No Man’s Sky (NSP, XCI) ROM + v4.5.2 Update

No Man’s Sky The game is built around five pillars: exploration, survival, combat, trading, and base building. Players can engage with the entirety of a procedurally generated deterministic open-world universe, which includes over 18 quintillion planets. Through the game’s procedural generation system, planets have their ecosystems with unique forms of flora and fauna, and various alien species may engage the player in combat or trade within planetary systems. Players advance in the game by mining for resources to power and improve their equipment, buying and selling resources using credits earned by documenting flora and fauna or trading with the aforementioned lifeforms, building planetary bases and expanding space fleets, or otherwise following the game’s overarching plot by seeking out the mystery around the entity known as The Atlas.

GAMEPLAY

No Man’s Sky is an action-adventure survival game played from a first or third-person perspective that allows players to engage in five principal activities: exploration, survival, combat, trading, and base building.

The player takes the role of a specimen of an alien humanoid planetary explorer, known in-game as the Traveller, in an uncharted universe. They start on a randomized planet near a crashed spacecraft towards the edge of the galaxy and are equipped with a survival exosuit with a jetpack and a “multitool” that can be used to scan, mine, and collect resources as well as to attack or defend oneself from creatures and hostile forces. The player can collect, repair, and refuel the craft, allowing them to travel about the planet, between other planets and space stations in the local planetary system, engage in space combat with alien factions, or make hyperspace jumps to other star systems.

While the game is open-ended, the player may follow the guidance of the entity known as The Atlas to head toward the centre of the galaxy.

The defining feature of No Man’s Sky is that nearly all parts of the galaxy, including stars, planets, flora and fauna on these planets, and sentient alien encounters, are created through procedural generation using deterministic algorithms and random number generators from a single seed number. This 64-bit value leads to there being over 18 quintillion (1.8×1019) planets to explore within the game.

Very little data is stored on the game’s servers, as all elements of the game are created through deterministic calculations when the player is near them, assuring that other players will see the same elements as another player by travelling to the same location in the galaxy. The player may make temporary changes on planets, such as mining resources, but these changes are not tracked once the player leaves that vicinity.

Until July 2020, the game used different servers for each platform version; following a July 2020 patch, cross-platform play was enabled for all supported platforms.

STORY

The Traveller (the player character) wakes up on a remote planet with amnesia and must locate their crashed starship. After finding their starship, its computer guides the Traveller to make the necessary repairs and to collect the resources needed to fuel a hyperspace jump to another planetary system. En route, the Traveller encounters individual members of three alien species, the Gek, the Korvax and the Vy’keen, that inhabit the galaxy. During their voyage, the Traveller is compelled by an unknown force to reach the centre of the galaxy.

Along the way to the centre, the Traveller is alerted to the presence of an anomaly in a nearby system. Travelling there, they find a special space station (“The Space Anomaly”) where many strange aliens reside. Two of the aliens, Priest Entity Nada and Specialist Polo know what other aliens in the galaxy appear to possess, including being able to speak to the Traveller without translation. They tell of a strange being, found at the centre of the galaxy. They can guide the Traveller towards meeting it, by directing them to a nearby black hole that can quickly take the Traveller closer to the centre of the galaxy.

As the Traveller continues on their journey, they begin receiving messages from an alien entity named Artemis. Artemis says that they are also a “Traveller” and wished to meet others of their kind, but were trapped in a sunless world after stepping through a strange, ancient portal. After triangulating Artemis’ position and seeking help from the local alien species, the Traveller discovers that Artemis’ location does not exist. Upon telling Artemis the news, the transmission ends mysteriously and the Traveller learns of yet another Traveller named Apollo.