No Man's Sky

You wake next to a broken ship on a random planet in a galaxy of eighteen quintillion of them. Repair the ship, leave the atmosphere without a loading screen, and go anywhere you can see.

That seamless planet-to-space flight is still the thing nothing else does as well. Around it, Hello Games has spent a decade stacking systems: base building, farming, freighters, fleets, settlements, submarines, mechs, expeditions, story campaigns. The modern problem is not lack of content, it is that the game hands you all of it at once.

• Survival is light: hazard protection, life support and a fuel economy, all solved with common materials.
• The main story (the Artemis path) is a real, strange, well written science fiction plot.
• Base building is unrestricted, and you can hold bases on many planets at once.
• Expeditions are time-limited shared journeys with set goals, and they are the best way to learn the systems.

1. 1

   Follow the tutorial prompts exactly

   The opening is a scripted repair sequence. It teaches scanning, mining and crafting, and skipping ahead leaves you stranded.

2. 2

   Learn the scanner

   Scanning planets, animals and plants pays real money and marks resources. It is the cheapest income in the early game.

3. 3

   Fix the ship and leave

   Getting to space is the moment the game opens. Do not spend six hours on the first planet.

4. 4

   Find a space station

   Stations are where you learn languages, buy technology, trade and take missions. The mission board is your income and your direction.

5. 5

   Follow Artemis

   The main story path gives structure to what is otherwise an ocean. It also unlocks systems you would not find alone.

6. 6

   Build a modest base

   A landing pad, a refiner, a teleporter. The teleporter connects your base to the station network, which changes everything.

• Inventory and slots. Almost every early frustration is a space problem. Expand ship, exosuit and multi-tool slots first.
• Refining and crafting chains. A refiner turns junk into value, and knowing three recipes makes money trivially.
• Technology upgrades. Modules slot into ship, suit and tool, and adjacency bonuses (matching modules placed together) matter.
• Freighters and frigates. A capital ship is a mobile base and a passive income fleet.
• Settlements, planetary bases and farms are the long-term projects for people who want to build.
• Expeditions run on a schedule and reward exclusive cosmetics. They are also a superb tutorial by stealth.

The story is far stranger and more thoughtful than its reputation. Artemis, Apollo, Nada and Polo lead you through a plot about a galaxy that may not be a place at all, and about the three alien races and the Sentinels that police them.

• The Atlas is the thing at the centre, and its questions are the actual story.
• Gek, Korvax and Vy'keen each carry their own history, and learning their languages word by word is how you read it.
• The Sentinels are not simple monsters. What they are protecting, and from whom, is a plot point.
• The story asks what it means to be a simulation aware of itself, and it is far better written than a procedural space game needed to be.

• You share a universe with everyone, and can group up with a small party to explore together.
• The Nexus, in the Space Anomaly, is the hub: multiplayer missions, other players, and shared expeditions.
• Bases can be shared and visited, and popular builds get discovered by strangers.
• Co-op scales the fun rather than the difficulty. Nothing forces you into groups.

• Slot upgrades before ship upgrades. Cargo space is the real progression.
• Learn one refining recipe that makes money and you will never be poor again.
• Build a base teleporter early and connect it to the station network.
• Do not sell the story items. They look like junk and they are not.
• Use the photo mode. Half this game's value is looking at it.
• Set the difficulty options to suit you. The game encourages this, it is not cheating.

• The official site's update log, which is genuinely the best summary of what the game now contains.
• The community wiki for refiner recipes, expedition guides and technology adjacency layouts.
• Ask in our Discord if you bounced off it years ago. It is a different game now, and that is not marketing.