I believe the customizable staves from the Echoes update was a proof-of-concept test run for customizable ship building

Everyone, or at least a sizable portion of No Man’s Sky players have requested some type of custom ship building. I think all ships up to now will be kept as is, with no changes. So ship hunting will still exist. I think if Hello Games implements new ship types to the game, they will be customizable like the staff. Ship parts would of course be procedurally generated and distributed somehow to all existing systems. We would have to find parts through some type of “treasure hunt” mechanic. This is what I’m hoping for anyway. So what new types of ships could Hello Games implement? I actually do like BOTH the classic “rocket-like” looking spaceship and the circular saucer spaceship.

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Seeing the interface I had the same thought, actually. The entire system looks like it would be relatively reusable for other wysiwyg-style crafting of things.
However, there’s reason for caution in these expectations. HG has a track record of implementing entire systems for one specific feature and then not reusing them to unlock their full potential.
The two most obvious offenders here are desolations dungeons (which I expected them to at least extend to abandoned space stations), and frontiers settlements (which contains a lot of NPC logic and procedural building templates that sit around doing essentially nothing for the game, because every settlement you find is in its barest state until you build it up, and the NPC behaviour is mechanically irrelevant).

So I would not at all be surprised if this was another instance of “we built a cool system because we were interested in doing this thing, now we’re on to other things”.
Also, I wouldn’t expect any new ship types. The easiest way to integrate this right now would be to make blueprints for the already existing procedural parts, and hand them out for finding crashed spaceships or as mission rewards.

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And yet, we were told more was to come for the settlements. And nothing has happened, yet. So we can hold onto hope. And there were those datamined space stations. Have not seen those yet either.
HG keeps saying, ‘much more to come’. I will keep hoping.

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I think failing to get settlements on Switch sorta put a pin in their plans to expand on it.(someone please correct me if no longer the case and Switch has Settlements now)

However taste of metal/settlements being a required field in order to start meeting Autophages might be a hint at whats to come. Now that we’ve given them bodies and been accepted into their clan, perhaps the last step is finding them a frontier to call home (which will lead to them making some renovations with the local systems space station going off a certain year old data leak?)

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I think that HG trying to get the game to play on various devices may be what was holding them back and/or slowing them down and/or made them change development plans. But every studio needs money, specially when your trying to fund a game with free DLC and no microtransactions and development on another new ambitious game… and this is one way they may be doing that.

I still think that HG are going to bring ship customization in some form eventually. They have been dropping subtle hints that allude to it. I also think that the procedural interiors are going to be used in more areas soon. As usual, developers like to reuse assets and mechanics as much as reasonable and so far they haven’t done a whole lot with customization even though they have the ability now(exomech, staff, player character)

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@Licoricemint
Good call. Customizable ships are here.
Couldn’t resist replying to confirm your future prediction was right.

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I hope that somewhere out there, there is someone commenting under my internet post predictions from years past to tell me I was on the ball. You’re a good soul, KF4LDP <3

Or how massively wrong I was about the new space station look being a thing brought on by the Autophage XD

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Thank you @toddumptious .
That was my first post in over a year.
I’ve been called an Old Soul, but never a good one.

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