Jeff Cork - Limitless Sky: No Mans Sky Unofficial Discovery Guide

Contents

Introduction

Welcome, traveler. Youre about to embark on a journey unlike any other.

Ahead, youll find planets to discover and explore, teeming with life and artifacts from those who have come before you. You could spend years fully charting a planets surface, naming your discoveries for those who come after you, and mining the world for valuable resources.

But thats just the beginning.

Hop into your spacecraft and you can soar beyond the stars, setting a course for the complete unknown as you inch your way toward the center of the galaxy. How long that journey takes is completely up to you. Between you and that goal are quadrillions of unique planets, loaded with unpredictable creatures and breathtaking vistas.

Fully discovering everything there is to see in No Mans Sky is an impossible task, even if you tap into the collective hive-mind of every player who experiences this incredibly ambitious game. This guide wont even attempt to fully chart one of the games 18 quintillion planets. Instead, it will provide you with everything you need to know to embark on your own unique journey.

Do you plan on living your virtual life as a peaceful explorer, leaving minimal footprints on each planet you visit while adding to the collective knowledge base? Would you rather find your fortune (and infamy) blasting apart trade vessels and avoiding the authorities as a space pirate? Or perhaps youd like to learn the secrets of the universe by cooperating with alien cultures?

No Mans Sky can be overwhelming by design, but dont let its scale paralyze you. Regardless of how you choose to play, well give you the foundation you need to tackle the universe on your own terms. Whether youre looking for guidance on what minerals and resources are worth your time, how to upgrade your weapons to meet their planet-carving potential, or how to get your hands on a ship that will become the stuff of legend, were here to help.

No Mans Sky will surely be changing over the coming months and years as development continues and updates are released, but lets get started. Weve got a lot of ground to cover, after all.

Note: No Mans Sky is available on the PlayStation 4 and PC, and the two versions are functionally identical. For the sake of this guide, well be referring to the PS4 control scheme. The button mapping will be different on PC, but the references to gameplay and the overall flow are the same on both platforms.

The Origins of No Mans Sky

Looking at No Mans Sky, its easy to assume that its the creation of a massive team of developers, from a studio with a track record of producing massive open-world games. The reality is much differentand far more interesting.

Before it wowed the world with the prospect of discovering an entirely new universe, Hello Games found success in a charming little game about a motorcycle stuntman.

Hello Games was founded in 2009 in Guildford, England. The town, located a quick train ride away from London, is a hotbed of English game development; it has served as home to game studios that have created top-tier titles such as Burnout, LittleBigPlanet, Fable, and many others. After working at a variety of Guildford studios, four developersRyan Doyle, Grant Duncan, Sean Murray, and Dave Reamdecided to break away from larger companies and form their own indie studio.

That studio became Hello Games, and its first title was the PlayStation 3 game Joe Danger. The side-scrolling action game, released in the summer of 2010, featured the titular stuntman in a series of escalating feats of derring-do. Players had to time their motorcycles jumps and calculate their landings to score bigand avoid getting scorched by fiery hoops, devoured by ravenous sharks, or other career-ending failures.

The game was a success, and the small team worked on bringing it to the Xbox 360. They also hired a few more employees and began work on its sequel, Joe Danger 2: The Movie. The follow-up added more variety to the formula, giving Joe more vehicles to choose from and dropping him into a variety of different movie-style action sequences.

Audiences seemed to like Joe Danger and what Hello Games was doing, but Murray, programmer and studio co-founder, was growing restless. He had what he later described as a bit of a breakdown, and worried that the new studio, which he and his friends had founded to express their own creativity, was heading down an all-too familiar path. After Joe Danger 2, what would come next? Joe Danger 3? Joe Danger 4? As much as he loved the little guy, it wasnt a future he was thrilled about.

Murray set up a private office within the studio, and for a year worked on a secret project once his work on Joe Danger 2 was finished. He created another new game engine, but this was far more advanced than the one he had worked on with Joe Danger. Joe Danger gave players the thrill of being a stuntman. This new project would possibly give players an entire universe.

Eventually, Murray took Duncan and Doyle aside and explained what he was working on. Until then, it had been clouded in mystery. For years, Murray had been fascinated with games such as Elite, which let players explore space and forge their own paths. Hed wanted to be an astronaut for a time, and games turned out to be the next best thing. What if he could live that childhood fantasy through his own creation?

The three of them expanded work on the project, which was called Project Skyscraper. Hello Games is a small studio, but that core team wanted to work on this exciting new game in isolation. They took what seems like an extreme measure and set up a studio within the studiocomplete with its own locks and entrance. They decorated this new space with covers of old sci-fi paperbacks, filled with fantastical visions of far-flung planets and alien ships. These would provide inspiration while the team worked on what would become No Mans Sky.

Murray says that its easy to see their isolation as an act of selfishnessespecially when the rest of the team was so desperate to learn what their co-workers were toiling away onbut that it was ultimately one of generosity. The people at Hello Games are more than co-workers; theyre friends. Even now that the team has grown to just over a dozen or so people, its a tight-knit group. Murray wanted the game to be more than just a kernel of an idea before he shared it with them. He wanted to impress them with a clear vision for what, exactly, theyd been working on all this time.