Found this large waterworld with blue oceans, blue skies, white clouds, a few sparse islands scattered around, ~900u depth, and chilled out Sentinels. It's a single planet system with two moons, larger than normal planets but not quite Giant size.
I've seen a number of questions from new and returning players recently asking what to do next or to prioritize. As a relatively new player myself, here's my personal list, compiled over several months of exploring and optimizing my main save.
Completing all of these unlocks everything you need to be able to just have fun exploring the universe and all other game activities with confidence and relative ease.
To keep this post reasonably concise, I'll link to further details in the comments or other posts instead of explaining everything in detail here.
Progress the Primary missions Atlas Path and Artemis Path till you unlock the Space Anomaly. Happens early in the campaign.
Learn how to make credits and nanites, the two main currencies. Fastest/easiest way in the early game is to hunt for crashed Sentinel Interceptor starships, claim them, scrap them at the space station, and sell their parts at the trade terminal for credits and their upgrade modules at vendors for nanites. Get 10-50m credits per ship. More details in comment section. While you're at it, collect a Sentinel Multitool from the Harmonic Camp in that comment, and use it as your primary MT for now. Also, familiarize yourself with the other methods of acquiring nanites.
Glyphs: Unlock all 16 glyphs early so you can use portals to fast-travel anywhere in your current galaxy. You eventually unlock all 16 glyphs when you complete the two Primary Missions above, but that can take a while. There's quicker way to unlock them early in the game. Here are two guides for that: 1) Single planet with 14 Traveler Graves, or 2) 16 space station locations with Travelers. In both cases, unlock the first two glyphs (Sunset and Bird) by going to Space Stations till you find a Traveler (translucent alien). Talk to him multiple times till you can ask him where he came from, select that. He will mark a Grave somewhere in the system. Go there and interact with it to unlock a new glyph. Do that twice to unlock Glyph 1 & 2, then follow the instructions in one of the links above to unlock the remaining 14.
Exosuit: Fully upgrade and optimize your exosuit (video). Huge quality of life improvement, makes you more or less invincible, and able to jetpack leap long distances. Also unlock all the slots.
Starship: Get a powerful and optimized starship. Ideally you want one with all 4 Supercharged (SC) slots adjacent to each other (all edges touching, in a Square, L, S or T shape). Start with one of these Exotic ships. Put an Infra-Knife Accelerator and three S-class upgrades in the SC slots, and the Q-Resonator blueprint upgrade next to them. Then after you unlock Purple star systems in #9 below, upgrade to a cool Sentinel Interceptor with 4 adjacent SC slots (unless you already found one while salvaging them for money in #2 above). The main advantage of Interceptors is that they can hover in place without moving, the only other ships able to do that being the Starborn Runner/Phoenix Expedition rewards, and corvettes.
Freighter: Get your first freighter for free, then trade it for an S-class Freighter with good Supercharged (SC) slot layout. Or search Youtube, /r/nmscoordinateexchange, or nmsce.com for other good ones, but very few have that 4-square SC slot layout. Then use this guide to collect S-class upgrade mods for it that optimize hyperdrive range and frigate mission bonuses.
Freighter Base: Set up a base in the freighter with at minimum a Scanner Room, Teleport Chamber, and Orbital Exocraft Materializer. The scanner can map all planets in a system simultaneously, without you having to land on them, which makes exploring and mapping worlds much faster.
Exocraft: Unlock and upgrade your Minotaur and Nautilon exocraft. The remaining exocraft are optional. A fully upgraded Minotaur is an amazing vehicle for traversing uneven terrain with long jetpack leaps, even climbing the highest steepest mountains. It's super fun. And with the AI autopilot, it fights with you against aggressive Sentinels, Horrors, Broods, etc. Nautilon for deep water exploration. Always carry in your bags a Minotaur Geobay, Nautilon Platform (surface), and Nautilon Chamber (sea floor) to summon each exocraft, until you can install an Exocraft Summoning Unit in your Exosuit (requires access to purple systems, below).
Campaign Completion: Now unlock Autophage Camps and Purple Systems. TLDR: See link for details, but requires completing the primary quest campaigns Artemis Path and Atlas Path, then the followup quests They Who Returned and In Stellar Multitudes. This unlocks access to the full NMS universe.
Multitool: Get two multitools - a Sentinel or Autophage Staff MT optimized for weapon damage, and an Atlantid MT optimized for Mining. Sentinel and Staff MT's have the highest internal damage multiplier, and Atlantid MT's have the highest internal mining multiplier. Start with any Sentinel MT from any Harmonic Camp in #2 above. Then upgrade it to this one. Then after you unlock Autophage Camps and Purple systems in #7 above, also grab a high-damage Staff, and one Atlantid MT for mining.
Corvette: Finally, start going down the Corvette rabbit hole. Corvettes are starships you can custom-build. A well-designed and optimized corvette is more convenient, more capable, more powerful, and as maneuverable as any starship (or even moreso with some work put into it). It can also be more efficient at mapping and exploring systems than a starship+freighter combo. Build your own, or download one another player has shared (google NMS corvette sharing). Then upgrade and optimize it (video).
Secondary Missions: By now you'll have accumulated a number of Secondary Missions in your Log. Work through and complete those to clean up your log a bit. They introduce you to all the various side activities and patch content added to the game over the years.
That will take a couple weeks or months at least, and then you're set to do anything else the game has to offer. My current project is searching for rare Giant Earth-like worlds in purple systems, but there's all sorts of other stuff to do.
Here are three good Scanner upgrade mods, and seeds for the first two:
Update: It seems this is a Secondary/Secret/Magic/Glitched autophage staff, which can't be freely added to inventory, only exchanged with an existing MT. So go get a trash MT first, and exchange it for the staff.
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Has anyone ever run into the problem with staves, or any MultiTool for that matter, where you can't freely add it to your collection, but can only exchange it with your existing MT? Is there any solution to this? (I suppose a workaround would be to get a trash MT and exchange with that one).
Update: It seems this is always the case with Secondary/Secret/Glitch Autophage staffs. You just have to get a trash MT from somewhere else first and exchange it with the crafted autophage staff.
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Has anyone ever run into the problem with staves, or any MultiTool for that matter, where you can't buy it or add it to your collection, but can only exchange it with your existing MT? Is there any workaround to be able to claim it without exchanging it?
Posted about this a while back, finally figured it out. The Fauna stat especially is only 116 away from a perfect 11,000%. Lucrative in conjunction with foods that give a Fauna analysis buff in the Nutrient Ingestor.
To make the staff that contains this mod, go to planet via portal glyphs, look for base on Titan moon named "Near Perfect MT mod". Stand on the white square, face your body West, Assemble but do not Claim a staff two times to activate the "magic" or "secondary" staff. Assemble a third staff using Concentric Transducer head. Should result in Lambda-Geometric with the X-class mod. Claim it, harvest the mod, scrap staff at the Anomaly. Repeatable, make as many as you want.
PS - since this is a Secondary/Secret/Magic/Glitched Autophage Staff, you can't freely add it to your inventory, you can only exchange it with an existing staff. So get a trash multitool/s from somewhere else first to exchange it for (space station, etc).
Found this Earth-like "Abandoned Paradise" giant planet. Blue skies, white clouds, green grass, shallow seas, relatively low mountains, and scattered with both ancient ruins and fossils. Not actually abandoned though, plenty of Korvax around manning the points of interest.
Memory stones are sparse on the giant, but one of its moons is also an Abandoned Paradise, and memory stones are dense there. In case anyone is looking for ancient ruins base part recipes.
I put bases on Sentinel Pillars on both the giant and the moon for easy planet-wide Sentinel deactivation.
Enjoy!
I made a Steam gameplay video for the first time recently, playing No Man's Sky in Steam on Mac (M5 with Tahoe 26.5). But when I tried to Export it and save it as a file on my disk, it gives the error in the title and doesn't export. I've tried with multiple videos of different durations and file sizes (from 4m to 1hr), but same error every time. Anyone know what could be causing this? Is it some Mac OS setting blocking this, or a Steam setting, or something else?
Found this "Grassy Giant" planet whose picture in the Discoveries tab looks like an almost 100% landlocked planet with very little water. But instead it turns out to have almost no land or grass at all because it's actually a giant waterworld.
There are a few tiny but mountainous islands scattered around the surface, but 99.99% of it is water. Only about 400u deep, but the mountains are huge.
Sentinels are aggressive, so I'm looking for a Sentinel Pillar to put a base on to easily deactivate them, but am getting the bug where the pillar always appears on a nearby moon instead.
Seems giant waterworlds are rare, nmsce.com has none listed for any galaxy, until this one.
PS - renamed to Ahch-To after posting this, so the screenshots don't match the name.
If we have recovered NHI technology from UFO/UAP crash sites, and NHI are actively operating craft on and around Earth as so much video evidence suggests, why haven't they taken back their tech and crash remains? Why are the aliens just letting us keep and reverse engineer their technology, when they probably have the capability to take it back from us if they wanted? Is there some kind of quid-pro-quo going on between human and alien? What's the explanation for this?
Update: Possible Answers:
I've seen several new and returning players ask what to do next and how to unlock purple star systems, so I'm posting the answer in the hopes this makes it easier to find. Unlocking purple star systems requires 1) first finishing the main campaign, 2) and then unlocking Autophage camps, 3) and finally purple star systems. Details:
That unlocks all the unlockable star systems and planets in the game. After that you'll want to explore, or collect some cool starships, or Sentinel Interceptors, and a freighter, or finally make your own corvette, or build a cool base on your forever planet, all of which you can find more info on searching the NMS subs and Youtube.
Found this rejuvenating giant planet near another recent find. Felt like standing at the bottom of a mountain waterfall and smelling the renewing misty air. Until gigantic lightning bolts began flashing all over the sky and electrocuting everything around. Great scenery either way, enjoy :).
There's been some criticism of GW3 using the Unreal Engine, mainly around its graphics, but I've been wondering what advantages it may confer.
For one example, a huge, fully contiguous world not divided into a bunch of square maps with immersion-breaking boundary walls could be worthwhile upgrade. Anyone know if UE5 enables that capability, or any other interesting worldbuilding or gameplay upgrades for that matter?
(Fwiw GW2 does a good job of minimizing immersion-breaking with the waypoint system and generally large and sometimes eleborate maps (Verdant Brink, Tangled Depths, etc). And, maps with metas keep players focused in the playable area. But, playing games like No Man's Sky recently makes me realize game engine tech is probably at a point where that's not necessary anymore).
Am I just missing them, or do these not exist? Kind of annoying to have to run to and from the corvette area in every pirate system.
Found this beautiful glacial giant planet near another recent find. Blue skies, white clouds, snowy icy mountains. Posting for anyone looking for an icy earth-like giant planet.
Found this beautiful white sand giant planet in the vicinity of another recent find. It's a lush biome so mostly hospitable, except the Sentinels are aggressive and attack on sight. I'm trying to find a Sentinel Pillar on the actual planet so I can put a base there to easily deactivate them, but so far the only Pillars that appear are on one of the moons and don't deactivate the sentinels on the Giant.
I discovered this earth-like giant planet recently, and an autophage camp on one of its moons has a multitool, Lambda-Geometric, with a near-perfectly rolled Scanner X-class mod (first pic).
However, there's some order of operations required to craft it which I didn't write down and forgot, including possibly standing behind the terminal as you can see in the pic. I've tried every different combination I can think of but no luck recreating it.
Are there any expert staff crafters who can give it a go? I put a base on the camp called "Good MT Scanner Mod".
