I really liked the emptiness. I hope we get this as a game mode. want to try it in perma-death, see how many tries it takes to get to the next system.

Speaking of the emptiness, >!was anybody else disappointed at the ending, how the galaxy was just suddenly populated without a big universe-switching event at expedition's end? It's like everybody just popped up from hiding spots, "Surprise!"!<

I personally handwaved that away as >!"the iteration repaired itself,"!< but yeah, it was a bit abrupt.

Wait when did that happen? Or is this the difference between expedition on new save vs. starting from an existing save the Anomaly? I achieved everything and got the message to go back to the Anomaly, but I was able to keep exploring the empty universe for a while before I did that.

Yeah, I started from an existing save and the ending was just... Normal?

If you finish the expedition and keep playing it just switches to a normal universe. But if you finish and stop it won't like immediately switch what's loaded so you may not notice unless you go explore more planets etc.

If you start a new save, after the expedition it "reverts" to a normal save. Hence, the Universe suddenly becomes populated again.

Spoilers man!

Sorry. Edited.

All good!

Literally, thanks for the spoiler lol.

Yeah I was hoping they actually chose abandoned star systems for those so that atleast the stations would remain abandoned like they actually were evacuated and we just had only been traveling those systems. It was still cool though for sure 👍

I doubt it. I’d suggest it was completely separate instance with slightly different seed/build rules.

I have really missed the aloneness from what the game was in 2016. Throw in a few planets with the glorious-fog-of-distance and (?) icons that fade into and out of view as you travel and we're golden.

It would also be neat as a mission part of the story, preferably pretty late in story missions, where something happens and you are all alone for a while trying to figure it out.

I really liked the 'find a spot away from machinery, and look at the stars' requirement. Very different from usual expedition milestones.

I started a new run and literally the first thing I did was point up at the sky and waited.. and I got the milestone within the first minute lol. Fun how such a simple mechanic was also cleverly hidden.

Yeah that was the last thing I had to do and it was 7 AM so I had to fart around all day before I could star gaze

You could just fly to the other side of the planet next time

I did do that once lol

I just flew to the night side of the planet I was on lol

Ah crap I now remember I flew to a different planet hoping the time would change but it didn't at all

You have a space ship

i was doing that and actually maling a point to sit there and stare and contemplate my existence... then the sun rose with like 15 seconds left on the timer lol. was rather annoyed at that

I had it raise and reset on like 59.5/60.. really ridiculous

Something about that one just threw me off the first time. I thought maybe sit in the space shuttle and just drift in space, quickly realized “no duh I have an engine on my ship that’s machinery”. Next time I tried I actually got it, but the day cycle came about 3 seconds from actually getting it so had to hop to the next planets night cycle

Yeah, I like the ones that just say to coast through the stars for a while too. Ironically I get very excited when I see quests in a game that just tell me to relax

I'm a big fan of the new ship, especially because you can scrap it and make your own with a custom paint job, and you can use parts from it to make other ships.

Is there a way to replicate the signature trail on the exp hauler when it's scrapped?

I think you can unlock it from the anomaly quicksilver station. If not you can just press x (if you’re on computer) while hovering over the starship trail to store it as an item so you can transfer it to other ships.

if you start from your main save, right when you get the new hauler equip it and go to your main save. Go to the anomaly and you can make multiple copies of the hauler for 2800 nanites each.

Does it also contain the modules inside it?

My gut tells me the vulture is HG's way of testing out adding new ship parts and those ship wreck base parts will be used as something we can come across planets to extract brand new unique ship parts.

Dont you just get 1 part from each ship scrapped though?

Yes, but if you have the Iron Vulture as your selected ship when you end the expedition, then you can copy it over as many times as you want, provided you have the nanites.

You can also quickly swap your ship in the station from the context menu, which will cancel the delete-fade animation and keep the ship in your inventory.

When you scrap and build your own with the wings I dont think you get the advantage of hovering in place.

You can hover with whatever has the wings.

I had sentinels do a scan of my ship and found those nip nip buds you got as a reward for one of the things. Dicks. lol

Same

Same on my PC run, on my PS5 run got lucky and transferred those to my freighter before I got scanned anywhere.

Haven't gotten the freighter yet. I saw it briefly but then it disappeared

I think mine is the creeping ominousness of it

This. The first planet really creeped me out!

The opening planet was actually quite disturbing. Loved that!

The struggle to survive, the endless cacophony of worms rumbling the earth, fields of hungering tendrils threatening every step. I felt tense the entire time until I got off the planet and into space. Really made me appreciate those little red oxygen plants that seem to exist on all planets, considering how far and few between they were on that planet.

Did people actually struggle? I'm annoyed that I didn't notice at the start that settings were set to normal difficulty, so it was a lot easier. Still, it was a grind to get oxygen from those rocks, I didn't really run for oxygen plants that much.

Mostly it was balancing your movement with how much oxygen you have on hand. Doesn't help that some of the starship repairs use oxygen in the crafting recipe. It took me maybe 30 minutes not counting time spent in menus of just constantly managing oxygen supply. I mostly ignored the rocks and went straight for oxygen plants because i figured the time spent gathering the trace oxygen amount from some rocks would waste more than just melee boosting to the nearest oxygen plant and replenishing between objectives as needed.

Alright 👍 You could stand still and have no drain (at least in my 'normal' settings)

Did the worms always make those bellows as they travel, or is that new?

The sound they make now is altered from what it used to be but they always made noise.

My music must be turned too loud then! I usually listen for the vibes but maybe I’ll switch back to just the ambiance for a while.

I've owned NMS for years but have never gone on an expedition. I'm enjoying how it makes you try things that I've never included in my normal play style. I've never looked for sunken freighters. I've never had an egg companion. I didn't know there were robotic life forms. It's been very refreshing!

I like how it takes you out of your ship and multi tool comfort zone and takes you back to basics. I cloned my Utopia Speeder when I had enough nanites but ended up having too much fun in the explorer I found and restored per the objective. Have to confess to utilising my main save multi tool though as my Scatter Blaster is super OP and makes easy work of Sentinels.

Yeah, this was the first time I bothered to use the nautilon, now I have a underwater dock in my main base.

Honestly, the isolation. This is the first time playing No mans sky in a while that felt truly lonely. No alien civilization, no functional outposts, no freighters and starships bustling about. It is empty, dead, and alone. Not even the familiar faces of nada and polo, nada being reduced to a empty shell and polo seemingly vanished like the rest of the anomaly iterations. The anomaly doesn't feel like "home of the travelers" without the travelers within to give it life. It really makes you reevaluate how often you talk to alien NPCs and use their infrastructure in the normal game. Once there is none of that, you are left to fend for yourself entirely, nothing but the scraps of civilization to assist yourself with. Its also even more unsettling to salvage derelict freighters, finding the remnants of the crew and the relevant captains log and crew manifest, only to find that without any signs of civilization the loss of the freighter is meaningless and the rest of the universe is just as dead and long gone as the crew. Like others are saying, i would honestly really enjoy a gamemode like this.

And because of the emptiness, the worm sounds made it even more jarring whenever they popped up. I supposed technically it wasn't really empty universe, there were still worms, terrors and sentinels around, but other humanoid species anywhere which was actually kinda nice.

Having base icons, save beacon icons, and comm balls be completely invisible with multi off. Hoping very much this tech becomes part of the main game. Runner-up: no fleets warping in directly in front of me every. single. damned. time. I leave atmo or drop out of pulse.

But a single ghost escort ship was ok.

This!

Between the fleets warping in and ships flying over to see what you are mining and no pirates, empty space seems much better.

I’ve been playing on and off since day one launch, but for some reason this is the first time I attempted an expedition. What the hell was wrong with me? This was pretty fun overall.

Favorite thing was when I realized there was no threat from attacking pirates and I could safely go where I wanted without worrying about it. It's like playing on Survival/Permadeath all the time and then going into Normal for an expedition: it's a vacation.

The objectives that had you just stare at space. I’d never done that before and it made me realize just how beautiful this game really is

I finally learned how to duplicate a ship (the last expedition was my first so I wasn't sure what I was doing and I ended the expedition to collect the Starborne Runner.) I now have the parts to build four sets of Iron Vultures or to give to friends who don't complete the expedition in time. About halfway through scrapping them, I realized I could take out the atlas statues, engine exhaust mod and S class upgrades to install in my other ships. The rewards from this expedition were fun too. I never spend Salvaged Data on decorations so it was nice to get some new things to use around bases.

Yeah it is great getting a lot of salvaged data, and fun scrapping free ships.

I really enjoyed the silent reflection time at the end.

Nice shakeup that I can't buy or research modules, gotta run with what you brung.

The rewards, the expedition was boring and repetitieve, but i got a new ship out of it!

you're trying to pulse drive to the station and suddenly a large group of freighters and frigates warp in right in your path and now you are bumped out of pulse and have to ignore 3,000 requests to join your fleet before you can get back to flying towards the station. in NMS, any travel time more than 30 sec is way too long.

So... a couple of things about that expe.... 1) Life isn't a question, it doesn't need an answer. That kinda stuck with me. I won't bore you with my inner philosophical discussion, but suffice it to say, I sort of drifted in space thinking about that for a little bit. I like it when games, movies, books, hit me with an idea that challenges me to look at my own viewpoints and consider that maybe if I altered how I approached life I might see things very differently. 2) I absolutely hate shuttles. I don't mean kind of, I mean with a passion. There are no benefits to flying a shuttle... Its not faster, more maneuverable, have stronger shields, or do more damage. It just... exists. It's not even a cool looking ship, like the Lambda Shuttle in star wars... It just looks like a flying brick stacked on more bricks with some wings thrown on as an after thought. I mean..... they could at least give it some atmospheric bonuses, like scanning for tech models or something... Anyway, rant over on shuttles. I just hate having to spend an entire expedition in a shuttle. Its mind bendingly depressing. Alone in the universe, and forced to fly a shuttle. Why does hello games hate me so much? 3) The whole thing just kind of made me ponder the idea of an entire empty universe... devoid of any sentient life, except atlas or sentis.... It was both... exhilarating and massively depressing at the same time. I'm curious what the next expedition is.. if there is one.

I liked how it actually made me feel kinda sad, especially with the "go out to space and sleep" objectives. Really poetic in my opinion.

I liked the " take a minute and look at the stars". I don't do this often enough ( in the game or in real life )

I liked the final objectives of "bake a loaf of bread and stare at the night sky." Didn't exactly care for how I wasn't able to bake something else and had to follow that specific recipe for a loaf of bread, but when it was done I felt a very cinematic sort of satisfaction.

That feeling of being alone...the only thinking, active traveler in a galaxy completely devoid of civilization, and the eeriness of knowing that's because it all went extinct long ago... Disabling multiplayer from the settings, looking at the stars, picturing in my head the vastness of all that explorable space and knowing I'm alone

The fact there's ~~13~~ Edit: 22 bases already in the same system I went through, but these and all in nearby systems are basic practical stuff rather than galactic center memes. I've been flying to random beacons and markers after the expedition just to explore what's up, it's pretty cool.

Star gazing

I want a difficulty modifier that does this, that makes every system abandoned

Is anyone else replicating the Iron Vulture and harvesting the parts in volume?

Honestly, it was my first expedition. I liked that it was more difficult, but I wish I knew the items and ships didn't go over to the main save. I was happy that they didn't because of the amount of units and nanites that I got, but I happened to get a sentinel ship which I had never seen before and it was gone.

Empty space. No pirates chasing you around, no fleets warping in just as you enter a system, no idjits in the way when you are mining asteroids.

I like that it has a creepy vibe to it, and it reintroduces the early-game resource struggle.

That it was over quickly. But also yeah, the thing you said. If I had to be a space pauper, at least I wasn’t also getting attacked every 5 minutes.

I actually like the more aggressive yelling worms and the quick-generating nests with tendrils. That first world was wild.

When it ends. That moment is like no other. If you don't want to mess with pirates in your main save, turn them OFF in Difficulty Settings.

As a 2016 player, I loved it. Don't get me wrong, the updates have objectively made the game better. But I'd missed that sense of solitude, even playing with MP off.

The end was nice. Otherwise this was my least favorite expedition in a while. The little shuttle was just kinda shit, and the lack of any vendors or anything made it hard to upgrade and keep going and the nanite cost to copy over my regular ship was too high. I had an option to grab a Sentinel ship but at that point I just wanted to get to the end. Was glad when I finished.

The post-expedition return to normal gameplay has been wild for me. All the colors really seem to pop, and the graphics. And the space station missions gameplay loop. Is it just me, or has it been improved?

I found these funny little gopher creatures that I'd never seen before. They pop their heads up out of the ground, check you out, and then poof they're gone.

I'll be honest, I've never done one,and I dont really understand the using an existing save vs new save business. Will I wreck my existing setup?

No. I always do expeditions without making a new game. It just bounces back to the Space Anomaly after you've finished the expedition and you'll get the rewards from the kiosk, but all your existing stuff will still be there.

Thanks!!

Its so... calm. Its empty, but not \*empty\* Its just me, my ship, and a wide space with nobody to help me. It feels so alone, dangerous, and post-apocalyptic

About those freighters, where are they comming from? I've recently come back from the expedition after only a few hours on the main save, and I wonder, are they all from players or are there also "NPC fleets" beyond the derelicts and pirates?

Nothing it was shit. A pointless, totally unconnected tick list of asinine tasks. That find synthetic lifeforms task had me feeling like those videos where someone comes home from a really rough day with some takeout food and it falls out onto the floor and it’s like the final straw to their already shit day. This crap is not why I play no mans sky. I deleted the game now anyway.  Screw you no mans sky adrift. Screw you!