The Queue: Back on my…

…planets.

Surprising no one, I went back to No Man’s Sky for the Frontiers update. I like it in theory, especially the builds menus, but in practice I really wish I could become the Overseer for more than one Settlement at a time. I get that it’s probably a tech limitation more than a gameplay philosophy restriction, but I’d much rather have Preston Garvey constantly hassling me to go open new ones than have to resign my successful settlement on a garbage planet in order to manage a new one on a different garbage planet.

This is The Queue, where you ask us questions, and we hopefully give the right answer, because if not the Sentinels will probably attack again.

So No Man’s Sky is a horrific bag slot juggling simulator. You’ll have a geegaw, and then you run it through a refiner to make a macguffin, which you can run through again to make a thingamabob, which can also sometimes become a doodad, and all those separate things are also sometimes found in nature. You need sodium (or Better Sodium) to run one vital life support system, oxygen (or Better Oxygen or Really Good Oxygen) to run a different life support system, plus three or four different types of carbon for your mining gun, and that’s before you add in projectiles or the building subgame or fetch quests or upgrades or the various types of spaceship fuel.

So I played for a while last year, and I got fed up for a number of reasons — though, to be fair, the fact that it made my CPU spin too hard to be able to watch videos in my second window was a big factor. I’m the type of survival gamer who picks up everything, and I tend to get the most enjoyment out of exploration and discovery as opposed to crafting and bag management, so it was a real sticking point. My husband recently started playing, and one of the first things he asked me was why I never upgraded my backpack with extra slots.

Excuse me???

So if you, like me, are an idiot, in every normal star system’s space station hub, next to the guy in the leftmost bay next to the transmog platform who sells you upgrades to your life support systems, there’s an outline of a backpack. If you get close to it, you can buy one additional item slot for your backpack. You can only use it once per system, to give you incentive to get out there and explore more systems. If you page over you can choose to upgrade your tech or cargo tabs instead, but again, it’s one new extra slot per system.

Don’t worry, I’d already charted over 20 systems before finding this out, so.

So remember the previous tab when I was talking about watching videos on a second monitor?

It sounds jokey, but the grindy nature of doing the vast majority of pet battles really kind of demands it. I know I’m always far more into playing WoW in general when there’s a show or channel I want to binge, but pet battling is on its own level there. Also, I do pet battling far more when I’m waiting out long queues with a DPS class than I do when I’m playing a short queue healer. It’s a really great little side activity to kill time. I’d also recommend you pick up a few pet battling addons, like Rematch, in order to both better assess the pets you have and to automate things a little bit.

Beyond that, it’s simple to get into per se, especially since a lot of the more recent tamer battles will scale to the level of the pets you’re using. In general, as long as you keep your family weaknesses and strengths in mind, you’ll be golden in PVE. There are a few battles with a slightly more difficult puzzling element, but beyond that it’s just the desire to play them.

I did write an article several years ago on how to build a good PVE pet battle team. The logic and decision making I discuss is still sound, even if the article itself is old as the hills.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Personally, I have zero handle on the passage of time anymore. So yeah, October? Sure. In my head it’s still May 2020, so that’s plenty of time to prep a patch, let alone a .5 patch.

Even being shown a calendar, I’m pretty wishy-washy. I’d guess October, wouldn’t put it too much past the beginning of November, just because of all the end-of-the-year weirdness.

It varies from game to game and person to person.

I tend to have okay luck finding guilds just by having a kind of mercenary attitude about it, though this clearly isn’t for everyone. I’m gonna just join guilds, and if we don’t vibe or something… off-color… happens, welp, smell ya later and better luck next guild. Most guilds these days have a Discord or Guilded for better organization and teambuilding, making it both easier to get to know people and more of an implicit investment when you do join up. I find them by grouping up, asking about it during dungeons, stuff like that. Heck, I’ll even join a Trade Chat guild if I like the name enough — though those usually don’t have a high rate of success.

Beyond that, the usual social media suspects are probably your best bet — and give you a better chance to vet your picks in advance. There are guild recruitment threads on the official forums to peruse, too.