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. :(
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.
yeah it sucks but this rule has kinda kept me from building a real base I care about
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.
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.
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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