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Month: November 2021

A Gallery of Anomalous Space Encounters in “No Man’s Sky”

A Gallery of Anomalous Space Encounters in “No Man’s Sky”

[ NOTE: This post might be considered to be a bit of a spoiler. Be warned! ]

In February of 2020, Hello Games released the Living Ship update to No Man’s Sky which brought players the chance to own and pilot a new class of sentient starship, hatched from an egg and featuring unique organic technologies. Along with these procedurally generated ships, the update added the possibility of new, anomalous encounters with mysterious space objects and strange new lifeforms while pulsing through a star system. Some yielding rewards and some bringing danger, quite a variety of strange encounter scenarios were added to the game. (The Desolation update, released a few months later, introduced the Anomaly Detector which allows the summoning of these near-space anomalies.)

I made a blog post talking about the update and sharing a video of some of the things I was seeing, just a few weeks after it arrived. I’ve experienced a lot more anomalous encounters since then and do quite enjoy the living ships themselves. They have a smoother sort of feel that’s hard to describe, flying them in the game as compared to the traditional ships, I’ve found.

Recently, we were talking about these encounters on the NMS Discord and I posted a couple of in-game photos of some that I’ve had since the Living Ship update. I received a few comments in response, several asking if one of the shots was generated using mods. (It wasn’t.) It has been my experience that, in these encounters, some anomalous items appear more frequently than others. The feedback that I received on the Discord would seem to bear this out.

Seeing this, I thought I would share a few shots of the more interesting such encounters I’ve experienced. These are a few of the things I’ve seen infrequently, or perhaps only just once. (I’ve taken photos of most every unique encounter I’ve had, pulsing around the systems out there).

So, what have you seen out there?

New Frontiers of Base Building in “No Man’s Sky” Expedition III: Cartographers

New Frontiers of Base Building in “No Man’s Sky” Expedition III: Cartographers

At the end of March, Hello Games released the No Man’s Sky Expeditions (v3.3) update which brought a new, periodic, community-focused play mode to the game. I published posts and videos about my experiences with first two community Expeditions, Pioneers and Beachhead, as I completed them, here at NMSspot. A several month hiatus from Hello Games followed but, happily, Expedition Three: Cartographers finally landed — and on the heels of the major Frontiers (v3.6) update that brought the all new Settlements dynamic, allowing players to basically run their own little Mos Eisley, as well as a massive overhaul to the base building system and the base parts to choose from. (And I must, here, mention that in the aforelinked release notes to Cartographers, I was humbled by Hello Games’ kind nod to a piece of my in-game photography, a pursuit I most enjoy while exploring within No Man’s Sky.)

Cartographers placed players on a toxic world with extreme geography and a disabled explorer ship. The ship in question was of a highly unusual configuration making the task of repairing it and getting off the planet a rather long and laborious one, far more involved than that of a traditional starship. Once repaired, the player was able to escape the planet and seek out the various rendezvous points in systems across the galaxy and complete the remainder of the Expedition.

Given that I would clearly be spending a considerable length of time on that starter planet, I built a base near my downed starship, trying my hand for the first time at construction using the aforementioned new base parts. And that was a learning experience; many of the parts were quite unfamiliar and in the days and weeks after the Frontiers release, a series of patches arrived addressing various kinks in the entirely new building dynamic. (Things have since smoothed out nicely.)

Building that initial base was good practice and by the time I was able to make my way to space, I was ready to give it another go on the final rendezvous world, the Expedition’s end planet (or moon, as the case turned out to be).

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