No Man's Sky - Interceptor

[siread]

3 hours ago, Jonzo said:

Every time I go to quit to desktop on PC, my screen goes black and everything becomes completely unresponsive.

 

Anyone else had this issue? Is there a fix. The game itself runs fine.

I thought v1.04 fixed this but if not you can ctrl+alt+Del and go to task manage > processes, right click NMS and 'Bring to front' (I think). 

[robdood]

1 hour ago, Gorf King said:

 

I doubt you're getting 500LY closer to the centre per 'normal' jump. You might jump that far, but not that much closer to the centre. (Similarly, you jump a shitload further than that per black hole, but only a fraction of that distance closer to the centre.) Try it again both ways, noting distance from centre before and after, and let me know. I'd be interested to see if your results differ significantly from mine.

Sure, I'll check! I only checked the last couple of times.. Sure @Captain LeChuck or possibly @Broker noticed a similar thing.

 

Itust be confusing units or bugged or something tho, pretty sure my last jump said I'd travelled something ludicrous like 800,000 LY, but I was only about 4,000 closer to centre.. 

[Gorf King]

Yes, that's what I was saying. The distance you jump doesn't anywhere near equate to how much closer you get to the centre of the galaxy. Obviously you're not jumping in a straight line from your starting point to the centre.

[robdood]

30 minutes ago, Gorf King said:

Yes, that's what I was saying. The distance you jump doesn't anywhere near equate to how much closer you get to the centre of the galaxy. Obviously you're not jumping in a straight line from your starting point to the centre.

Sure, and I'd been more on board if the distance jumped wasn't nearly 4-5 times the distance to the centre, it just seems strange as there's no context for where I am in relation to where I was, if you follow!  

[robdood]

..byh about the same amount as I could by just spending a whole tank of warp fuel..? Considering something always gets damaged it seems more hassle than worth!

[robdood]

*tears hair out*

 

I want to go and test it now but real life interferes. 

[Gorf King]

2 hours ago, Captain LeChuck said:

Also, you don't need to rely on the anomalies to direct you to black holes. As you make your way along the path to you can spot in the galactic map other black holes - the they get highlighted in dark grey. You can warp to those and then venture through the black hole you find there. 

 

As I was saying, I'm not sure if those black holes appear on the default map from the start, or if something triggers them. I didn't notice them all over the place until I'd finished Atlas. 

 

Anyway, I've had one of my most exciting sessions in ages today. I've been sitting in a hole in the ground for the past seven hours, barely moving.

 

Yup, I've been doing the extreme survival milestones. As you may know, this set of milestones, and the trophies that accompany it, aren't cumulative. They used to be, but in the day one patch Hello decided to make this challenge one that you have to accomplish on one single planet, without ever leaving it. In effect, you have to be in 'extreme' conditions, and stay alive - so no deaths at all - and never leave the planet's surface, for 32 sols. That equates, it seems, to roughly 8-9 hours. Now, it's all a bit silly, and probably one of the dullest and most pointless things you can do in a game. But they give you a trophy for it, and here it seems somehow fitting; a kind of grim light relief from the super-long trek to the centre. So - bloody-mindedness and that - this morning I found myself a nice inhospitable planet, landed the ship, and quickly blasted a hole in the ground next to it in which I could hunker down from the elements. (Bizarrely, you can just take shelter in a hole or cave or building - anywhere but your ship - and that counts as long as outside it's 'extreme'. So you only have to worry about topping up your life support once every hour or so.)

 

Obviously I'm not going to stare at a cave wall for eight hours. So I set an hourly timer on my phone, got myself comfy in the hole in the ground on Cayde-45 - extreme low temperature, storms, and high security sentinels raging outside - and switched HDMI inputs to something more entertaining. An hour later, I switched back, topped up my life support, hopped in and out of the ship to save, and dived back down into the hole. I did the same an hour letter, and a hour further on from that.

 

This is how my day went, the slow march of time marked by the odd five minutes when I clocked in early, those idle minutes spent watching the shadows slowly creep across the lip of the hole in the ground. Sometimes it was night, and sometimes it was day. Sometimes there was a storm, sometimes just sun on ice. Occasionally, I saw some flying lizard types arcing slowly across the small patch of sky above. I lazily tried to scan them, but they always evaded me. No matter. I'd scanned enough flying critters to last me a lifetime. 

 

Then one time, I switched back to a PS4 error report. Amazingly, No Man's Sky had crashed while I'd been doing nothing but sitting in a hole in the ground. I'm not quite sure exactly what had taxed its code a little too much this time - perhaps an ant had crawled in beside me and excited the voxels into action in just the wrong order - but whatever it was, it was too much to take. This was about five hours into my vigil, and I was slightly anxious that my last save might not have worked. Rebooting the game, I saw that it had - so although I'd had a setback, things were soon back on course. I left for another hour. Next time I checked in all was well. I saved, topped up my life support, and went down the comfy hole again.

 

Now, the thing about this monitor I'm using... well, it's a monitor, not my main TV. I sometimes use it for games to save the plasma the bother, and sometimes I use it when I'm switching inputs with the computer a lot. And the thing about that is, it's quite slow to react when you press the clunky little buttons underneath the display to cycle through inputs. And the thing about that is, that last time I checked in and all was well, I'd just hunkered down in my hole and pressed the button to switch the input away from the PS4, when suddenly a sentinel appeared in my cave with me. A very hostile sentinel. I had about three seconds before that input actually switched, during which time I emptied as much ammo as possible into it, but it was still very much alive and shooting me in the face when the monitor flickered to the other channel. OH FOR FUCKS SAKE I thought - because the one thing you cannot do in Extreme Survival is Not Survive. You can't die, not once. 

 

'I can't die!' I screamed, and frantically cycled through the ugly, clunky fucking little input buttons on the underside of the wobbling monitor to select HDMI1 again. In the aeon-long wait for it to switch, for me to see whether I'd be looking at a survivor or a corpse, I desperately held down the right trigger, blind-firing for all I was worth, not knowing where I was aiming but simply hoping I'd take the little metal fucker down before it took me. Then the controller rumbled ominously, and became still. 1... 2... and my hole in the ground on a desolate shoreline somewhere on Cayde-45 suddenly reappeared, a sentinel canister lying on the ground in front of me.

 

I immediately dug myself further underground. My hole in the ground has now expanded to become an Al-Qaeda-style network of tunnels that no sentinel would ever dare enter without a substantial invading force behind him. And needless to say, I'm spending the rest of the evening watching myself very carefully down there. Entertainment be damned - I'm not letting this fucking game, this fucking stupid universe, get the better of me, and that's that. Even if I hate myself for doing so and have no fun whatsoever in the process. This isn't that kind of game anyway. This is a unique experience.

 

Wake me up at 9, someone. 

[Theholyhogg]

I still can't find any multi tool inventory upgrades, I'm so confused lol 

[Gorf King]

LOOK AT THE STARS! LOOK AT ALL THEM STARS! I JUST HIT NINE STARS!

 

/goes back into cave, sets alarm

[Pob]

That's a great post Gorf but it also validates my decision to eBay the game and settle down for som Deus Ex tonight!

[TehStu]

I'll never be able to get that trophy, I'm lucky if I string together 9 hours of play over two weeks.

[Cosmic_Guru]

17 minutes ago, Theholyhogg said:

I still can't find any multi tool inventory upgrades, I'm so confused lol 

 

Do you mean tools or upgrades to them?  For upgrades check the stations in each structure - a bit nondescript, boxy even in appearance.  Also given out as rewards by aliens, as are new multitools. Multitools may be purchased from red equipment lockers in outposts and in a-------s. 

[Gorf King]

13 minutes ago, TehStu said:

I'll never be able to get that trophy, I'm lucky if I string trusted together 9 hours of play over two weeks.

 

You don't have to do it one sitting. You could have about eight or nine one-hour sessions, as long as you just did that every time on the same planet. You could even leave your hole in the ground if you don't mind dying, but fuck that! Just don't take off in your ship or it might do that 'oh look, think I'll just fly off into orbit' thing it does, and fuck you hard, cos that's game over mate. I mean, it wouldn't make much of a game, but then *bites knuckles*

[Theholyhogg]

19 minutes ago, Cosmic_Guru said:

 

Do you mean tools or upgrades to them?  For upgrades check the stations in each structure - a bit nondescript, boxy even in appearance.  Also given out as rewards by aliens, as are new multitools. Multitools may be purchased from red equipment lockers in outposts and in a-------s. 

The amount of slots I have, I still have 5 but I need to get some.more so I do some serious mining 

[Cosmic_Guru]

Yep, black holes just see you zapping around the sides of the thing, damaging a bit of gear in your ship each time.  I think if your'e aiming for the centre as your game goal you would be better off leaving them alone and just making a run for it with the Tau (or is there an Omega) drive.

[Gorf King]

No, no, no. Look at LeChuck's figures. You get loads closer to the centre per jump through a black hole than by normal travel.

[Cosmic_Guru]

What's the maximum straight jump with a Tau then?  He did 1.7k in the post above but risks having to repair drives.

[Gorf King]

He provided that figure too. It's less than 160LY in his example. It would take forever to get to the centre like that.

[Cosmic_Guru]

OK, point taken .

[robdood]

Thanks LeChuck!

 

I must have just been a bit more pissed / stoned than I realised  last time I played

 

That's still absurd though, I'm torn between pushing on just because I'm addicted (a dick?) or shelving it for a while until they do some decent content updates... 

[macosx]

Well in the general theme of bloody mindedness that has taken over this thread: 

After the smorgasbord of barren, dull, rocky planets I was served up yesterday. I thought I'd have one more throw of the dice today and try and get that bloody theta warp drive. (I really wanted to see what was in the blue planets!). After an hour I got it and set about amassing the huge amount of materials to install it. This took a few hours. Then it broke flying through a series of black holes as well as the tau! I was determined not to be beaten, fixed them all and set out on the Atlas path which I only picked up recently. I finished it in an hour and a half  

Spoiler

Which after the pitiful resolution was an hour and a half wasted (even after Gorf's warning. Still it was a day for bloodymindedness.

 

After that I'd thought I'd check out some green E class planets , supposedly with the best chance of looking like an E3 trailer. I hit paydirt, found a lush tropical planet filled with Dino's, the big one looked that was on the  Belari V demo planet. Might stay here a bit. 

 

 

[MrCarrot]

So assuming we're all approximately the same distance from the centre as LeChuck, you're looking at approximately 100 black holes to get the 'end'. I think I might pass.

[TehStu]

We never did find someone not in the Euclid galaxy, did we.

[Gorf King]

 

 I think that might be me taking a little break from this game now. Tell us what the centre's like when you get there, LeChuck.

 

(There won't be anything there)

[macosx]

There a story up on kotaku re the pros and cons of the black holes. Their testing says a manually plotted path to the centre using sigma, tau and theta druves is better than stopping to fix your ship.

[Gorf King]

It depends what breaks. LeChuck's evidently been a lot luckier than me with that so far. The big warp enhancers having to be rebuilt is a real pita.

[macosx]

Well I've had to fix a theta today and we are talking 2 multiples of 1000 materials. Once was enough.

[Gorf King]

I have all the drive upgrades, and it doesn't seem to make much difference to the black hole jumps I do.

 

I just did one before switching off tonight. It all seems pretty consistent - I made it 1,626.5LY closer to the centre for that one jump. That's over 10 times the biggest distance I could get just following the 'direct route' using a normal jump. I think it usually works out that way, so although McCarrot's right, and it'd take me about 100 black hole jumps to get to the centre, it'd take well over 1,000 non-black hole ones. And this time I got lucky, and it was only my photon cannon cooling unit that got busted, which I was able to repair immediately with what I already had on me. Just pack out your ship with as many useless modules as you can get I'd say, and go for the black hole route.

 

Not me though. Not tonight. I'm off to play a video game for a while.

[siread]

40 minutes ago, Gorf King said:

Not me though. Not tonight. I'm off to play a video game for a while.

He'll be back tomorrow.

 

I might actually head away from the centre towards the outer edge, which is still a LONG way away. I bet HG fucked up and put all the cool shit there.  

[Gorf King]

Actually, this is bugging me now, like I'm missing something. So I had to go back for a bit.

 

First I went and read a Polygon guide. This one, which says a well-plotted manual route goes as far as a black hole route. Using their optimal method, and ignoring the game's best, most direct route - which unsurprisingly is shit - to do it all manually, I took about five minutes easing in and out of my direct line to the centre, edging up and down a bit, pulling back or sideways when I was told the target system was out of reach of my drive. In this way I carefully selected the system furthest from me that I could jump to. And I jumped. It took me a lot closer than the game-plotted best route. In fact it took me 384.4 LY closer to the centre. 

 

But that's still nowhere near the 1600 LY that Polygon say you can get - which would be roughly equivalent to a black hole jump. And yes, I have I have a Sigma, a Tau, and a Theta, all plugged in together. So what am I missing here?

 

The other thing is, when I made that 384 LY jump, there was a black hole really close to the system I jumped to. A teeny bit closer to me, but not much. That's usually the case more or less anywhere I look, within reason. So if I'd jumped to the black hole system instead, I'd get the 384 (or about 370) LY jump, plus the 1600 jump off the black hole itself. And if I had been able to jump 1600 LY like Kotaku suggested, surely if I'd looked near that system and found a nearby black hole, I'd have got that jump plus the extra 1600 after it from the black hole jump itself.

 

Something to think about... for someone else. I'm definitely off now. Definitely.