gemini://dungeonhack.net/nomanssky.gmi

I've been playing a lot of No Man's Sky lately. It tends to go in waves - I'll play a lot of it for a short period of time, then I'll stop playing for months or even years. Then the cycle repeats.

This time, I'm doing a lot more combat than I used to and not because I seek it out. The recent pirate expansion has increased the number and strength of pirate ships attacking me in space. The addition of a hotkey to automatically follow an enemy has made this a lot less annoying than before - combat is really easy in No Man's Sky, so having a feature to make it take less time is very welcome. Also, I had to do a quest chain that culminated in me fighting a very large army of Sentinels at one of my bases. That was harder, and I almost died a couple times trying to kill the swarm while also whittling away at very large mecha. That this was essentially a required quest in order to unlock certain (non-combat) features of my base was irritating, but eh, it was a one-time deal.

With the help of the Internet, I discovered a couple tricks to getting resources. The first is that you can multiply your carbon pretty easily and make a ton of money off of it. You'll need a medium or large refiner, and a lot of oxygen. Then you just refine the carbon with the oxygen, and refine the result with the oxygen too, and just keep doing that until you have a ridiculous amount of carbon products. A quick way to get oxygen is to just buy it off of pilots in space station landing bays. The other trick is getting large quantities of other resources by equipping your ship with a positron ejector and then blasting the bejeesus out of the terrain at slow speed and low altitude. You'll get thousands of units of ferrite dust and other things this way.

I discovered a perfect paradise planet. No inclement weather, no Sentinels, no hostile wildlife, a beautiful blue sky with two suns and a ringed planet off in the distance, and a generally lovely aesthetic. I named it Asgard, even if that's rather tired at this point. I'm working on building my largest base there now, though my primary base is still on a bit of a hellworld several star systems away.

We'll see how long No Man's Sky keeps my interest. I'm still playing Final Fantasy XIV, and Galactic Civilizations IV launched a couple days ago, so that also has my attention.