Explorer's Log: Day One

I pre-ordered No Man's Sky.

Five minutes into the game, I was already dead.

It turns out that there's a steep learning curve to No Man's Sky.  Not too steep, but definitely a "here's your game - by the way I think tutorials are for idiots" kind of steep.  I re-named my starting planet Kakrafoon (an homage to Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) and set off to figure out just what the hell I was doing and where the hell I was going.

When you start off in No Man's Sky, your rad space ship is mad broken.  It's up to you to fix it.

Fortunately they soon gave me this bad boy, straight from Star Fox's hangar.

You get only a few inventory spaces and some context clues to help you figure out where to go.  Fortunately the actual activity isn't that hard (even if it is time consuming).

And flight leads to cool views like this one.

Your liftoff engines are criminally inefficient for what the game demands.  They only use Plutonium (which is supposed to be uncommon as a resource, but that varies from planet to planet), and they use up 25% of your fuel supply every time you take off.  If there's an upgrade for those puppies to make them more efficient I have yet to find it.

The first planet I was on was a frozen wasteland.  I was happy to leave.

And excited for all the pretty colors in warp travel!

Warp travel was a hassle to get going.  Little did I know it would be my downfall.

You see, you can find crashed ships sometimes while you're exploring.

Like this sad wreck.

While I chose to skip the above pictured derelict, I did find another that was far more appealing than the bonus content Arwing that Happy Games had gifted me.  It was banged up, but then so was my first ship so I didn't think much of spending a little extra time exploring enough to fix it up.

And it was red.  Red means go faster.

My new ship did lack something the Arwing had: fuel in its warp engine.  My only goal from the game at this point was to leave behind the second star system that I had come to and get on with my journey towards the center of the galaxy.

I have spent quite a bit of time looking for the components I need to power my warp drive, but to no avail.

Lots of carbon-based trees, though.

I have bounced from planet to planet in this star system trying to find what I need, but I fear I may have stranded myself.

This communication station didn't have what I needed, even though it was cool as hell.

Resigned somewhat to my fate, I began to explore what I had in earnest.  I am resolute in my belief that the commodities I need to escape this star system will come my way.

I made a friend with this weird praying mantis creature.  She pooped platinum for me.

My travels took me pretty far, and I've already unlocked the silver achievement for walking around on foot in No Man's Sky.

One thing I will say about the game is that it tends to overuse the word "unit."  Everything is measured in units.  Everything.  You walk in units.  Your speed is measured in units.  You get paid in units.  It's all units.  Confusing.

A cozy housing unit only twenty units away from a cave filled with Plutonium!  300 square units!

Knowing that I didn't have a functional warp drive, I opted for a better ship when I found it.  I wasn't really losing anything at that point - the ship that I had found was less aesthetically appealing but it had more cargo capacity and boasted a number of (broken) systems that even my current ship did not have.

Like an R2-D2 built right into the wing!

I didn't just wander around blowing up rocks and scanning animals, though.  I also pursued as much information on the local dominant species as I could, the Gek.  Well, here's what I can tell you about the Gek: their First Spawn are straight up assholes.  Everywhere I go there are death threats and promises of galactic conquest from those First Spawn dick weasels.

But at least they have the common courtesy to teach me their language.

I have collected more than 30 words of the Gek language, but whenever I talk to one of these sardonic unhelpful little lizard people I still get mostly garbled sentences.  I can't wait until I learn the Gek word for "is," or maybe "the."

The trade was also good.

There were always plenty of minerals to grab.  Often, more than it's worth carrying around with you.  Especially when you find duplicate, non-stackable trinkets that sell for a quarter of what a good stack of Elenium will sell for on the Galactic Trade Network.

That is a two-hundred unit tall pillar of pure gold.

I'm still poking about on those four planets (one of which I was so frustrated with that I renamed it Bullshit).  The irony will be when the planet Bullshit is the last one I finish exploring and it has what I need.  Hopefully I didn't break something by taking one of the many awesome ships they provided me in the early game.

Hopefully I'm just stranded until the game decides to actually give me the antimatter I seek.

Hopefully.