I spent the holidays running all five of the expeditions that Hello Games brought back for No Man’s Sky, ending up with the lesson that, despite any bitching I do about some of the tasks required, I am drawn to the structure and guided experience that an expedition brings.

So when I get back from an expedition… I feel the absence of a list of things to do.

That isn’t exactly true.  There are a lot of things to do, and there are any number of goals I could set off in pursuit of.  I am more at a loss of which direction to go.  In a sandbox game like NMS, figuring out your objective is as important as anything else.

Do I want to build a base?  Expand my settlement?  Upgrade my freighter?  Farm?  Explore?  Chase milestones?  Work on my standings with the three races or with the four factions?  Work on the three primary quests?  Work on the dozen secondary quests?

And key to picking that is figuring out which of the above I can make some tangible progress with.

For example, Potshot and I spent some time searching for a paradise planet on which we could experiment with base building.  And we found such a planet and spent some time working on it, only to deal mostly with the quirks and bugs of how bases work in the game.

I’ve been trying to make this work… and it has been difficult

After some builds and rebuilds and learning that flattening some land to build on was a mistake because it will randomly return to its original state.  After a week or so of fiddling with that I had something like the basics of a base, but was tired out on the whole thing.  Also, I remain annoyed that there are no landing pads that will accommodate a corvette.

This is why I am hoping for a big base building revamp expansion, but we’ll see.

At one point I decided to chase some of the remaining Steam achievements I had left.  There were four remaining, two related to extreme survival and two related to reaching the center of the galaxy.

I spent a bit of time each evening jumping down the path laid out to the center of the galaxy, but that started to feel like a fool’s errand, that just traveling by ship jumps was going to take me well beyond my patience for such a task.

The primary missions… I hope on them every so often.

The big three quests

But those too seem… a bit repetitive.  I spent some time on The Atlas Path this past weekend, which basically added up to following a slightly different path through the galaxy in order to find a series of Atlas Stations where you can dock up, learn a few words, get some minor insight, then get sent along to find the next one.

My character may dream in Atlas, but I do not

Cool look, the whole Atlas thing… but I am inevitably distracted by… just about anything.  I find a planet type I haven’t seen before or I feel the need to stop and check in at every station to talk to the locals.  That gets me a bit further along in all of those milestone.  Granted, I am already exalted, or whatever the final rank is, with each of the primary lifeforms.

Standings with the Gek

There are still some things to wrap up with the Gek, for example.  Nothing that grants me anything special, but I think we’re all aware that, given the right circumstances, I’ll working on making the numbers go up just to see the numbers go up.  Better go smuggle a bit more.

I am likewise set with the Korvax and the Vy’keen, as well as two of the four factions.  I need to work on the Explorer’s Guild.

Explorer’s Guild Stats

I am the furthest behind with the Outlaws… and even with them I am pretty far along considering that Outlaw systems are not as common.

The Outlaws

I can probably knock those out with some effort… should I choose to apply it.  We shall see.  The one things I did lock on to a bit over the last week was one of the extreme survival milestones.  All I had to do was get to “Robust” and I would get one of those four missing Steam achievements.

In my wanderings I found a scorched planet that offered exactly the right setting.  The temp was hot enough day and night to keep the timer counting up and there were plenty of storms so I could spend some time running around harvesting storm crystals, which is one of the things you can turn into the Explorer’s League to raise your ranking, as well as plenty of phosphorous deposits to mine in order to keep my extra heat resist shielding topped up.

It is hot out tonight!

So the timer slowly moved towards my goal.

Almost to Robust!

The “minutes” are in game minutes, which equal one second.  Also, I was going from the previous milestone, at around 18K minutes, so I didn’t spend 450 hours on the planet in order to get the achievement.

Robust at last

Still, the seconds ass up.  The final achievement on the Extreme Survival path will require another 4.5 hours of hanging out in hostile weather.  I like the game, but I am going to have to take that in smaller bites.  I can only harvest so many storm crystals before the game gets a little tiring.

So I carry on.  As noted, there are a lot of things to do in NMS, but I do sometimes need a goal to drive me in order to get me to log in.

But we should be getting another expedition… soon-ish?  We shall see.