There is, no doubt, a lesson to be learned for me from the No Man’s Sky holiday expeditions.

The lesson may be, despite my complaining about some aspects of the five holiday expeditions, all of which I ran, including the two repeats that I had run not too long ago, that I like expeditions.

I suspect that there are a few aspects to this.

Sure, there is the obvious one, the rewards… and I cannot say that I dislike that part of the routine.  But that can’t be all of it.  Or even much of it.  I didn’t even get any special rewards out of the last two repeat expeditions.

Instead I think it is the structure that the expedition brings to a game that can otherwise be a pretty wide-open sandbox.  The sandbox aspect is grand and I have gone off in any number of directions over time… many directions except the center of the galaxy I guess… need to work on that… but sometimes it is nice to have a bit of task driven narrative to ride along with.  Let the game do the work for a bit.

Also, having spent time working on expanding my inventory and collecting a backlog of supplies on my main save, it can be refreshing to start anew for a bit without having to start from scratch.

So off I went into the expedition, trotting over to the first base on the first planet.

Here is where I pick up my ride…

My ship… a tall one this time… was waiting for me, one among a whole pack of vaguely insectoid exploration ships.

Are those wings? Antennae? Signal boosters for the Wi-Fi?

As part of the usual routine, the ship needed repairs, which required chromatic metal.  Fortunately, this time around, I remembered that quartzite can be refined into chromatic metal, something not mentioned in the tool tip that prompts you to get that repair done.

The tool tip remained as uninformative as before and I saw a few posts on Reddit asking how to get chromatic metal when none of the items in the tool tip were available in the first system.

In running around to gather materials, I noticed some oddly named items.

The Mineral “Canonize the RSS Hub”

I had to look up what the RSS HUB was, and I gather it is related to a Spanish speaking in-game group called the Royal Space Society.  When you’re the first to discover something you can rename it, and I gather that an RSS member got in early and started rolling out the propaganda demanding… something.  Being an “official” part of the game I guess.

Anyway, they named a bunch of things.

The plant named “RSS Hub must be canon”

Good luck with that.  Of course, they were not able to be first on everything, and somebody had some thoughts on their effort.

The mineral named, “RSS is the Devil”

Getting past that I managed to repair my ship, make the first jump, and start down the expedition path which quickly has you dropping your shiny new ship for a corvette.  You need it because you have to do a number of space walks.

Outside the corvette, wandering around in space

The story itself… isn’t all that.  It is more a matter of having a list of tasks to finish that I found satisfying.  Also, I am a fan of the corvette and will apparently jump off the back ramp and into a black hole if a tool tip tells me to.

I just need to check it off the list, okay?

Some items on the task list were more enjoyable than others… though even the under water bit, which I found to be a bit of a chore last time around, was smoother now that I had been down that path before.

Into the Nautilon and dive, dive, dive!

There was even a rainbow at the end of that venture.

If you look closely, it is a double rainbow

The one quirk was that, despite the water landing upgrade and a full load of fuel, my corvette obstinately refused to be summoned.  So I had to set sail for a bit to get myself back to my ship… which had also decided to hover 20 feet in the air, so I had to time the jet pack lift off just right to hit the boarding ramp.  But I made it.

Then there was the phase where you hunt things… where the tool tip is still broken, telling you that there are no Hungering Tendrils in the system even as you stand on the planet killing them.

They are literally on this planet, I just killed two!

So some things never change.

But each stage had some more corvette specific activities.

Stepping out in space again

One of the things I did consider when starting this expedition was turning off multiplayer.

Having other players can be a mixed blessing.  At first there is some novelty to it, as rare is the moment when you run into anybody in your main save… or such is the case for me.  But then the game starts to balk at too many players in one location and all the little player and ship location markers and notifications start to overwhelm things.

So it was a bit of a toss up.  In the end I left multiplayer on and it was fine… except for a couple of people who sent invites to group up on random planets.  I am okay with other people around, but I don’t want to… you know… actually interact or anything.

Mostly it was kind of interesting to see what people did with their initial corvette parts and how so many of us opted for the exact same simple design.

At one of the rendezvous with a chip very much like my own in the background

You can see that I added the Atlas shield booster to the top of mine.

And then I reached the end… the last bit being the fishing tasks, which were easy enough.

So it was back to the anomaly to pick what I wanted to carry back and then collect my rewards.

The end of expedition payout

12 million units and 7K nanites isn’t my best haul, but it is a nice little boost at the end of the expedition.

Now I am done and have to wait for whenever the next expedition shows up.  Probably in late February.  That is my guess.

But you too can make it through.  The expedition runs until the 13th, so you have through the weekend to get in and do it.  And, if that Reddit post is to be trusted, you can do the whole thing in two hours if you can follow instructions.

I was never very good at following those kind of instructions.  I am too easily distracted.

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