Over the weekend, the Squad made its triumphant return to No Man’s Sky. Everyone was eager to see what the new graphical update – well, looked like. I thought it might be cool to check out the new expedition too for something different.
In 2022, we started a save probably after the game was on some sort of Steam sale. We didn’t get very far evidenced by the fact that 3 out of the 4 of us hadn’t completed enough of the tutorial to get to the Anomaly, a kind of nomadic player/ upgrade hub fo the galaxy. It’s also, more or less, the end of the tutorial.
Apparently CC was using an old save since he had access to a freighter with an ungodly amount of raw resources. Which he judiciously doled out to the rest of us as needed.
I vaugely remember out last time through. We were making good progress I. the main questline when we landed on a planet with ancient bones all over the place. We stopped to check out what those were, then proceeded to strip mine the planet of its fossils to sell to the nearby space station for buckets and buckets of credits. As a result, loading in this weekend we all were rich and were greeted by some very stylish ships.
None of us could remember how to actually do anything. A good start.
We puttered around for an hour, calling out key bindings when one of us stumbled upon them. Who wants to read through the keybindings in the settings right? The core mechanics of shoot things to gain resources paired with don’t let your bars deplete to zero came back fairly quick. I had some close calls while getting distracted and not replenishing my life support. But there are enough alarms and screen flashing to get your attention.
Toast and I didn’t have any launch fuel to get our ships off the planet so we set off to figure out how to do that first. Once we got that squared away, it was off to space to join up with CC and Blades on the freighter.
From there, we decided to check out the expedition. Now, you can start a new save file to go directly to the Expedition mode, but the Squad lies to do things the hard way. There’s another option to start the expedition from your current save via the Anomaly. We didn’t know this at the time, but this gives a slight advantage because you get to bring along some resources and technology from your current save along to pick up at a later time. The problem was, most of us didn’t have access to the Anomaly. We tried having CC call it in for all of us but it just doesn’t work like that.
Off we went to complete the main quest so we could all get access.
We weren’t far off. We had to build the warp drive to jump to another star system. Then do some exploring from planet to planet to get an event to trigger so we could meet up with the Anomaly. Once we had access, we had to run around and talk to everyone to fully unlock all the stations and vendors there. Then, and only then, could we start the Expedition. We didn’t have enough stuff to bring in to it so we all chose to start fresh.
The Liquidators Expedition focuses on combat which isn’t something I associate with No Man’s Sky. The only combat I’ve done is shooting at some Sentinels when they don’t like what I’m mining and attack. The expedition, on the other hand, comes with mutant bug creatures to shoot! Fun fact, the Sentinels still don’t like it when you shoot the bugs even in self defense. So my first encounter included running from bugs and the space police! They started it!
What was nice is that this game mode seems to assume you’ve played before. There’s a shortened version of the tutorial where you have to get your ship operational by collecting materials but you don’t have to go through much else to get going. This was a bit of a challenge because the planet we started on didn’t have much in the way of Oxygen plants which we needed to fix our ships. It took us all a good 20 minutes of running around to get enough of it.
With ships fixed, we went to space to find another planet to collect enough things to sell to buy Microprocessors for the warp drive. Along the way, we found a derelict freighter which turned out to be one giant box of loot. We spent the rest of the night running through the frieghter opening all the boxes and selling all the loot to the station. Now we all have warp drives and we’re ready really dig in to the expedition this week!
Many Welps 