Finished the 3rd planet a little while ago. Didn’t like it. First landing almost as soon as I got out a hostile sentinel blew the whistle. Managed to survive the sentinel ship until I was able to pulse out. Back to the area to land again and as soon as I got out it all repeated again except that I couldn’t outrun the sentinel ship so I eliminated it. Two ships immediately showed up and I couldn’t get to pulse. Eliminated them and three ships showed up. Just too much. Reloaded a two back backup and was back to the first landing, I think. Immediately reentered the ship and cruised the area trying to locate the coordinates. Finally took a chance and landed. Immediately ran off towards an unusual spot. Once there I stayed in a protected area and placed a base computer just outside the entrance. Built a base and ran into it. Completed everything I needed to do and built a teleporter so that I could leave safely.
It is only the 3rd planet, thank goodness. My strategy is to TM into the ground until they call off the hunt.
One advantage, the Pulse Splitter. The expedition rewards you with upgrades. It becomes fairly powerful very quickly. You will be needing it for the spawns…did I mention those? The big worms that pop out of the ground and send an army of monstrosities after you. Oh and make sure the sentinels don’t see you attacking them. 
Make sure to hang onto 3 flesh ropes.
I’ve tried that. Sadly, the sentinels in my game appear to regard the laws of physics more as guidelines, or maybe an optional extra. Sometimes being underground will confuse them, but other times they just pass straight through solid rock. And whilst they sometimes can’t get to me underground, they can still see me, and they can still shoot me. Rock walls don’t stop their weapons fire.
All that happens when I’m underground is that I’m trapped in a tunnel, with limited movement. Much of the time, it doesn’t seem to bother the sentinels at all.
They do that? They didn’t in the past… that might get quite interesting.
That sounds lore-accurate, actually 
They were in a previous expedition, the one that brought sandworms, and they remained afterwards. I forget what they are called but, you must clear out a nest of them for flesh ropes…to cook…
I remember the nests, but I don’t remember any monstrosities being involved. All I remember are some appendages flailing around ineffectively in place while I was picking them out from a save distance. If they release monstrosities when attacked, that situation would get a lot more “interesting”.
Let the sentinels see you firing on them and it gets even more interesting. Then do all of this on a steep slope… 
The strident players complaining & lusting for increased and more challenging combat have made the game a lot less enjoyable for me. I can adapt settings during normal games, but Hello Games keeps forcing unwanted conflict that I cannot change on me during expeditions.
One alternative might be to keep the first-run expeditions the same but allow such setting changes in the “redux” expeditions. Then both sets of players would be [mostly] happy.
I’m with you. I’m beginning to think my NMS days are coming to a close. :sadface:
Is this expedition forcing multiplayer this time (like previous expeditions have forced other things)?
I believe it starts with MP disabled, but every other setting is set to enabled by default. So it’s still best to actually verify those are as you want them to be before anything
I’m only half-way through, but I have all my multiplayer and sharing settings set to “off”. So far, the only thing it’s tried to make me do is upload my bases (I have uploaded them, but I don’t think it would have forced me to). I haven’t been forced to meet or join in with anybody else.
So (so far) no, it’s not forcing multiplayer on me.
It does force upload to complete the milestone. I decided to delete my bases after again, because I do not plan on keeping them. Not sure if there was some specific reason for this, maybe they wanted to stress test busy systems?
Ah, my error.
I was wondering about that. I was also wondering about the relative lack of overcrowding, compared to previous missions. And I wondered about the title “fractal”, which others have also commented on.
And I wondered whether HG were using fractal mathematics in the management of game instances. The thing about fractals is they’re infinitely divisible, whilst maintaining structure. I wonder if they’re preventing crowding by using a fractal algorithm to split off more and more game instances?
Just a thought.
I’m not sure why anyone wold call that a fractal algorithm, really. I mean, it’s essentially a load balancer, not a mandelbrot set. You’re not actually subdividing or splitting, you’re multiplying (the only thing that gets split is the number of clients, but that’s a simple division).
Also, you’d probably want to optimise for maximum player number on all instances, for gameplay as well as efficiency reasons.
It might well be though that they decided to lower the maximum players per instance in this case, presumably to take some stress off the whole “we’re gonna put a lot of bases into each instance instead” thing they’ve got going on.
I don’t know what fractal means to HG in this instance, chaos from simplicity maybe? It doesn’t seem to fit the update in what I have seen so far and only lightly represented in the expedition by repeated quests that all had the same structure but differed in the details. While researching fractals to see if there was some meaning that I didn’t know I realized that the triangles in the NMS Fractal logo look a lot like the Sierpiński gasket.
It is likely that fractals already play some part in NMS. Before release and in various presentations Sean mentioned L-Systems which which are rewriting systems trying to simulate/explain biology (plants in particular). The classic rewriting system was the snowflake curve proposed by von Koch in 1905 and this was referenced in the book ‘The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants’ as an inspiration. Still this doesn’t explain the relevance to an update featuring a catalog of discoveries, qol updates, accessibility improvements, gyros and VR.
MP was on for me but I saw far, far fewer players than previous expeditions. I began to see more bases but not players.
Yep, stuck on the expedition. And won’t be restarting. I finished the caldera mission, but lost everything on top of the vulcano. And now I’m in a spawn death loop. Not my idea of fun.
And since when can’t you pin ingredients anymore?
Beat the expedition a few days ago and I have to say that I noticed a few things that seemed a bit different. I went to the internet to see if it was just all in my head and it seems that there are a few things that the patch notes didn’t mention or vaguely mentioned for some reason. Settlement changes is one of them.
Not yet sure is settlements we’re improved or if they sort of just “reset” the layouts but most seem to be saying its an improvement while a few say it was a downgrade.
Also, was anyone else experiencing a massive framerate drop only when inside the abandoned space station from this particular expedition?
I have a settlement I have built inside of extensively. Have not checked it since the latest exp patch, but it was the same when I was in it a couple of days ago.
Did the patch fix your controller issue?