Tricks And Tips

[Art Blade]

the waypoint list not going back apparently is a bug I already read about. Like, it hits all of us.

Fragger (and D_B), trading dynamic resonators worked the next system, too (I checked during a test jump). And actually, now I can make 2M in quarter of an hour because I already know who is selling how much and who is buying. I recognise their ships and names. :-()

[fragger]

The ships don't seem to come in often enough for me to achieve that sort of rate. Three or four might come in during the course of a couple of minutes, then they'll go and there will be several minutes without any. In fifteen minutes, I will see maybe a dozen ships in total, only three or four of them will have the low-priced items and I will only able to buy two or three items from each of them. I tried again, this time dealing in Power Reservoirs, but I was only able to get hold of about 10 of them, netting me a profit of just a few thousand units over a space of 15-20 minutes. The low ship frequency simply doesn't allow me the opportunity to rack up enough transactions to make a huge amount of money.

I'm actually making more money in less time by going down to the planet, filling up with gold-star resources and selling them through the Trade Terminals. In the time it took me to make about 6,000 units on the station I made about 230,000 through mining. And I didn't miss a single ship.

Maybe ship traffic density varies from system to system or something, but I only get a handful of ships and I interact with every one that does come in. Most of the time I'm hanging around an empty hanger bay.

[Art Blade]

When I am at the space station, it takes a few minutes until it turns into Grand Central. I sometimes can't even catch all the ships docked there because they only stay like one or two minutes and there are already new ships coming in. It is so busy I need a break between every million I make  :-()

both D_B and I are in a Vy'keen system. The test I ran was in a Gek system. What race is governing your system? If it's neither one, then you're probably screwed just because of that  :-\\

[Art Blade]

I just remembered, the other (quite advanced) career I gave up started in a Gek system where I developed my trading skills.

I was unable to trade like that on a trade post down on my moon. I remember trying somewhere else, too, and it didn't w@&k, either. They didn't have any +100% over average buy/sell trade options at all, only a few percent plus and minus. Apparently it needs to be done in space stations.

[fragger]

Maybe that's it - I'm in a Korvax system. These guys aren't terribly interested in money - not like the Gek, who go "Joy! Trading!" at the prospect of a haggle :)

Come to think of it, the last time I tried this was also in a Korvax system in my first game and I couldn't do very well then either, about the same as now. I seem to remember that the Gek station was a lot busier.

I've been trying it again, the most I could scrape up was about 50,000 in around 45 minutes, even while wheeling and dealing in two commodities at once. I don't miss out on any ships because there's never that many of them.

I've found the same thing as you did about Trading Posts (I like to call them Starports) - none of the traders who come and go ever have gold-star commodities. Even the Trade Terminal in the central building will not match the one in the Space Station for gold-star goods.

Fortunately, a hot commodity with both the traders and the Galactic Trade is Heridium, and there is a ton of it on the planet right below the station. So I'm doing pretty well with that. I've gotten to the point where I can lase down a pillar pretty quickly. I run the laser until the heat bar is just short of turning red, let go of the button and hit it again immediately - you can almost keep lasing continually that way. With a pillar of stuff, I start at one side and lase top to bottom until a side is gone (may take two or three passes), then move along to the next "new" side and repeat. They go down pretty quickly that way, I can reduce a pillar in just a few minutes.

[Art Blade]

I do the same when slicing off a pillar. :) Only my tool's got some nice cooling apps so it is next to impossible to get it to overheat. Well, it's got 18 slots and 10 are dedicated to the mining laser.. 8-X

by the way, I like your "Starport" and trading post I like even better because it describes the trading whereas a starport could be just about anything between a space station and a ship yard (which I haven't seen yet, if there is any) :)

I tried my trading speed at my space station and I racked up 2M in 15 minutes. ;)

[fragger]

Rub it in, why dontcha :-D

[fragger]

Okay, I've finally cracked it. The only commodity this works with is Dynamic Resonators. Nothing else comes close. I was able to make about 400,000 in about twenty minutes.

But I don't believe I could possibly make 2 million in fifteen minutes because the frequency of ship arrivals (or lack thereof) simply won't allow it, even now that I know the buyer's name and can watch out for him. But it may also be due to the fact that since I'm in a new game, I don't yet have a lot of suit slots.

Still, at least I now have a ticket for the gravy train, even if I'm not traveling first class :-D

On another subject, it definitely seems to be the case that the bigger the ship you now have, the correspondingly more expensive the even bigger ships will be. I'm still on my initial 16-slotter and I'm seeing 30-slot jobs going for around 4 million. In my last game, I had a 24-slot ship and the 30s were costing around 8 million. The downside is you don't see anything bigger than about 30 slots when you have a 16, so there's no way you can go straight to a cheap 39 or higher.

So here's the dilemma. You want more slots than your starter 16. Do you go straight for the cheap 30, gaining heaps of space but making the 30+ ships that much more expensive, or do you settle for less space now with a 24 and maybe get a cheaper 30+ ship later on? The thing is, if you have a 24 you will probably be restricted as to what size of ship you will subsequently be offered. You will probably have access to larger vessels if you currently have a 30 than you will if you have a 24. If you really want a 48 sometime, you're going to have to buy the bigger ships to get access to the even bigger ships. And the cost goes up exponentially.

I'm torn between which way I want to go. How big a ship might I ultimately want? Hard to say at this stage. I had a 30 last game and I was starting to feel the pinch a bit once I started tooling up a good number of upgrades.

Or you could just go from shipwreck to shipwreck, swapping out your current ship for the downed one and gaining inventory space one slot at a time until you reach your desired size. This won't cost you any money as such, but the trade off is that you are then spending a great deal of time and effort getting the resources together to repair every new ship you get. And if you need a resource you can't find, you're stuffed. Well maybe not stuffed, but at the least dreadfully inconvenienced :-()

On yet another subject, asteroids. There are scores of them floating around and of course they're useful for mining Thamium9 for your Pulse engine fuel (you can also travel a relatively short way outside the space station, fill up your ship with Thamium9, bring it back into the station and flog it for a quick hit of cash). But there are also much bigger rocks drifting around among the small ones, large potato-shaped affairs that can be composed of Copper, Iron, Iridium, and some other minerals. I found a good way to mine them - approach them at minimum velocity, and using your Photon Cannon walk your fire along their length. When you start to get too close, throw it in reverse! Hold down your "braking" key and your speed will go down past zero and into the negative - you can fly backwards in space. So I move in, move out, move in, move out, peppering the asteroid up and down the whole time until it's all been mined.

[Dweller_Benthos]

I've been finding crashed ships, I like the idea of just finding something and fixing it and then taking off with it.

On that note, a bit of a hint/warning. I was at an outpost which had a scanner to find distress calls and an alien who would give you stuff. I went to the scanner first and found a crashed ship, had the marker on my hud for it. Then I went to the alien and on my first try didn't get a good result. Went back and loaded my save game to try again. Marker for the crashed ship is gone, but the scanner is already active, I can't reactivate it and get the marker again. So, lesson learned, don't load a save game when you have active markers, they will disappear.

And also to expand on Fragger's mining of the large crystals on the surface, give it a scan first and a grid of boxes will be overlain on top of the crystal. These are the mine-able chunks. Mine a bit and when the scan grid goes away, scan it again, if no grid boxes show up, you've got everything you can get from it, even though it may look like there's more left, and it will even pop up on your hud as that material, if you mine it, you won't get anything from it. Only material marked by the grid is something you can retrieve.

[Art Blade]

I noticed that, too, D_B. Before, I mined down into the ground under a pillar but realised that I didn't gain anything from that, then I learned about the grid. It is also useful to find hard-to-see small floating bits in the air that you can still mine using the grid.

fragger, good post and good that you got on the gravy train :-D Traffic is the key to speed but you should increase the exosuit's cargo space. I did my 2M-run with 16 free slots.

[Dweller_Benthos]

From reddit, the size (& maybe shape?) of your ship affects various abilities like speed, etc.

https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/comments/4yz8eg/psa_your_ship_looks_affect_its_survivability_in/

[Art Blade]

I suppose the ships you see are randomly generated once you land somewhere like a space station or, and that's more interesting, once you reload a save game (also, for instance saving yesterday, resuming today, which is but a reload) and apparently the ships around you, even at different locations, stay that way until the next reload.

I resumed my game from yesterday on a space station. Today, I only saw ships that had a max size of 35 slots and quite a few with like 27. Yesterday, I saw lots of 39 and the likes. Today I even went planet side and the ships there were just like on the space station.

Maybe it's a good idea to reload if you can't find a ship to your liking.

[fragger]

That's interesting about the different ship styles and how they affect gameplay, such as number of hit points.

@ Art, Yep, I could have made more dough if I'd had more vacant suit slots (just 12 at the moment). There are plenty of suit-slot pods on the planet under the station, so that will be what I'll do next. I'd been saving the dough for a good ship (those extra slots get dear) but I see now that it would be worth spending the money on them :)

[fragger]

I think I may have a clue about what causes the get-flipped-into-orbit glitch.

Earlier today I landed very close to a pillar of Heridium which I planned to mine. The ship landed so that it was facing the pillar, only a few steps away. I got out, mined, then got back into the ship. When I took off, the ship moved forward automatically as it does, and as soon as it passed over the remains of the pillar, whoosh, up into space.

Since then I've been landing well away from any pillars or large deposits of minerals that I plan to mine, and so far (touch wood) I haven't had a single flip-up.

I've flown over stumps of former pillars before, but I think if the ship passes over one while it's still in the process of lifting off, the glitch is triggered. Passing over a stump when the ship is already well into flight mode won't trigger it.

Possibly the cause of the glitch is some kind of clipping error once a large piece of the landscape, i.e. a big pillar or dome of minerals, has been removed too close to the ship and the terrain clearance function then doesn't know how to deal with the altered piece of terrain, or reads it as a small region of space and thus puts you there.

It would be interesting to find out if the free flight mod actually eliminates this glitch.

[Dweller_Benthos]

You might want to try the low flight mod then. I had it installed last night and it makes a world of difference to how you fly. Of course, now you can (and probably will) crash right into the ground and other obstructions, but isn't that what flying is about? No wait, flying is about not crashing, mostly. Anyway, the few times I've had the boost to orbit thing, it seemed like it was the ground avoidance function either bugging out or being extremely overly cautious, as in, it knows you are close to something and might crash, and can't figure out how to avoid that so it just tosses you into orbit where you're "safe".

With the ground avoidance turned off with the mod, that would go away, I think, as with the mod installed, you don't take off and immediately jump to a safe altitude, you just take off and start going forward, which can be a nuisance, if you've landed in a place that's not easy to maneuver in. I've hit things a few times and damaged my ship, mostly when I landed really close to an ancient artifact ruin and took off and clipped inside it for a bit. Bang, crunch.

Saying that, how do you repair your ship? You have the "health bar" like you do for your personal health, and then several icons underneath that for "stored health" I'd guess you'd call it. The health bar regenerates over time, but I can't find any way to get back the health icons, like you can for your personal health by grabbing first aid canisters and such.

[fragger]

I'm not sure, but try bringing up your ship inventory and clicking on the Deflector Shield. It can be "recharged" like your engines when it gets damaged. You'll need either Iron, Titanium or something else, maybe Zinc, to restore it.

[Dweller_Benthos]

I'm pretty sure my deflector is fully charged, so that makes me question, as I never noticed much before, do different ship types have different amounts of those health icons? I didn't read that reddit post fully, maybe that's what they are talking about? Maybe this small ship just doesn't have as much health as a bigger one? I will have to notice next time I switch. But it would make sense. It would also make sense that there's a way to replenish those health icons if you do lose some.

[fragger]

Yeah they do, my new ship has eight hit points or health icons or whatever you call them.

[smg id=9050 align=center width=600]

The big bulky ships seem to have stronger hulls or something. The trouble is, I don't think you can find out how many hit points a ship has until you get it and sit in it.

[Art Blade]

better more armour than none, when it comes to pirate encounters.

[fragger]

My sentiments exactly :) The heftier ships don't look as sexy as the sleek little fighter jobs, but they make up for it in ruggedness.

As for speed and maneuverability, I can't discern any difference between the ship I have now and the little fighter I started with. Same top speed planet-side (115u near the ground, 125u over 1000ks altitude and 150u in space). It seems to turn and bank at the same rate as the old one.

[Dweller_Benthos]

OK, yeah, my latest ship it seems only has four health icons, so that makes sense. It could just be me, though, but it seems it's more maneuverable than the bigger ships, turns faster, etc. Not faster total speed, either in atmosphere and in space, those don't seem to change. Next time I get a bigger ship, I'll have to make closer note of it's handling.

That still begs the question no matter how many health icons your ship has, how do you get them back once you lose a couple?

I've had a few close encounters with the ground since installing the low flight mod. The main problem is, you can't decelerate below ~35u, so say, you clip the top of a tree, you don't slow down, you tip forward, sliding down the tree, getting caught in other trees until you nose dive into the ground, all the while taking damage and furiously tapping the landing button in hopes you land somewhere before your shields give out. Because the controls are so mushy, you can't pull up fast enough to get out of trouble. This is with the mouse or controller, so it's not a device issue, it's how the flight works in the game.

So be careful with the low flight mod, hehe.

[Art Blade]

 :-D

[fragger]

D_B, I read that there are a couple of ways you can get your ship's hit points icons back once you've lost some.

The first way is the easiest. Apparently if you land at a planet-side Trading Post, get out of the ship then get back in, the points will be restored (the source claims that this doesn't w@&k in the Space Station, only at a Trading Post). I haven't tried it as I haven't had to, it's what I read online somewhere so don't take it as gospel :-()

The other way is to interact with an alien in one of those outpost/settlement type places on a planet. After you've had your initial interaction with him, you can give him 20 carbon for another interaction. He might then offer you a choice of repairs, provided you have the required level of standing with that race. Once again, I can't verify this.

[Dweller_Benthos]

ah, OK, thanks Fragger. I was pretty sure that ship only had three icons when I looked, and then the next time I noticed it had four, that might have been after I reloaded the game, but I could have landed at a trade post too. I'll notice more closely next time.

[fragger]

Oh, yeah, forgot to mention - apparently reloading the game resets the hit points too :-[ :-()