Compiling up to date ODS information

Hey there…It’s been a minute, or several. I’ve been meaning to gather data regarding No Man’s Sky’s Online Discovery Services, or multiplayer in other words, for awhile now once it became more elaborate, but just hadn’t gotten around to it.

As I’ve tried to research the subject I was kind of surprised to find that the community doesn’t appear to have any clear resources on the subject. The wiki’s woefully out of date, and where it isn’t, it’s just overly basic, so I thought I’d reach out to see if folks here might be able to help.

Here’s some of what I’ve been able to gather thus far, with some questions on points I’m unclear on:

No Man’s Sky Multiplayer Basics

  • Console multiplayer requires Xbox Live Gold or PlayStation Plus. Nintendo Switch will likely require Nintendo Switch Online if multiplayer is made available on Switch.
  • No Man’s Sky is cross-play. This enables you to play with friends from any other platform that supports online multiplayer.
  • Player groups are limited to 4 members, but you may add others as friends in-game to easily reconnect with one another. (Do we know what the max number of friends one can add is?)
  • When beginning a new game with the tutorial enabled, after a certain point you will be directed to visit the Space Anomaly. The Space Anomaly serves as the multiplayer hub of the game, and is often referred to in the community as the Nexus. It holds up to 16 players across all platforms.
  • The Nexus itself is the Space Anomaly’s mission board. By picking a mission through the Nexus, you may be joined by other players to help you complete your chosen mission.
  • The Nexus also offers what are known as “Quicksilver missions”, these are missions exclusive to the Nexus and provide a currency called Quicksilver which is used to unlock a variety of rewards from the Quicksilver Synthesis Companion nearby.
  • Quicksilver missions appear daily, in real-time, rewarding a lower amount of Quicksilver and may be queued up to 3, so you may technically complete 4 total in one day (that day’s mission, plus the 3 queued). On weekends, specifically Saturday & Sunday(?) these missions provide a higher amount of Quicksilver.
  • Outside the Space Anomaly, you may rarely encounter other players in what’s called Ambient Multiplayer throughout the universe. The max number of players you may see this way at one time is 8 players on console, and 32 players on PC.
  • On console, communication methods are limited to proximity voice chat, or nonverbal player emotes. On PC you have the additional option of text chat by hitting the enter key and typing messages, as you would in other online PC games.
  • Additional settings for customizing your multiplayer experience may be found in the Network Menu, including the ability to disable multiplayer completely, disable or limit PVP (which is enabled with anyone by default), among other various details.

NMS Multiplayer Intermediate Details

  • Player built bases are not immediately shared and visible to others. To share & display your base to others, you must upload the base after construction. (This also applies even if people are starting together & in the same instance, yeah?)
  • However, some structures you can build outside of a base may be uploaded automatically upon construction, e.g. Communications Stations. These tend to have a strict limit per player per planet, though.
  • For collaborative basebuilding with other players, the builder’s network settings must be set to allow you to build on to their base, and the builder must be online (I’ve seen this mentioned, but has it been confirmed the base owner/builder has to be online?).
  • For base-related missions, you must be sure to construct mission-related parts, such as specialist terminals, within your own base. Building these structures within another player’s base will not be recognized for your own mission progression.
  • You may gather resources from other players’ bases’ extractors, silos, and hydroponics without fear of stealing from them. These base collected/grown resources are instanced to each player. (Can the same be said outside of bases? Presumably yes, but I’m uncertain on this.)
  • Storage containers or rooms in other player bases will only display the contents of your storage containers/rooms, if you’ve constructed them & stored anything there. They do not display other players’ stored contents.

NMS Multiplayer Advanced Details

Additional details I’m unclear on:

  • How many discoveries can one have saved/uploaded before the old ones are kicked out?
  • How many bases may one player have uploaded per planet/system? Is it simply the same as the approximate 30 base limit if uploaded, but possibly hundreds otherwise?
  • What non-base structures placed outside of bases, besides Communications Stations, get uploaded upon construction, if any?
  • Can other players assist you on non-Nexus missions that involve, say, killing animals or Sentinels, or do their actions not register for you with standard station missions?

Besides all of this, what else might you add to this big ol’ primer on NMS multiplayer? I just know I’m forgetting some other really stupidly obvious stuff. Thanks in advance!

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We have seen accounts of people accidentally building on top of each other. This causes only one base at a time to show. So a person could show up and find their base inaccessable.
As for Switch, at last check, the Nexus missions were inactive leaving players no way to collect Quicksilver. It is presumed they will have the next Expedition but really hoping Nexus missions are available soon.
And yes there are special weekend missions that begin on Friday evening and run through Sunday.

This is a nice project! Some of these questions, I need answered as well. Hopefully, others here have those answers.

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Aah, thanks for the clarification on when the weekend missions begin, I couldn’t recall if it was Friday or Saturday. I’ll have to review when the exact time is, as I know some folks like to know that info.

I was aware of the Switchuation with Nexus missions, but I’m expecting that to be resolved in some manner soon. My hope is that they’ll finally decouple them from the always online requirement & make them operate like station missions so people can still play them even when they may not be able to be online. With the Switch that’s far more likely than ever before, not to mention with people able to play on the Steam Deck.

After all, Expeditions already work that way so long as you begin them before going offline, albeit I’ve not tested to see if there are any issues with completing, or attempting to complete, them offline.

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I am not a multiplayer person at all, but I can answer or clear up some of the questions you have :slight_smile:

NMS Multiplayer Intermediate Details

For a base upload to become publicly available in Single Player, it can take some time as the Online Discovery Server (ODS) will have to update (once a day for bases from what I have seen). When playing in Multiplayer, you rely on instanced data, which can therefor directly make a base visible to you, uploaded or not, depending on the instanced data.

It has been confirmed that the owner requires to be online, for someone else with editing rights to be able to make changes. I am however unsure of the owner requires to be in the same system or not, which I have seen reported as well.

The same can be said for anything that is instanced to the player. When data is shared, it is being synced. Meaning if a player harvests a planet resource in the instance, another player will see it disappear if in that same instance.

NMS Multiplayer Advanced Details

I have done a lot of research in Single Player on this actually. The total amount of bases in to become available to you (loaded into your save), depends on the total amount of parts, and appears to never exceed 20,000. It is however possible for the odd base to end up being served in memory. This means that playing on a save where you have no base at all, will be able to serve you more bases, than playing on a save where you have pretty much reached the 16k limit yourself already, as there is only 4k left for additional bases to be loaded.

In busy popular hub systems, this will often result in a low count of bases available. Bases will indeed drop from the list of available bases, requiring re-upload to become visible again.

Overlap can happen regardless of restriction. It is entirely possible that another player builds a base right on top yours, even if restricted, to then both be completely visible.

Additional details I’m unclear on:

Not quite sure on the mechanics, as I have not looked too much into them. I do know your save can handle a load of discoveries which have yet to be uploaded. I imagine this only ever becoming an issue, if you ignore to upload any (DiscoveryData > Available). As soon as you upload, this information is first being ‘queued’ to then become present on the server (DiscoveryData > Store), which loads known information for the system you are in. After upload this data is then also removed from the list of ‘Available’ data.

I know you can have a couple of thousand discovery items at least. In most cases it seems more likely that the UI in-game will start to fail making items visible, as these limits are likely sooner reached. For example the amount of systems/planets listed.

A player can only ever have 1 base uploaded (publicly available) per planet on your entire account, regardless of game mode (now difficulty). So if you have uploaded a base on planet X in system Y in save slot 1, to then play on save slot 10 in a completely different game mode and upload a base on that same planet X in system Y, this will become the only 1 base available to the public, with the other previously uploaded base disappearing for others. You can therefor at best, only have as many bases publicly available in any system, as the system has planets, on a per account basis.

I can’t think of any to be honest.

Such actions will not register for the ‘other’ player. These require to be registered client side for these client side missions to progress.

Some other events, may however trigger progress, such as receiving an item required, where the player’s client is only looking for a trigger that changes presence of something in inventories, It is therefor strongly advised against doing client side missions with Multiplayer enabled, due to possibly missing out on other assumed progress made. Imagine receiving an item, which then assumes you can craft it, not giving you the BluePrint, but progressing your mission regardless.

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Thanks for the additional info! I’m not a multiplayer person either, as you may know =P, but I definitely like knowing how the online elements may affect me whether I like’em or not.

Also I should have clarified the discoveries question, I was primarily thinking of planets/star systems, but your response covers that regardless. I’ll have to prod some other folks (or wait till someone else that may know swings by) or see if I can parse the save data to identify an upper limit on that.

Btw, regarding resource instancing, that’s good to know…And means that they are not instanced in the sense I meant, i.e. MMO sense. In the MMO sense, at least for some MMOs, resources are often set up so that multiple players can use the same resource node, i.e. pick the same sodium flower in our case, without having to find a different one. Extractors already operate in this manner more or less, sort of surprising surrounding environmental resources aren’t handled similarly.

Also good info regarding bases. I remember when Next first dropped & some friends & I were trying to sort out how this stuff worked, being rather unclear on how base displaying worked, i.e. need to upload or not when in same session. I’m sure some others may still be in that situation given that clear info in-game nor out of game has dramatically improved on the subject.

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