About two weeks ago I set out on Expedition 23: Our Journey Continues, the 10th anniversary expedition for No Man’s Sky, which kicked off shortly after the Cosmos update arrived.
No Man’s Sky – Cosmos
As I noted at the time, the expedition starts off with the usual expedition trope, which is you waking up as a fresh character with just basic equipment and a ship that needs repair.
Another broken ship to repair
Beyond that, this expedition was different. Expeditions are often focused on exploring the features delivered with a recent update. For example, after the Voyagers update we got the Corvette expedition which was focused on building and using the new corvette class ship system.
Likewise, after the Remnant update we got the Remnant expedition which was… well… alien world trucking simulator… with cargo hold physics.
The Colossus cargo goes into the hole… oh the memories
This time around the expedition, called Our Journey Continues, was an exploration of where the game has gone in the ten years since launch as the team at Hello Games sought to improve and expand No Man’s Sky.
This involved an expedition with five phases and 43 milestones… which is kind of a lot.
The Five Expedition Phases
That said, a lot of the milestone were fairly easy, geared to give you a taste or quick sample of what an update brought to the game. Often the game handed you the stuff for to accomplish one milestone when you finished the previous one.
So, if you did things in order, when you hit the Voyagers milestone you had just received a pack of corvette parts. You just had to go find a station that had corvette assembly facilities… which could be a trick if you were like me and bouncing back and forth on the expedition waypoints. The old style stations do not have that ability so I had to go find one. Easy enough, but it wasn’t a complete gimme.
Likewise, when you got to Remnant you didn’t have to go truck space garbage, you just had to equip the gravitino coil, for which you had been handed plans and the parts, and then go find some garbage to play with.
The interesting bit is that at the conclusion of each milestone you get a bit of insight from the team about what was going on. For example, why is the expedition trope the fresh start on a strange planet with a broken ship?
From the Expeditions update summary
And they are not wrong. I am mostly “done” with No Man’s Sky in general, but I come back for the expeditions because, in part, they represent a bit of a fresh start.
Some of them tell you things you may have already known, like the popularity of the Voyagers expansion.
Voyagers was indeed popular and unlocked player creativity
Others just gave a bit of the team’s mind set or how they approached things. A couple sounded more like hagiography, a bit of team mythology they tell themselves to paper over the rough patches. But most of it was interesting.
A number of times they referenced how they used their procedural generation tech to solve a problem. For example, the huge number of moves they needed for their Pokemon knock-off update, the Xeno Arena, was a problem solved by procedural generation.
That made me suspect that if they were making the game today they would call it AI, because every algorithm over a modest amount of complexity seems to be getting highlighted as AI these days. So let’s just be happy they aren’t jumping on that garbage bandwagon I suppose.
As for the milestones themselves, there were a few that required a bit of work. At one point I had to upgrade a building at a settlement and found that the one I chose needed nitrogen, which I did not have. I had to go to the anomaly and get the plans for a gas extractor then go find a toxic planet to set it up on in order to extract the nitrogen I needed.
Getting my daily dose of nitrogen
Then when I got back to the settlement the upgrade itself took 90 minutes. Fortunately the clock on upgrades keeps running when you’ve logged off, so I logged off and did something else for a bit.
The toughest milestone for me personally was for the Sentinels milestone, which required you to find a sentinel pillar, something you can do by fighting through five waves of sentinels. But I hate fighting sentinels and have never successfully defeated all five waves of a sentinel encounter. Just not my thing. I prefer to just get out the terrain manipulator, dig a hole, and hide in it until they get bored and go away.
Fortunately, the community had me covered. While I had turned off multiplayer you still play in the same universe as everybody else and see all their stuff, including a handy base built at a sentinel pillar.
Finding the sentinel pillar the easy way
That let me go turn off the sentinels on the planet… which is one of my favorite things to do… again, do not like sentinels… and complete the milestone.
The community is also pretty good at highlighting other things, like runaway mould sites, which you can harvest and process into nanites.
Money in ball form
There were a few nice items to be had during the expedition. I had been somewhat dissatisfied with the initial ship we received, mostly because it had too few upgrade slots and I didn’t have the nanites on had to upgrade it. But I got the vintage interceptor and that became my default ship for the expedition.
The vintage interceptor on a landing pad
That was some fun. I rode that along to the end of the expedition.
The last milestone was the one I was a bit worried about, as it would require me to win a holo battle in the Xeno Arena update. I had not bothered with that, not being keen for another Pokemon variation in my life. So I was wondering how I would do with three animals I had tamed along the way.
Holo Arena match up
It wasn’t a walk over, but I did manage to knock out the other team with one pet left standing on my side. A bit of Pokemon battle strategy knowledge probably helped, but this was likely an easy round. I had no coordinated plan and was simply lucky that I had a couple of attacks that were super effective against… ice type? Were those ice type?
After that, it was off to see Atlas, which took a few jumps. But once there it was the usual routine of docking up.
Arrival at the Atlas Station
There things ran to the usual plan. I asked questions, got no answers, gave my own responses, and learned very little. Atlas is not in the business of keeping us informed of the details. And then Atlas launched me into a new galaxy.
What is the Hilbert Dimension?
There I found myself on a strange planet, my suits systems coming back online, and my ship broken… my poor vintage interceptor, every single module on it non-functional. A real “Look how they massacred my boy!” moment. I wasn’t flying off in that.
And I wasn’t going to go down that path again. One expedition trope per expedition please.
So I summoned my original ship, headed into space, summoned the anomaly, and docked up to finish the expedition. After two weeks of chipping away at it I was ready to wrap things up.
I collected quite a bit of stuff in the final totals.
The expedition summary
22 million units, 21.5K nanites… all that runaway mould helped… and 656 quicksilver.
Then it was time to press the button and finish the expedition.
Expedition complete
Then I was back on my main save and could head on over to the vendor who hands out the rewards.
The rewards claim list
I collected all the plans for the artwork and posters and what not… and the astronaut figurine, which you can stick on the control panel of your ship.
The astronaut bobble head in the vintage interceptor
It kind of just sits there, seeming to be floating, on some of the cockpits, but it is kind of neat. Something for the corvette I am sure.
And then, once that had been settled and I had put away my rewards, it was back to my exploration ship and the loneliness of the vast universe. Some day I will find my motivation and reach the center of the galaxy.
Related:
- Hello Games – Expedition 23: Our Journey Continues
- Reddit – NMS Our Journey Continues Expedition 23 In 4 HOURS
- TAGN – No Man’s Sky and the Cosmos Update
- TAGN – Starting Off with Our Journey Continues
- Hello Games – Cosmos: Introducing Update 7.0
- Hello Games – Cosmos 7.01 Update
- Hello Games – Cosmos 7.02 Update
- Hello Games – Cosmos 7.03 Update
- Hello Games – Cosmos 7.03.1 Update
- Hello Games – Cosmos 7.04 Update
- Hello Games – Cosmos 7.05 Update