It is interesting that you’d mention Mill. The thoughts you express were originated by Blaise Pascal, and are in philosophy commonly referred to as “Pascals Wager”, as it effectively applies game theory to theology.
The same concept from game theory would later be used in a thought experiment involving AI, an argument that is known as Rokos Basilisk. It’s effectively the same argument, except it involves an AI that can reconstruct your mind.
No philosophy expert here, but this wager sounds phoney. The option “if I don’t believe and god exists, then I go to hell” should be “… then some of the believers threaten/claim I go to hell”.
Imagine I said “hey philosopher, either shut up and go on your way, or babble and I slap the back of your head – only one of these has a good outcome, therefore, philosophers should all shut up”. Then you’d rightfully say that the “negative outcome” is just a threat by a bully. Why base your life on the threats of bullies? 
Doesn’t matter – actually we wanted to talk about lore. 
I agree with Polyphemus that we don’t even know whether HG have a fully fledged out cohesive story to be discovered or not. But in any case, speculation can be entertaining, and games are for entertainment, nobody should be surprised that we entertain ourselves with (hopeless but harmless) story speculations in a science fiction forum.
I personally got burned out from wanting to figure out the story by the ARG, there were so many people speculating in that Discord that you couldn’t even read, but here it’s slow and harmless Kaffeeklatsch.
Certainly not here, either 
Pascals Wager has faced many criticisms (the most obvious that Pascal conveniently forgot that there’s multiple religions, which makes the game a lot more complicated). I’m no fan of it either, by the way. Already conceptually, it completely misses the point of what faith is about. Game theory is about winning. Faith… is really not.
Interestingly, this one doesn’t matter so much. If we suppose that God will let you into heaven anyways, we have another possible positive outcome, but it is not mutually exclusive with the other one. I.e. believing still has a larger probability of “winning”.
I think that’s even kind of the point the mentioned Mill was making, which was in the wider debate of whether or not God was moral (which is a debate centuries old and not, as some believe, recently invented by reddit pundits).
Unless, of course, the majority are wrong and there is no hell and God never intended most people to go heaven…that changes everything.
Lots of fun here! Keep it going!
You know, I only introduced Mill to illustrate the idea that it’s pointless to pursue some lines of enquiry.
In a mystery narrative, the involvement of alternative histories and unreliable evidence are the ultimate “get out of jail free” card. Anything is possible, nothing is false, and all truths are equally suspect. Nothing can ever be proven, because somewhere, sometime, things happened differently. If you allow the evidence to change, you break the chain of cause and effect. It’s an easy dodge for writers looking for a quick fix - but it really messes up the story.
The narrative of No Man’s Sky can either be resolved by logic and evidence, or it can’t be resolved at all.
I am thinking of the fact that SM has a love for sci-fi stories and the fact that each new major update has a cover that looks like an old paperback book. Surely, there must have been some sort of story, even if just a loosely written one.
Oh, we know there was a central story. We even know who the original writer / consultants were. And I do think the old sci-fi books are very significant.
The trouble is, from my point of view, that I don’t believe much of what they wrote was originally intended to make a coherent story - a lot of it was window dressing - a jumble of suitably weird science fiction tropes and concepts, presented in fragmentary fashion, to make the traveller’s journey seem strange and uncanny. And that was OK, because the game wasn’t intended to last very long. Most computer games are forgotten 3 years after launch.
But here we are, nearly seven years later, and players are still asking for conclusions and explanations.
You’re right, of course.
In 1273 B.C., in Sumer, a group of the faithful* were gathered into the arms of The Lord, and ascended into Heaven.
God had His chosen few. He deemed the “Universe” idea a success, and moved on to other projects. Since then, God lost interest in the Universe. It was put in his store room, in a packing case. Eventually, it will be thrown out with the trash.
*Little is known about them. The ancient Greek writers referred to them as “Caprinites”. Herodotus quotes ancient sources who knew them as “The Stinking People”. Apparently their priests told them God wanted them to rub fresh goats cheese in their hair every day, and never wash it off. It turned out, quite by chance, that the priests were right. One day in the summer of 1273 B.C., God gathered the Caprinites to His bosom, and took then to wherever The Blessed go. Since then, God has had no interest in Earth or its inhabitants.
Oh my. We’re datamining philosophy. 
in fairness things are quiet.
I could explain how I reworked code to improve efficiency in my mbin/pak file reader by over 30% by implementing one reflection per class / cache system with version control if it would help bring things back into code related stuff lol
Go for it! I won’t understand a word but will be fascinated none the less.
lol… Its pretty boring stuff, but basically instead of examining and identifying every property in every class over and over again and reading binary data as you loop through, I store the details after a class is examined once and all referenced classes , so as it loops through say 1000 products, it only had to do the checks once instead of a 1000 times. Especially when your checking every property for Attributes. Then its just a matter of Version / GUID idents to allow you to read any version of the file if you coded for it. So example. ages ago I added support to read all product data from base version to current, so I check for removed products etc. You would never notice the difference, until you deal with a large amount of repeated data.
I said it was boring lol
Yeah, reflection is a rather expensive toy… 
It’s probably wonderful coincidence,
but
did you know that phrase “seventeenth” in Hebrew Kabbalah has the same numerical value like phrase “sixteen sixteen” (16/16).
s90 e5 v700 e5 n40 t100 e5 e5 n40 t100 h8 =1098
s90 i9 x300 t100 e5 e5 n40 s90 i9 x300 t100 e5 e5 n40 =1098
or perhaps, as Convergence argues, there is no such thing as coincidence
I’m currently cooking something up that might be interesting (well at least for me), and I have a problem that the dataminers might be of help with. I have not idea about the NMS data structures, so I don’t know how difficult this information is to extract, but I don’t think it should be too hard. In any case, I’m just asking in case anybody might feel like extracting that information, otherwise I’ll have to look into it myself at some point.
The question is about milestones. Specifically, faction-related milestones. These have medals associated with various ranks, but they do not display that rank (anymore). What I am interestend in is what number for which milestone results in what medal, and how many there are for each.
I am specifically talking of these milestones that are visible in the specific faction view. THere’s miletones for the three races, which are mostly the same, and then there’s one special milestone per race. And there’s the milsetones for guilds, where there’s two that are the same for each guild and 3 that are specific to each guild.
Here they all are.
Race milestones:
Guilds common:
Merchants guild:
Mercenaries guild:
Explorer’s guild:
I know that for standing, the medal progression looks as follows: 1/3 , 2/8 , 3/14, 4/21, 5/30 , 6/40, 7/60, 8/100, with 8 being the highest medal. I don’t know what the medals are called, however, and I’d like to know that information, and the point of achievement, for all these milestones.
nms resource was putting this together awhile back. Not sure if he finished.
I gave him a file to help him , LEVELEDSTATSTABLE.XML - Google Drive
That’s where I have the progression for the standing from, but couldn’t find info on the other milestones. Thanks a lot for the file, I’ll have a look.
Yeah, looks like it’s all in there, thanks a lot!
Now I’m fighting with myself whether to wite a parser or not because I might be too lazy to do it by hand, but also too lazy to write a parser…
So, done that. One thing I realised is that it’s only two custom milestones per guild. The third one is identical to a general milestone, and those all have their levels displayed in the UI, so no need for this.
For everything else, here’s the summary. Value refers to whatever the milestone is counting. Title refers to what is called the “medal” in the UI. And Level would be how many stars you’d have at this point if they still were displayed.
Aaaaand the board completely destroys the formatting. Give me a moment, I’ll post it in code tags…
## Race milestones
### Standing (these are the only ones that can go into negative and don't go from level 0 through 10)
Value Gek Vykeen Korvax Level
* -5 Rival Enemy Annoyance -2
* -2 Competitor Detractor Irritation -1
* 0 Customer Neutral Unstudied 0
* 3 Client Accomplice Point of Interest 1
* 8 Valued Customer Ally Test Subject 2
* 14 Collegue Close Ally Research Focus 3
* 21 Partner Comrade Trial Candidate 4
* 30 Friend Preceptor Significance 5
* 40 Best Friend Adjutant Savior 6
* 60 Most Favoured Commandant Singularity 7
* 100 Trade Lord Templar Traveler of the Atlas 8
### Words learnt (in specific language)
Value Title Level
0 Incomprehensible 0
5 Beginner 1
10 Student 2
50 Understood 3
100 Familiar 4
150 Conversationalist 5
250 Fluent 6
350 Interpreter 7
450 Scholar 8
550 Linguist 9
650 Universal Translator 10
### Systems visited (of specific race)
Value Title Level
0 Uncharted 0
3 Trailblazer 1
5 Scout 2
8 Warp Engaged 3
12 Surveyor 4
15 Rover 5
20 Voyager 6
30 Pioneer 7
40 Explorer 8
50 Overseer 9
60 Discoverer 10
### Missions completed (for specific race)
Value Title Level
0 Outsider 0
3 Initiate 1
5 Recognised 2
8 Journeyman 3
12 Associate 4
15 Senior 5
20 Master 6
30 Advisor 7
40 Veteran 8
50 Exalted 9
60 Ambassador 10
### Smuggler (Geck only)
Value Title Level
0 Good as Gold 0
10000 Clerical Errors 1
100000 On the Run 2
200000 Fence 3
500000 Bootlegger 4
1000000 Smuggler 5
2000000 Lawbreaker 6
5000000 The Agent 7
10000000 Master Smuggler 8
20000000 Uncatchable 9
50000000 Blockade Runner 10
### Sentinel walkers destroyed (Vy'keen only)
Value Title Level
0 Untested 0
1 Beheaded 1
3 The Coup 2
5 Triumph 3
10 Victory 4
15 Vanquisher 5
20 Battle Hardened 6
25 Unstoppable 7
30 Hunter-Killer 8
35 Ascendant 9
40 Pillar of Glass 10
### Nanites collected (Korvax only)
Value Title Level
0 Untainted 0
250 Glittered 1
500 Shifting Clusters 2
1000 Creeping Light 3
5000 Like Sand 4
10000 Harvest of Light 5
20000 Cluster Horde 6
40000 Impossibly Fragmented 7
60000 Drawn to Glass 8
80000 Awash with Foam 9
10000 Reality Grains 10
## General guild milestones
### Standing
All three guilds use the same progression and titles!
Value Title Level
-5 Hated -2
-2 Hostile -1
0 Unknown 0
3 Initiate 1
8 Apprentice 2
14 Journeyman 3
21 Associate 4
30 Senior 5
40 Master 6
60 Elder 7
100 Exalted 8
### Missions completed (for guild)
These are exactly the same tables and ranks as for missions per race.
## Merchants guild milestones
### Plants farmed
Value Title Level
0 Soft Handed 0
5 Forager 1
10 Farmhand 2
15 Harvester 3
20 Exo-Cropper 4
30 Agriculturist 5
40 Botanist 6
50 Soil Warrior 7
60 Astro-Agronomy 8
70 Cropmaster 9
80 Born of Soil 10
### Rare treasures
Value Title Level
0 Empty Handed 0
1 On the Hunt 1
3 Digger 2
8 Seeker 3
15 Collector 4
25 Connoisseur 5
35 Hoarder 6
50 Treasure Hunter 7
65 Ancient Restoration 8
80 Gifts from History 9
100 All that Glitters 10
## Explorers guild milestones
### Rare fauna discovered
Value Title Level
0 Uneducated 0
3 Naturalist 1
10 Collector 2
15 Scanner 3
20 Analyst 4
25 Researcher 5
30 Compiler 6
35 Archivist 7
40 Classifier 8
45 Zoologist 9
50 Encyclopedia 10
### Plants catalogued
Value Title Level
0 Plant Blind 0
10 Hobby Scanner 1
20 Enthusiast 2
30 Green Fingers 3
50 Plant Hunter 4
75 Ecologist 5
100 Floral Collector 6
150 Botanical Archive 7
200 Seed Bank 8
250 Exobotanist 9
300 Verdant Horde 10
## Mercenaries guild milestones
### Pirates destroyed
Value Title Level
0 Untested 0
5 Novice 1
10 Nuisance 2
15 Scrapper 3
20 Troublemaker 4
30 Fighter 5
40 Menace 6
50 Notorious 7
60 Dangerous 8
70 Expert 9
80 Legend 10
### Horrors eliminated
Value Title Level
0 Innocent 0
5 Scarred 1
10 Stained 2
25 Tainted 3
50 Haunted 4
75 Consumed 5
100 Fiendish 6
125 Eradicator 7
150 Annihilator 8
200 Exterminator 9
250 Face of Death 10
Nice! This is going in my huge No Man’s Sky OneNote notebook!