Could you test something? When you invite another player, is the weather also good for them?
Did that happen to you too, that the weather is purposefully punishing in multiplayer? Me and a friend lost interest in playing together, and we talked about it, and it basically went “Why did you build our base on such an toxic planet, and not on the paradise planet I showed you.” - “No, my planet was the paradise planet and you kept dragging me to some toxic wasteland.” - “What?”
On other planets, the conversation never came up, so I don’t know, is the weather always out of sync, but we only talked about it on reputed paradise planets? Bug or feature?
Is the weather calculated procedurally in a way that there is a timer that changes the weather every x seconds, and what we call “paradise planet” means simply a planet where the timer is stopped and the weather never changes — and it depends on the weather cycle of the moment when you land, your personal weather stops on either a good or bad one?
So here is something someone here noted way back. When you start a new game, HG handicaps the planet so you can have an easier experience. I am not sure if this is still true but, I lived for ages on a nice quiet planet until I had a visitor. As soon as MP was active, the true nature of the planet showed for them but not for me. This include both weather and sentinel behavior. I then noticed that when I looked at planet stats, it had bad weather and bad sentinels but was not for me. The next time I played, the planet and sentinels were bad for me as well…
It is the only reason I could think weather would differ for two people unless there is a bug.
Yes, I remember a bug that could permanently change your internal home system setting if you joined another’s game. That removes the special protection that’s normally granted the player there. I built my main normal-mode save on what seemed like a peaceful desert planet, only to find out later it was an aggressive sentinel world for everyone else.
Once, after doing some MP missions, I returned to my base only to find my home was now a rather dangerous place. Reloading/restarting couldn’t fix it. Fortunately I regularly backup my saves (a lesson learned from a near-catastrophic Atlas Rises bug), so I restored an earlier one and all was fine with only minimal progress lost.
I thought the bug was eventually fixed, I haven’t encountered anything like it in years, but I can’t say for sure.
We have special protection in our spawn system? Ugh, that’s not very nice. I tend to dawdle in starting systems quite a bit, never realised that it’s effectively easy mode…
Very interesting, I heard of this „first planet“ phenomenon as well, maybe that was it. I was wondering whether we “break“ someone’s paradise planet by visiting… Does this only happen with the first and later planets are stable?
It was only the starting planet. I am not sure it is still this way. However, it is still true that you do not see sentinels on your starting planet so the extreme weather may still be true as well. Make sure to check planet stats in Discovery and compare what it states to what you see.
This would make a good topic to be moved to Help a Fellow Traveller.
The discrepancies between the environments in our games is what eventually made Mal and I stop playing MP together. When we play NMS together now it is in Parallel Play mode.
I haven’t noticed it with MP but the other day I started a new game to test ignoring the initial distress beacon. The bad weather never came, something that starts when you follow the normal path to getting the part to fix the ship. I also didn’t have bad weather on the next planet until I set down the base computer when the weather instantly changed to bad. Not a roll in of bad weather, but an instant switch into the middle of a storm. At least during the initial tutorial they hold back weather and sentinels.
So it is still governed by the story but the actual weather comes in with the Base Computer. Before, it would remain good until someone came to visit. That was during the Orb days when we were floating spheres. I thought I had the perfect planet for ages until someone visited…
Very interesting, thanks for sharing! My solution was to always start separately and only meet with players that are already established past the tutorials, and then, meet in “neutral territory”. All these weird bug avoidance rituals…
