I’m staring at a series of red symbols, each potentially representing several hours of work. My hyperdrive is broken, my storage space is clogged with sparking components, and I’m fairly sure my landing gear is oozing something dirty at me. I need to mine copper from limited deposits, harvest organic material for valuable carbon, and fuse the copper into Chromatic Metal—all while dodging the watchful eyes of Sentinels. At best, I’ll be hobbled until roughly half of these elements are repaired. At worst, I’m stranded on a planet that, though beautiful, has little of the resources I need.

I need to build a base. I need to find a way to establish contact with the trading post at least 30 real-life minutes away, and buy what resources I can’t craft. Hell, I have to learn new words so I can even communicate with the alien beings that inhabit it. Somehow, I couldn’t be happier. 

‘Repetition’ can be a dirty word for people who play games. It conjures images of grinding through endless waves of low-level enemies, or trekking through environments you grew tired of long ago to fulfill another basic fetch quest. Yet, several successful games (and even series) have been built around repeated, even mundane routines. Why is this the case?

The core concept separating good repetition from an aggravation you tell your friends to struggle through to get to the good bits of a game, is storytelling. What is the narrative that emerges as a result of a player’s repeated actions? Fighting waves of creatures emerging from the sea itself to attack your newfound coastal refuge in Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of DANA is heroic. Even without a goal like getting a high score, both context and experience (i.e. hearing your comrades’ morale increase as a result of your killing a disturbingly large lobster) make these raids feel like a legitimate part of your story. You’re the desperate defenders of a shipwrecked, thrown-together family. Driving along the autobahns of Euro Truck Simulator, you create stories in your head. The truck you’ll own one day, when you work for yourself. The highest, safest speed you can reach along a familiar highway, to beat the bad weather rolling in behind you. 

Contrast these scenarios with quests in an RPG where, despite being the next savior of mankind, you stand in a graveyard for a few minutes killing any zombies that happen to pop their heads above a crypt. Heroic? Significant? Interesting? Not really.

Animal Crossing: New Leaf is a game that understands the difference between good and bad routine acutely.

After moving to a new town and being introduced to fun realities like crippling debt for your new house, you’re thrown into a loosely-guided tutorial of things you can do in town. Picking seashells leads to sending letters, to catching bugs, to fishing, to watering flowers. Maybe someone new will come to town, and you want to have a chat. Maybe you want to get deep into expanding and renovating your home—in the eyes of the game, it doesn’t particularly matter. Since Animal Crossing runs on a constant 24-hour cycle regardless of your participation, and those basic actions (fishing, bug catching, etc.) never change, it’s a game you can play for 20 minutes in a day and set aside without guilt. In fact, those 20 minutes a day are the point. You become closer to the world and its people through routine.

Interactions are gentle and, sometimes, intentionally clunky. To donate a fossil to the local museum, you have to look for a star-shaped hole in the ground. Then, you dig in the space with a shovel. After, you trek across the map to reach Main Street, and the Museum at its far end. Blathers the Owl, its curator, repeats the same lines he did yesterday and the day before that, before you can finally reach a dialogue menu to get the fossils assessed. After they’re assessed—and only then—can you again reach a menu where you can donate the artifacts, or excuse yourself to sell them for a profit. You have to go through this sequence every single time you want to assess or donate a fossil. Routine can’t be rushed or exploited in the game, as evidenced by the patchy landscaping of a town if a player wears the grass away through frequent sprinting.

Yesterday, you fell into a hole while looking for fossils. Today, you avoid the hole and unearth a Pitfall Seed you use to trap a villager you don’t particularly like in their home. Tomorrow, you’ll give a rare bug you collected to a baboon man, and receive a straw hat you try to sell off without feeling guilty. Your narrative is a life lived, with all of the little mundane steps in between that make it feel real. Friction, and occasional misfortune, are a necessary part of this life—much like No Man’s Sky.

At first glance, No Man’s Sky and Animal Crossing seem to have radically different philosophies. However, if Animal Crossing is about the joy and journey of routine within a single, static community, No Man's Sky is about the joy and journey of routine within an intergalactic community. In both games, incremental progress occurs within worlds where growing knowledge, maintenance, and increased capabilities for exploration, form an interconnected flow that can't be rushed. You log on, collect necessary materials for upkeep and upgrades, and in the case of No Man’s Sky, maybe learn a few alien words from a glowing monolith on your way to the next series of tasks.

To return to my hilariously broken starship, that laundry list of tasks ahead of me is the equivalent of falling into a hole in Animal Crossing—intentional, memorable friction on what would otherwise be a smooth, boring road. In their development updates, Hello Games calls No Man’s Sky players “explorers”. That word choice is significant. These moments of repetition and routine, misfortunes along the life lived, are what No Man’s Sky’s fluorescent planets, and constant churn of tiny activities serve to evoke.

In a given day in No Man’s Sky, I can swing between freaking out about discoveries of Whispering Eggs and their accompanying biological horrors, to struggling to get enough fuel in my new ship to limp back to my frigate. The lows make the highs stand out all the more. In this rhythm, there is a truth:

Outstanding adventures don’t just require routine—they demand it.

If you hop into No Man's Sky today, you'll receive a radio broadcast from space. Specialist Polo, the alien imp typically found chilling in the mysterious space anomaly, has a quest for you. And not just for you but for everyone, because No Man's Sky has begun hosting community events. Participate, and you'll earn Quicksilver, a currency you'll be able to spend on new emotes, cosmetics, and base decorations at a new vendor aboard the anomaly.

The current event takes place over the next week. Polo will give you coordinates and direct to you a nearby portal. Activate the portal with the coordinates, and you'll be transported to a planet where you'll be asked to dig for buried technology capsules. You'll probably find lots of other players there, too, and maybe one of them will be blasting Wayne Brady's game show Let's Make a Deal over their open mic at an excruciating volume. Or maybe that was just my personal community experience.

After muting Wayne Brady, use your visor to look for buried modules, and you'll find a new resource inside them: hex cores. Collect 25, and you can head back into space, where Polo will give you Quicksilver in exchange for your cores. Visit the anomaly and you'll find the new vendor in the back room.

There are two pages of new stuff you can buy from the new vendor using Quicksilver: a new emote, a cool-looking helmet, plus decorations like decals and statues you can build at your base. (You'll need resources to build them: I bought a gold statue and now I need gold to construct it.)

You've got the next six days to dig up hex cores to turn into Quicksilver, so get digging if you want to collect all of the items in this week's event. (Offer not valid in creative mode.)

No Man's Sky player Long_Nose_Jim is making a list, checking it twice, and gifting really shiny doodads to players low on cash. As the generous explorer explained on Reddit, rather than a sack full of toys, he's toting a ship full of stasis devices around the galaxy and giving them to anyone who wants one, provided they play on PC and in normal mode. 

Stasis devices are valued at over 15 million units and require considerable resources to craft, but they're only used as fodder for vendors. In total, Long_Nose_Jim says he's hauling over 3.3 billion in units altogether. How did he get so rich, you ask? With "a 20 dome farm with nine large refiners pumping out 16 circuit boards and 16 living glass per harvest," Long_Nose_Jim said. That, and peerless "enthusiasm for crafting." 

Some players were worried that Long_Nose_Jim's generosity might rob some new players of the No Man's Sky experience by obviating their early-game efforts. No Man's Santa addressed these concerns: "I am not joining random games and popping them into peoples inventories," he said. "Some players can't be bothered with the grind for units and just want to explore the universe so to them I say 'I got u fam.'"

If you'd like to get on Long_Nose_Jim's nice list, just add him on Steam (same name) and hope for the best. He says he'll keep giving out stasis devices every evening until he's out of stock. And if you're really strapped for cash, keep an eye out for the lookalike ship that one No Man's Sky player is willing to pay 200 million units for. 

Thanks, Polygon.