Three hundred hours in, multimillion unit production line, so many side quests done, 3 copies bought to share with family later and I'm finally doing the main quests🤣
The story is great so far and I enjoy the mystery/anime levels of complexity. I love that it works entirely offline and with multiplayer. I love that Hello Games chooses a working business model over gouging us for every little thing they do. Haters gonna hate but I love this game.
It didn't take me long (uh, 100h, give or take) to realize that planting cactus in a desert planet and selling that gel you can make with them was the fastest way to get money.
Getting nanites was a real pain, tho, as I decided to play on survival, so stacks were limited to 500 units. Left my game running with a macro to deliver food to the foody alien in the Anomaly several times. Average of 70 nanites per deliver of simple meat recipes
As for the story...
Story Spoiler
I found it really meh at best. Atlas is just a malfunctioning "overseer"/guide/admin that controls simulations. Artemis lives in a simulation. Not soon afterwards, you also find out you live (play) in a simulation as well. It was worth a smirk for the meta commentaryLastly, getting to the center of the galaxy was a fucking pain. Not because it was hard to reach the final stars, but because, on PC, you have to do a command you don't typically do when traversing the stars. I don't remember exactly now, but you had to aim at the center then press one of the buttons that shows on the top left of the screen to properly plot a course. I had to look that up on the internet.
Back to comment on the spoiler after finishing the story:
Tap for spoiler
I let Artemis die haha. Oops. After the game eluded to me being reset, I did some research. I play on Permadeath. I don't wanna willfully lose a save.Anyway, I swapped to a beater ship, multi-tool and stripped my tech before the purge. When I reset, I ended up in a new galaxy in the middle of a fucking firestorm and almost died. I had about 100 batteries on me and managed to switch to my good multi-tool and borrowed before I got overcooked.
What a rush.
Restarting fresh after a reset on permadeath is the highest challenge the game can throw at you. I came real close to dying 3 times during those, one time I had to dig a hole and then dig further find a cave to recharge my hazard suit
Set yourself up a base on a dissonant world and upgrade the laser and engines for 1 exocraft and get you some radiant shards. You can pull up roughly a shard per minute and 5 shards is 250 nanites in the refiner. Not to mention the dissonant mirrors, which are 95 nanites each
Those didn't exist back when I played :P