The planets in No Man’s Sky are supposed to be, well, planet-sized. Most players will only see a small percentage of any locale, if that, before boredom sets in and another planet is explored. One man, however, has decided to undertake a pilgrimage that is testing the limits of his sanity, if not the limits of the planet generation itself.
No Man’s Sky player Steambot was fifty hours into his playthrough when the idea of walking across a single planet crossed his mind.
“Word had gotten out that the center of the galaxy was a bit underwhelming so I was kind of at a loss as to what I wanted to do next,” Steambot told me via email. “I was still obsessed with the game (and had been since it was first announced) and wasn’t ready to stop playing.”
More overtly, Steambot saw his idea as a way to combat some of the negativity and backlash surrounding the game.
“I really wanted to add something fun and positive to the conversation and show people (including Hello Games) that there were still people that believed in this game and weren’t ready to give up on it,” Steambot said.
The planet Steambot settled on for his experiment was random, he says, in that he wasn’t necessarily looking for the most interesting or well-populated globe. Instead, he was intrigued by No Man’s Sky planet-name generator, which presented a world with a curious name: “Dudenbbeaumodeme.”
“It’s a cold world with infrequent, extreme blizzards that has greenish-gold days and vibrant purple nights,” Steambot said. “You’ll find tall mountains, deep, water-filled canyons as well as large snow-capped forests in shallow valleys.”
In terms of creatures, Steambot said that “fourteen foot tall deer-like creatures wander the land and large shark-like creatures prowl the waters.”
Steambot landed on Dudenbbeaumodeme and then just started walking in a single set direction. The plan was to keep walking forward until he circled back to his ship, no matter how long it took. To help himself out, he was going to make use of the jetpack trick, which allows players to glide across the landscape quicker than they would on foot.
“My favourite moment was the very beginning: landing on a random planet and just walking away, not knowing how long it would be before I saw my ship again,” Steambot said. “It was a palpable sense of stepping into the unknown that I hadn’t gotten from the game until that point.”
Four hours in, the scope of Steambot’s ambition actually started to sink in.
“I may have bitten off more than I can chew folks, Steambot wrote on Reddit. “I’m currently 4 hours from my ship and really have no idea how much further I have to go.” Fortunately, at that time Steambot still hadn’t 100% all of the creatures on the planet, so there were still things that could theoretically keep his mind occupied. Things were getting tedious, but not unbearable.
It also helped that Steambot was telling people about his adventures on social media, where folks could chime in with encouraging messages. Crucially, some players offered not only tips to make everything more bearable, but potential songs to listen to while on his expedition.
It almost wasn’t enough, as Steambot chronicled online:
I really wanted to quit tonight. It all started when somebody posted a video of themselves flying their starship through a canyon earlier today. I couldn’t get that image out of my head as I loaded up the game and started walking. I missed my ship so bad. I missed it like an ex-girlfriend.
Then I came across a language stone. The word was ‘leave’. I kid you not.
Worse, Steambot kept being reminded of how easy it would be to just leave — build a bypass chip, rev the engines up, and get the hell out of dodge. But he kept going anyway, out of a sense of duty to players who had been following his pursuit with great interest.
Ten hours in, things picked up a little more. He started naming creatures — some of which would attack him on sight. More importantly, Steambot afforded himself the luxury of exploring more of what he came across, just as a distraction.
“It’s so hard to resist exploring some of these caves I come across,” Steambot recounted. “Even though I know exactly what I’ll find they’re just so damn mysterious.”
The second wind was somewhat short-lived, because a couple of hours later, Steambot was back to feeling a profound alienation. Landmarks that he came to count on, like planets in the distant sky, were no longer providing the comfort they once did.
“The worst moment was when the three other planets of what I had named ‘The Pilgrim Star’ disappeared over the horizon,” Steambot told me. “For the first several hours they hung in the sky and provided a constant landmark in addition to giving a sense of how far I had travelled. When they were gone, I felt rudderless.”
Things only got worse from there. For the first time, No Man’s Sky crashed on him, stealing even more momentum away from Steambot. He also started losing a sense of where he was, and where he was headed. Waypoints around him seemed to fluctuate in location. Steambot was basically experiencing the closest thing a video game has to space madness.
“I feel hopelessly lost out there in the dark…I yearn to stand on a different planet and look at a different sky,” Steambot wrote.
So he took a few days off, tried to recharge the proverbial warp drive. It helped, and he came back re-energised to take on the ill-advised challenge. Even so, he knew that he still had a huge problem on his hands.
“For this entire journey a single issue has vexed me more than any other: how do I travel a straight line without a compass or a waypoint in front of me?” Steambot mused. He decided that, in order to simplify things, he was going to start following the direction of the sun.
The other big worry at that juncture was the rumours of a huge glitch that had plagued other players. According to reports online, when players reached the halfway point of planet exploration, the game would erect an invisible wall that could not be breached, therefore making it impossible to walk around a planet:
This knowledge scared Steambot. Had he come this far just to be defeated by some random bullshit? Was his tenacity and dedication all for nothing?
Fortunately, Steambot didn’t get hit by the bug that was making the rounds across the No Man’s Sky community. As of a few days ago, a few dozen hours into his trip, Steambot managed to cross the halfway mark:
As of this writing, Steambot’s not sure how much farther he has to go, nor is he 100% certain that he’s heading in the right direction. Even so, he’s not planning on stopping anytime soon — not until he finally sees his ship again, anyway. And when he does? He says he’ll just keep playing. This whole debacle somehow hasn’t soured him on No Man’s Sky, if anything, his experience just makes him eager to see more.
“There’s still so much to explore and cool new things are still getting discovered every day,” Steambot said. “I’d like to start working on the portal mystery too.”
“No Man’s Sky is one of the most interesting, if divisive, pieces of software ever made,” Steambot continued. “I’m obsessed with it. I recognise that it has it’s flaws but I frankly don’t care. It gives me a spaceship, a laser gun, and a practically infinite universe to explore and that’s just the game as it is now. It’s the kind of game I’ve always wanted to play.”
Comments
23 responses to “One Man’s Maddening Quest To Walk Across An Entire No Man’s Sky Planet”
Good to see people are getting their moneys worth…..and everyone elses.
You can also still get a refund.
Don’t let people make you feel bad, if you have a reason you feel is legitimate, make your voice heard.
(Legitimate people…..)
Got plenty of legitimate serious criticisms. Here’s one which may be the cause of most of them: the release was probably rushed which is why half of the stuff was missing. It was released just before Hello Games’ tax year was up. There was probably some financial pressure to show some profit that financial year.
Maybe it would have been better to decide how to keep track of direction before setting out…
Yes, I would of thought following the suns was obvious.
I haven’t played the game so sorry for asking a dumb question – why no compass or way to determine the direction you are heading?
there is, unfortunately, no compass in the game. or planetary maps. or anything that could help with pinpointing the direction he would need to go in. irritating design decision #372
Theres a compass, and if some landmark is in the forward arc it pops up on that compass. Problem with your ship will be that its behind you, so it wont appear in that arc until the forward direction is closer than reversing.
The compass has no NSEW markers though, making it hard to head in a specific direction like north south east west.
Not having personally been on another planet, I can only imagine that the magnetic poles a compass is based on would vary quite rapidly from one planet to the next, making a true north reference hard to be confident on.
Oops, replyfail. Pardon.
“As of this writing, Steambot’s not sure how much farther he has to go, nor is he 100% certain that he’s heading in the right direction. ”
At the time of PUBLISHING on the AU kotaku site: he finished ages ago.
Guys, check for updates before reposting weekend stuff from overseas on monday. You missed out on your own story for just 5 minutes of scanning reddit.
hahaha brilliant
Such a satisfying comment to read LOL
its always great to see someone create their own fun from games, while others are complaining there is nothing to do. I was actually wondering if the planets were all fully ‘made’ as a sphere or were they a continuous/endless flat plain. at what point were they ‘generated’
I really want to find an ultra-tiny ‘planet’ or moon, whatever, so I can test that generation theory. Is it possible to map out a planet in its entirety, discovering and mapping ALL nodes? Could you create an actual MAP of the planet? Or will it re-generate new terrain that’s pretty close to what you saw, but not quite, when you leave then return? Are all the nodes for outposts/monoliths/etc fixed, and when you scan for them with a beacon is it simply showing you things that are already there and waiting to be discovered? Or does a beacon scan cause that node to pop into existence?
This is actually what i was thinking. The Planets are not sphere’s at all. It’s just endless generation on a flat plain. Hoping to be proven wrong.
I had some weird day night effects while grinding out the extreme survival achievement. The sun stayed near the horizon and I was getting a night radiation warning while it was still light. So they might actually be a spherical projection. But they are probably just a square map that wraps north-south and east-west. The complete absence of any sort of map or user generated waypoints makes me think they are trying to hide a square map.
From the tech video, the planets are cubes projected into spheres. Cubes because of the initial planetary voxel generation.
-M
Planet-generation was one of the big let-downs for me, with No Man’s Sky.
The fact that it was all being generated on the fly, popping-in in front of my eyes on the PS4 with its god-awful visible generation, really highlighted how utterly random and meaningless it was.
The worst part was probably the fact that there was no variety on each planet, at all. Just a uniform biome, everywhere you went. This is the green acid planet. This is the blue ice planet. This is the barren rocky purple planet. This is the barren rocky red planet. This is the barren rocky green planet. This is the barren rocky brown planet. This is the other slightly different barren rocky brown planet. This is the utterly indistinguishable from the last ten barren rocky palette-swapped planets planet.
It was depressing as fuck, the illusion just shattered. Building placements weren’t telling any kind of story – an outpost wasn’t located next to a lake because there was anything special about the lake, or any kind of need for access to water… it was put there because the algorithm randomly dotted outposts all over the place, and here’s where this one landed, clipping poorly with the nearby terrain.
Not once did I encounter any planet’s version of Everest, or any planet’s Grand Canyon. Not once did I discover any planet’s unique Gobi Desert or Amazon River. Just the same terrain, copy-pasted with minor tweaks, as far as the eye can see, as far as the ship can fly. Uniform. Indistinct. Random. Boring.
Couldn’t agree more. At least give me a mountain that reaches above the clouds or something. Instead we get this rehashed landscape generator that on the first view of entering the atmosphere you will know exactly how the rest of the planet will look like. As an “exploration” game, it annoys the hell out of me, that you can pretty much ascertain the lands makeup just from a glance because the algorithm itself is pitiful.
I’ve got a beast of a PC, no matter what i did I was getting horrendous pop in when flying.
Buildings arent even randomly sprinkled, they are evenly sprinkled. Found a few big hills, and found some exposed bedrock in places. but very samey, like the same square kilometre the same everywhere, but cleverly not tiled. It desperately needed another layer of variation or density over the top.
This makes me wonder… wouldn’t it have been a better game if they made the universe significantly /less/ vast but every planet more interesting? It would be like a Terraria where worlds are connected and you’d have the real choice between jumping planets and exploring or making homes in a few planets and completely exploring/settling/mine them.
I feel that if mankind spent its time productively instead of on time-wasters like this, we’d be walking on actual alien planets.
Yeah, but we would need those who hold the purse strings to see it as a good idea, instead of only having a small bit sent NASA’s way…
For example:
“The Obama Administration has announced its new Federal budget and is proposing to cut NASA’s Fiscal Year 2017 Budget to $19 billion by carving away significant funding for deep space exploration, whereas the overall US Federal budget actually increases to over $4.1 trillion.”
http://www.universetoday.com/127309/nasa-2017-budget/
So, until actually having those in charge see exploration of space as a valid thing to spend money on… well, we’re screwed.
-M
Not only what mitharus said, but not everyone who longs to explore space and walk on alien planets will not be suited to it. The best they’ll be able to contribute towards the goal is to work really hard towards improving GDP and voting so that political and economic resources are devoted to making the goal of space exploration happen.
Work hard and vote and maybe one day someone ELSE will walk on alien planets! MUCH better than living it virtually yourself for entertainment.
This game could be more fun with some kind of building engine like fallout 4,so it would be the wasteland of the sky!