For the moment No Man's Sky holds the title for the biggest launch on Steam of 2016. 212,620 people were playing it simultaneously on launch day, according to Steam Stats, putting it far ahead of everything else to come out this year. But it's subsequently suffered a tremendous fall-off, shedding 88 percent of its concurrent user count in less than two weeks. That sounds like a lot, but is it?

If you look at this Reddit discussion of No Man's Sky's decline, you'll see plenty of eager grave dancing. One poster notes that even the infamous bomb Aliens: Colonial Marines only saw a concurrent user loss of 85 percent over its first month of release. "The only way to keep people playing at this point is to make it free," another poster said, claiming that he was bored after a single day; a third, riffing on the apparently-failed promise of being able to meet other players in space, added, "Players sure as heck aren't going to be running into each other now."

SteamSpy and SteamDB help us take a closer look at the data: No Man's Sky peak concurrent player count on August 11 was 212,604; on August 22, it was 25,689. Hourly concurrent players are similarly down, from a high of 127,224 on August 14 to 22,852 on August 23. That's a hell of a drop, but it comes with some caveats: It doesn't reflect the total population of the game but rather the number of people playing it simultaneously, and that measurement of intensity of interest is bound to drop as a game's newness wears off and players become less likely to sink 14 hours at a time into it.

But compared to other, better-received recent releases, NMS may not be cratering as badly as it appears. Far Cry Primal, for instance, saw its peak player count slide 82 percent over its first month of release; Fallout 4 dropped by 74 percent; Doom fell by 85 percent; Battleborn slid by 82 percent; Stellaris dropped by 82 percent; even The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, which we recently placed atop our Top 100 Games list, saw its peak player count slide by 71 percent during its first month of release. The hugely popular Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain slipped by an almost identical amount. One notable exception is Stardew Valley, which saw its peak user count slip by just 30 percent over its first month.

So although No Man's Sky has tailed off faster than other big games, it's not too far outside the normal decay that recent blockbusters seem to experience. Arguably it's a larger drop in concurrent players than you'd expect for a game that promised virtually endless hours of open-ended exploration 18 quintillion planets and all that. A single-player shooter with a ten-hour campaign is obviously going to see a more precipitous drop in its peak player count than an open-world RPG with 127 side quests waiting to be cleaned up. And that really speaks to what we found in our review: 45 hours of gameplay yielded 200 planets, 500 new species, and a dearth of interesting stories. When the core of your game is discovery, you'd better have some cool stuff to discover.

It's arguable that the huge launch of No Man's Sky made the corresponding fall-off inevitable, and it's also worth bearing in mind that none of this touches on the PS4 version of the game. But as a case study in hype, expectations, and disappointment, I have no doubt that we'll be talking about No Man's Sky, and its fallout, for a long time to come.

No Man s Sky has been out for over a week now and it s been met with a mixed critical reception, but no matter how monotonous it can be, one thing is certain: I volunteered to rank all the planets for some reason. We don t want you wasting a second on a bland purple sphere pockmarked yet again with two-legged goat creatures and sparse plutonium deposits, so really, I m doing a good thing. Yeah? Helping save time. It just might take awhile to get to the good ones.These are the worst planets of the bunch, and they represent the most irritating and bland aspects of the procedural generation in No Man's Sky. Stay tuned for part two, where we ll address the remaining 18,446,744,073,709,551,606.

The one with gross nonsensical terrain

Planet # 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 Name: MEAT CUBENotable landmarks: meat, cubes, trauma

Murder your eyes on the worst planet in all of No Man s Sky. From a distance its red crust appears a celestial menace, a Kinder egg that contains hell. I imagine jagged mountain ranges and harsh, arid environments home to only the most austere life forms but flying closer unveils a landscape that looks like a super volcano immolated a colossal mess of Chef Boyardee.

MEAT CUBE highlights the jarring byproducts of procedural generation. The tubes and cubes can function as weird alien landmarks in moderation, but spread across an entire planet (and MEAT CUBE is far from alone) they look artificial and overdone. I don t feel wonder looking at MEAT CUBE, only disgust. MEAT CUBE is a dark mirror held up to procedural generation, a warning against what we re capable of when we play God or make complex Excel spreadsheets. Knowing we re all made of stardust is not a comfort. This is abstract body horror, maximized, and it just looks silly.

The one with a bogus atmosphere

Planet # 18,446,744,073,709,551,614Name: ChadNotable landmarks: big muscles, weak will, soft heart

When I first met Chad, it put on a show of dominance. I m not trying to be alpha in space (the sun is a tryhard), so after showing off a dirty outer crust split by jagged red lines of magma, I lowered my gaze. Basic astronomy.

But after orbiting Chad a few times, I worked up the courage to enter its atmosphere. What I found below surprised me:

Beneath an imposing atmospheric layer, Chad hides a lush, verdant body populated with some of the most gorgeous, kind mega-deer I ve ever seen. Chad is soft. Chad is good. Chad just doesn t know it no one will ever know it, they'll just fly right on by, tired of the bleak ones. Chad is a tragedy and low-ranking planet because it's deceptive, hiding an interesting biosphere beneath an ugly atmosphere. I'm not sure if the lighting is playing trick or if it's literally a case of mismatched textures in the algorithm. Either way, it was jarring to go from Hell Planet to the Garden of Eden in the space of a few seconds.

The one that looks like a '90s Trapper Keeper

Planet # 18,446,744,073,709,551,613 Name: Lisa Frank, MFANotable landmarks: the color pink and also the color purple

Daytime was so saturated with neon I could only stomach taking photos at night. Lisa Frank, MFA's problem is shared among most of the planets: the colors feel slapdash and implausible, a quick swap between variables to make a scene pop. Occasionally, it can look great, directly lifted from a sci-fi book cover, which was an early guiding principle for Hello Games. Play more than a few hours though, and it starts to feel like the algorithm is coloring by numbers. A purple ground with pink highlights and turquoise plants works in terms of color theory, but with enough time, it looks silly and turns into an obviously superficial variable.

That you can t craft a sequined denim vest on this planet is also a major disappointment.

The one with nothing going on

Planet # 18,446,744,073,709,551,612Name: Son of ChadNotable landmarks: none

Forced to grow up against the commanding orbit of Chad, Son of Chad, a lowly Satellite moon doesn't have much going on. I tried to tweet at popular astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson with a few questions about Son of Chad s cracking surface, patchy vegetation, and poor retrogrades to no avail it's a moon with no recourse. Bummer.

But I suppose that as a moon, Son of Chad does the trick: a rocky grey landscape, no atmosphere, an abundance of every mineral I have and none I need. It looks like Arizona got sucked into space. Moons also tend to be lacking in color and energy, and Son of Chad is no different. I suppose it's realistic, but it's boring up against its more vibrant cousins.

The one that I married

Planet # 18,446,744,073,709,551,610Name: We Need To Talk SharonNotable landmarks: currency, codependence

When I first skirted the surface of this planet, two things came to mind: donuts by way of '90s Christian sing-a-long shows and marriage.Overall, there s not much going on here. The vistas aren t exactly pretty thanks to the garish open mouthed Os peeping out of the horizon. I imagine googly eyes on each and every one. And Vortex Cubes, while valuable, give the otherwise barren planet a thrift-mart vibe. I suppose this planet provides and easy way to make money, but beyond that? Just some really dopey rock structures. Like MEAT CUBE, bizarre shapes are pretty interesting in moderation, but once you realize they whole planet is dotted with them, everything starts to feel a bit too much like math.

The one with a lot of damn water

Planet # 18,446,744,073,709,551,609Name: Microsoft PowerPointNotable landmarks: color gradient effects

There are a ton of planets covered in water. You hearing this, NASA? Water planets are really frustrating when you don't have a cool boat. If only your jetpack wasn't useless in it and your rebreathers didn't require a constant supply of minerals to stay useful. Water planets have a ton of unique wildlife and often hide potent mineral deposits in their depths you're just forced to move like a slug through it all and there's nothing you can do about it.

Like Chad, Microsoft PowerPoint also had a jarring atmospheric color change.

If there is a god in No Man's Sky, they really like Instagram filters.

Don't get me wrong, it's a pretty scene when you stand still. But Sentinels and predatory hamburger-faced dogs wouldn't stop trying to kill me, so I couldn't really soak it in. Emptying my multi-tool's battery takes them out with ease, which makes them more annoying than if they were a legitimate threat. They function as tiny mosquitoes whose sole purpose is to buzz 'survival game, survival game' into my ear every 30 seconds. Leave me in peace to stare at the orange stuff, please. Let book covers be book covers.

The one with the very bad birds

Planet # 18,446,744,073,709,551,607Name: Four Beers DeepNotable landmarks: Nothing, apparently

Scanning flying creatures in No Man's Sky is a pain, so when I found Four Beers Deep, a flat, arid planet filled with fliers, I figured I'd bite the bullet and find them all. After far too many attempts to place the scanning reticle on the pixel-sized space that would initiate a bird scan, I finally got one. They were flying away, but once you start, distance typically doesn't matter. And it didn't, until they dissolved in front of my eyes. The scan finished, telling me everything I needed to know about this planet and any with a damn bird on it.

The one that might as well be Earth

Planet # 18,446,744,073,709,551,605Name: EarthNotable landmarks: the green part

What's so good about earth, anyway? The deer don't even have floppy tentacles shooting out of their faces. No one's ever gleefully exclaimed that Nebraska's a blast to stand on. The United States is made up of flat farmland and treacherous mountain terrain that can sure look nice, but isn't always inherently fun to be in. And that's OK, it's just the way things are. Besides, we've thought up plenty of ways to entertain ourselves in the last couple centuries alone. Videogames, heard of 'em?

If you dig a little, anything on earth becomes interesting for its violent geological history, and while that's not really the case on this earthly approximation, taken at face value it is at least nice to look at. Just like on the real earth, green hills and a bluish sky are fine by me and the thousands of landscape painters throughout history who've given a great deal of attention to sheep, and what they're up to. The problem is that No Man's Sky doesn't give you much to deal with its approximation of endless cornfields. They can look nice in the right light, but there's nothing to enable and encourage appreciation. There's no button for turning off the HUD, no built-in camera, no surveying tools that reveal anything below the surface, and toxic weather or angry sentinels are always rearing to suckerpunch you out of any romantic meditative trance. Put away the poetry books and get back to mining, nerd.

The one that is Tom

Planet # 18,446,744,073,709,551,609Name: Tom MarksNotable landmarks: Handsome Man Mountain

To be fair, sometimes the procedural variables really do come together and make something memorable. But this planet isn t memorable in the greatest way. This is some real uncanny valley stuff. I don t like coming into the office anymore.

I'm sorry. I have deceived you. This is actually Tom's head. But really, where are the bizarre one-off planets and events in No Man's Sky? I can deal with a few MEAT CUBES and a series of Nebraskas if there's a chance I'll see something altogether different in a few more stops, be it Tom's skull or not. I know No Man's Sky is massive, but I would have figured we'd see less uniformity as time went on. There has to be something truly strange hiding in those 18 quintillion planets, right?

Many No Man's Sky players, myself included, have wished that when piloting our ships over a planet's surface, we could fly closer to the ground. Well, our space-prayers have been answered. The LowFlight mod, by Hytek, allows you greater control over your ship's altitude, meaning now you can really skim the surface, fly between trees, through valleys, and under those hovering rocks alien planets always seem to have for some reason. You can even fly directly inside caves, as you can see in my gif above.

The reason this mod is so helpful is because it can be hard spotting items of interest on the ground from the altitude we're typically forced to fly at, particularly if said items are slow to render. This also makes landing where you like a lot easier: who hasn't released a gusty sigh when realizing that monolith you tried to land next to is actually a four-minute walk away? Now you can get nice and close before setting down.

If spaceship spelunking isn't enough, you can also fly underwater. I've tested that too, though it's not a heck of a lot of fun. Your viewscreens go blank, and you can't really make out all the lovely underwater features. Still, it's step above our ships refusing to fly below 1,000 feet except when landing. Below, you can see a video of the vanilla flying height and the modded one. It really does make a big difference.

Be warned: flying low means you might smash into rocks, trees, and mountainsides, all of which will damage your ship, and quite severely. I can attest to this: I destroyed my ship three times in about five minutes of playing with this mod. Caves, especially they're not very roomy, your ship isn't meant to fly inside them, there are tons of rocks jutting from the ceiling, and it's hard to back out of them. Also, a general warning: this is a mod, and might mess up your game in other unknown ways. Proceed with caution on all fronts.

Installation is easy, and only requires a single file to be dragged and dropped into a folder. You can find the instructions here.