Foundation Update 1.1 (base building etc)

[Art Blade]

The discussion around No Man's Sky since release has been intense and dramatic. We have been quiet, but we are listening and focusing on improving the game that our team loves and feels so passionately about.

Positive or negative feedback, you have been heard and that will truly help to make this a better game for everyone.

This update will be the first small step in a longer journey. We hope you can join us.

http://www.no-mans-sky.com/foundation-update/

Welcome to the Foundation Update. It adds the foundations of base building, and is a foundation for things to come. This is the first of many free updates.

from steam:

Today we're very excited to bring you the Foundation Update (Update 1.1).

We'd recommend you check out our full Patch Notes - but here's a summary of what you'll come across in this update.

First of all we've introduced three game modes. Normal mode is the original, chilled exploration experience you're used to. Creative mode allows players to explore the infinite universe without limits, while also allowing them to craft to their heart's content without any resource requirements. Survival mode pits players against a more brutal environment where merely staying alive is a challenge in itself.

Secondly the Foundation Update brings base building to the game, giving players the opportunity to claim a home planet where they can start building and decorating their very own, fully customisable outpost. When you're ready, recruit alien lifeforms from Space Stations and task them with researching new technologies in your base. Farming, Science, Weapons and Technology specialists are available for hire.

A new farming system also allows you to plant and grow biome specific crops either inside your base (using Hydroponic Labs) or outside in the right environment.

New equipment is also on hand to aid explorers as they continue to explore distant planets. This equipment can be deployed in the field and includes save points (essential for survival mode), waypoints (to permanently mark your position), automated mining harvesters and Signal Scanners (which can find uninhabited bases and more).

The third key update in Foundation are Freighters. These enormous ships can be found cruising through space and, upon boarding, players can speak to the Freighter's captain to purchase the ship at great expense. Freighters can be summoned at will by explorers, and come with huge expandable cargo holds which are ideal for storing and transporting large quantities of valuable resources. Vessels can be customised in the base building section, allowing role specialisation.

There are a number of other improvements worth noting, including stackable products, a new intelligent quick access menu, visual updates, new technologies and more.

As with any new update, it's possible you'll come across bugs or issues which we'll aim to fix as quickly as possible. To help us understand the issues you're experiencing, please head to our dedicated Bug Reporting Form and enter a report with as much detail as possible.

This is the first of many free updates that will build on the original No Man's Sky. We hope you enjoy it, and look forward to hearing your feedback, ideas and suggestions.

Thank you,
Hello Games

[Dweller_Benthos]

Been seeing rumblings about this on the reddit sub the last couple days, looks like they are actually still working on the game. But, it seems they are essentially making it Space Engineers.

Here's the reddit post with a long list of changes.

https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/comments/5f5o4k/introducing_foundations_update_v11_and_full_patch/

[Art Blade]

thank you for that link :)

Here a vid by Hello Games on the new update, titled "No Man's Sky: Foundation Update (version 1.1)"

! No longer available

[fragger]

It's heartening to see that Hello hasn't given up on the game. Maybe they can salvage it yet. Will the gaming public give them another chance though? I'm willing to check it out with the new stuff, but I'm inclined to wait until any major issues have been tackled.

No word on frame rate issues? I haven't yet checked out Dweller's link to Reddit, I'm a little pressed for time right now. All the new stuff doesn't really add up to a hill of beans if the game still runs like a constipated slug.

Thanks for the heads-up though Art, this might be worth keeping track of.

[OWGKID]

Sounds great, but I wish the game was released in an early access state rather than the 60$ shitshow it turned into at launch.

I hope Hello Games will get its reputation restored by fixing NMS and the game turns into a great game in the end ^-^

[fragger]

Well, I just got on to Steam and the patch is downloading now, so I might pop in when it's done and see what's what. Will get back to you guys directly :)

[fragger]

Okay, I had a bit of a play, and here are a few impressions:

First off, my main gripe with the game remains  - a crummy framerate. I started on a wintry planet with a fair bit of foliage and animals, and it was the same old jerkfest. There are some new features such as a motion blur and a new anti-alias option, but in the case of the AA I still had to turn it off to get any kind of decent framerate. The motion blur is WAY overdone on its default value (120) but fortunately you can turn it down incrementally. I ended up dropping it to I think about 40 because when it is on its default max value, you only have to turn your head a little and everything blurs out crazily while your head is turning. It's like being very, very drunk.

When you start the game now, after the logos but before the starfield appears, you will see this (this is a bigger image than I usually post, so you can sort of read it if you enlarge it):

[smg id=9404 align=center width=600]

Note what it says at the bottom. You can now start a new game from scratch here without having to turn off Steam cloud sync and deleting your saved game file, which is cool. Well, not cool - normal. I didn't know about this and started a new game the "old" way. Turns out I didn't need to do that.

Atlas Pass v1 is no longer required to get into the "other door" in the space station, and inside there, you will find this:

[smg id=9405 align=center width=600]

It did nothing when I interacted with it because I think it only operates once you get your own base going. I haven't gotten anywhere near that stage yet.

Entering via the regular station door, there was not one Gek inside but four (having a bit of a booze-up, apparently). I didn't interact with them yet, but this may be how and where you "hire" aliens to w@&k for you, once you have something for them to do. The hats on some of the Gek may have some significance there.

[smg id=9406 align=center width=600]

Got rocks? If asteroids were the bane of your existence before, you're gonna hate this. The number of these tumbling ship-denters has been increased, so asteroid fields are really dense now. This was actually a relatively sparse patch ??? Not crazy about that, but at least Pulse drive still lets you fly right through them undented.

[smg id=9407 align=center width=600]

There are lots of changes and some cool "quick menu" options that let you do things like charge up your gear quickly without having to do it through the inventory screens. Scanning on a planet will give you a better idea of what's around (for minerals, periodic abbreviations are now used instead of vague icons that you have to figure out). There are some new minerals, and some old favourites like Chrysolite now require an "advanced" mining beam to gather. Some newies require "Hazmat Gauntlets" to get. I haven't gotten those yet.

There are some new things which I haven't figured out yet. For example, when you bring your Scanner up to analyze a plant or animal, some weird thing called "Tech" or something appears with a ghosted-out image of some arcane piece of apparatus floating in front of your eyes. I had to hit my "Analyze" (or Zoom) key a second time to get the Analyzer to come up. Dunno what that's all about at this point, and in classic NMS style there isn't a great deal of forthcoming info about it.

I've only had a very quick look so far. "Quick" here is a relative term - where I started, the nearest source of Heridium, which you need to fix your Pulse drive, was a flipping 10-minute walk away in freezing temperatures. I also had to spend a fair bit of time traipsing around looking for what I'm sure was the only Zinc weed on the entire planet.

There's a bunch of other new stuff that I haven't plumbed yet, but this is enough to comment on for now. One thing I'm interested in is being able to buy a Freighter, and apparently even if you don't own one you can still dock inside one (I think each fleet of Freighters will now have a Command ship which has a hanger bay that you can land in, similar to a space station).

This is my gaily-coloured start world, with a couple of the ever-present Sentinels:

[smg id=9408 align=center width=600]

It's not evident here but there were some quite nice fog effects at one point, which looked pretty cool. Animals are pretty much the usual deal, on this planet anyway, with things like your typical mini-stegosaurus type of critter and those living potato sacks that bounce all around.

I'm interested in delving more deeply into this now, just to see what else they've come up with. Maybe NMS will climb to greatness one rung at a time, but it might still be at risk of falling off the ladder altogether. We'll see. It's something kind of newish to play around with, anyway - for now at least.

EDIT: One last thing, it's worth checking out the Reddit post that D_B linked to, there's a good comprehensive list of the new additions there. Thanks for that, D_B :-X

[Dweller_Benthos]

Nice info, Fragger, I have the install backup on a thumb drive here at w@&k, so I'll pop it in once I get home and give it a try. I wonder how mods will w@&k now? And if my old mods still w@&k? Also, how loading an old save game will affect anything.

[Art Blade]

Thanks for the report, fragger :)

and yes, it does sound and look intriguing, indeed.

I also want to keep using my old mods.. let's see how that pans out -- I'm willing to bet that the modding community won't take long to adapt :)

[Art Blade]

Well, erm..

I just fired up the game, used the Creative option and pressed and held the button to "continue" which sent me (after a flipping ages-long starfield trip loading shaders forever) to a new planet and a broken starter ship. So I assume I cannot continue anything as long as there are no savegame files -- as seen in fragger's pic, "no save data" actually means that there are no savegames from your old game  :o :D

Started to fly around (maybe due to the old mods) in a ship that sends sparks flying and creates a smoke trail and decided to get out. Checked an animal (lol, forgot how to bring up the multi-tool, took some time getting that sorted) and decided to leave the planet.

and the game crashed before I left orbit. Excellent.

To be continued..

[PZ]

Nice post fragger - hope the game turns out well for you!

[fragger]

Cheers :)

@Art, it may be too late to mention this, but I'm wondering if your Steam cloud synchronization is checked or unchecked? If unchecked, maybe it should have been enabled before you started up a new game. I unchecked mine (and deleted my old save file from my PC) before I started because I wanted to start afresh, but maybe enabling that before firing up the "new" game would make it start from where you left off.

Then again it seems like it's a pretty substantial update, so maybe old saves just aren't compatible with all the new gizmos.

I haven't had a crash (touch wood) but Hello did say there would probably be issues that would need sorting out. Maybe that's one of them. I also gave my PC a cold restart after the download, dunno if that did any good or not.

[Art Blade]

gonna check (or uncheck) that, fragger, cheers :) However, I believe it's the mods trying to fix something that isn't what it used to be, hence causing some kind of havoc in the game engine.

[OWGKID]

You should always look for mods compatible with the latest update. GTA V instantly crashes if I use an old version of my native trainer mod.

[fragger]

Yeah, sounds more likely.

[Dweller_Benthos]

Fired it up last night and had no issues (well, after I uninstalled all my old mods....) and continued my old save game, which is filed under "Normal" now. Flew to a planet I hadn't been to yet and looked around, same old same old, as far as that goes, but it may be that since I was in the system on the "old" game, the new planet features won't show up until I get to a new system. Had to re-learn the controls again and that's when I found out that they have hard wired the "Z" key to one of the base building menus. Problem is, that's the key I use to walk backwards, so every time I want to retreat from something, I end up opening the build menu. Not convenient. And no way to re-bind what that key is, it's not even listed in the controls menu, so if I hadn't been using Z to walk backwards, I'd never had known there WAS a build menu key. But let's hope they add that functionality to a future update.

Low & Slow flight mod has been updated and a new version of fast actions (no delay to select a menu option) has been released, and those are the two most important mods for me, as the game is pretty much unplayable without them. I will give it another go tonight and maybe move on to a new system. I will give the game a chance, but I don't see how building a base and buying a huge freighter ship will make that much difference.

I've also read that the type of ship you have now makes a difference as far as space battles go. I had a distress beacon pop up when I went back to the station but ignored it. So I haven't tried space battling yet. The new quick menu system makes it easier (supposedly, I didn't think it was very fluid to use) to recharge shields and weapons, but I might get used to it.

Oh yeah, there's two new "Health Upgrades" for the exosuit, but I didn't have the required aluminum, so no idea what those do.

[fragger]

I'm assuming that the dev's use of the word "foundation" means that more will be built upon it in the future. I have the same impression though, that building a base or getting hold of a Freighter might be fun for a while, but will ultimately lead us back to the old "What do I do now?" conundrum.

[OWGKID]

Yep, that's the problem when you don't have anything to do. I played Minecraft a lot in Survival Mode until I felt I had done everything. Now, I simply go into creative mode and build stuff.

[fragger]

I might give creative mode in NMS a go, but it seems to me that would be an even faster way to get to the point where you run out of things to do :)

[Dweller_Benthos]

The thing is, the point of this game is to explore and travel, not hang around a base you've built. What happens when you travel a very long distance, do you just abandon that base?

[Binnatics]

I've been reading about all the new stuff and your first impressions digging into it and, it totally doesn't attract me at all. Somehow, it only brings back bad memories of what we've been doing and missing. I don't feel like this new stuff is adding something valuable to the gameplay. More of the same, non-working stuff and pointless deeds.

What lacked in the game was true mystery, and somehow a goal or story to achieve and explore. But there wasn't. I don't think there is now. Just more toys in the same sandbox.

I will keep an eye on the topic though, especially reading about NMS was a big joy. I hope I can imagine some mystery back in that somehow ;)

[Art Blade]

I am looking forward to the creative mode because I already enjoyed building in Space Engineers. Only in NMS, stuff looks better. :-D

[Dweller_Benthos]

I have yet to try creative mode, that's a really good way to get to know what a game has, without the cost. Thing is, then you go to a survival game where you have to collect the materials to build that stuff, it can be a shock. Because you find out to build that cool landing pad for your ship you need HOW MUCH IRON??!?!? WHERE DO YOU EXPECT ME TO GET ALL THAT, GAME?!?!?!

But Binn is right, with no story or goal to move towards, it's just another sand box, really. If there was goal like getting to the center of the galaxy, ooops, wait...... but OK, if you DO get to the center, then you leave that galaxy behind forever and everything you've built is now inaccessible?

I didn't play it last night, I've gotten back into Wolfenstein Old Blood because I feel a little guilty I never bothered to finish that game, just barely started it, really.

[Art Blade]

 :-D

[fragger]

I played around a little bit more. I've docked on a Freighter (got some screenies, will post soon) which had three docking entrances, but they all lead into the same big hanger bay. Other ships come and go as on a station, but not as frequently. I made my way to the bridge and met the captain who offered to sell the Freighter for 15 million. I don't have that kind of dough yet. The Freighters also have storage slots (this one had 18) but I think they hold a lot more than your starship's slots.

Our old friends the pirates are still alive and well. I used my sole Hyperdrive jump to go to another system as I didn't much like the one I started in, and it wasn't long before the pirates were on my case. Been jumped twice now and they seem to wait until you're right in the middle of an asteroid field to have a go. With the much denser fields now, having a twisting dogfight among the rocks doesn't make life easy. I took as much damage from hitting asteroids as I did from the pirate ship.

I don't know why they felt they had to thicken the rock fields. That might not be so bad if they hadn't also increased the frequency of the fields themselves - they're bloody everywhere. What would have been better in my opinion was if instead of having fields of these scattered all through a system, they'd had one or two planets in each system with a ring of rocks around them, so you could go to a ringed planet to mine the rocks instead of having to fly through another asteroid field seemingly every few miles. Even that Freighter I visited was surrounded by flipping rocks. Real space is not chock-a-block full of stupid rocks. There's way too many of the damned things now.

Some of the inventory functions have been improved. Moving stuff around within your inventories has been changed, you no longer have to click and drag. Just click once on the resource, then click on the slot you want to move it to. I like that better. The quick access function for recharging stuff is a welcome addition, though you can only access your ship's quick-recharge option when you're actually in your ship. If you want to recharge ship systems while you're outside, you have to do it the "old" way. That's reasonable enough. Slots with resources in them now have the amount of resource showing in the corner of the slot, e.g. 217 Heridium, 126 Gold, and so on. Small changes, but helpful ones.

The required resources for recharging your equipment have been changed. For instance, you no longer need Thamium9 for your Pulse Drive, it now needs Iron. To reflect this, most asteroids now are composed of Iron with a few Thamium9 ones thrown in, and the usual fewer big rocks made of stuff like Iridium. Your Landing Thrusters still need Plutonium, but that resource seems to be a lot scarcer now. I'm struggling to find it and a lot of the time I've had to buy it from the station or from other ships. I can't recall off the top of my head which resources are now required for recharging which pieces of equipment, but generally it's not as easy as it used to be (stuff like Zinc and Titanium, or the yellow "resource family" if you will, appear to come into it more).

Some planets now have no structures on them at all, typically the "resource haven" type worlds. I think maybe the idea is that you build a base on one of these, so you can haul in the Gold or Aluminum or whatever and sell it (I don't know if a Trading Terminal is something you can build - otherwise you'd still have to haul your stuff back to the station to sell it, since there are no buildings and thus no Trading Terminals on the planet). Artificial stuff generally seems scarcer. I've been to about half a dozen planets and haven't yet seen anything like drop pods for suit slot upgrades, and when a planet does have buildings they seem less frequent.

Oh, and the additional aliens on board the station are indeed workers that you can hire, and they already speak full English - no need to learn their language. The regular aliens that you come across still speak their own dialects however.

So far - meh. I agree with Binn and D_B, it's looking like just an extension of the sandbox. This game needs missions or quests, or some kind of adversary to compete against, either economically or militarily. And I really feel that they should w@&k on improving the optimization for the PC version before they start churning out new content - the frame rate is still abominable and this puts a serious dent in any enjoyment of the game. Draw-in distance still sucks as well. If I can run the later Far Cry games and GTA V on my rig, with all the terrain and foliage in the former and the zillions of details and huge draw distance of the latter, and still get a silky smooth frame rate in those games, there's no excuse for not being able to get the same kind of results within the significantly less-detailed world of NMS. I shouldn't have to turn everything down to low or off and drop several screen resolutions to get a barely playable frame rate. That is unacceptable, Hello.