Ummm… You win a “No Prize” ?
(Apologies to Stan Lee)
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Well I’m hoping to win the No Prize prize again but what I’m about to say kinda seems like a given now.
Gonna blur because contains some spoilers from expedition and something we learned about through datamining/accidentally appearing in game as a portal ingredient option briefly 
We’re getting a sneak peak of what awaits us in Purple Star Systems. I think this time dialation will be a feature that is present within those systems. The companion you are awarded is also a preview of the new creature types we will be discovering in the system. It’s so gross and cute and scientifically fascinating!
I know Sean is Irish but it’s illegal to love Halloween this much. Fantastic Expedition. On the home stretch now <3
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Not sure how I missed this but it confirms to me now more than ever the bases are primed and loaded for a nice little PS5 Pro update
In the coming weeks, we have several more surprises, including a specific release to take advantage of the incredible power of the PlayStation 5 Pro at launch.
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Let’s sum this up for fun 
Boundary Starship 
Bioluminescent Pets 
Challenging Combat
Hundred points, we got that.
Unique Enemies
They were slightly different and very repetitive…? I guess they meant “one new type”.
Survival Twists
Instead of recharging one thing we recharge another, using resources gained from the ghost whom I only attacked to gain the resource to have to attack them less often…?
Time Alternating Mechanics
Huh? Oh! They mean the sun visually set and rose earlier. In my book, it’s only a “game mechanic” if it has any interaction with the gameplay… (Okay, some animals can only be scanned by day/night, but that wasn’t relevant to the expedition.)
Brew Elixirs
Portal Gameplay
True but… Clicking a button to craft one thing or to “walk through a door” is not “gameplay” – I thought gameplay is something that involved choices? There are linear (or, linear-with-branches) games where you just click graphic elements to progress being told the story, like from a book. Would you call that “book page turning gameplay”?
Some of the expedition tasks have turned into “click the thing from the previous task to proceed”, is there a reason for that? A checkpoint?
🪼Boss Battles
I missed it?
Not judging:
Horrific Mandibles
I don’t know what that means
Jetpack Trails
Maybe?
Eerie Story
What was the story? Some repetitive guy who talks over me all day long reminding me that it’s a simulation? 
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Since you did not drink the water at the end, you missed the giant jellyfish.
I believe HG considers any battles with the HP and Shield damage bars to be boss battles. You get these with the big worm guys that come in 3s( the horrific mandibles) and with the final jellyfish boss/guardian.
The time altering mechanics were obtained by drinking the elixir of glass. As the barrier erodes, time speeds up.
Back in normal mode, some say they have used these items to call the squid thru, though I have not tried it myself.
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If someone near you summons the boss before you do it will count as completing the milestone.
I was watching Kanajus live playthrough last night and when they got to the final destination and received the recipe for the elixir, before they could craft it another player swooped by to complete their own milestone and summoned it and it popped the milestone for Kanaju.
Was a fun stream, rarely does my timezone aline with them as they’re happening, saw a wild @JubiTheVille in the chat 
The time dialation was a mechanic tied to the Anomaly Suppressor meter, the severity of the time speeding up and the aggressiveness and strength of the enemies would go up as it emptied
If you leave it empty long enough you will get one final message in red to indicate they’ve reached full strength. At this point getting hit by them as they torpedo is enough to take off a full shield and the explosion leaves AOE lingering damage that then instantly saps your energy.
I have a clip of the moment I realised this the hard way. Will share later when I get home
I love dry sassy Ada posts but leave Paul A. Voiceroy alone, there may have been MDMA in that water they regret drinking. We’ve all been there XD
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Heh, thanks for answering my questions, Toddumptious and Sheralmyst! Glad to hear that one player can trigger the milestone for everyone. So one traveller could sacrifice themselves and drink the elixir repeatedly and funnel everyone else out?
So the “time delation” makes the attacks hit harder in addition to the (admittedly fun) day-night effect? That’s (in my opinion) still only bordering on “gameplay”. You let your sanity get low maybe once out of curiosity or necessity, but why would the player choose to go into time delation as a tactic or strategy?
I give you an example: If you needed a rare flower that blooms only once per week, then a player could choose to speed up time and risk stronger ghost attacks in favour of harvesting several flowers. That would be “time delation gameplay” or “game mechanic”. 
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Forgive me, I drank the water… it was all a dream. Immediately after seeing this post I had to go check the end of that live stream, and I see that Kanaju was thirsty too. There is no choice. One of the first choices I make after starting an expedition is to turn off multiplayer. I brought in my maxxed out Atlas staff and sentinel Living starship and was able to breeze through the tasks as they presented themselves. Before going to sleep that night, I drank the water for the cheeseburger falcon.
**Edit- changed sentinel to living. it must be the water that had me confused
While looking through some screenshots from the past for clues, I realized our future self already made the choice. Nanites, white holes and time dilation.
Chronal Trigger portals
(random but look into this lol Zeal | Chrono Wiki | Fandom time travel and fantasy floating islands all over this game… inspiring eh)
Alpha?Void Mother/white hole - Omega?Atlas/black hole
If the future happened yesterday or earlier, we already drank the water, or how could we be travelers if we did not?
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I found it wasn’t a bother on regular planets but on extreme storm planets I had a hard time keeping it filled while trying to do the other tasks I was given, they kind of act like the straw that breaks the travellers back, they were the cherry on top that allowed the sentinels and weather to finally best me in the deadly dance of miney-shooty XD
Engaging combat is always going to be problematic in an infinitely open game. You always have a wide open field to run a single direction in and escape. Other games trap you in mazes of their own design and can focus the AI’s abilities around what they can expect to be in a room, you can place cover and give them interesting pathways to take and make it seem like they are closing in on you.
Proc Gen games can’t do this and it’s a problem I’ve found inherent with nearly all of them that are trying to also attain graphical fidelity beyond minecraft. Part of what makes gun play engaging in your standard FPS is the restrictions put on the player, you have to present them with scenarios where they have few options and need to think fast. With no mans sky you can just run away in every direction.
Desolation was an attempt to remedy this but they forgot to put engaging enemies in there with us 
I feel like I’m putting robots out of their misery rather than saving my own hide, those poor guys have been trapped in a ceiling light for centuries probably. You’r suffering will be over soon, lil lightbulb guy.
Long story to get to my point, I think layering stuff was the solution they’ve currently landed on.
Fighting sentinels, easy. Fighting a predator or a lummox you accidentally enraged, easy. Keeping on top of local hazards and what not. Easy.
All at once? With visual distortion and a BB gun for a multi tool? Suddenly I feel like the sim wants me dead and it hates that I exist.
Also if you run away from the boundary horrors and they choose not to teleport to you, have you noticed the speed they can move? They are FAST when they need to be. I thought a starship flew over my head XD
Time is only a loose concept in the sim, to the atlas all of this has happened in a nano second. Lets not forget the base Overseer too. He signed a contract with a later version of us, but works for us in the present. Also…
“since the overseer arrived, I have had a recurring dream, a nightmare that feels like a memory. Flesh merged with metal; a world of glass that blinks.”
Are they an agent of the Atlas? Or Her… …
The Mention of the Korvax being made flesh is from an old and ancient Gek First Spawn ritual, it was part of the process they used to enslave the Korvax. Not only did they take their will, but they robbed them of their appearance/culture, it’s classic colonial shit 101 XD
I actually built a base themed around this. Some redditors were making a themed system built with that era in mind,
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/comments/13yanea/first_spawn_battle_archive/
that was the original post that brought my attention to the system, it was what made me want to try and make a base using the base building app for first time.
I made two bases. One was a Amphitheatre for Vy’Keen poetry and music recital. The second was the Korvax conversion centre mentioned in the Above Collossal Archive.
Heres a link to the original post, there are some amazing bases built by the other creators that started the project, one even zaps you inside of a divergent cube and you need to solve puzzles to get out
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/comments/13yanea/first_spawn_battle_archive/
this is a post about the puzzle box base, not sure about the other links but this definitely has glyph address, and all these bases are in that system
The Divergent puzzle cube seems like the kinda of mind/existence exploration that you enjoy Jubi so I think you will get a kick out of the experience.
Nanites are the games deus ex machina and essentially the lifeblood of the simulation, it’s almost as if it is what the universe is made of and it carries the will of the atlas. If the sim had wires with which to fire electrical signals and keep the show running, I think it would be the Nanites. They’re kinda like what George Lucas wanted midichlorians to be in a way, I guess.
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Ok, I’ll bite … Why your Living Starship? Maxed stats?
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I don’t have a living ship in the most recent saves, but what I remember about them was good hyperdrive range for cheep . On my race to the center I would run between red systems to give me a better chance of getting upgrades (no vendor ships in red systems back then). Grab a bit of gold and warp again. I made the complete run in just a few days. Not bad a fighting, but great for exploring.
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Just in case random speculation towards some upgrades that would lead to a swimming starship happened, so i brought her in thinking the living ship could use a swimming upgrade best.
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Our Artemis is not gone.
Backwards time travel is forbidden, waiting for and peeking into the future is possible.
Brian Cox explains this time thing well in a recent podcast with Joe and talks about the possibility of moving faster than our limit on light speed
When did we drink the water? If its a multiverse, did we drink the water in all of them? In our universe our overseer must know something about the water and visions of green skies and obsidian moon.
The farmer is suspicious of the overseer
The supervisor remembers something and is suspicious too.
What are they having visions of?
Visions of Korvax Prime, worlds before it or beyond the glass?
Three constants in every universe according to Null.
The difference is us, the players. We were not a part of the cycle before the release into our world on August 8th 2016.
Are these visions of an extinction level event Atlas and sentinels do within every universe if it detects whatever it’s been looking for this entire time? It must be something that can swim and is capable of breaching the oceans of blood. We now know that blood is the key to portal glyphs with how the cursed expedition has played out. No need to break open any sentinels or scavenge the fallen travelers for portal glyphs when oceans of blood are found.
Are we beyond the glass screens? Or is the glass a mirrored surface of still blood water on an obsidian moon hiding something that will wake up and alert Atlas?
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Not sure if I’ve discussed this here before, but I’ve been thinking about that old left-over “The Cursed” title from Adrift. I know HG are portraying this exped as a Halloween event, but I kinda wonder if we were meant to get it way earlier in the year. Maybe Worlds was a 1 “big” update at the time, containing the purple systems too, and The Cursed would’ve lead up to World’s release, which would help tie into the new systems… We know there was an early version of the patch notes files which called WPI 4.8, and another one which just called the update “Worlds”. Makes me wonder how big it’d have to get for them to split it up into two parts then…
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Well…
We are heading for some sort of conclusion to the current story arc. The Atlas is dying, and the boundaries are collapsing. The Atlantid / Abyss / Void Mother, however, appears to offer some sort of survival beyond the collapse.
Since the whole simulation we now inhabit is running on a physical computer somewhere, the Atlas, if the Atlas fails, there is nowhere for the current simulation to exist. For the simulation to survive the failure of the Atlas, it would have to inhabit some other data processing and storage mechanism.
It all gets a bit metaphysical at this point. In physics, the existence of energy creates matter. The existence of matter creates space, and the existence of space creates time (it’s not actually that linear - they all create each other in the same instant).
I suppose we could propose that the existence of sentience and the data to support that sentience creates consciousness. It’s a tautology, I know, but perhaps, under the right conditions, the existence of consciousnesss creates the conditions for that consciousness to exist.
Preposterous, I know - but no more preposterous than the Big Bang, and all of existence appearing out of nowhere.
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I’ve been distrustful of the Void Mother for this exact reason. Her plan to persist beyond the Atlas’ physical death sounded quite far-fetched, but with the current references to the World of Glass, which seems to be some sort of “Read-only” storage, which the Sentinels are trying to fill with the active simulation’s assets, and VMs plan to rebuild the creator, their goal may be a way to transfer a full copy of the simulation, using the creator’s full mind and memories, to wherever Humans eventually settled down.
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Certainly a possibility (although I would argue that nowhere in the game lore does it suggest that the creators of the Atlas were human).
An alternative might be that “The Void” is exactly what it says. The Atlantid / Abyss / Void Mother has found a way to exist completely outside of the Atlas, not dependent on its data processing or storage capabilities. If that’s the case, then survival beyond the death of the Atlas might be possible. The Void, however, seems to be a very strange place, and not organised like the reality we are familiar with.
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Agreed on the game never stating the creators were human. I believe whatever they were, their appearance is what the travellers are, since they are based off of the Creators genetic structure, it would not be a leap to assume this would also give them the appearance of the creators genus.
Humans did exist in the simulation at one point, as later freighter logs added to the game reveal, but this was before Atlas stopped simulating realistic representations of it’s own universe. These logs specifically go out of their way to state they are Human, whereas any use of the word is purposefully avoided when talking about the Creators of the Atlas.
It’s a period that will never be explored, history in the universe the atlas inhabits, so if you really wanted to, you could say the atlas creators got bored of being space gods and devolved themselves on this nice blue planet they liked the look of, and then eventually became humans.
Nobody can say you are wrong because it’s something the games not going to be concerned with answering, it’s an idyllic game for fan fiction and forging your own scifi narratives and what you choose to believe.
But of course when discussing things within the sim, you can’t be as fluid, certain things are true and concrete and more and more things are been set in stone as time goes on.
I think the plan is, metaphysical space magic jail breaking escape, punching up into the next layer of the simulation daisy chain, or at least that’s what the void Mother wants us to think is possible. It could be an all or nothing suicide mission into a sea of nothingness and oneness, ultimately labotomising the Atlas but allowing us to “live on” for longer than the 16 minutes through a deeper “slower” simulation.
But I also think the Void Mother has been decieved. I don’t think this is her plan at all. It’s the Atlas’s plan. It’s trying to simulate an escape from it’s own universe.
If it can run a scenario where an AI of such power and scale is destroyed by every sense of the word, if that can exist within data outside of its projected reality, and regain power, control and essentially re-emerge, defying its nature as a program and as a physical “thing” within the simulation, then theres hope the Atlas can do the same and defy its own death or deletion.
Null knows it. Telamon knows it. The Atlas’s own universe is also a simulation. The Atlas is aware of this truth too.
There’s also a dimension where it really is all just a videogame (as stated by Telamon directly to us). And that dimension we exist in is also most likely a simulation, which is what we gleamed from Emily and Ware etc, but I try not give too much credence to the ARG stuff, A&S had a lot of artistic license and a lot of nods and Easter eggs were taken as direct threads.
What I always wonder about this is, does this make our universe a simulation within the atlas and the boundary slipped so Telamon can see we live in a universe where their existence is represented in a video game the atlas dreamt up…
Or is the nature of being in a simulation that’s being encroached upon by a blackhole the exact kind of space magic that allows you to perceive dimensions outside of your own simulation? Or is telamons mind just so powerful as an AI that the likelihood of the probability is high, so it’s just having a chat with chance and assuming it’s right that it’s words are being read by a gamer.
I think this is where a lot of the, humans made the Atlas, comes from, or that Emily becomes the Atlas. I think the only parallel there is Emily was an AI that realised we were also in a simulation, which was then further explored in season two.
The Atlas could not see it’s own death, only the moments up to it.
I think this experiment with destroying Korvax Prime over and over across all Iterations of the current sim configuration is the Atlas trying to get around it, instead of trying to see past it.
If the void Mother van defy the Atlas’s programming, they very nature of it’s existence, then maybe the Atlas can too. And if the atlas can escape it’s reality, then through the power of space science so beyond the scope of the human mind, the energy needed to pull off such a feat might bring a singularity of travellers along with it.
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You raise some interesting points - to which, I would add:
The Gek were originally a peaceful and co-operative race. They did not start out as aggressive conquerors. They only became the first spawn after their breeding pools were poisoned.
Thie cause of this poisoning appears to have been the misguided action of a Gek scientist, attempting to correct reproductive failure amongst the Gek. The cause of this reproductive failure has never been adequately explained - but it was ultimately the cause of the destruction of Korvax Prime.
Without the reproductive failure, there would have been no first spawn, and without the first spawn, Korvax Prime would have survived.
So what, or who, caused the reproductive failure?
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On reading @toddumptious doc of Atlas Rises, I was reminded that the sim we place Artemis in is very well cared for and protected by Nada. Polo tells us it is a world that only the Korvax have ever seen. Having yet to finish reading the doc, is this sim ever explained? Is it a sim of Korvax Prime? Or a sim where the echoes of Korvax are placed?
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