My spouse and I have played NMS since release. After switching to the Steam version a number of years ago, we were lucky enough to start our current save in a system that had a paradise planet. While we weren’t the first to discover the system, we were the first for the planets, flora, fauna and minerals.
Anyway, we both started bases on the paradise planet and have had those bases ever since. This planet was one of my favourites with gorgeous fields of glowing flowers (at night), purple grass, no storms, pretty water… you get the picture.
When settlements came along, we moved our main bases to settlements, one of us on the paradise and the other on a toxic planet in the same system.
I spent many, many, many hours adding to my settlement, doing clever things to make it look nice and RPing the hell out of everything.
On the paradise planet I also turned my first base into a ‘tourist attraction’. Then discovered this absolutely gorgeous flat field surrounded by hills. Inside one of the hills was a natural cave entrance. Low and behold the cave also looked spectacular with glowing fungi. So I also RP’d this as a tourist attraction - land in the field at night for a rolling field light show, enter the cave and go spelunking lit by cave roof covered in glowing fungi…
Then the first planetary generation update came. All seemed well until I reached my ‘Cave of Wonders’. The glowing fungi was gone. It was just a barren boring cave now. That hurt, but fine. It wasn’t as bad as some people got as we still had a beautiful purple glowing paradise.
Then an update to settlements wrecked all my decoration. So I meticulously fixed it all and made it even better. I have cared for my settlement, made good choices for the inhabitants…
So, I was super looking forward to how beautiful our slice of paradise was going to look after the 5.0 update. I could only imagine how much more gorgeous the water and sky would look.
Imagine my horror when my spouse said that our main planet was showing as “Worm infested” when scanning. My anxiety rising I head to our paradise and my heart sinks as my ship clears the clouds. It is indeed now infested.
Worse is that my settlement is completely gone. The pin for it is still there but the settlement interface is non-existent.
All that remains is all the base parts I added - now either floating in the air or completely buried as the landscape has radically changed.
I then visited every single one of my other bases. Some are still functional as the landscape hasn’t changed but the planetary type has in about 90% of them (weirdly some planets are still completely the same but most are different). My runaway mould farm has been replaced by metal fingers.
Worst off is our paradise planet where both the type and landscape are different.
There’s other weirdness like the Discoveries being simultaneously reset but not - it will say a planet is undiscovered but when I land, it’s suddenly gets the proper info back for it.
But on other systems, the discoveries are completely reset - in my AI Valve farm system, the system comes up as discovered by me but none of the planets were until I landed on them. The one that I have a base on has the name I gave it but all the other planets in the system are completely reset to their original names (and this system had some sentimental names as it was my final Atlas story system).
I’m going away for a week soon and was looking forward to playing some NMS beforehand. Now just have a sour taste in my mouth. So many hours lost and funnily enough I’ve lost any motivation to play at the moment. :(
I once lost a Minecraft multiplayer world that me and a friend had put hundreds of hours each into, and that got me so upset and depressed it was ages before I could go back to the game. So I think I get how you’re feeling.
It’s a funny sense of loss isn’t it, a strange hollow in the stomach that is weirdly like mourning. Some people might be inclined to laugh and say you’re overreacting, and ask “How can you be so upset over something in a game, that isn’t even real?” - but what’s real is rather subjective, isn’t it.
Sure, the place wasn’t real, but the energy and creativity and care you put into it was real, and the time you spent there together with your spouse was real too.
Sucks that 5.0 had to do you dirty like this. I hope you enjoy your time away, and come back when you’re feeling it again.
Rule 1 of UPDATE season for NMS: all planetary bases and existing planets are forfeit, unless you’re lucky
All the more reason to have primary base on a freighter.
pretty much
Can confirm.
yeah it sucks but this rule has kinda kept me from building a real base I care about
isn’t the whole shtick of this game that there’s multiverses? why don’t they put each world gen update in a new universe so shit like this doesn’t happen?
I mean, it’s kinda there, but getting to the ‘next’ universe isn’t simple. You’d be locking 90% of players out of any new content until they essentially ‘beat’ the game, and then have to do it again on any other save files, or after any new updates. They’d have to completely redesign how the alternate galaxies work both mechanically and story wise for that to really work.
Yeah, honestly I don’t get why they couldn’t grandfather in older stuff, or as you said, just generate a new multiverse.
I’m so sorry :( that is actually really damn sad. I hope you both find a new and even better planet if you decide to continue playing :(
Well I guess it’s time to RP a major cataclysm coming to your world and having to relocate.
Honestly hate these posts. People want all these changes and updates but never think about what it would require. How else are you gonna revamp planets without changing the hundreds of thousands that have already been discovered? So you either change nothing and have people complain it’s boring or apply the fix and have people complain you broke it. There’s no winning.
While I do agree, there are steps that NMS could have done to allow people to keep their favorite settlements/planets. They could:
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Only apply the new planet generation to undiscovered/new planets
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Keep the old generation in a different “dimension” and allow players to view older dimensions
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Only apply the new generation to planets that haven’t had visitors/people there for X time.
Among other things. It’s not an impossible problem, but it definitely would require quite a bit of extra work for Hello Games.
In all of those cases you are now locking away the new features to only be discovered at the ends of the galaxy or after beating the main game and learning about the multiverse. The galactic core would remain entirely unchanged. So everyone new playing would be stuck on v1.0 for hours until they get far enough away from EVERYONE while everyone else is drifting about in v10.4.
Look at Minecraft: if you keep your old world, you have to travel to places that have never been generated yet to see new chunks formed. Eventually you have a massive world where the center is old and buggy and then further out you go suddenly features are available. It’s the reason why most people don’t keep legacy maps running for years, and when they do, there’s massive train/teleport systems in place to get you the fuck out of the og spawn.
They likely just have one algorithm that uses seed based on star systems id or location. This way the planets are the same for everyone and they only need to store data based on player interractions like bases and discoveries.
Due to this the changes can’t be applied to just “selected” planets. Separate dimensions might be possible as they already have similar systems in place for expeditions and galaxies. These could however confuse returning players looking for new content.
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My condolences. I genuinely empathize with that feeling of having lost a lot of work on something. I just wanted to add two things to the other replies:
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While your awesome base may have been lost, the experience that you gained from making it is not. You’re a better base builder now than you were then, and you have a seasoned eye for the kind of setting that will make for an amazing new project.
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I think NMS tries very hard to (and is very successful at) teaching us to embrace ephermerality, to let go and be comfortable with the process of continually moving forward. Our character is merely one of an infinite number of instances of some entity that experiences time and space in an infinite way… All of the amazing things we have ever discovered are collectively less important than the act of discovery itself…
Even now, there is a virtually endless universe out there, with millions of sights that no one has ever seen, including – especially – those that you have yet to create yourself.
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Damn… That does really suck, I was worried about this type of thing occurring. I checked my bases today and thankfully were all intact, I figured they kept the planets with existing bases the same but apparently not it would seem :(
So far I’ve been exploring new worlds and really haven’t been noticing much of a difference to be honest except for the clouds and water are noticeably different and nicer.
That sucks. I’ve checked multiple bases across my saves, and somehow none of them were impacted. I expected at least a couple of them to be trashed because I tend to build along the terrain and into caves. While surfaces features of the planets changed, the terrain itself seemed to stay the same.
I’m not holding my breath though. Worlds Part 2 is coming eventually and there’s no telling what will happen.
