Sky diary #9: Solitude

After a long break, I’m back in No Man’s Sky. Not that I didn’t do some “work”, or more accurately fucking around, in the game in the meantime. In fact, I’ve built several new homes in the game in my search for a decent climate that I still haven’t found.

But the Hello Games guys have been far busier. Check out the update with its far more impressive space stations. I like the vaulted ceiling here or whatever you call it, looks like a space cathedral.

I think I prefer this pink world more, though. They really expanded these stations and made them a little more distinctive, which I appreciate.

There’s some trading to be done here, especially since I now have unlimited money thanks to even more illegal addons to my suit that give me far more money than I should be getting for scanning rocks and plants on new planets. I’m convinced this all plays into an in-game interstellar MLM or crypto scheme somehow. Maybe that’s one of the quests I need to unlock. Either way, something’s not right.

But there’s only so much time I can spend on these stations, hanging around in the seating areas and wishing I had some fucking coffee to order. I guess I have to make my own coffee. Time to explore again.

This is some Lovecraft bullshit, I hate it. I’d rather live on the neon volcano planet than here.

My primary goal at this point, having totally forgotten the mainline quest or any of the other goals I had a month or two ago, was to find a planet that 1) was hospitable to my kind of life, 2) had abundant resources, which my current temperate planet base was lacking in, and 3) didn’t look like a portal into a nightmare world of radiation and toxicity with monster plants and eyeball creatures rolling around.

I found a barren wasteland covered in creepy as fuck leather ball sacs sitting on leg-like struts — that was out. Then I found an ice world, and I was desperate enough to try to settle on it. Plenty of resources were around, at least, making the extreme temperature more worthwhile to brave (though it will still kill you if you’re not careful.)

These strangely humanoid uranium and gold balls might also want to kill me, so I killed them first and extracted all their resources. Not sure I like the implications of the quotes there.

After looting the land and scanning everything in sight as usual, I found a clearing in a nice wooded mountaintop and built a base there. Behold, the tour of my new homes that I’d never be able to afford in real life despite all my working (and fuck Dave Ramsey, just incidentally.)

I am a little proud of the design on the right, even if it is pretty simple.

This is a pretty inviting base for a forbidding environment like this. You know that feeling when you’re inside with the fire going while it’s freezing outside?

Just like this. Though the hospital bed isn’t all that inviting.

I might have missed my calling as an interior designer. I have some sense for what feels good to me in a living space, anyway, even if I can’t achieve it in real life yet. If I ever build a house (this is in the pure fucking fantasy category) I will have this kind of bedroom with a far more massive bathroom attached. Just imagine a large brightly lit tiled room with a giant hot tub and TV like in Scarface.

Here’s still another design I tried out to see if I could have a base perched on a small island or even rock like this, and it turns out I can — utility/storage room on the lower floor, living quarters on the upper with a nice glass ceiling and balcony wrapping around almost the whole thing. This reminds me of Gehn’s hideout in Riven, especially considering the fucked up red ocean and many islands around. People knock the Myst series these days a lot, and while it did have its serious limitations, I still think the first two at least were interesting and had a nice scope.

Here’s a house in a far more pleasant place, in Windows XP Bliss land. The house looks a little stupid and boxy, but I like the setting, so it’s all right. Though this place strangely feels more lonely than the last. That annoying fucking message down there in the bottom right doesn’t help. There’s probably a way to get rid of that, but I just try to ignore it.

Speaking of lonely, I also thought I’d build a base on one of those ocean planets with just a few islands around. You don’t get more isolated than that. I tried to build a tall tower on this flat island with no other features, but it turned out to be a total mess:

It’s a good thing nobody else is on this planet, because this certainly violates the universal building code if one ever existed.

I tried to make this structure as inviting as possible anyway. The inside is of no interest at all, just some empty rooms to connect these outer balconies with awnings (purely decorative and nonfunctional — they don’t do anything to keep the burning rain off, because of course this god damned planet has that too.)

112-degree weather is horrible. Even a normal summer here on Earth is bad enough, and God knows what’s to come. But at least it’s pleasant here at night if it’s not raining, so to add to that feel, I built a fifth-story bar area here overlooking the sea. There’s a rooftop bar back in my college town I liked, not for its drinks (their collection sucked) but for the view and atmosphere. I think they survived off of that atmosphere, and the scenery there wasn’t as nice.

In case the dangerously stupid architecture wasn’t obvious from the other screenshot, here’s a better one. That tower at the top looks ready to topple over at any moment.

Of all the places I’ve seen in No Man’s Sky so far, this is the one I’d like to visit most, burning rain aside. I like this janky fucked up tower I built here with nothing useful in it: it’s a horrible waste of space and material, but it’s my house now, and not even those asshole NPC pirates know where I am here since they haven’t attacked me like they have on other planets. I also like the solitude out here, just like a Baker or a Jarvis Island, tiny guano mine islands in the Pacific that people tried and failed to live on back in the 40s. I named the island St. Helena after Napoleon’s South Atlantic-bound prison; I bet the French emperor wished he could have ended his life in a structure as equally cool and probably about to collapse as this.

As I travel, I keep coming across existing structures, many of which are locked and guarded by those fucking sentinel robot shits that attach to your ass every time you make a step in the wrong direction. I was happy to blow up one of them recently with a new weapon attachment, but then the sentinel defense squad showed up within 5.98 seconds to destroy me and cut my engines so I couldn’t escape.

Luckily, a few of these facilities are open, sometimes with NPC workers hanging around inside to talk to and sometimes not. I prefer when they’re not around since they tend to get in the way and even get pissed off and ask me to leave, imagine that. The above structure was seemingly abandoned, however, so I felt free to move in, placing a new base computer and effectively taking the place over from whoever owned it last.

It’s fully furnished! Also nice of them to leave their nanites behind for me to steal.

This place may have been abandoned because of the planet’s hostile environment. It’s not the weather this time, but something far less predictable and more difficult to deal with: the wildlife. After first landing on this planet and doing some scouting and scanning, I had to flee to this site to escape predators out to kill me. My suit upgrades have made it a lot easier to flee like the coward I am with my speed and boost capabilities, but an astronaut who flees from every potential danger is at least more alive than a dead one. The better part of valor is discretion.

But it was also here that I finally learned about an entire aspect of the game I’d been ignoring until now. While standing on top of my ship to protect myself from a tusked and extremely pissed off animal, I found the “feed animal” option. I quickly made some animal food pellets and fed one to the angry predator, who instantly calmed down and became ready to submit to my authority. A far cheaper price for its loyalty than I was expecting, but I’m not complaining.

This Tai-Tai is now my companion, and I have no idea what to do with it. I guess it’s a she, since I soon learned it’s able to lay eggs, but then I think that might be true of every animal in this game, so maybe that’s not a relevant point. I’m just happy it’s not trying to kill me anymore. Even better, it’s prepared to defend me from other predators, though it can also be too zealous in its defense by going more on the offensive when I don’t want to draw attention to myself. Still better to have around than not, and I can summon and put away my friend at will (though where it’s going when I put it away, I have no idea. Maybe the pokeball is implied here.)

After a while, Tai-Tai laid an egg and immediately got weirdly possessive, but not in the way I would have expected.

I appreciate that you’re not trying to kill me anymore, but this is a little too far in the other direction. Don’t need my combined pet/security system killing any other animal helpers I might recruit out of jealousy. Maybe I should keep them separate in the future just in case.

I didn’t exactly ignore the egg as its parent suggested — I put it in storage. I’ll hatch it in good time, though I really don’t know what I’m supposed to do with it otherwise. The potential animal companions in this game are interesting, especially the truly bizarre ones, but I think there might be a lot more depth to the breeding system than I’m willing to get into. Much like with the Chao Garden in Sonic Adventure 2, I can appreciate the depth of a game mechanic while also mostly ignoring it.

It’s a good thing No Man’s Sky is so hands-off in that sense. There’s also a cooking system full of recipes that I’m sure can get you all kinds of benefits, and while I did try it out a little bit, I didn’t get too in-depth with it either.

I’m not bothering to make any more food for this Cronus guy since his judgments seem to be so wildly randomized anyway. Get your own cocoa, asshole.

I didn’t expect to write so soon after my last post, but I think I had a lot built up here, and that along with one sleepless night. Things aren’t going so well for me right now, though that has less to do with my material wellbeing, which I could easily deal with on its own, but more with my general mental state. That’s to say that if I were someone else in my situation, I’d probably be just fine, but since I am unfortunately myself, I’m not.

As a totally unrelated aside, there was a notorious preacher some years back who would take a camera crew and try to convert people on the street by asking if they were good people, then advancing the argument that they could only truly be good and get their souls saved if they joined his church or sect or whatever. I wasn’t interested in the preacher’s argument, which I’ve heard a thousand times in similar form — the only reason I know him is because I once received one of his fake million-dollar bills featuring a tract that failed to turn me from my infidel ways. No, I was far more focused on the interviewees’ responses that they were in fact good people.

I don’t believe I’m naturally a “good person”, whatever that is — I’m actually selfish and want to be totally left alone, which probably isn’t good — but I try to be as good as possible and to act against that selfish nature, which causes me some discomfort even if I have some understanding of my own faults. More than anything else, I don’t understand the supreme confidence some people seem to have in their own goodness, especially when so much historical evidence suggests that true goodness is rare when doing the right thing means taking a serious personal risk. Self-reflection is hard, but that’s the only real way to improve moral character, sort of like exercise for the soul. (Edit: I stand by all this, but after thinking about it a minute more, most likely a lot of those people on the street just didn’t want to be bothered by some asshole and basically gave him a “yeah, sure, whatever” kind of answer hoping he’d go away. I probably would have myself in that situation instead of going on a long philosophical bullshit argument, which might be more fun but also a lot more time-wasting.)

Sorry, now I’m the one preaching. I have to get some self-flagellation in every so often, and where better than in these NMS posts where I mostly go on about personal stuff. Until next time.

 

 

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• no man's sky
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