Expedition

Earlier this month, I wrote about how No Man’s Sky didn’t have much to offer in the way of multiplayer. I still think that rings true, but the Liquidators Expedition does solve some of the problems I have with it. Mainly, the shared goals, well sort of.

The Squad has been picking our way through the latest expedition which is set to end on September 2nd. So far, most of us have made it to Phase 4 out of 5.

This Expedition is suppose to take you through worlds that showcase the latest graphical and procedural generation update. We have visited some interesting places, my favorite being the starting world with a giant floating eye creature and islands floating everywhere. We’ve also seen planets made up of mostly water with huge waves and even bigger underwater creatures. Other planets may not have been memorable but they did show off the new flora and fauna combinations.

The Liquidators Expedition focuses heavily on combat. Each phase of the expedition has you traveling to a drop zone, which spawn bug creatures that you need to eliminate. Then you have to travel to an infestation site to shoot even bigger bug creatures! Each phase has an optional goal of killing x number of bug creatures too.

There’s been a whole lot of shooting things the last few weeks.

Combat, inherintly, lends itself as a great multiplayer activity. It’s certainly easier to take on the swarms with a few friends. There isn’t much structure to it, nothing to really plan for, just go out there and shoot the bugs until there aren’t any more bugs! The big boss bugs add some variety, they have armor that needs to be shot off before they take damage so there’s an option for coordination but it’s not strictly required.

The shared Milestones for each phase of the expedition also lean in to a more focused multiplayer experience. It would be nice if these were actually shared between the party playing together so each person didn’t have to go to their own drop zone, or collect their own eggs, or take out their own number of bugs, but it’s something. Inevitably there is some waiting around while every one finishes up their milestones for the current phase. It does give us all something to work towards together which is more than I can say for the normal game.

With that said, the expedition does kind of speed run you through the different features of No Man’s Sky that we haven’t seen before. Things like Frieghters, mechs, and other exocraft that can maybe serve as goals for us to chase together when we do go back to the main game. I still think the Nexus missions will give us more focused goals to persue together too, we just haven’t tried them yet.

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.

*Waiting for Blades to get to the Anomaly*

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!

*Not the most comforting sight when you wake up from a shipwreck*

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

Weird Bug Creatures and Stuff

A Return to No Man’s Sky