, I may regret not just putting in the effort to get an S class, but that for another time.
For now though, I’m happy with my A class but I still enjoy hearing what others went through to get the freighter of their dreams. Oh, and I think the increased frigate capacity may be a reason for me not to get an S class. Could be unrelated because stability on Switch has always been a bit off, but with three pages of frigates I think I’m seeing more crashes when I’m in the same system as my freighter.
Okay let me just get way off-topic on this but can we talk about Capital Freighters vs freighters a second? Wiki's and Tubes all seem to make the distinction between freighters (lower-case f) and Capital Ships/Freighters (upper-case F).
Play enough and see enough under attack by pirates and you will notice yes, they sometimes are noticeably larger than the random freighters you might find in this or that solar system. Certainly they are larger than most of the freighters which you may see randomly warp into a solar system after you arrive. They all still show up as Your Capital Ship in navigation. So what's the deal with making the distinction? Is it some kind of save-editing data-mining thing where people have started differentiating the two because there's something intrinsically different?
I swear there are more layers of player-added classification...
I could never get into reloading. I tried it a couple times and it just wasn't for me. Like I don't think it's cheating or anything but with the loading times being what they are on the Nintendo Switch (where I play) it felt to much like reloading to get a shiney starter. I'd rather spend the time complaining about not getting my dream ship on each new encounter than re-rolling the same encounter. Actually, now that I'm thinking about it like that it doesn't feel as frustrating no finding an S class at every turn. Thanks!
Crimson first ‘cause I had the parts. Then I thought if the other was harder to get (required drops from quads I think didn’t it?) it must be better so I reloaded my quicksave and went and got crystallized hearts or whatever it was so I could get both.
S class freighter?
I started my save as a rookie and just accepted the first freighter I was offered. It was a B class and had plenty of base built with parts I hadn’t even unlocked yet which was great for me ‘cause I was so early-game. Finally decided to get around to upgrading to a top of the line freighter, and after a couple weeks just casually checking out every freighter I happened to see the best I saw was a couple A’s.
Today I pretty much exclusively hunted for freighters for four hour (not contiguous hours, I can’t game for that long all at once!) without finding an S class. Finally, I caught an A I liked the look of, so I settled. Before I start spending bulkheads, is it worth it to keep casually looking for an S? Like, is there really any bonus beyond more supercharged slots? Searching gives me few results and most of it is 2-3 years old so may not even apply anymore.
I’d love to hear the groups advice, anecdotes, and other random freighter knowledge.
I appreciate the info, however, my post is just a tasteless joke.
First Diplodocus
Found some big “normal” looking Diplodocus on an ice planet today while doing my quicksilver missions. Someone was there first for sure ‘cause there was a pretty half-assed base next to a portal where I landed. Still, cool to organically find one that doesn’t look bizarre.
May as well jump back in with the Singularity expedition, couple weeks left I think.
Experimental Rifle, white, right on the station
It’s a class 3 economy so you can probably re-load for something better than a C tier. Upgraded to S tier it’s got four supercharged slots on the left and I got over 50,000 potential damage with some perfectly average neutron cannon weapon tech.
You’ve had a grape soda, how about a can of Tab?
I’m like 70% sure Tab is pink. Is Tab still a thing or did Monster and RedBull and the rest kill it?
I think there's some level of filtering on dissonant worlds too. I'm on a toxic world now, and I still get the green toxic storms, but everything is somehow a bit more purple, and I don't just mean the corrupted sentinels and shards all over the place. And it feels darker, like the black is deeper if that makes sense.
I'm going to have to check out more worlds and see if there's any other anomalous coloring out there...
Planetary Color Spaces
I think it was very creative of Hello Games to handle colors the way they did. We got infinite worlds and all those worlds care going to need a “look”, something if not unique to that world then at least different to the point that every twelfth planet you visit looks like that one you were on yesterday. We get atmospheric differences from planets to planets, blue sky here, yellow sky there, and all the variations for soil and plant life and everything.
What I really like is the color shifted worlds. If you’ve played for a while you’re sure to have noticed your ship looks a different shade on the local space station than it does on a planets surface. There’s also whole worlds where they seemingly started with a normal set of colors and then desaturated everything, or otherwise filtered everything.
Look at my image. I got the same jet pack trails in both, they look like “what’s on the tin” on the anomaly, but on one of the color shifted worlds, they’re yellow, like very yellow. How does anyone feel about these shifted worlds? I like them, they keep things interesting. It makes me wonder if things are set up like either sky = blue for some worlds and blue = magenta on others. Each set of rules will give you colorful worlds, doing it two different ways just adds variety.
It’s been a few days now and I’ve posted, commented more, and found more useful tidbits just reading here than I have in any other NMS community. Maybe it’s ‘cause it’s new, so it feels okay to be a n00b or maybe it’s something else entirely. I may not be able to put my finger on it, but I sincerely want to say thanks travelers, for being the way you are.
Are you buying storage slots at such a price because it’s faster than questing or scrapping ships for storage expansions or ‘cause once you’re rich it doesn’t feel so expensive? I’ll always buy slots (whether it’s for ships or multitools) until around a hundred million or so, but after that if I don’t have the storage expansion item, it can wait ‘till I do.
Exploration is a big part of it though. From finding the planets where the plants I want to farm grow natively so I can collect the seed-stock, to trying to complete the local systems encyclopedia, there’s always something to do if you want to stay in game and play while things grow.
Ha! Underwater, that’ll go a long way to keeping those dang domes from looking out of place. Nice thinking.
I buy a lot of stuff, like a new ship or multitoool, then I gotta upgrade it to max, which means spending a lot of credits to get a lot of nanites. Then I find a tool I like better and I need to rinse and repeat. Same situation with the fighters in my squadron, gotta max out a ship so I can swap it with theirs. Still, all of that only takes so much cash, so there’s an element of keeping a nice big round number in the bank as well. And I should say I’m not maintaining multiple farms, and never building on a scale that nets multimillions per hour. Part of that’s because I won’t make them big enough, and part of that is I only hit it once a day even if the turn around is every few hours. I got too much exploring (and not enough game time time) to zip back and cash in multiple times a day.
Farming, it can be too much, but it’s honest work
First, RIP meme legend Dave Brandt. Farming can be pretty tedious, and some of the things that make it easier are just plane ugly! I’m looking at you bio-domes!
If you want to farm circuit boards, which as far as I can tell are the most cost-effective, single site, single planet farm there’s no way around it, you need some planters. I should note I gave up on farming stasis devices because I didn’t care for looping between three gas-farm planets and endless refining to get condensed carbon.
For a long time I just set up bio-domes in a row (with a four-space planter in the center of each) for how ever many plants I needed for the math to come out right. Then I’d run through harvesting all with one button push until I got to the end. I tried making loops, or long runs with a short-distance teleporter to get me back to the start. It works, it’s just utilitarian and unappealing. And those domes really clash with wood, stone, or metal walls, they only match with the pre-fabs.
For something new I’ve tried setting up a big airy room with rows of planters. I feel like that really looks a great deal better. It’s also nice that I can pretty much keep the same style between the “grow room” and the rest of my base. Harvesting 80 something plants one at a time isn’t awesome, I can handle it once a day though.
Has anyone found themselves having to make a similar choice between an efficient harvest and an appealing layout? Did you find a way to make bio-domes look good with the rest of the base? Do you like the look? I’m curious to hear what other people have done. The only set ups I know other folks are using are the ones people have put into tutorials and they are all really cookie-cutter. What are all us random schmoes doing?
Yeah! Now that you mention it they do always seem to have some sort of outlandish description. Like yesterday I ran into a “Lost Red Planet” and wouldn’t you know it, the colors were toned like something had come along and sucked out all the red.
Robot Fauna
Encountered my first robot fauna today, and they don’t eat creature pellets, they eat batteries. Like, when I go to my companion registry, there isn’t a creature pellets icon theres an ion battery icon!
Is that only when I’m in proximity to a robot fauna, like it will automatically toggle back and forth? I’ve been running around for like ages on this planet and I haven’t seen it turn back to creature pellets. If I find just one more fauna I’ll have them all for this planet, and so far, all robots. Are worlds all robot or all organic?
Alien Pistol with Teeth (Euclid)
Looks gray to me but I'm told I'm colorblind. Found it right in the cabinet on this space station in Euclid where I happened to end up after finishing my latest Nexus mission. I can't seem to figure out how to make a multi-image post so I made it a single image. Feel free to tell me a better way to share images in the future. Nothing super special, but hey gotta keep adding content to grow the community!
Quicksilver Priorities
Obligatory notice: I play on Nintendo Switch. Now that I can do Nexus missions and earn quicksilver, are there recommendations on what I should work towards? I like that for most of the items I have to spend several days to get enough banked to buy stuff, but it makes me hyper-aware that I should be wise about it.
Like I already got the egg to get a living ship (love it!) and the -null- bobblehead because better shields seems like a nice thing to do for my ship, but what now? do I get more exhaust trails? Do I get more bobbleheads? What about the other backpack, I'm getting real tired looking at the default one.
I'd be very curious to hear about what order people picked things up in, or what made them make the choices they did. Anyone feel like sharing their preferred buys?
Living Ship Upgrades
I play exclusively on Nintendo Switch, if that matters, and upon picking back up after around three months of terrible work/life balance I find Switch players get nexus missions! Anyway, spent my quicksilver and just completed starbirth today and was wondering if there’s any good (and not an interminable YouTube video) advice on getting upgrades? I’ve got a bunch of living frigates and have been using them exclusively to pick up upgrades that way. I’ve also seen some 3 year old posts about just pulsing for random encounters that may drop upgrades but am only just now going to try that for a bit. Is that really the only two ways to get living ship upgrades? Sorry if this is a dull sort of question, I may have 250 hours in but I’m more of a wander around seeking novelty type player so a lot of obvious stuff escapes me unless it happens to be something I read a post about.
The Galaxy List in a Spreadsheet
If you, like me, are so acclimatized to Excel from your work life, a list of the galaxies in a spreadsheet just makes sense. Yes this same information (often with much greater depth) is online in multi-page wiki’s and info-graphics. If those are what you need, great, use them! If like me, you need to make notes, and keep track of things, and need a spreadsheet here’s a plain one that’s good to start from.