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Melee reload jump trick - in flight screenshot

Speed Tip: The Melee + Reload Jump Trick

03/21/2023 blakespot Comments 0 Comment

Everyone who’s played No Man’s Sky for any amount of time knows about the “melee jump” or “boost jump,” achieved by executing a melee lunge and triggering your jetpack in the middle of it, transferring the forward force of your melee lunge into your flight. This is a quicker way to get around than simply lifting off with your jetpack.

But…do you know about the melee + reload jump trick?

I was hanging out on the Discord sometime in late 2019 or so when someone was explaining the old reliable melee jump to a new player. In response, someone piped up, making mention of a many-times-faster jump trick that will let you cover a span of terrain about as fast as as a starship. No one in the channel had heard of this one, and the guy (I wish I could remember the handle) explained precisely how it is done. It took me a few tries, but I got the hang of it and have been using this trick to travel long distances across a planet surfaces ever since.

How to do it: Fire off a few rounds with a projectile weapon (Boltcaster, Pulse Spitter, etc.) and then, while walking forward (not running), press and hold down the melee button. While it’s still held down, tap fast and frequent on the weapon reload button (square on PS4/5, X on Xbox, ‘r’ on keyboard) — tap it over and over fast and you will sporadically gain ground speed, though the direction is erratic. When you’re moving at a good clip, light up your jetpack and away you go! Note: You must have spare Projectile Ammunition in your suit inventory for this to work.

I made a short, not-great video demonstrating the trick way back when and have shown it a number of times over the years to Travellers unaware. It seems like this is not a widely known technique. When this issue came up again this morning in the Discord, I decided to make a much better video and post the technique here to the blog.

God…speed, Traveller.

Tower base with massive companion egg in yard, planet behind

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

11/03/2021 blakespot Comments 0 Comment

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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A “Photo Mode” Glitch in “No Man’s Sky” on PC and How to Work Around It

08/03/2021 blakespot Comments 5 comments

One of the things I most enjoy in playing No Man’s Sky is in-game photography. The visuals are so, well, otherworldly and striking that capturing the perfect shot is a challenge I take on many times in each play session. When No Man’s Sky Pathfinder (v1.2) was released, Hello Games added a proper Photo Mode to the game that is, in my experience, unmatched in any other game out there. It allows the action to be frozen while camera placement and various other filter options are tweaked for just the right shot. They further improved Photo Mode in the recent release of No Man’s Sky Prisms (v3.5), adding several new controls. In No Man’s Sky, “virtual photography” or “gametography” is quite a pleasure and easily done.

Unfortunately, despite the numerous enhancements (including VR gameplay) that No Man’s Sky Beyond (v2.0) brought upon its release in mid-September of 2019, it introduced a glitch to the screenshot system that is still there to this day. It doesn’t affect everyone; it is an issue for PC players using certain anti-aliasing settings. It took me a few days after Beyond arrived to notice it but I soon saw that, after the update, screenshots captured in Photo Mode, upon close inspection, looked as if the anti-aliasing had been completely turned off.

Now, a bit of history. With the release of No Man’s Sky Foundation (v1.1) in late-November 2016, Hello Games introduced (among many other features) TAA or temporal anti-aliasing. Prior to this, FXAA or fast approximate anti-aliasing and SSAA supersampling anti-aliasing were the two AA modes available in the game. TAA is much cleaner than FXAA, and is the mode I choose to use on my i7-6700K PC with Nvidia GTX-1080Ti. Another available mode is TAA+FXAA, but to me this looks a bit too soft, ever so slightly blurry — I prefer TAA. (SSAA was removed from the game early on.) And, with the release of No Mans’s Sky Prisms (v3.5), Hello Games added DLSS or deep learning super sampling for PC users with Nvidia RTX-class graphics hardware, which uses machine learning to perform rather impressive asset upscaling to 4K resolution.

As in-game photography is such a big thing for me, I tried a few different approaches and discovered that if I set my shot up in Photo Mode as per normal but used Steam’s F12-key screenshot feature, the resultant image looked great, just as photos taken with the “Take Screenshot” button / key used to look, before the glitch arrived. This has been my workaround to the issue, but I have submitted the issue with screenshot examples to Hello Game’s tracker site.

Click the photos in the embedded gallery above and have a look at the full-sized screenshots provided to see the issue described here. The top two screenshots were taken shortly after Beyond landed in 2019 while the bottom two were taken yesterday, in the Prisms update. The TAA anti-aliasing mode is active in both sets of photos. (And for a brief time there was an issue with the zoom / aspect ratio between the two screenshot approaches, as demonstrated in the first pair of screenshots above, but that was addressed in short order.)

Zoomed: Photo Mode “Take Screenshot” key on the left, Steam F12 screen capture on the right.

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The Observatory That Stood Up and Walked Away From Me

07/06/2021 blakespot Comments 4 comments

I remember the first time it happened. I was mining rocks on some planet’s surface in order to load up on Pure Ferrite and Ferrite Dust for a base I was putting together. After a while at this tedious task — lo and behold — the rock I was mining sprang legs and started to run away from me! I was hundreds of hours in the game before seeing this, and it jarred me, taking me completely by surprise. Doing a little research for this post, I see that these “Sentient Minerals” are a thing that was announced in the No Man’s Sky Visions (v1.75) update, back in November 2018. They attempt to flee the heat of a mining laser and, if you can catch them, provide concentrated resource rewards. (Somehow I had missed that detail on the Visions release page way back when.)

Since then, I’ve encountered these fleeting boulders a handful of times in the game, but it’s still a rare thing. Not nearly as rare, however, as something I saw in a screenshot posted about a year ago on one of the social media feeds.

The screenshot in question showed a floor panel held high in the air above a planet’s surface by four gigantic legs, apparently running away from the player. The poster indicated that they were mining the rocks sitting within a decorative planter in a side room (which requires an Atlas Pass v2 to enter) of an Observatory building when not just the rock but the building itself sprouted legs and began to walk away. It was an absurd looking situation, and I wasn’t sure whether the poster was using some mod to get the effect, or if what was reported actually had happened in the game. Since then, however, I’ve gone out of my way to mine any rocks I’ve encountered inside Observatories, sadly with no dramatic results.

Until this weekend, that is, when all that mining paid off. When it happened, it was even more of a jump scare than my encounter with that first fleet-footed rock, despite the fact that I was specifically trying to get the Observatory to sprout legs with said mining. A couple of rocks into it, the room fell away and I was outside, four enormous legs towering high above me. The floor panel of the room I had been standing in was aloft and on the move. I chased after it, but it disappeared after getting some distance on me.

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No Man's Sky characters tilted by a glitch

Community Event (Sept. 18) – Or Where Not To Park a Derelict Freighter

09/23/2020 blakespot Comments 0 Comment

I don’t post about every weekend community event, but this past weekend’s was so out of hand that I thought I would share a video.

As I emerged from the portal on the event world, I found myself in the middle of a lot of action, with boltcaster rounds whizzing all about. Sunday, it seems, was a busy day on the event world.

Player bases peppered the planet’s surface, and after making my way to the Anomalous Disturbance to find out what was needed to quell the disturbance (Albumen Perls), I explored several. Among them was a large canon-shaped base that I investigated, failing to realize that it was actually capable of firing players far above the surface and into space. I learned this after-the-fact from a video by Jason Plays who demonstrated The Cosmic Cannon, as created earlier on a different planet by player Commander Keen, who apparently constructed it on the community event planet as well to give folks something rather unique to play with (portal coordinates to the original location can be found in the video).

After visiting several other bases and gathering Albumen Eggs, I headed back towards the site of the Anomalous Disturbance, noticing a massive freighter half-embedded in the ground. It was not there moments earlier. As I approached the landing pad of a large base next to the Disturbance, I noticed the landing rings were set at an angle. This observation betokened what was to come when I stepped out of my ship and onto the pad. I was — tilted. Leaning. I could walk, but as if in a stupor of some sort, with controls skewed along with my orientation with respect to the ground. I then noticed my jetpack had been disabled. And that’s when I realized just what was going on.

Someone managed to glitch a derelict freighter (which arrived with the Desolation update) into the event planet and in close enough proximity to the event site that “gravity” was obeying the floor angle of the freighter and jetpacks were disabled, as they are in a derelict freighter, because the game thought I was inside the freighter. It was quite difficult negotiating the base where I landed in order to get to a clearing where I could summon my ship, which was the only way I could think to get out of that bind. And, indeed, once I lifted off, things were back to normal.

I love the creative player bases and various other clever player creations on community event worlds, but this one seemed to actually have put players at risk of having to restore from their older save, which could be costly to players that hadn’t made a manual save in a while (or who don’t backup their saves frequently). And, as can be seen in the embedded video, I wasn’t the only one affected. It wasn’t such a fun experience.

At any rate, I quelled the anomaly and it was revealed that Ariadne is no murderer — an unknown imposter has taken on his/her appearance and stands in their place…

A Look at My “Forever Starship,” Found Way Back in NMS 1.0

05/08/2020 blakespot Comments 1 comment

On Saturday, October 29, 2016 (at about 9:52am) I found my forever starship. It’s a fighter, of silver and red.

This was in the original release of the game, when crashed ships were everywhere and you could grab one, fly off, find another, and repeat — usually jumping up a notch in slot capacity every time. That dynamic ended a few weeks later, though, when the Foundation update landed.

I present this post as a pictorial of one of the very nicest looking ships I’ve encountered in the game in my nearly 2,500 hours in, but also as a sort-of bug post aid for Hello Games because, as you can see, with the release of Beyond, the wing nacelle color treatment has become anti-symmetric; the color of one wing engine evolved to not match the other over the course of a few updates. I have only seen this in fighters with this particular wing arrangement, known as Wing_K (and quite a few other than mine: 1 , 2 , 3 , 4). I’ve reported the issue to Hello Games via the ticket page, but it is, as yet, unaddressed. [Update: Skel#8634 (Discord) let me know that there is a mod that partially works around this issue, for PC users who want to give it a try.]

It is interesting (this issue aside) to see how the design of a ship’s features has evolved over the nearly four years since No Man’s Sky launched, especially the extraordinary details that have been added in recent updates. With the release of Beyond, the scale of the game’s ships increased significantly, a move necessitated by the addition of VR gameplay. This allowined for greatly more intricate details to be put in place. The ships, today, look incredible and far more refined than they did “at birth.”