No Man's Sky is not a horror game, but I'm feeling a palpable sense of fear and dread right now. I'm in an underground network of caves, surrounded by plants that emit toxic gas, and I don't know how to get out. There's no breathable atmosphere on this planet whatsoever. My life support is nearly depleted. I have barely any resources for crafting and no terrain manipulator addon for my multi-tool to dig my way out. But even if I did get back to the surface, I'd still have to deal with the biggest problem of all: Right next to me, wedged in between the seven-foot-high ceilings of this dead-end underground tunnel, is my spaceship.

Don't even ask how I got it stuck there.

Up shit creek without a terrain manipulator 

When I first see Tabielde on my scanner, the small, grey planet doesn't look all that interesting. It is on the outer edge of the Afayenni solar system I just discovered. It looks bleak and has no valuable minerals other than a double helping of Pure Ferrite. But then I notice its classification as a "Forsaken" planet. Never having seen that descriptor before, I figure I'd be doing the Explorer's Guild a massive disservice by not checking it out. I just never imagined that Tabielde would almost become my tomb—and all because I'm a grade-A dumbass.

When my ship touches down on its surface, I realize that "Forsaken" is just a flowery way to describe this planet as barren. No flora, no fauna, and no atmosphere. Just a lot of Ferrite, angry robot Sentients, and these glowing orbs that are too bright to stare directly at. Each step costs me an alarming amount of life support, which makes moving very far from my ship impossible. I touch down, take one look around, and then decide this place sucks. Back into my ship I go.

But just as I am taking off and about to leave this barren, boring rock some billion light years from the Galactic center, I see a valley that looks far from natural—almost like it has been hand-carved. I decide to pilot my ship into it to get a closer look. After a few seconds of flying through it, the valley takes a sharp turn and I follow without thinking. Instead of continuing onward, though, the valley immediately nose-dives into a cave. Before I can even think to pull up, my ship enters into it. Oh shit, I think. You can fly underground?

Yes you can. And no, I wouldn't advise it.

For a few seconds, I think things might be ok. The ambient light from outside makes me believe there might be an exit nearby that I could smoothly fly out of. Instead, the tunnel instantly tightens around me. I begin banging wildly against the sides of the cave as the last bit of light disappears and leaves me in total darkness with only the damage indicator revealing that I have just clumsily scraped a wall. Then another, and another. This continues for seconds until my ship becomes so wedged that when I switch to the third-person camera it clips through the level geometry and shows me the impossible emptiness of this planet's core. I am fucked.

Almost a minute passes as I wrestle with the controls to try and free my ship in hopes of turning around and flying out the way I came. But I am stuck and there is nothing I can do. With only one thing left try, I initiate the landing sequence. To my surprise, the ship stops clipping through the geometry and successfully lands. I hop out and flick on my torch. I am in a claustrophobic section of cave with terrifyingly low ceilings and stalagmites everywhere.

Almost immediately I resign myself to my fate. I am going to die in here and have to load an old save. I do what anyone would do in this situation and take some funny pictures and wander around a bit, waiting for the inevitable. Seconds tick by and my life support is nearly depleted. At the same time, I alt-tab out of the game while paused to tell our own intrepid No Man's Sky explorer Chris Livingston about my predicament. "You can't just dig your way out?" he asks.

I explain how severely screwed I am: My ship's launch thrusters are depleted and would need recharging, I have no terrain manipulator tool on my gun and would need to build one, and my life support is nearly gone and I only have a little bit of oxygen left in my inventory.

About ten minutes earlier, I had exchanged my multi-tool with an NPC because theirs was slightly better at mining. The tradeoff was that this new tool didn't have a terrain manipulator installed. I had intended to replace it immediately but then, like an idiot, gotten into my starship and blasted off to explore Tabielde. Funny how that happens. 

But then, just as I am about to willfully let the rest of my oxygen run out, I have a terrible epiphany: When I hopped out of the ship, No Man's Sky triggered an autosave. If I die now, I will simply respawn to five minutes earlier—trapped in this cave for eternity until I load a much older save and lose up to an hour of progress. That will not do. I have to survive.

I switch on my recording software to keep a record of my valiant attempt and set off into the darkness of the caves, hoping to find the surface. My descent was so chaotic that I have no idea which way to go. As I pick my way around the deadly toxic-spewing plants, the cave begins to widen. Suddenly, the path I follow drops into a vastly larger and more oval-shaped tunnel—the exact unnatural shape of the valley that first caught my eye and led to this whole mess. Am I closer to the surface than I think?

Not second-guessing which direction I should go, I turn right and follow the tunnel. At this point, my oxygen is down to 35 percent and dropping. If I want to survive, I'll need to find oxygen soon. As I trace a path along the bottom of this extremely large, oval-shaped tunnel, I spy a red glow in the distance that almost takes my breath away. It's an 'oxygen rich plant.' My life support systems have already dropped to 20 percent at this point, but the two plants give me 45 units of oxygen—more than enough to keep me breathing for a bit.

As I continue moving onward (with no idea of whether I am headed to the surface) I find another oxygen rich plant. In that moment, I see a smaller glimmer of hope: I might just have enough oxygen to find everything I need and escape. The tunnel turns gently up ahead and I see a sliver of night sky. I run forward and, after a 30-second jog, step out into a night sky bookended by the ridges of the valley. I feel free, but at the same time I know my mission is only just beginning. 

The great escape 

Several meters from the mouth of the cave I find exactly what I need: blue di-hydrogen crystals. It is more than enough to craft the terrain manipulator and launch fuel I need to actually escape. At this point, I am pretty overwhelmed and make the mistake of thinking I need the carbon from a nearby crystal formation. I move toward it but then see a sudden red question mark indicator on my HUD noting I've been spotted by the highly aggressive Sentients that patrol this forsaken world. I turn to see one at the crest of a slope to my left and sprint toward it to hide myself behind the steep slope of the valley.

Great. Now I not only have to deal with my rapidly declining life support but also sentient machines that will alert impossibly tough reinforcements if they spot me. I take a few minutes to catch my breath in the menus and chart out exactly what resources I need.

In order to survive, I'll need to find:

• 1 di-hydrogen jelly requiring 40 di-hydrogen (for the terrain manipulator)
• 2 carbon nanotubes requiring 50 carbon each (for the terrain manipulator)
• 1 metal plating requiring 50 ferrite (for the launch fuel)
• 25 di-hydrogen (for the launch fuel)

And that isn't including any extra carbon or ferrite to keep my multi-tool's harvester and terrain manipulator running. Oh, and enough oxygen to survive the whole ordeal. And that is assuming my ship is close enough to the surface that I can even dig the damn thing out. Who knows how deep down I flew in my panic? It's an enormous challenge that I know I probably won't survive even though I've come so far.

Once I am squared away (and realized my error in thinking I needed more carbon), I harvest the rest of the di-hydrogen crystals and assemble my terrain manipulator. When I install the addon onto my multi-tool, I realize it already comes fully charged—I won't need to waste precious oxygen harvesting ferrite. Thank god.

It's now time to dig my ship out.

With the Sentient nearby, I quickly jetpack up the opposite slope and run out of sight before it notices me. I am now out of the valley and on the flat, rolling surface of Tabielde. I am so close to freedom. My life support is low but I manage to find another oxygen rich plant to harvest to keep me relatively safe from asphyxiation—but other Sentients are everywhere too.

A squad of NPC ships flies overhead and I turn up to watch them pass, knowing there is no way to signal them to come to my rescue. I wish I could fully describe the inescapable feeling of loneliness I have in this moment, watching these three ships pass by while a kilometer below them I am slowly dying.

I run along the surface of Tabielde following the on-screen icon indicating the location of my ship and once I am roughly above it I mentally prepare myself for the dig. At this point, I still have no idea how deep underground it might be. I begin carving a hole out of the earth with my terrain manipulator. It'll need to be quite large to fit my ship, but I figure I can dig first and worry about the dimensions later. 

After evaporating a few meters of earth, the terrain manipulator stops working even though its still charged. What the hell? My heart sinks. Is there some kind of limit to how far I can dig? Am I stuck on the surface? Have I come so far only to die because of arbitrary game systems? Not willing to quit, I begin pointing the manipulator at nearby terrain desperate to see if I can get below this invisible barrier. Far to the left of my initial hole, I punch through into a cavern and my heart leaps for joy. I drop in and land right next to my ship. It wasn't kilometers below the surface like I had feared. I can't tell you how relieved I am.

Buy why couldn't I dig it out? Experimenting with the manipulator a bit more, I realize that No Man's Sky prevents me from deleting terrain near my ship, which I guess makes sense. But how am I supposed to fly it out? I decide to not overwhelm myself thinking about it. First I have to finish digging the hole.

A few minutes later and my terrain manipulator quits—its charge fully depleted. I have dug a reasonably-sized hole that I hope is big enough. The only problem is instead of being right above my ship it is off to the side by a few meters. If I hop in and waste half  of my launch fuel taking off only to realize I am still stuck and can't move, my desperate rescue will be over. I'll be trapped on Tabielde, stuck in an infinite save loop of agony for the rest of my days.

My life support is at 60 percent but I have no oxygen left to recharge it. It's now or never, baby. I board my ship and craft the metal plating and then use that to make starship launch fuel. I load the fuel into my thrusters and then, with a little prayer, press the 'E' key.

There is a brief, sickening moment where the camera glitches out and I'm worried I'll be stuck clipping through the level geometry again but then—suddenly—I am free. My ship sails gracefully above the surface of Tabielde, its moon-like plains fading into distant blackness. I exhale sharply and realize I have been unintentionally holding my breath. Maybe the constant strain of my life support was weighing on my more than I realized. But it doesn't matter anymore. I point my ship's nose to the sky and punch the accelerator, leaving this forsaken planet behind me.

No Man's Sky's bothersome survival systems used to annoy me. They always felt like a chore standing between me and whatever mysteries were waiting for me in this procedurally generated galaxy. But on Tabielde, these systems (and my own sheer stupidity) came together in perfect concert to create one of the most stressful and exhilarating survival game experience I've ever had. It was a like walking a constant tightrope where even the smallest bump could have ruined the tension and sent me plummeting into ruin.

If you ever find Tabielde on your travels, stay the hell away from its valleys.

For all the noticeable improvements to be enjoyed in No Man’s Sky's recent Next update, the game is still…obtuse, to put it kindly. Early tutorials do a pretty good job of teaching the basics, but I still feel like there’s a lot of important information the game isn’t explaining. When I’m playing with my friends, we’re constantly bouncing questions off each other in Discord hoping that one of us has banged our head against a problem long enough to discover No Man’s Sky’s vague solution. 

But you needn’t be as confused as we were, because we’ve gathered a bunch of answers to these common questions to help you in your travels, both in multiplayer and singleplayer modes.

Multiplayer

So, can people see my base if they’re not in my game?

In short, yes, but only if you’ve uploaded your base. You can upload your base at any time by visiting the base computer. Assuming the online systems are working as intended (which is a lot to ask right now), anybody visiting your planet will be able to see your base as you last uploaded it.

There's no need to worry about vandalism. Visitors won’t be able to edit or destroy your base, and any griefing inflicted by visitors won’t be reflected in your session, unless it’s done by a friend playing with you. Though there’s only a small chance anyone will ever randomly happen upon your base, providing a cozy shelter protected from the harsh elements might just save a life someday!

Why can’t I summon my freighter?

There are a couple of reasons this could be happening. Usually, you can command your freighter to make a cool warp speed entrance to almost anywhere in space (even when you're standing on the surface of a planet). But while in multiplayer, the community has already discovered an unfortunate limitation: Only one player’s freighter can exist in a system at once.

If you want to see your own freighter and your friend's is already present, you’ll need to warp to another system before you summon it. If you’re having trouble calling your freighter while playing solo, you likely need to find a larger space for it away from other nearby ships.

Can my friends and I play co-op missions?

Yes! But be warned, they’re kind of buggy right now. Your freighter’s control room has a mission terminal with jobs that your multiplayer compatriots can join you on. The game is a little finicky about making sure everyone gets the mission, but as long as you and your friends are grouped up the mission reward will be shared. These missions tend to be harder than the typical ones, so beware about trying them solo.

Why can my friends and I make the same discoveries?

Well, that’s not by design. When the discoveries system is working properly, whoever visited a planet first and then uploaded their discovery will be the true founder. The same goes for plants, animals, locations, and districts. Right now, the discovery systems are usually offline or intermittently functional. This has led to my friends and I both discovering the same stuff and there being no clear answer to who will be etched into the planet’s history.

On the bright side, you'll still earn Nanite Clusters with discoveries either way, so these issues don’t impede progress.

Why can’t I warp to the system my friend is in?

It’s probably your warp drive. The game does actually try to tell you this while you're viewing the galactic map, but it’s just vague enough that people are still confused anyway. 

Each system is a different type of star. With only the default warp drive, your ship can only travel to yellow stars. Upgrades to your warp drive can be purchased from space stations that enable travel to red, blue, and green stars as well. The colors represent different biomes that will generate in each system type. These harder-to-reach systems contain some of the weirdest planets you’ll find, so it’s an upgrade worth investing in.

Singleplayer

How do I unlock more building parts?

Despite this being part of the initial tutorial, the reveal process for new base building materials is infuriating and vague. You must unlock most of the important parts of base building by slowly revisiting your base computer as it recovers old archives. Every 90 minutes, it’s ready to teach you how to make something else. The other main way to discover more blueprints is by continuing to unlock items in the blueprint analyzer using salvaged technology. 

Eventually, buying existing blueprints from the analyzer will unlock new ones. So even though you don’t plan on using three different colored lights and metal hallways, go ahead and unlock them anyway to progress further along the blueprint tree.

If I buy this ship and leave my old one behind, will I lose it?

Let’s break down the three scenarios for acquiring new ships first. You can either buy, exchange, or find a new ship. Buying means you get a new ship but keep your old one as well. Exchanging for a new ship means selling the one you’re currently flying for a trade-in price towards a new ship. Make sure to transfer all your old ship’s inventory before buying, because there’s no going back afterward.

Finding a new ship is done by encountering a crashed ship on a planet. You can add this ship to your collection for free, but it will need repairs before it can fly. When you buy or find a new ship, you don’t need to worry about leaving your other ship behind, and any ship in your collection can be summoned at any time on a planet. If you leave a ship behind in some random desert, it will automatically appear back on your freighter later. It will also keep whatever inventory it already had.

How do I transfer items from my freighter to me?

Well, you can’t, at least not directly. You can beam anything from your suit or ship inventory to your freighter, but you can’t beam it back. (I guess that would be too convenient.)

Instead, there’s a workaround using storage containers. By progressing in the base building quest, you’ll unlock the blueprint for storage containers. Each one has five high capacity storage slots. Your freighter can beam down supplies to the storage containers, which can subsequently be transferred to your inventory by interacting with them. It’s a weird system that creates an extra step in the simple process of trying to sell stuff. Alternatively, you can always park inside your freighter to gain access to its inventory. This might be faster if you simply summon your freighter close to the space station, and then make a pit stop.

What should I sell and what should I keep?

Early in the game, any rare materials you find are better off sold. Yes, there are uses for most of these items in one way or another, but inventory space is precious in No Man’s Sky, so keeping a rare thing you found that will help you build something 30 hours from now just isn’t worth it. In an infinitely generated galaxy, there will always be more resources to be found. Instead, prioritize keeping core elements on hand that make your life easier.

How should I be making money early on?

The game broadly lays out how to make money, but there’s some specific strategies that can be employed to make a healthy income. At space stations, acquire an S-rank upgrade module to your analysis visor. These modules will increase the monetary gains for scanning plants and animals by over three thousand percent, usually. That means scanning a particularly large tree or animal could give net you an easy 200,000 units. This is my favorite way to casually make good money while doing something I already enjoy—exploring a new planet. 

Another good way to make money is to find a planet with a lot of Gravitino Balls. These are glowing balls just sitting around that, when picked up, immediately initiate combat with the sentinels. So, grab a bunch out of a pile and then make a run for your ship. Finding a toxic planet abundant in Chlorine is also a lucrative business, but bring some extra hazard protection upgrades to make the toxic storms more bearable.

After spending a week rocketing around the galaxy of No Man's Sky in creative mode to see what I could find, I thought it might be fun to play in a completely opposite fashion. I begin a new game in Normal Mode and decide that once I find a planet I like, I'll just land there, hop out, and never fly my ship again.

I find the planet of my dreams almost immediately, but the 'never fly my ship again' part doesn't quite work out. After spawning on a typically miserable starter planet I repair my starter ship, take off, and immediately spot a beautiful, temperate, peaceful moon in the same system. Once I land, I only use my ship as a cargo container for a while, stuffing it full of the resources I don't have the room for in my inventory. I build my first base, add a teleporter, then build a second base and teleporter next to a galactic terminal I find about a fifteen minutes away (on foot). Even with both base teleporters built, though, they don't activate. Apparently if you don't visit a space station first, you can't use teleporters at all. My flying days aren't over yet.

In those early hours of resource gathering and building I don't really miss using my ship, and I definitely don't miss constantly crafting launch thruster fuel and endlessly shooting asteroids to fill my pulse drive. At the same time, running everywhere, as you probably know, is a bit of a pain. With a weak-ass sprint meter and jetpack, neither of which last more than a few seconds, it's an awkward way to cross long distances. Using the melee attack + rocket boost exploit (which is apparently now an official feature since it's never been fixed) alternating with sprinting does get you around quickly, but it's still a cumbersome way to travel.

A few times I'm severely tempted to break my rule and summon my ship. Discovering the location of an area to visit and seeing the UI tell me it's a 10 minute trip on foot, or a 20 minute trip, or a full damn hour of running, while knowing my ship is sitting right there and would make my travel time a matter of seconds, is an exercise in discipline.

But crossing a planet on foot is ultimately more rewarding than skimming over it. I find so much more by stopping to peer through my visor than I would rocketing along and using my ship's scanner. My biggest problem is forgetting to carry a crafted save point and portable refiner with me. I have now crafted four of each simply because I keep putting them down and then running for 15 minutes before realizing I never picked them back up again. Then again, sometimes I do remember and wind up with several of each in my backpack, taking up extra slots in my inventory where I need to store resources. I'm a forgetful spaceman.

Spending so much time on one world also highlights the weakness of planets that only contain a single biome. No matter how far you run, you're basically going to be seeing the same plants, creatures, and landscapes over and over again, like a cartoon character running down a hallway and passing the same pictures hanging on the same walls, over and over again.

It would be cool if maybe one in a thousand planets in No Man's Sky was a superplanet of some kind, a world with multiple biomes. For truly settling down, a bit more variety on a single planet would be nice. At least I found a portal, though so far the single glyph I located will only take me to a gross, barren world. Hopefully I'll be able to open the doorway to nicer places in the future to give me a change of scenery when I really need it.

After visiting a space station to get my base teleporters working (I now have four of them), I return to my moon, though once again I discover I can't just ditch my ship forever. I need to build specialist terminals, which require specialists to operate, one from each faction. Those faction members need to be found in three different systems, so I'm off again, crafting warp fuel and visiting other stars like I promised myself (again) I never would (again). At least once I visit them I can use the teleporter to reach them from then on, but I'm still spending far more time in my ship than I want.

No Man's Sky is determined to keep me airborne. After parking back on my moon, a damn space anomaly appears in my system. I'd be happy to ignore it, but it begins sounding a klaxon. GLONK. GLONK. GLONK. GLONK. It's like when you're trying to enjoy a tranquil summer evening and someone's car alarm goes off. GLONK. GLONK. GLONK. GLONK. Irritated, I get back in the ship I'm trying not to fly, and fly it to the anomaly, where the little Gek inside demands I meet 30 aliens and report back to him. Time for more warping and chatting in space stations. 

(To be fair, NMS was originally supposed to be about inter-planetary exploration exclusively, with no base building at all, so it makes sense that it pushes me back to my ship. It really didn't have to GLONK about it so much, though.)

The game also keeps trying to drag me into a space battle. There's been a protracted fight just outside the space station in my system, inviting me to get involved every time I get near it. It's so desperate to have me shoot space pirates that when I'm standing back on my moon again (after meeting 30 aliens, the anomaly vanished) I look up and see that the battle has basically shoved its way into the atmosphere. There are even fighters skimming over my moon shooting at one another from time to time. I get it, videogame: you want me to have spaceship adventures. I'm just not interested.

Well, truth be told, I'm a little interested. As I'm dragging myself around the planet on foot, I do sometimes want to hop in my ship and go somewhere else. These 10 minute, 20 minute, and hour-long expeditions are starting to take their toll, doubly so when I forget to bring my damn refiner and save point with me, and I don't have exocraft-constructing capabilities yet so I can't do any driving. Every now and then a few ships will skim over my moon and it definitely makes me want to join them. For now, though, I'll just suck it up and keep on running.

Prior to the launch of No Man's Sky's NEXT update last week, I wrote about modder Redmas' NMS Origins. Designed to "restore the original vision" of the game, the creator stressed their love for No Man's Sky and that their adjustments aimed to improve what they already considered a great game. 

Just over a week following the launch of NEXT, Redmas has created eight mods along similar lines.   

Fantastic Beasts, for example, boosts creature encounters, and changes creature size, numbers and behaviours. Birds fly closer to the ground, Flying Snakes move slower and Sharks, Whales and T-Rex now tower above their vanilla state counterpart. 

Metal Spaceships, on the other hand, adds metal textures to the fighters and dropships, and a mat effect for Scientific spaceships. Alien Structures Deposits replaces the vanilla Deposit assets with alien structures; while Atmospheric Freighters places frigates above crashed freighters, resource deposits, and crashed ships. The latter does not, however, change building placement. 

Redmas' catalogue of NEXT mods can be perused in full here—a list which includes the creator's Hoverbike, Wheelbike and Redmaspod vehicles. Here are some lovely screens:

The No Man's Sky Next expansion has been well-received and drawn nearly 100,000 new and returning players into the game, but the reboot of the galaxy has had some unpleasant consequences, too. Changes to planets, resources, and tech were expected, but more of a surprise were some changes to existing, player-owned ships. It didn't affect everyone, but one player's favorite ship was reconfigured, and they're will to pay handsomely to find a near-identical replacement for the original.

Reddit member avaslash posted that they're willing to pay 200 million units (technically, items worth 200 million, since in-game money can't be passed around) if someone can find a match for the ship they lost in the expansion. Here's the nitty-gritty details:

• must be black or dark grey as the “under” color. A very very dark blue is acceptable.
• must be white as the “over” color. With the wings and armor being white.
• must have yellow highlights/decals. Can not have decals of any other color.
• you must record the coordinate of the system in which it was found and take a well lit screenshot of the ship.
• overall design must be similar but it does not need to be exactly identical. Please refer to this gallery of hauler designs: https://imgur.com/a/XaDvT
• Hull Configuration: Patagon-S
• Cockpit: Katuo-S
• Wing Configuration: D-Flect
• Tail Fin: Any except Alula Bonus of 10 million units if it has RTX-IBIS or Rectrix
• Booster Configuration: Any. Bonus of 10 million for Sabre-05
• Specialized Storage Configuration: None

If you spot a ship like this on your travels, take a screenshot and note the coordinates of the system. Contact avalash on Reddit, and then:

"We will link up on steam and meet in game. If your screenshots are to be believed then I will give you a 25 million down payment as a gesture of good will. We will travel to the system where you found it, locate a trading station, and when we see one like it land, i will transfer the remaining 175,000,000 units to you (through items of equivalent value such as freighter fuel)."

There's a bonus, too, of items worth 50,000,000 if a suitable replacement is found before August 12. A number of players have already submitted hopeful candidates, but avalash is pretty darn specific as to what they're looking for, and so far an acceptable replacement hasn't been found. So, keep your eyes peeled. It could pay off.

Thanks, Rock Purple Shotgun.

A player has created a tribute to Hello Games founder Sean Murray in No Man's Sky by carefully arranging construction tiles on a planet's surface. The tribute is pretty big, as you can see from the images above and below, so if you happen to be flying over a planet and spot Murray's face looking back up at you, you're not crazy.

"I got an image of Sean, removed the color, resized it to 37 x 50 pixels, posterized it to 4 levels, then used the resulting image as a guide and counted carefully. Time consuming, but not difficult," tweeted the tribute's creator.

The tribute, and its creator's base, are in the Euclid Galaxy, and the portal address of the planet was provided on twitter in case you want to give it a flyby yourself.

Thanks, Destructoid.

Yesterday we looked at some weird discoveries players have been finding while playing No Man's Sky Next, but today we want to celebrate some of the alien creatures we've spotted on our travels as well.

Such the enormous crabby monstrosity above. I like him because it looks a bit like he's got a bushy moustache below his beak.

That's definitely a moustache, right? I hope so, because I named it Mr. Moustache.

Below are the rest of the best creatures we've discovered since No Man's Sky Next was released.

Above is probably the biggest boy I've spotted so far: if you enlarge the image by clicking in the upper right corner, you'll just be able to make out my Gek character standing by the creatures rear right foot. He's a biggun! Got a little armor plating and some fins, too. For style or aerodynamics? Only he knows for sure.

On the other end of the size spectrum is this little fella. He's so short I couldn't even see him while he was hopping through the orange grass, but he eventually made it to a clearing and posed for a picture. I think he evolved from a space potato.

Speaking of small, I found a little herd of two-legged antlered aliens being hunted by a much larger critter. I killed the predator and started feeding the little joggers, who began following me around on their wee little hooves. A storm was brewing so it was eventually time to go.

Above is one of Andy Kelly's finds, a creature which looks prepared for just about anything. I see a beak, I see feathers, I see flippers, and it's bipedal. That about covers all the bases.

I feel like crab monsters are a bit overdone in No Man's Sky—I see some version of them on nearly every life-supporting planet—though it's enjoyable when they're quite large. As a bonus, this one had a wolf-like pal at his side.

Winged creatures, once known in No Man's Sky for being a massive pain in the ass to scan, haven't seemed to change much in Next, though this four-winged bat was pleasantly smiley.

This is perhaps my favorite creature because it looks perfectly reasonable. It's got a few feathers: perhaps I've caught it mid-evolution from dino to bird or vice versa. Or maybe it just uses feathers for keeping cool and looking good.

Another of Andy's finds, if it held real still and closed its eyes you might think it's a weird rock formation. That's not a bad survival skill to have, though visitors do have a habit of shooting rocks with mining lasers, so maybe it's best to keep moving.

Crabs, crabs, crabs. Like I said, they're everywhere. These are flying, though, sort of, or at least doing an air-scuttle. I don't know what they're doing up there when all the food is (presumably) on the ground, but hey, I'm not gonna tell 'em to land.

This plant monster is like a bag of eyes that sprouted some leaves. It doesn't get any prettier, either, as after I shot it and rolled it down a hill I found another disturbing feature. Some things are best left undiscovered.

Finally, this beauty that's a bit hard to puzzle out. It's got a long neck, a weird horn on its head, and legs that have about six too many joints (or perhaps the perfect amount of joints for whatever it happens to be) and a tail that looks like a spoiler flipped vertically. When I fed it, it stuck its head in the sand. Maybe it's trying to diet.

Tens of thousands of people are busy exploring No Man's Sky again, discovering all sorts of weird and wild sights in the procedurally generated galaxy. Below I've gathered up the weirdest of what players have found, but first let's start with a few of my discoveries. Probably the oddest moment I've had this past week was when I warped into a star system and found myself staring at a moon that appeared to be sporting a rather massive vagina on its surface.

I know there have been plenty of players who have use terrain tools to sculpt dongs on planets, but this is vagina so big you can see it from space, and it isn't the result of player shenanigans. It's a naturally appearing mathematical occurrence that just happens to look like a very big vagina. (Or maybe it looks like the flame of a candle. You be the judge.) Here's a full-sized image.

The moon, called Dagnor III, circling a planet named Crobia, was an 'Empty Moon', with no creature or plant life present. Even the vagina itself vanished when I flew too close, disassembling into more random-looking cracks and ridges in the moon's surface long before I got close enough to land. To me, though, it will always be the Moon Vagina of Dagnor III.

With that bit of business out of the way, here's a look at some other oddities spotted in No Man's Sky over the past week. Obviously there are some spoilers below if you want to find (and be surprised by) all this stuff yourself. 

This planet covered with bony things

Many players have come across planets that are lifeless but simply covered with these weird objects that look like they're made of bone. You can mine them for resources if you have an advanced laser, and as far as I can tell they're new to Next, joining other semi-rare oddities like bubble planets.

This other weird planet covered with these other weird things

If you've come across a [REDACTED] planet (that's what it's called on your scanner) and landed, you probably saw some of these... things. Again, it's another somewhat rare occurrence, littered with tall metallic spires, some of them hovering a few feet off the ground.

This blobby plant creature that has a huge butthole

I'm not obsessed with body parts or anything. I promise! I just keep accidentally finding them in No Man's Sky. Here's a large multi-eyed plant blob that was sloshing around on a planet, and I decided to kill it and push it down a hill because I am a massive space jerk. That's when I discovered it had an enormous butthole (or some sort of hole) that it hops around on.

OK, that's it for body parts from me, I promise. Probably.

This abandoned, pre-Next space station

You'll no longer find a space station in every single star system: some haven't been discovered or explored by the NPC factions yet. Others, however, have been colonized but later abandoned. What's really cool is that these abandoned stations have the same layout as the original space stations: the single round door and same types of small chambers they had before they were redesigned for Next. The landing pads all glow red and it's more than a bit creepy in there. If you find one, be sure to check it out.

Aliens that bring their own chairs everywhere

It was always a bit strange that trading posts had all these seats set out for visitors, rows and rows of them, but no one ever sat in them. Before Next, the single occupant at the post always stood. With more NPCs added, I figured now some of those seats would at least be filled.

Well, no. There are usually a handful of NPCs at the trading posts, and some of them are sitting. But it looks like NPCs prefer to bring their own chairs with them. I'm still not sure who all those seats at trading posts are for and why no one will sit in them. Another No Man's Sky mystery.

A very, very red solar system

I'm not the only one at PC Gamer playing No Man's Sky, as our intrepid photographer Andy Kelly posted last week about all the interesting stuff he's been coming across, including a startlingly lovely, extremely red galaxy (above). I've seen a lot of blue and yellow and green systems, and some that are fairly reddish, but I've never seen a bright red system quite like this. Beautiful.

This sentinel walker at rest

What I'd hoped (but sort of doubted) might be pilotable mechsuits shown in the Next trailer turned out to be high-level sentinel walkers, mechanical protectors of the resources on certain planets. Reddit member Scinetik spotted one on of these pain-in-the-asses on hunkered down in standby mode. 

I love that they have sort of an offline, resting pose. Just chilling out, relaxing, waiting for someone to break the rules. And then it's stomping time.

A floating chocolate-dipped donut

Mmm, delicious! If this planet found and posted by Reddit member Lunitari696 contains an island that looks like a chocolate-dipped donut, maybe it also contains a massive cup of coffee, too. You'd need a pretty big ship if you wanted to take it with you, though.

Is this a ship for ants?

Hm. Decent little hauler there docked at a space station, until you notice it is a decent very little hauler. I'm not sure the player, if they chose to buy it, could even squeeze in there since they're actually taller than the wee ship. And if so, surely it wouldn't have the cargo space to hold more than a few gravitino balls.

A hex moon orbiting a hex planet

Hex planets have been around since the last expansion, and while I don't really know their purpose they're still one of my favorite planets to come across. I've seen these synthetic planets and hex moons before, but only one at a time and never two in the same systems. It happens, though, because he's a hex planet with a hex moon orbiting it. Reddit user TezzaMcJ found these two beauts.  There's a couple more shots here.

A frigate of hungy ghosts

You can acquire frigates by flying close to them and hailing them on the radio, and then inspecting their stats. Before you buy it, make sure you take a close look at the crew. This crew's mood is 'Hungry', which could mean hungry for action or maybe they're just not well-fed.

Be sure to look at the Notes section, too. It contains important information, such as about this frigate found by Reddit user phoisgood495. If you enlarge the picture above, you'll see the note mentions that the frigate is 'crewed by ghosts.' Huh. That seems important. That seems too important to be left to a note. In fact, it should really be painted on the side of the ship.

It was a big weekend for No Man's Sky. Following the release of the Next expansion, Hello Games' space sandbox drew a peak concurrent playercount of around 97,000 players on Sunday. That's not quite half the total the 2016 launch drew on Steam, which was just over 212,000 concurrent users, but it's close, and not bad for a game that's been out for two years. As a reference point, a Reddit member pointed out that this weekend's surge of players surpassed The Witcher 3's all-time peak of around 92,000.

Beyond the co-op multiplayer and other new features of Next, the price drop to 50% off is certainly helping, too: NMS has been sitting atop Steam's global top sellers list since Next launched last week. Reviews on Steam have also risen from 'Mostly Negative' to 'Mixed', which makes me think of the episode of Arrested Development when the Bluth's stock rose from 'Sell' to 'Don't Buy', but an improvement is an improvement.

We've been among the players exploring the features of the new expansion. Andy cataloged the coolest things he's seen in Next so far, I found a bizarrely sad little planet where happiness is forbidden and one where the awful weather made me never want to leave. In other words, if you own the game but haven't played in a while, it's a good time to try it again.

Hello Games just added a bunch of new features to its space sandbox with No Man's Sky Next, and here I come to ask for one more. I'm requesting a remote camera I can place on a planet so that after I've left it light-years behind I still can turn on a monitor in my ship and take a peek at what's going on. I made a video above (also here on YouTube) of a planet I visited that had some of the most constantly terrible weather I've seen, but it's a planet I still wound up exploring for days and not wanting to leave.

When it comes to No Man's Sky, I'm not a base-builder. I've been to a lot of planets but few that made me feel like setting up shop. I take some pictures, maybe do a little documenting (as I did on the colorless planet I named Sadworld this week) and move on forever. There's a few quadrillion other planets to visit! I've got no time for sentimentality.

That's why I was a little surprised to get so attached to a planet named Obosthom Gaur. First of all, it's in a system that seemed cool the moment I entered it. Just look at these beautiful babies all lined up in a row for me to land on and criticize (there's even a fifth planet in the row, but way too far off to fit into frame):

The purty one in front? That's Obosthom Gaur, and I landed there first. At least I tried: the planet was gripped in a storm so impenetrable I couldn't see more than a few feet in front of me. At first I couldn't land at all: it turned out I was over an ocean I couldn't even see. On my second try I wound up plunging into a cave. My third try got me onto solid ground, but I still couldn't see with the exception of a bunch of enormous alien plants waving around in the wind and rain.

A lot of planets in No Man's Sky look weird, but this is the first one in a while that felt truly alien to me. The weather was just the start, hiding the planet from view most of the time but then allowing a glimpse of startling sunsets and the rest of the solar system before it began to storm again. I'd be looking up at the blue-tinged ringed planet in the sky, and then clouds would pass in front of it, and when they cleared the rings would be bright amber. The enormous plants writhed and waved slowly as if they were kelp caught in an ocean current. Despite yellow clouds and pink rain the oceans were bright blue. Storms would come on in an instant, turning the world a blinding white for ages, then clear just as quickly. Half the time I couldn't even tell if it was daytime or night.

So, yeah, I guess I'm saying I would love a little remote camera I could leave behind so that while I'm making long trips from planet to planet in the future, I could just turn on a monitor in my ship and see what the weather is like on Obosthom Gaur. In the meantime I think I'll actually break my own rule and build myself a little base with a teleporter. Just in case I've gotten a little sentimental and want to come back. I have a feeling, somehow, I'll wind up missing all that rain.

(Just for fun, here's a little outtake from my weather footage, because this one alien creature wouldn't stop messing with my car.)