You get an atlas word and nanites for presenting a wonder to the atlas. The round orbs on the floor give words again for different races and atlas. If you have 100% a race’s language, walking over an orb that would have given you a word for that race will yield nothing. I was able to 100% the atlas language after a few atlas stations.
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Decided to see how the free weekend was looking for NMS in terms of steam stats.
Already you can see that active player levels are above what you would normally get with a small update, closer to what you’d get with a large update in fact.
Peaks are usually around 16:00 and 20:00 UTC . Sundays are always the most active day for players across the globe.
It’s only the afternoon here and already Sunday has passed Saturdays peek and we are a ways off from 20utc.
It is looking like the free weekend was indeed successful at drawing in a larger player base, what the attachment rate will be remains to be seen.
I noticed it wasn’t advertised well on steam (theres even a Guildford Festival starting on monday… closest I could find on featured store page) and not sure how it appears on the front end for a console. I’d say word of mouth between friends probably did most of the work, “hey this game is free we should all finally see what the fuss was/is about”
I’ve also realised this is a great way for Hello Games to stress test things for Light No Fire. I feel Expeditions were already testing this, hey lets see how our code handles a bunch of people starting on the same planet.
Now its, “okay lets see how many it can handle if we open up the gate to as many people as want to come in.”
I look forward to many more “tests” 
The more travellers, the merrier.
Here is the active players chart for the last 12 months. You can see peaks for smaller updates, and a big peak for the big yearly update at summers end. Also a nice small lengthy wave at christmas for Expedition Redux.
For an update that some are saying is one of the smallest; it hitting higher or similar player peaks to those releases last year tells me the Free Trial definitely brought in some extra heads,.
Since I started typing this…
Up by 300
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Huh… I never even realised they looked different…
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Well they did not have the light panel displays before. Maybe they appeared on the planets when they appeared on the space station? Idk… 
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