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Because the game was so Overshadowed by Controversy during its disastrous launch in August 2016, tropes for this era of the game's release were much different than the various free updates Hello Games released in the years since, especially the NEXT release, made live on July 24, 2018. Therefore, this page has been categorized into folders describing the pre-release and immediate launch era of the game (2013-2016) and the game's development since then.


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    Tropes in-game and in general 
  • Broken Base:
    • With the Foundations Update, some became happy, but others continued saying it's too little, too late, arguing those features found in the update should have been in the game to start with, and that putting them in won't help the game much, if at all.
    • The reception to the Waking Titan ARG to promote the 1.3 update is split down the middle for fans. On the one hand, many find it both interesting and fun, especially since it adds a lot of story details to a Story Breadcrumbs setting, and think it's leading into a nice meaty update after two rather small ones. On the other, many fans are cautious of getting the hype train started again after it ran wild before the game's release.
  • Complete Monster: -null- was the First Traveler to ever explore the galaxy and was filled with an insatiable desire to see everything. Realizing they would never live long enough to see it all, -null- would travel to ATLAS, resetting the universe and killing everyone except themselves, at which point it's implied they devoured the Mind Arc containing their sapient soul echoes to become immortal. In the process, they did something contributing to ATLAS's slow demise and the end of the Multiverse, forcing ATLAS to reset the universe multiple times trying to fix it. They would then trick the Traveller into using a Mind Arc to "save" Artemis, trapping a sapient echo suffering within it and forcing the player to either place him in a simulated reality or Mercy Kill him. At the end of the game, -null- desperately begs the Traveller to abandon their attempt to save the ATLAS and the multiverse, knowing it may result in -null-'s death, once more proving themselves a selfish creature who prioritizes their own survival over literally everything else.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse: Apollo has gotten quite a few fans for his cool personality, relatability to the player base, and the fact that he's one of the few characters in the game that genuinely cares about you.
  • Fandom Rivalry: May be brewing with Starlink: Battle for Atlas, with many calling Starlink "No Man's Sky done right" and in general taking shots at this game while praising that one.
    • Friendly Fandoms: On the other hand, fans of this game and fans of Cyberpunk 2077 often get along, despite the two games being totally different. This comes down to them being two games that had rough launches, only to bounce back with DLC and patches done in the years since their release.
  • Funny Moments:
    • When you die, a random quote is displayed. Usually, this is from a famous scientist or philosopher, but one possible quote is Jaden Smith's infamous "How can mirrors be real if our eyes aren't real?"
    • When the NEXT update allowed players to customize their character's appearance, the game's different species were made available for selection. When you select the Gek as your species, in first-person mode, your viewpoint will actually be lowered compared to the other races, given that the Gek are the shortest out of the species of beings in the game.
    • In the NEXT update, you were given the ability to recruit a fleet of frigates once you obtain your first freighter. When you send your frigates out onto missions to get rare items and credits, sometimes your frigates will fail a mission, suffering damage, and return to you. Reasons usually include being attacked by pirates. However, in one instance, the crew of a frigate that suffered damage apparently partied so hard that they broke their own ship.
      • On missions, your frigates may encounter a Vy'Keen death cult. Your crew gives them what they ask for.
      • Even the descriptions of the frigates and their crew can be hilarious. This one has wood paneling on her bulkhead and a haunted radar that decreases her exploration rating. Crews can sometimes have a lax dress code and other frigates can have "pleasing wall art" as well. A frigate can also have a combination of traits that's amusing in a descriptive sense, such as Angry Captain (boosts Combat) and Lazy Crew (deducts from Industrial). The Normandy is noted as needing an aquarium.
      • This log entry:
      Log entry 4194: Ground crew chased by aggressive blob creatures on planet. Crew able to take several photographs while fleeing.
      • An ongoing collection of illustrated frigate log entries can be found here.
    • One of the goals in an expedition is to feed and befriend an aggressive creature. The instructions for finding said creatures reads, "Identify dangerous predators at a distance with the Analysis Visor, or up close by examining their teeth."
  • Game-Breaker:
    • In the game's initial version, encountering any planet that features an abundance of some super rare, high value material, such as gravitino balls, albumen pearls, or vortex cubes. Doubly true if gathering these does not provoke an immediate Sentinel ambush, and you can get a price markup in your favor when selling the resource. It's entirely possible to fly away from such planets 10-20 million units richer.
    • Later versions introduced upgrade modules of different grades that you can install on your multi-tool, your exosuit, and your starship. It is entirely possible to find S-class scanner upgrades for your multi-tool that increase your flora and fauna scanning rewards by 6000% or more. These upgrades even stack. It is not unusual by then to be able to earn 500k or more units per creature/plant scan.
  • Genius Bonus:
  • Goddamned Bats: Sentinel drones on any high security planet will attack you on sight, and since they're literally everywhere, this results in the player spending a lot of time fending off attacks before they can go about their business.
  • Good Bad Bugs: The Emergency Broascast Unit is normally intended to be used only once. But when it is tuned and then put into the Portable Refiner before unsealing the door at a derelict freighter (which normally removes the now activated unit), the item will not only not be consumed but also revert to its initial state after leaving the freighter, allowing the player to use it again.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: A meta example comes in the form of talking to an interface late into the game. Its monologue gives off a very funny echo about the production of No Man's Sky.
  • Memetic Mutation: Sean Murray's "mind blown" expression that he did during developer interviews. This eventually became an Ascended Meme when it was added into the game.
  • Misblamed: While there is no doubt that the disastrous launch of this game was due to undelivered promises from the trailers in the initial version, it was not entirely Sean Murray and Hello Games' fault. No Man's Sky launched simultaneously for both the PC and the PS4, and there was pressure from Sony to release the game quickly. If the game was a PC-only release at launch, then Hello Games would have likely gone the Early Access route. Since Sony does not have an Early Access program, Hello Games had to release the game as "complete" on both platforms in its now-considered unfinished state.
  • Narm Charm: Some of the planets are immensely alien, housing incredibly bizarre and even creepy environments. While some of these are silly (for example, a planet of spherical objects), Hello Games does such a fantastic job of setting the atmosphere that it actually works.
  • Quicksand Box: The game features a game world so large (specifically, a universe with over 72 quadrillion procedurally-generated worlds to explore that will take 1.1 billion years to fully discover, even at a rate of two planets discovered per second) that you might just choose to take your small craft, land it on a planet, and stay there.
  • Scrappy Mechanic:
    • One of the most divisive mechanics in the game are the survival mechanics, which require the collection of various resources in order to craft new gear and keep existing technology charged. Many players find the constant need to hunt for resources and the worry of keeping their ship and life support powered constant frustrations and distractions from the actual exploration part of the game.
    • Another problem that is near universal among players is the poor inventory system, which is not only difficult to use and manage, but also incredibly small, and upgrades take up inventory slots as well, further limiting what you can and can't carry. It also doesn't help that there's absolutely no way to increase your inventory space other than buying a ship with more inventory slots. However, this only increases the ship inventory and not your personal inventory, which are both separate. There's also no way to increase the storage capacity of the containers or rooms one can build planetside or aboard freighters, respectively.
      • In previous versions, additional personal inventory slots were available for purchase only at drop pods, which are fairly common across most planets. The first extra slot is free, but each additional slot past that one costs an additional 10,000 units. By the time you've maxed your inventory at 48 slots, you will have shelled out a cool 6.3 million units. That's more money than you would likely pay for a decent-sized ship! This was averted in later versions by making drop pods on planets give you inventory space upgrades for free, provided you have the materials on hand to repair the damaged drop pods. You can still purchase inventory slots on space stations near the exosuit upgrades vendor. However, although this allows you to care around more stuff, it did nothing to alleviate the awful inventory management system as a whole.
      • Another issue with inventory management is the lack of interconnectivity between different inventories. If you're trying to refine some materials aboard your freighter, the materials you need might be stored in your exosuit's main inventory, its cargo inventory, your starship's inventory, your freighter's inventory, any of your six exocrafts' inventories, or any of the up to ten separate storage containers, and only the ones in your exosuit inventory can be accessed directly. Crafting high-level products thus often boils down to running back and forth between two dozen inventories just to find the stuff you need. There are also some very harebrained limitations, like being unable to craft freighter upgrades from components stored in the freighter's own inventory.
      • Speaking of freighters: their inventory might be larger than the others, but it's still tiny compared to how friggin' huge these ships are. It is possible to expand the number of inventory slots using bulkhead modules, but acquiring these means being forced to explore derelict ships and complete all objectives, which usually takes up to 30 minutes and presents its own frustrations - and only awards a single module. Even then, the max number of slots available is the same as any ship's inventory, and the stack size per slot is the same as in the player's own high capacity inventory. Players who expected their storage issues to be solved as soon as they get their first freighter tend to be sorely disappointed.
      • The scaling of ship prices as you increase available inventory slots is so expansive that the only viable option to max ship inventory space is to play the crash site trading game. An early game vessel can run from 1 to 2 million units, which isn't that hard to make. A ship that has around 20-25 inventory slots may be around 12 to 15 million - steep, but doable. Ships with more than 40 inventory slots can set you back 60 million units. A ship with the maximum of 48 slots can cost over 100 million units, which can be more than a low-tier freighter is sold for in some cases.
    • The way achievements are implemented. The announcements take up a good chunk of the interface and take away much of your control; it will almost certainly get you killed more than once. Later versions allowed you to skip this by holding down a button or key, but it's still very intrusive.
    • The fact that the Sentinels are part of the game at all. They serve no purpose but to make the player feel insecure while exploring the Wide-Open Sandbox, and their ubiquitous nature means it's impossible to do anything without having to deal with them one way or another. Because of these things, the game's progression becomes much more tedious.
    • Transmission towers have an annoying tendency to send you to crash sites you've already visited (even if you disabled the distress beacon!), depriving you of opportunities to discover and potentially claim dozens of new ships across a playthrough.
    • Similarly, resource deposit markers aren't deleted once their corresponding deposit is completely mined out. You'll be revisiting a lot of empty holes in the ground because of this.
    • The update that introduces customizable player character and made third person perspective the default also made moving in first person feel floaty despite the game is initially designed for first person in mind.
    • One update in NEXT increased the timers for crop growing. Depending on the crop, players would expect to wait anywhere from 2 hours to up to 48 hours for growth times before harvesting. Many people complained that this ruined one way of making a lot of money in the game, since for a while, another way to make money in the game, commodity trading between different planetary systems of differing economies, was broken simply because the trade commodities did not appear in the trade hubs for purchase. These crop timers were later reduced after many complaints.
    • Space battles would be a lot more fun if your ships didn't handle as if they're moving through molasses. Even the most maneuverable fighters are difficult to line up properly due to their wobbly flight behavior, and trying to get rid of a bunch of pirates while piloting a hauler can be frustrating beyond measure.
    • Frigates suffering damage on expeditions. There's no way to reliably prevent this from happening, and neither is there an expedient way to repair them from the fleet management screen. Instead you have to personally fly to each damaged vessel, land on it, navigate a maze of corridors and walkways and finally spend a bunch of resources to repair up to half a dozen damaged components per ship. And if you don't have the necessary resources in your inventory, you have to leave, scrounge them up and repeat the whole procedure from scratch. It's a cool feature the first time it happens, but gets old real fast.
    • Sandworms are a nice addition to some planets due to their potential to startle players who are out exploring. However, the fact that they are fast moving, unpredictable, and basically impossible to scan due to not registering in the scanner field means that a lot of planets' zoology lists are now unable to be completed.
    • Settlement disputes. After becoming the overseer of a settlement, players will sometimes be summoned to the settlement to resolve a conflict among the citizens. However, these conflicts almost always boil down to “he said, she said”, making the decision of which party to punish feel extremely arbitrary to some players. To make matters worse, these conflicts stop any new building projects, expeditions, or arrivals from happening until they’re resolved, annoying many players - especially when the conflict is something as petty as “Decide who to blame for a breakup” or “Who really owns this sofa?”
    • Frequent updating, even more often than Minecraft does and Hello Games seemingly never stopping, cause many mods, which designed to alleviate the scrappy mechanics above, to not work, forcing the mod makers (or users themselves) to update the mods to keep up. Also it doesn't help that unlike Minecraft, players can't choose to stick to a particular version, especially those with older computers when updates bump up the minimum system requirements.
  • Spiritual Successor: To Noctis, a space simulator with a similar premise and large universe consisting of billions of worlds made by Procedural Generation.
  • Suspiciously Similar Song: The Flourishing Planet song has some parts that sound suspiciously to one from The House in Fata Morgana, right down to the song cutting out at the same part for a few seconds before resuming.
  • That One Component: as of the Endurance update, Salvaged Frigate Modules, which are required to unlock freighters' base-building components and tech upgrades. Unlocking everything requires close to a hundred of them, and unlike their ground-based equivalent, Salvaged Data (which is fairly easy to excavate from Buried Technology Modules, which can be found underground in every inhabited system in the universe), there is no reliable method of acquiring them other than random encounters in which their drop rate is 4 percent at best. All you can do is hope a frigate fleet finds one, or that you're lucky enough to loot one from a grounded wreck or an intact derelict in deep space (the latter can only be found with a single-use emergency scanner that generally costs five million units or more), or try to hunt down and raid an NPC freighter that might have one in its cargo, or hope for a one-in-a-hundred chance that a mission offers one as a reward.
  • That One Sidequest:
    • To get the Extreme Survival milestones, you have to stay on a planet with extreme weather conditions for 32 "Sols" (in-game days, which last 15 minutes each). And if you leave the planet for any reason, that timer will reset, so don't expect to get the milestone by just stopping off on your way to the center. Depending on the planet's day-night cycle it can take up to 16 hours to reach level 10 for Extreme Survival! The only saving grace is that you just have to be on a planet with extreme conditions, you don't actually have to be out and about, so you can just find some shelter and camp out for a while. Later versions make this achievement more lenient by counting the total time spent on any planet with extreme conditions; you don't have to stay on only one planet continuously, but it still requires a full 8 real-time hours. It does reset if you die for any reason, however.
    • "Starbirth", the questline that unlocks your first Living Ship, is much, much worse than Extreme Survival, though mainly for the same reason: it takes ludicrously long to complete. For starters, grinding enough quicksilver to purchase a Void Egg in the first place takes a minimum of 6 real-life days, not counting the time you need to actually do the quests that reward the quicksilver. Then you receive a quest that sends you to a random planet but doesn't give you the exact target location. Instead you're given a random set of imprecise coordinates you must chase down by watching a display you can only see in the highly restrictive cockpit view of your ship, and the nature of this rudimentary navigation system makes this one of the most frustrating tasks in the entire game. When (if) you finally find your target, you must collect a bunch of unique resources, craft a piece of your future ship and then... wait for ~24 real-life hours for it to mature. The whole shebang then repeats no less than four times, so when you claim the fourth component you've spent at least 10 days on this quest alone, which is much longer than it takes to complete the game itself. If your patience held out this far, try to decipher the nebulous portal coordinates you receive next, jump to the target planet (usually one with extreme weather) and chase down another three sets of coordinates for the final ship component until you can finally claim the damn ship. Everything about this quest appears to be deliberately designed to make players Rage Quit long before they make it anywhere near their Living Ship, which is only exacerbated by how ridiculously buggy the whole quest chain is. And to put icing on the cake, the living ship's sole advantages over normal spacecraft are a larger tech inventory and longer hyperjump range, which is paid for with a severely restricted weapon selection and a weird upgrade system.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Some critics agreed that the fleshy alien-like corruption that surrounded certain planets would lead to a recurring enemy that becomes more and more of a threat as one gets closer to the center. It remains to be seen if this plot device will be expanded upon as of the NEXT update.

    Trailers, pre-release, and launch era (2013-2016) 

    Post-launch era (2017-present) 
  • Broken Base: While many have forgiven Sean Murray and company for their initial missteps, and sales have increased, there are still some who are bitter, and don't wish to give the game another chance when they messed it up so bad initially. Another faction appreciates and even supports the continued support and patches, but worries that this could set a precedent for game developers releasing broken games and then simply patching them in post instead of delivering a properly finished product. On the other hand, that was already a common issue, as is the even worse one of releasing an unfinished game and never fixing it.
  • Discredited Meme: At this point, with just about all of the originally missing features since added and then some, calling Hello Games & Sean Murray liars (and calling the game by any of the insulting nicknames that brought attention to this) has fallen out of favor within most circles of people aware of the game, fans or not. And the people who still despise the game from its launch period are increasingly becoming a Vocal Minority.
  • It's the Same, So It Sucks: Despite the plethora of added content culminating in NEXT, a number of players are frustrated that there haven't been any meaningful changes to the game's focus on repetitive resource grinding and inventory management. The only provision made to avoid this is the Creative Mode, which eliminates resources entirely.
  • Memetic Badass: After Sean Murray got his act together and started working on building the game into what had been initially promised, he of all people has become this in the game's fandom, rivaling Morgan Freeman in terms of god-like awesomeness. And it's all thanks to the game's many updates. Ditto for the rest of Hello Games. They even won a category at the game awards for the best ongoing game in 2020 for all their hard work!
  • Memetic Mutation: NEXT added lots of new content, and fans went to town with some of it.
    • Sean and the Hello Games team being worshipped as gods has taken off in the fandom (see Memetic Badass above).
    • The dance emote. It's not uncommon for gif animations of various fan's avatars dancing in different (sometimes inopportune) locations.
  • Moral Event Horizon: -null- crossed this by resetting their iteration of the universe and doing something to the Atlas (implied to have at least contributed to its impending demise), in the process killing everyone in the universe, solely to try and become immortal and see everything there is to see. Worse yet, a piece of lore gives the implication they may have eaten a Mind Arc containing the soul echo of their entire universe. The player has the option to rightly call them despicable for this.
  • Polished Port: The VR version of the game.
  • Spiritual Successor: The Exomech update, and the later Sentinels update, bring a bit of Titanfall action to the No Man's Sky setting. Like the former, you're able to call in a Mini-Mecha to pilot and fight enemies, or (with an additional technology upgrade) jump out and let it fight alongside you while you're on foot. The major difference is this game's much slower pace, and the Minotaur being a fair bit more awkward to move around in compared to a Titan.
  • Win Back the Crowd: They've managed to pull this off several times.
    • The Foundation Update adds many things to the game (base building, improved visuals, board-able freighters, bug fixes, etc.) along with making the overall experience much closer to what the E3 demos showed off. Considering that many people were angry these weren't in the game before, it brought back a part of the player-base seeing as the developers are indeed listening to feedback.
    • The Pathfinder Update added land vehicles, online base sharing, new weapons for both the ship and multi tool, improvements to the discovery menu (allowing to set a way-point directly from it, making traveling to previously visited star systems much easier), photo mode, as well as many cool filters that can be applied to it, and the ability to own and purchase more than 1 star ship. So if you already have a Cool Starship, but find another one you really like, you can buy that one too in your freighter.
    • The Atlas Rises update is this in spades! On top of adding even better visuals than was already in the game, there's now improved space combat, dramatically increased likelihood of planetary ship dogfights, low flight, functioning portals, an overhauled and much more user friendly interface, missions and factions (and the wars that come with them), new worlds, A NEW STORY, and the biggest feature of all: multiplayer. Although players cannot directly interact with each-other yet, especially given the enormous distances between individual players, the fact that it is now possible for 2 travelers to meet is a HUGE Moment of Awesome on the part of the developers.
    • No Man's Sky NEXT seems to have finally done it for them. In addition to the game being released for the Xbox One, the update added proper multiplayer with drop-in and drop-out with other players, revamped dogfights, the ability to visit other players' bases, parties of up to 4 people, and the ability to customize your freighter to make it a mobile base. Since the July 24, 2018, release of the NEXT update, 79% of Steam user reviews have been positive (compared to only 39% positive reviews before the NEXT update) while the all-time reviews have risen to 47% recommended from an all-time low of 12% recommended. Consecutive player counts on Steam alone reached a peak of nearly 98,000 people on July 29, 2018, a massive surge from an average of under 1,000 people before the NEXT update and the most since the game's all-time high of 212,613 on its release day on August 12, 2016.
    • The Beyond update, released in the summer of 2019, continued the trend of free content updates, bringing a vastly enhanced online multiplayer system, called No Man's Sky Online. It brought an MMO-style social and online experience to the game while not including Microtransactions or subscription fees. Another new component in the Beyond update is No Man's Sky Virtual Reality, adding VR support and increasing the immersive experience while flying in your starship and allowing for more intricate terrain manipulation. Updates include increasing resource stacks from 500 to 10,000, the ability to ride animals, animal husbandry, cooking recipes, and more.

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