Date Posted: 03/04/2023

Originally released in 2016 and published by Hello Games, No Man’s Sky had something of a troubled launch with numerous features that had been implied or seen in trailers conspicuously not being in the game. I watched both Angry Joe and the Zero Punctuation reviews of the released version with both heavily criticising the lack of features, and more importantly the lack of things to actually do. The game is based around a procedurally generated galaxy; unfortunately that galaxy had nothing much happening in it. I hold Angry Joe’s opinion in high regard so decided to steer clear of it, and it faded from my memory. However, I started hearing rumours that it had been continually upgraded, updated and new content had been patched in, so after a subsequent Zero Punctuation review I decided to check it out.

I am a fan of Subnautica with the original game probably being my favourite survival crafter. One of the reasons for this is because it actually has an endgame, you are working towards building an escape craft to get off the planet, all the crafting and resource gathering is built towards that goal. I decided to give the game’s Hardcore mode a try in which if you die that is it. Now I took that to mean no respawns, in the normal version if you die, you return to your base with an empty inventory. On my first Hardcore attempt I didn’t escape a wreck before I drowned and I died. Not to worry I thought, I will just reload my previous save and continue…except the game wipes your save if you die. That’s it, game over. I was a little miffed because one mistake had resulted in sixteen odd hours of work down the toilet. I started again, and this time made it around twenty hours in before I again made a stupid mistake, died and save was lost. Yes, I know I could probably have backed up my save on a flash drive, but I couldn’t really be arsed to do that. I considered restarting when I realised that the reason for my careless mistakes was really just so I could start over. At the time of my death I had basically unlocked everything necessary to build my escape rocket so the game was in its final stages. If I had succeeded in Hardcore mode then Subnautica would offer no further challenge so I would have no further reason to play it which I don’t think I wanted. I had watched a few guides on how to succeed in Stranded Deep but didn’t want to try that again, and so decided to give No Man’s Sky a chance.

So similarly to other survival crafting games there is not much of a story but I will give you the gist of my experience. So, the game opens with you waking up on a planet next to a damaged ship with no memory, and no resources. You are instructed to repair the ship, which you do, and then head off into space where you are directed to a nearby space station. From there you embark on an epic adventure that will take you beyond the furthest stars…well, that is what the game would probably describe itself as being. In reality you have basically one over arching goal in which you face the prospect that everything happening is a artificially created reality (well duh we are playing a video game) and you are given the choice to restart everything and create a new galaxy (so you are a bit like Neo in the original Matrix Trilogy) or just pretend everything is real and continue exploring the galaxy you are in. Slight spoiler alert, after you create a new galaxy you don’t lose access to the previous one and can pop in and out of that as easily as you pop to the shops. So the game’s delusions of being some kind of epic space opera fall rather flat.

At time of writing have clocked up a little over one hundred and twenty-odd hours of play time so you may be asking yourself why I have played that long if the story is a bit on the shit side, well, allow me to tell you.

I will admit that I initially really did not know exactly what I was doing. I was following a side mission looking for some alien called Artemis, and discovered a crashed ship. My starting ship was a C-Class and the crashed one was a B-Class. Now logically as B is higher rated than C, I took the crashed ship, renamed it the CRS Columbo and started the painstaking process of repairing it. Some of the damaged components could be repaired with resources that could be discovered on different planets and other required technological components that needed to be purchased for using one of the two forms of currency, namely Units. I travelled to many a distant star system searching for the resources I needed. Some were only available on planets orbiting Blue Stars, others only on planets orbiting Yellow Stars, and so on. I slowly and pain stakingly upgraded my ship to go to further systems with more resources. Eventually I was able to fully repair my ship.

I think it was also during this galaxy-wide resource hunt that I discovered the Base building element to the game. How this works is you deploy a Base Computer which allows you to claim an area on a planet then start building basic structures. I think timber walls, floors, a door and a roof were already unlocked with personal portals and a bioreactor being your only power options. Constructing portals basically allows transport between your bases and any space stations in any systems you have visited. During my resource hunt I had discovered a lot of Upgrades which I had installed on my ship, my spacesuit, or my multi-tool plus a bunch of crap which I didn’t really know what to do with. So on a seemingly pleasant world I began to build a base with storage containers to hold some of the stuff that I’d gathered.

Each system has a starbase and each starbase looks the same. Externally they look like diamonds, spheres, squares, or whatever. So there are none that look like Deep Space Nine or Babylon-5. Nor do they reflect the dominant species of the system. On a side note there are basically three races, two of which are torn from Star Trek: a warrior race called the Vy’Keen which are a rip-off of the Klingons, the Gek which are the Ferengi and the third are the Korvax which are artificial intelligence that can download their consciousnesses into different bodies (I think). Getting back to the starbases you’d think that one built by the Vy’Keen would look different to one built by the Gek, but it doesn’t, they are all the same so if you warp to one there is no easy way to identify where the hell you are in relation to where you were. This is also the nature of the procedural generated nature of the game. In Subnautica certain things were found in certain biomes, and those biomes were fixed. Yes finding them was a pain in the arse because there was no map but once you got to the right biome you could usually find what you were looking for. In NMS there is no way to know if you are going to find what you are looking for when you warp to a new system or if is just a waste of time.

What you have to understand going into the game is that everything takes ages to do. Upgrading a starship’s inventory can be done with vast amounts of Units but I haven’t tried to do this yet because I don’t know if $75 million Units will unlock a single slot or many and if it is one I don’t want to waste all those Units to find out. I have around one hundred and thirty million Units so as you can imagine $75 million is a fairly hefty chunk of change to use on finding out how many slots that amount unlocks. The other option is with augmentations. But augmentations cannot be purchased, instead they must be found from completing Guild missions, scrapping crashed ships, or from frigate missions. I have been unable to find a reliable way of getting augmentations which is why I have stuck with the Columbo because it is the ship I have been unlocking new slots for this whole time and cannot be asked to start over with a new ship. 

The slow boil affects everything in the game. You can become Overseer of a settlement (a settlement not many, just the one) and can build landing pads, community buildings, and stuff like that so your settlement generates more Units for you. Thing is that I can throw a base together in a few minutes but if you are building something for a settlement you are usually looking around two hours of time to put up the walls, another two for the roof, and probably another two whilst it is decorated or something. So six hours to build a single structure. Yes you can go off and do other things but you are forever popping back to start the next bit of the construction. Plus there are many other things that take time. Refining materials is a big part of the game and it might take twenty minutes for the refiner to craft something you want. The problem with this is twofold. Firstly you are endlessly waiting for certain items to fall into your lap (like the augmentations) and secondly, you end up playing longer than you want because you are looking at a timer thinking to yourself “I’ll just wait till this finishes then start the next bit of construction” so you play for that extra 20 minutes, then realise another time is about to run out, so you play for a bit longer…on and on…until you are clutching the controller and giving yourself a firm talking to about saving and quitting for the night.

During my first tens of hours I’d focussed most of my time on fixing the Columbo and had been quite content doing that. I had unlocked other items from my Base’s Research Station which included a solar panel and battery unit which could be charged so electronics would work at night. I have been irritated by the fact that batteries apparently don’t exist in the Subnautica universe because having solar panels that shut a base down completely at night did seem a bit stupid. Certain planets had certain resources so I started putting bases on those planets so I could fast travel to a particular location if I needed a particular resource. By this time I was pretty sure that I was starting to see everything that the game had to offer.

This is when I discovered that No Man’s Sky is great at not really telling you stuff…

I don’t actively like playing online with humans, and in recent months have been able to play GTA Online without using the MTU hack because Rockstar unlocked the ability to do all the game’s activities in Invite Only lobbies. So when I play that game I go into an Invite Only lobby and can spend my time just doing whatever I want without being bothered by anyone else. No Man’s Sky features a multi-player hub called the Space Anomaly in which players can gather together to go on joint quests or whatever but can’t attack or grief each other. I had paid no attention to this hub station, basically only going if a mission forced me to, and when it did, flying in, doing what I needed to do, and flying out again. However, it turns out that this hub station has a massive array of blueprints for your ship, your bases, your multi-tool (something you use to dig up resources and fight enemies) and your exocraft. These blueprints can be purchased for Salvage Data which can be found from buried technology modules (which I knew about) or by completing various Guild Quests (which at the time I didn’t).

The difference between Upgrades and Blueprints is that an upgrade can be applied to one thing whereas if you have the Blueprint then you can build that item as many times as you want.

I also discovered at yet a later time that some of the blueprints can only be unlocked whilst following certain story objectives, which makes purchasing them pointless because you’d have eventually unlocked them for free. As a result I stopped buying Blueprints as I did not want to waste my hard found Salvage Data on something that I would eventually get by playing the game. It has only been now that I am on to my second galaxy that I have returned to the Anomaly to purchase everything I did not get before because I am fairly confident that the story has no more unlocks up its sleeve.

At this point I am going to give a free tutorial guide to anyone who is planning on playing this game, and these are all things that I wish I knew sooner:

Exosuit and Starship Slots – When you start out you have very few inventory slots in your space (or exo) suit for equipping upgrades or installing new technologies. Plus your Inventory slots are also limited. On each Space station there will be an exosuit upgrade bay in which you pay x-amount of Units to unlock a new slot (if you have any suit augmentations you can then add those too). Now if I remember correctly the game defaults to upgrades of the Inventory. Paying for upgrades in the early game can be expensive. However, you will stumble across encrypted navigation data basically everywhere you go and these can be exchanged with a cartographer (also at every space station) for the locations of Drop Pods that contain suit upgrades. You buy a chart, fly to a planet, activate it, fly to the Pod, repair three components (the ingredients for which can be found on literally every planet) and the game unlocks a new slot. Unfortunately when you repair a Pod the game again defaults to the Inventory. What is not made clear is that you can choose which you want to upgrade, by just selecting a new slot. There also does not seem to be a limit to how many slots that you can unlock. I assumed that I have maxed out everything so ignored any other pod I stumbled across without realising that the suit has far more available slots than it looks like it does.

Build Farms - One of the items you can unlock is a resource finder for your suit’s visor. What this does is find hotspots of resources, gasses or electricity. I tried this a couple of times but there was never anything anywhere near any of my existing bases so I didn’t bother with it. The thing is that you need to search for the locations then put down a base location. Resources can be found in deposits on various planets with many of them being planet spercific. Uranium is found on radioactive planets, phosphorous on lava worlds, and so on. Dig up those deposits and you’ll get yourself maybe a couple of hundred units of whatever resource you were looking for. However, if you find a hotspot you can build a mineral extractor (which you get the blueprint for from the Anomaly) and multiple Storage silos (also unlocked from the anomaly) which will work on their own gathering potentially thousands of units. The more extractors you build the faster the extraction process and the more silos you construct the more they can hold. Paraffinium is a vital tool for fixing discovered crashed starships and it was something I was also struggling to find. Now I have a Paraffinium Mine and more of the stuff than I know what to do with. The resources are gathered in real time so will be silently working away even if you are not playing the game so set up a mine, go off and go to work, or do whatever it is you do when not playing games, come back and you will have a nice collection of a hitherto hard to find resource. Also label your bases so you know what is where, which makes coming back to a specific location soooo much easier.

Guild Missions – As I said above each space station is for all intents and purposes identical. They will have locations where ships can be upgraded or crashed ones you have found can be sold. Classes can be upgraded. At time of writing I have a fleet of S-Class ships with only two needing to be upgraded. But in truth I have no idea if Class even matters. The Columbo was a B-Class when I found it but now it is an S-Class. It is my best ship because I have basically spent the last hundred odd hours upgrading it, and giving it the best technologies. My other ships I have basically for the sake of it and occasionally take one of them for a spin but ultimately return to the Columbo because it has the best shields, weapons, inventory space, and so on. Anyway I digress, on each station you find an Envoy (I think he’s called), basically the guy sitting on the far left, with a guild guy in the middle and a cartographer on the right. Approach the Envoy and you can do missions for three guilds. The Explorers, the Mercenaries and the Merchants. Completing the missions will unlock nanites (which in turn are used to upgrade ships, or unlock new blueprints for your ships, exosuit or multi-tool), storage augmentations for your ship, suit or multi-tool, units as well as various other resources. As far as I can tell the rewards are random with useful ones like the storage augmentations being much rarer than Units. What makes these missions a double edge sword are the fact that they are pretty repetitive with there only being about ten missions: kill animals, feed animals, deliver item, raid structure, hunt target, find missing person, dig up ruin, destroy sentinels, photograph a building, and blow up a resource depot. As a result it doesn’t take long for them to become something of a grind to work through. Some missions are system specific and others (like culling animals) can be done anywhere on any planet. You can go to different envoys on different stations to unlock a whole shopping list of quests to complete, and whilst they are repetitive, what is really useful is the fact that quite often you get the same missions. One mission might task you with culling eight animals, and another with killing eleven. So you don’t need to kill a total of nineteen animals, you kill eleven and both quests are done. They can also be handed in at any envoy in any station so my advice is do a bunch, hand them all in, get a bunch more and rinse, lather and repeat.

Storage Containers are linked – Containers have specific numbers which seemed a bit pointless initially until I learned that they are actually all linked together.  This comes in particularly useful when you get a freighter (basically a mobile base) with a matter transporter because once you put storage rooms into it then you can summon it into orbit on whatever planet you are on to build whatever you want from the resources you have gathered onboard.

Stargates – They are called portals in the game but they are stargates and even do the unstable vortex thing that the stargate from the titular film and various spin-off TV shows do. They have different glyphs that need to be unlocked that can only be done during the Atlas Path so blitz the Atlas missions as quickly as possible (resent the simulation, or don’t, fate of the galaxy blah, blah) to unlock all the glyphs. Once you have done that then find a stargate and build a base next to it. Activate the glyphs and look up where to find decent resource planets or locations where you can find crashed S-Class ships. Now this is where the procedural generation is odd because there are some fixed locations where you can find ships or resources that other players have come across and marked. Which leads me to the next and final thing I wish I’d known…

Other Players’ Bases – As with any game there are going to be people who have poured endless hours into playing through it. I’ve clocked up a hundred and twenty-odd hours but I’m willing to bet there are players that would call that an introduction. My bases usually serve a purpose with most of them now being Farms or Mines. The thing is that you can use the stargates to find other players bases which have been set up to mine various resources, and once you get to them you can just help yourself to whatever they have gathered. One particular planet is a gold mine for Curious Deposits which are these sphere like things which produce running mould, and running mould can be converted into nanites. I discovered that making Units was pretty straight-forward. Find a crashed ship using either a signal beacon or point-of-interest chart, claim the ship, warp to a space station in a system with a booming economy and sell it for a few million Units. Simples. Nanites on the other hand were far harder to find, until I discovered this planet, I established a small base in the middle of dozens of other players bases and simply walked into those, fired my mining beam into the deposits to harvest the mould, hopped into my ship, few to the next one and kept doing that. The best base I found had a short range transporter which I discovered if you used to teleport away then turned back round and teleported back, all of the deposits would have respawned. Converting 9,999 running mould into 1,999 Nanites takes about 20 minutes, and I have 5 refiners in my main base the Christabo Facility, so produce around 10,000 in 20 minutes. It is a very efficient way to get enough currency for the blueprints and is made possible thanks to bases created by other members of the NMS community. I have come across a few random clusters of Curious Deposits on other planets but did not realise that I could construct a base round them and keep harvesting them. However, if I encounter them again then I am definitely going to do that so I don’t have to keep flying from base to base on the Wonka Balls Planet (yep the person who found it named it that) to gather the running mould.

There is more to talk about but I think that I will leave it there because otherwise I will just go on and on. I could talk about the fact that certain technologies can be created after purchasing or unlocking blueprints but others can’t and there doesn’t seem to be any logical reason why. I could mention that I have no idea if a ship, freighter or multi-tool’s class actually matters because I didn’t notice any different in the Columbo when it was a B-Class to when it was an S-Class. I could question why every time I board my freighter I get a the same log entry explaining about how freighters work flashing up on my screen. I might well ask why the frigates I send on missions regularly suffer catastrophic damage and must be recalled for repairs that the crew are unable to fix when the problem is usually no more complicated than a lose screw that takes me half a nano-second to fix.

When all is said and done though, I am continuing to play the game. I have a feeling that NMS will occupy my attention until I have either unlocked all the trophies, or created bases that mine all the resources that I’d ever need, or all of my ships, suit, and equipment are S-Class. I remember playing Jurassic Park Evolution almost obsessively as I sought all the trophies but once that final one pinged, I quit the game and have not returned to it again. NMS might suffer the same fate. But considering I have once again grown thoroughly bored of GTA Online and there are not many games that are still holding my interest after a hundred plus hours I can’t see myself abandoning NMS just yet.

I have spent many a day sitting playing this game for hour after hour, but it is also good to put on for a half hour here or there if you have some time to kill. There are some enemies which can be both annoying and a pain to deal with but if there is no challenge then a game gets boring. I think that is why NMS works because it paces things out. If I could just buy all the upgrades for my ship or freighter then I’d get bored. The fact that it takes time and effort makes it more rewarding. Play it for a few hours or a few minutes and it will hold your interest either way. If you are fan of survival crafting games, and found Subnautica to be a fun game, then I think that No Man’s Sky will be your cup of tea as well. I am happy to give the game a Thumbs Up because like I said I wouldn’t have invested so much time in it if it wasn’t doing most things right.

7/10 – No Man’s Sky doesn’t end, the ending isn’t an ending because the game carries on afterwards. Usually I don’t like games that don’t end because you are basically just pissing about when the story has concluded. Thing is, here that works. There is more to explore and discover. Plus just flying around in your ship is quite therapeutic with the occasional space battle with pirates keeping you on your toes.

Date Posted: 10/09/2023

I have been playing No Man’s Sky for a couple of hundred hours now and have upgraded my freighter, my various ships, my multi-tool and myself pretty much as far as they can go. At time of writing it is not possible to upgrade the class of your freighter but everything else I own is S-Class, I have numerous bases which gather all the resources I could possibly need, and more units than I could really spend. Again at time of writing I have over a trillion Units, a trillion, thousands of nanites, and a significant amount of Quicksilver (these are the game’s form of currency, units to by stuff, nanites for technology, and quicksilver for special items on the Space Anomaly) so as you can imagine there isn’t much left for me in the main game. However, every once in a while an Expedition comes along and are only available for a limited time, seemingly being lost forever if you don’t complete them within the time limit. Recently Expedition 11 launched so I decided to check it out…

I am going to start by going through my play through thus far and naturally give my thoughts and opinions.

So I created a new save file and started playing. My Gek character appeared onboard a C-Class freighter with a basic C-Class ship in the hanger. Since I wrote my initial review of NMS in which I didn’t really see the difference between C-Class and S-Class ships and weapons I have come to realise that basically the difference is that you can unlock more upgrade slots the higher the class. The more upgrade slots you have, naturally the more upgrades you can install to improve your equipment. As far as I can tell, that is the only difference between the different classes within the game. Anyway, once the game began I had a freighter, a ship, and a basic multi-tool. What I didn’t have was naturally any of the resources or equipment that I had gathered during my 200 odd hours from my other game. Still, this was a new game effectively so that was not surprising. I was instructed to check out the Expedition Log and was given several objectives in Tier One to complete. These objectives were things like, land on a planet, walk 2,000 metres (or feet, or yards, or whatever the game calls it). Dig a certain distance underground, you know, nothing too tricky or difficult to achieve. One of the main components of the journey would be that I was going to need to travel from star system to star system to meet at various rendezvous points.

It has taken me many, many hours to gather everything I needed to get to the state I am in my other save file (henceforth referred to as the main game) and truth be told I was in no mood to spend hours and hours working on this expedition. The main reason for this being that I am 99% sure that once you complete this Expedition there will be nothing else to do, I won’t be able to import anything back into my main game, so this whole exercise is about unlocking cosmetics that are only available for a limited time.

As a result I used a duplication glitch to basically max out everything as soon as I could. Now how the glitch works is you place down a portable refiner, put whatever you wish to duplicate in the first slot, then exit and place another refiner on top of the first. Put as many refiners down and you want, then delete them all. The game will register that each of the refiners you put down had whichever item in its primary slot and will return that item to you when you delete the refiner. As the number of items you have increased, you put more items into the slots increasing what you need basically exponentially. You can get a single storage upgrade for example and if you have only 2 refiners, 1 becomes 2, 2 becomes 4, 4 becomes 8, and so on and so on. It works with any item because the game lets you put anything in your inventory into the refiner’s slot. As a result what took hours to do in my main game, such as getting all the freight upgrades, technology unlocks from the Space Anomaly, getting nanites and units I was able to do in a fraction of the time.

So, with my starting ship upgraded I did a little side mission to get a better sentinel ship, scrapped the original, and then continued with my new ship. This time I only bothered to upgrade what I thought I would need and was not concerned about the cosmetic stuff.

The First Tier of the expedition progressed smoothly and I moved to the next rendezvous point, and started Tier 2. This is when I started to notice the fundamental flaw with the procedural generation that makes up the majority of NMS. One of the items that I needed to find was storm crystals, such a thing is not usually hard to find, and frozen planets are usually a good bet. However, I went to planet after planet and not a damn one has a stormy climate. So I was unable to collect the crystals I needed. It turns out that you can complete any objective in any of the Tiers and they all count towards your completion of the Expedition. Unfortunately, the problem I had finding Storm Crystals was just one of many issues that I was discovering.

Certain Expedition mile stones you have direct contrail over, build a base, no problem at all. Find an underwater artefact. Build yourself a submarine with a deep sea sonar scan, find an underwater ruin, go to it, dig up the artefact and again job done. The issue is that I have a handful of milestones to complete and the game is crossing over from being challenging to being frustrating.

I think for anyone there is a very fine line between what is a fun challenge and something that is just a frustrating bore. One of my milestones is discovering an animal with a body temperature over 60 Degrees Centigrade. The in-game Expedition guide suggests that you go to hot planets and scan the life forms there; sadly, I have travelled to over a dozen worlds and have been unable to find an animal with the right temperature. I have gone to planets in which my exosuit’s onboard computer is constantly telling me that I am on an Extreme environment planet that have superheated storms every few minutes and yet I still cannot find an animal that run’s hot enough. This has happened every time I have been given a task that involves going to a planet and finding something with a particular trait. The trouble is that there is pretty much nothing that you can do about it because the game is procedural, so how many burning planets do I have to visit to find what I am looking for? A dozen? A hundred? A thousand? So something that started off as a challenge has become frustrating, scanning for a planet, finding one, landing and scanning every life form, not finding what I am looking for, returning to space, warping to a new system and doing the exact same bloody thing again. I have checked out online threads and there are some players who have found exactly what they are looking for immediately, and others that have been searching for days and still not found what they need.

Days!!

Days searching for something and not finding it.

Personally my response is to say “fuck that” because ultimately what all players of this exhibition are doing this for are cosmetics. New decorations for your bases, or different colours for your jet pack’s engine, that kind of stuff. Really nothing that screams that it is going to really benefit you in the long term. These unlockables (once unlocked) can be picked up from the Space Anomaly in your main game or subsequent games if you start over again, but anything as cool as a unique ship, or armour set, or multi-tool seem to have been in previous Expeditions but by this one there isn’t anything interesting left to reward you with.

In truth what is pushing me forward is my curiosity because I wonder if you complete this expedition in its entirety do you get the rewards from the previous expeditions? I am assuming not but I would like to finish it just so I can confirm from myself. Yes I know I could just Google it but like I said I want to finish it and see for myself.

No Man’s Sky has come a long way since its initial release, hell, in the limited time I’ve been playing it developer Hello Games have been adding more and more content. In one a few months ago you could find crashed sentinel ships and take them for your own, a lot of them had really cool designs, and in the most recent Echoes update a new race have been introduced. You can also warp into a system and find civilian freighter coming under fire from massive dreadnaught pirate freighters. If you so wish you can jump in to fight off the pirates and save the civilians but flying under the attacker’s shield and taking out their engines and shield generators in sequences that have been ripped straight out of Star Wars A New Hope. It really is a game where you can do as much or as little as you like which gives you a reason to keep coming back to it…unfortunately I can’t say that Expedition 11 has sold me on them. Yes, you could argue that as I used a glitch to upgrade my ships I wasn’t getting the true experience, but bearing in mind my ships mean I can go anywhere I want and still cannot find what I am looking for, what hopes do players who don’t know/don’t use the duplication glitch supposed to do??

The main game keeps getting bigger and better with new races to interact with, new story threads to follow, more combat to get involved in, and more ships to discover. Regrettably this Expedition just seems to be busy work with the interesting stuff being outweighed by the boring, tedious and repetitive nature of going to a random planet, looking for something, not finding it and then going to another random planet to look again.

Random luck seems to be a core component to this expedition and I do not like that as a game mechanic. Go to this plant, fight this boss, and get this reward, that I like. Go to this planet, scan every animal or analyze every piece of shit, not find what you need, so keep doing that for potentially days at a time and you might eventually come across what you seek…that I definitely do not like.

All in all it is a lot of effort to go to in order to unlock a new poster for a base or to hang on the wall of your freighter, so much so that like me, you might get to the point when you decide that the grind is just not worth the time it is going to take. A unique ship, or armour, these were features of previous expeditions, just not a feature of this one and if the past ones are lost forever then Hello Games could at least remove the unlockables from the game because my OCD tendencies do not like staring at an unlockable that I am never going to be able to get because I was not playing the game four years ago or whatever so it is lost to me.