Farming, electricity, milking: There’s so much new stuff in No Man’s Sky after the Beyond update hit that it’s hard to know where to begin. If you’re hopping into No Man’s Sky after a long time away, or if this is your first time playing the game, here are a few tips that I wish I knew before I started!
Just Make the Jump
Don’t feel like you have to explore every nook and cranny of your starting planet. Unless you luck out and begin your journey through the stars on a paradise planet, gather enough resources to get off-world as quickly as possible. Progress in the story is directly tied to movement throughout the system — hopping to new worlds or warping to new galaxies.
Piracy Is… *Whispers* Viable
Okay, look. Is it wrong to steal from unassuming space truckers? Yes. Is it super easy and the best way to ramp up your resource and cash reserves, so you can start building a base and travel further into space? Also yes. If you decide to dip your toes in the space piracy game, here are a few things to note:
- You will lose one reputation point for every storage container you destroy. You can easily increase your reputation with any given race by gifting the aliens you encounter their race-specific items.
- Take note of your resource needs before you open fire. Scouting the cargo containers surrounding frigates helps you plan an efficient path of attack.
- Have an escape route! As soon as you begin attacking another ship, a fleet of Sentinel starships will warp into your system. You can evade them by landing on a nearby planet and hiding out. However, the easiest thing to do is land inside your own freighter. You basically count as your own country. Space Law is weird…
Save All the Dang Time
Like any game, No Man’s Sky has a few technical issues. In the wake of the Beyond update, the game’s overall stability is more inconsistent than ever. In other words: It crashes and bugs out a lot. Avoid losing huge chunks of your time to a crash by making sure you save at every opportunity. The easiest way to trigger an autosave is to exit your ship. Yes, you want to exit your ship, not just enter it. This is a long-running quirk of No Man’s Sky that Hello Games doesn’t seem to want to iron out. Although you can also save manually by building a save terminal in your base.
Embrace the Melee Hop
The No Man’s Sky “melee jump” trick is another quirk that hasn’t been ironed out over the years. Except this one is great. It’s one of the easiest (and most vital) pieces of movement tech. A good melee jump will help you get from place to place on foot faster, and can help get you out of sticky situations.
To pull this trick off, just click in the right stick (or whatever control you have set) while moving to begin sprinting. Once you get going, press R1 or RB and hold X or A (again, depending on your controller and setup) at the same time. If done correctly, the lunge from your melee will turn into a jetpack powered leap. Have a fun flight!
Stay Focused
There are so many paths you can take in No Man’s Sky with Beyond. Each has its own, hours-long progression path. You can play the entirety of the game as an interstellar farmer, roaming from planet to planet and selling your harvest to traders across the galaxy. Or you can spend the whole time building bases and playing with the new electrical system. It’s logic features are powerful enough to create things like working combination locks!
That plethora of choice can stop you in your tracks, though. It could prevent you from doing anything other than scratching the surface of most of these systems. Pick just one thing and just… do that thing. I like to break this up into play sessions, personally. When I sit down to play the game, I’ll decide to spend my time over the course of the next few hours only progressing the story, or only making trade runs. Having that focus (and being willing to shift that focus) has allowed me to dive deeper into the new things in No Man’s Sky than I would have if I tried to tackle it all at once.
Hopefully these tips are helpful to you! As you dive into No Man’s Sky, keep these tips in mind and stay posted here at Fanbyte for more guides for the game.
