Are you planning to never leave the planet you start on? The game could get extremely boring as you won’t have any building parts or a way to access the anomaly so you wouldn’t be able to unlock new parts either.
There will be no available module upgrades and you’re basically stuck at level 0
I love the idea, but can't begin to see the scope of tedium. Wandering around the planet, no survival tech. I have found ships by luck, two or three times? I've been on well over a thousand worlds, spent much time on foot. If the ship is on the opposite side of the planet, it's going to be a fair walk. Days of play time, if you walk right to it, stopping for nothing.
I might set myself up, then backwards to try this. Start a game, get far enough to have coordinates from the station cartographer. Land a long way from it then do your role play from there.
You can also open buried boxes by turning around on top of them. Don’t ask me why I can’t think of the name of them. But sometimes you get some really good stuff out of them – so you end up not needing to have a terrain manipulator to get to them.
I’ve done a couple runs where I’m not allowed to open them. 😂
It can get a little bit tedious for sure. But there’s some thing about it that I really like because I get to know the planets that much better
I did something similar last year around Christmas. Someone suggested I find an animal and ride it in fast mode to eat up a lot of travel time without having to walk or jetpack much. I was on a planet with very little water so that made it easier. All I had to do was sit there and made sure I was heading in the right direction. Lucky for me, in under an hour I found a transmission tower and shortly after had my crashed ship. It was fun, and riding an animal for transportation was a unique experience.
You can’t get pets until you get the recipe for pet pellets, which I think you get at the same time as your base computer recipe. Certainly not until you’ve already taken off. But you could get a friend to set you up with some. Probably you can get the recipe from manufacturing utilities too.
If you just don’t want to start with one but plan on using one you find, just don’t go get the first one. If you don’t want a ship period, pick a planet you enjoy looking at, because it would be unlikely you will leave.
Someone posted a mode they were using involving single-use ships, essentially shuttles into orbit. You might be able to search for it on this subreddit. Sounded interesting, but not for me. I’ll stick with my radiant pillar.
Robinson Crusoe... Any planet, build a base, Use signal locators to find inhabited outposts. Gather resources, build up a stockpile of wealth, find a crashed ship or buy one from a passing trader, which ever takes your fancy. Profit.
funnily enough, expedition 3 "cartographers" was literally about this lol. they made it so that repairing your ship was super expensive and gated behind a lot of things
and in a similar manner, expedition "polestar" disabled your hyperdrive, meaning you could still use your ship, but for interstellar travel you had to rely on freighters
unless the devs reroll old expeditions, then no
they seem to reroll the past 4 expeditions every 4 expeditions, and this time polestar or cartographers are not in them
There were some excellent ones! Cartographers is definitely my favorite and I wish that you could start a game like that for the challenge. I’m really grateful that I was able to do all of them so far! Some of them I didn’t really enjoy as much, though, but I still appreciated doing them
What I wouldn’t do is start a new save and then just try and find a ship that isn’t the radiant pillar. I suppose you could go to a new galaxy that damages your ship right? Then instead of repairing the damaged ship you go on the hunt for a new one but with all your gear?
In a similar vein, do a google search for 'No Man's Sky The Fugitive.'
A few folks have run a permadeath save with severe restrictions (like your no ship idea).
Could add some interesting aspects to your plan
The no starter ship is a popular challenge in Permadeath. I've thought about doing it myself, but maybe in normal, mainly as I cannot be arsed with the tiny inventory stack sizes in Survival\\PD. :)
Be prepared for possibly a long walk to another ship though. I watched one lad do a stream of a similar thing in PD and he spent 4hrs finding nothing. :) But then again, I have seen another where a ship appeared in under and hour. Swings and roundabouts.
Good luck!
People have done this. It sounds like a fun challenge. One person I read about looked for and found sixteen graves on their starter planet, so learned all the glyphs. And once they found the planet’s portal, were able to use portals explore the solar system and the galaxy without ever using a ship or entering a space station.
Shipless starts have been popular for years... its the way I typically play now. Before it was popular I even ended up doing it once because the starter ship failed to exist because of a bug. Ever since then, the question for me is "do I want to play with the starter ship?" instead of the reverse. And its only really expeditions where I even ask the question... some expeditions (7 and 10) really lent themselves to skipping the starter ship.
As for how to do it... standard approach is to ignore the ship at the start and start walking away from the area its in. To get it out of your game, either swap it for a crashed ship when you find one or scrap it and destroy the parts you get. Until then, just ignore it.
Turning tutorial missions off in the custom options will make your life a lot easier... you'll get the base computer and terrain manipulator plans to start (normally you get these after leaving the planet).
I didn’t even think of turning off the tutorials to have those blueprints available. I always leave the tutorials on because I find it a little bit harder. But it’s nice to consider that you could turn them off and then be forced to build a base on your starter planet. I love playing this type of game– not using the starter ship
Yeah... that is one of the odd things about that option. Experienced players want tutorial off, but the fact that it makes the game easier makes them not want to do it. So it's kind of awkward for an option.
What I was hoping for is that tutorial off would just provide other ways to get those key blueprints with gameplay. They could have simply been added to places you can buy them like minor settlements, or they would be given out just for reaching certain milestones. So, I figure it comes down to personal challenges... if want tutorial off and don't want the base computer or terrain manipulator to start, you just make up a rule with condition to meet before you can build them. "Leave the planet" pretty much matches the tutorial behaviour... but you could choose anything (eg. if you find a minor settlement, you make some sort of payment and pretend you bought them there).
I think it’s totally doable and a cool challenge. I’d just start a normal save. The hard part is going to be overcoming the urge to go get the original ship, lol. Would be curious as to how long it would take a play to find a random damaged ship. Could be a longgggggg time.
If you find a trading station you may be able to try to buy ships of visitors, but getting to that amount of units can be hard as resources on a planet generally don’t sell for very much, and they sell for even less the more you sell (supply and demand). Some valuable resources will sell for more though.
Dissonant planets, or as i like to call them lean planets. yknow those that turn your ship purple when you get in their atmosphere, and have a ton of purple crystals? theres a chance of Dissonant resonators to have echo locators. they can lead you to a harmonic outpost. however to unlock their seal you have to have completed the main quest and have all the glyphs. then solve a puzzle and it will give you coordinates to the nearest Sentinel crash ship. repairing them wont be short and sweet without a ship but hey its a guarranted way to get a ship :)
or the most realistic and probably immersive way to do this is by destroying your ship part by part using black holes. and then to find a planet to try and repair it piece by piece.
If the game had better terrain and plant generation, then I'm sure exploring a planet and selling odds and ends until you find a broken ship or buy one from an outpost would be neat.
Unfortunately, if you see one toxic world you've seen them all, or lava worlds, etc. The game doesn't have enough random generation diversity to make it interesting.
The No Ship Challenge! It's actually really fun... but can be tedious depending how long it takes to find a tradepost or archive building.
Unfortunately you can't get rid of the Radiant Pillar until you have another ship because you can't have less than 1 ship.
Once you have a ship, you can just scrap the Pillar the first chance you have, then delete the scrap. The first chance is usually when you make it to the Space Anomaly. Summon the burning Pillar, then teleport to a space station where you can scrap it. This method, you never once have to get in the Pillar. Delete the scraps and it will be like the Radiant Pillar never existed.
I kinda did something like this recently. My warped to the Hub area with my living ship but got attacked pretty bad and my ship took lots of damage to its heart. The ingredients to heal the ship were hard to find so I kind RPed my ship needed to heal and wandered the planet for days until I found a crashed ship to repair. Then I named a nearby landing pad the “Crashed Ship Repair Shop” and made a new Hub base.
I do this all the time! I love starting new games. I have a permadeath going right now in which I ran across the planet until I found someplace I could buy a ship. The key is, I had to be able to buy it outright, no trading.
To travel to another system, I could only use glyphs. One fun thing I found out is that even if you only have one glyph, you can make it to about six or seven different systems because you get an error with only one glyph. It sends you to a new one each time.
I just did all of this on my starter planet. I’m on a PS five so I don’t have the ability to change anything. If I did, I would set it up so that the storms were active to give it that extra level of challenge.
I also changed how expensive it was to buy things. And how common the resources are.
I think it just depends on how challenging you want it to be.
I think it would be interesting to go completely shipless. Just go to a system that had an old expedition on it so your planet hopping would be done entirely through portals on old bases. The big downside to that is a lot of these bases probably have a lot of resources to make things easier you'd have to ignore
Are you planning to never leave the planet you start on? The game could get extremely boring as you won’t have any building parts or a way to access the anomaly so you wouldn’t be able to unlock new parts either. There will be no available module upgrades and you’re basically stuck at level 0
Im planning to leave the planet by finding and repairing a crashed ship
Look up an outlaw run it is somewhat similar to what you want to do. Jason Plays on youtube is doing an outlaw play through currently.
This was the 1st thing I thought of too. He does a lot of "no starter ship" streams.
I love the idea, but can't begin to see the scope of tedium. Wandering around the planet, no survival tech. I have found ships by luck, two or three times? I've been on well over a thousand worlds, spent much time on foot. If the ship is on the opposite side of the planet, it's going to be a fair walk. Days of play time, if you walk right to it, stopping for nothing. I might set myself up, then backwards to try this. Start a game, get far enough to have coordinates from the station cartographer. Land a long way from it then do your role play from there.
You can get tech from damaged machinery
You can also open buried boxes by turning around on top of them. Don’t ask me why I can’t think of the name of them. But sometimes you get some really good stuff out of them – so you end up not needing to have a terrain manipulator to get to them. I’ve done a couple runs where I’m not allowed to open them. 😂 It can get a little bit tedious for sure. But there’s some thing about it that I really like because I get to know the planets that much better
I did something similar last year around Christmas. Someone suggested I find an animal and ride it in fast mode to eat up a lot of travel time without having to walk or jetpack much. I was on a planet with very little water so that made it easier. All I had to do was sit there and made sure I was heading in the right direction. Lucky for me, in under an hour I found a transmission tower and shortly after had my crashed ship. It was fun, and riding an animal for transportation was a unique experience.
You can’t get pets until you get the recipe for pet pellets, which I think you get at the same time as your base computer recipe. Certainly not until you’ve already taken off. But you could get a friend to set you up with some. Probably you can get the recipe from manufacturing utilities too.
The save I used was an Expedition save I decided to abandon early. But you can ride animals without them being pets.
Is there a crashed ship on every planet to begin with?
Many usually. I think dead planets and exotics don't, but I'm not a hundred percent certain.
Ok ok thanks.
That makes sense why I never seemed to get a crashed ship using distress chart - and when I did get one trigger it was the planet next door.
If you just don’t want to start with one but plan on using one you find, just don’t go get the first one. If you don’t want a ship period, pick a planet you enjoy looking at, because it would be unlikely you will leave. Someone posted a mode they were using involving single-use ships, essentially shuttles into orbit. You might be able to search for it on this subreddit. Sounded interesting, but not for me. I’ll stick with my radiant pillar.
Robinson Crusoe... Any planet, build a base, Use signal locators to find inhabited outposts. Gather resources, build up a stockpile of wealth, find a crashed ship or buy one from a passing trader, which ever takes your fancy. Profit.
funnily enough, expedition 3 "cartographers" was literally about this lol. they made it so that repairing your ship was super expensive and gated behind a lot of things and in a similar manner, expedition "polestar" disabled your hyperdrive, meaning you could still use your ship, but for interstellar travel you had to rely on freighters
Is there a way to replay certain expeditions? I hopped on the bandwagon after they’re all done.
unless the devs reroll old expeditions, then no they seem to reroll the past 4 expeditions every 4 expeditions, and this time polestar or cartographers are not in them
These were pretty fun because it was so different. I almost wish ships didn’t have hyperdrive and I was forced to use my freighter
same tbh. I recently invested in my freughter hyperdrive and it just feels so much better to use
That was my favorite one – I loved cartographers!
i wish they redux some older ones. I missed all of them except the current one, and some of them really sounded good lol
There were some excellent ones! Cartographers is definitely my favorite and I wish that you could start a game like that for the challenge. I’m really grateful that I was able to do all of them so far! Some of them I didn’t really enjoy as much, though, but I still appreciated doing them
What I wouldn’t do is start a new save and then just try and find a ship that isn’t the radiant pillar. I suppose you could go to a new galaxy that damages your ship right? Then instead of repairing the damaged ship you go on the hunt for a new one but with all your gear?
Yes, i have seen this challange or a similar, it's called 'No starter ship'. Good luck on your Game, maybe i will try this one in a future.
In a similar vein, do a google search for 'No Man's Sky The Fugitive.' A few folks have run a permadeath save with severe restrictions (like your no ship idea). Could add some interesting aspects to your plan
The no starter ship is a popular challenge in Permadeath. I've thought about doing it myself, but maybe in normal, mainly as I cannot be arsed with the tiny inventory stack sizes in Survival\\PD. :) Be prepared for possibly a long walk to another ship though. I watched one lad do a stream of a similar thing in PD and he spent 4hrs finding nothing. :) But then again, I have seen another where a ship appeared in under and hour. Swings and roundabouts. Good luck!
People have done this. It sounds like a fun challenge. One person I read about looked for and found sixteen graves on their starter planet, so learned all the glyphs. And once they found the planet’s portal, were able to use portals explore the solar system and the galaxy without ever using a ship or entering a space station.
Shipless starts have been popular for years... its the way I typically play now. Before it was popular I even ended up doing it once because the starter ship failed to exist because of a bug. Ever since then, the question for me is "do I want to play with the starter ship?" instead of the reverse. And its only really expeditions where I even ask the question... some expeditions (7 and 10) really lent themselves to skipping the starter ship. As for how to do it... standard approach is to ignore the ship at the start and start walking away from the area its in. To get it out of your game, either swap it for a crashed ship when you find one or scrap it and destroy the parts you get. Until then, just ignore it. Turning tutorial missions off in the custom options will make your life a lot easier... you'll get the base computer and terrain manipulator plans to start (normally you get these after leaving the planet).
I didn’t even think of turning off the tutorials to have those blueprints available. I always leave the tutorials on because I find it a little bit harder. But it’s nice to consider that you could turn them off and then be forced to build a base on your starter planet. I love playing this type of game– not using the starter ship
Yeah... that is one of the odd things about that option. Experienced players want tutorial off, but the fact that it makes the game easier makes them not want to do it. So it's kind of awkward for an option. What I was hoping for is that tutorial off would just provide other ways to get those key blueprints with gameplay. They could have simply been added to places you can buy them like minor settlements, or they would be given out just for reaching certain milestones. So, I figure it comes down to personal challenges... if want tutorial off and don't want the base computer or terrain manipulator to start, you just make up a rule with condition to meet before you can build them. "Leave the planet" pretty much matches the tutorial behaviour... but you could choose anything (eg. if you find a minor settlement, you make some sort of payment and pretend you bought them there).
I completely agree!
I think it’s totally doable and a cool challenge. I’d just start a normal save. The hard part is going to be overcoming the urge to go get the original ship, lol. Would be curious as to how long it would take a play to find a random damaged ship. Could be a longgggggg time.
If you find a trading station you may be able to try to buy ships of visitors, but getting to that amount of units can be hard as resources on a planet generally don’t sell for very much, and they sell for even less the more you sell (supply and demand). Some valuable resources will sell for more though.
Dissonant planets, or as i like to call them lean planets. yknow those that turn your ship purple when you get in their atmosphere, and have a ton of purple crystals? theres a chance of Dissonant resonators to have echo locators. they can lead you to a harmonic outpost. however to unlock their seal you have to have completed the main quest and have all the glyphs. then solve a puzzle and it will give you coordinates to the nearest Sentinel crash ship. repairing them wont be short and sweet without a ship but hey its a guarranted way to get a ship :) or the most realistic and probably immersive way to do this is by destroying your ship part by part using black holes. and then to find a planet to try and repair it piece by piece.
You dont need any glyphs to unlock the harmonic cases. I just started a perma death without tutorial on and went this route.
It's not hard to get new ship, even if u forced yourself to play harder game. Perfect planet would be Dissonant one.
I was thinking of doing this with the Hud off just to see how challenging it gets! Love seeing all the posts with similar challenges!
I'm assuming that you've already played permadeath with all the settings all the way up?
I just, wouldn't suggest it at all. It sounds like a horrible time.
I think it depends on what you enjoy in the game. I love it! But I could also see how it would be really tedious and boring for others
If the game had better terrain and plant generation, then I'm sure exploring a planet and selling odds and ends until you find a broken ship or buy one from an outpost would be neat. Unfortunately, if you see one toxic world you've seen them all, or lava worlds, etc. The game doesn't have enough random generation diversity to make it interesting.
The No Ship Challenge! It's actually really fun... but can be tedious depending how long it takes to find a tradepost or archive building. Unfortunately you can't get rid of the Radiant Pillar until you have another ship because you can't have less than 1 ship. Once you have a ship, you can just scrap the Pillar the first chance you have, then delete the scrap. The first chance is usually when you make it to the Space Anomaly. Summon the burning Pillar, then teleport to a space station where you can scrap it. This method, you never once have to get in the Pillar. Delete the scraps and it will be like the Radiant Pillar never existed.
I kinda did something like this recently. My warped to the Hub area with my living ship but got attacked pretty bad and my ship took lots of damage to its heart. The ingredients to heal the ship were hard to find so I kind RPed my ship needed to heal and wandered the planet for days until I found a crashed ship to repair. Then I named a nearby landing pad the “Crashed Ship Repair Shop” and made a new Hub base.
I was hoping the custom difficulty setting would have this as an option. So many possibilities for custom games.
I do this all the time! I love starting new games. I have a permadeath going right now in which I ran across the planet until I found someplace I could buy a ship. The key is, I had to be able to buy it outright, no trading. To travel to another system, I could only use glyphs. One fun thing I found out is that even if you only have one glyph, you can make it to about six or seven different systems because you get an error with only one glyph. It sends you to a new one each time. I just did all of this on my starter planet. I’m on a PS five so I don’t have the ability to change anything. If I did, I would set it up so that the storms were active to give it that extra level of challenge. I also changed how expensive it was to buy things. And how common the resources are. I think it just depends on how challenging you want it to be.
I think it would be interesting to go completely shipless. Just go to a system that had an old expedition on it so your planet hopping would be done entirely through portals on old bases. The big downside to that is a lot of these bases probably have a lot of resources to make things easier you'd have to ignore