No Man’s Sky would be an even better survival/exploration game without owning starships. I have a save where I haven’t even left my starter planet and all I do is on-foot exploration and map out the planet. To map out the planet I simply drop base computers every time I run into a point of interest such as an observatory, transmission tower, trading post, etc, and give them meaningful names such as “Blah Blah Blah Observatory”. This style of play really makes No Man’s Sky an enjoyable survival/exploration game. This stops being fun when you get tired of the planet. So you need a way off the planet. In the difficulty settings, there should be a new option, “starter ship or no starter ship”. To get off the planet, you need to find or randomly bump into a trading post or planetary archive. The trading post/planetary archive will provide taxi service to the space station, from the space station you can get taxi service to other planets in the same system. Trading posts will be either “incoming taxis only” or “outgoing taxis only”. This way when you land on a planet from the taxi service, you will have no choice but to go to another trading post to get off the planet, thereby forcing you to engage with survival/exploration. To get to another system, the space station should also provide taxi service to an NPC controlled freighter currently in the system. After boarding the freighter, you can then warp to a new system. When you arrive in the new system, you then get taxi service to the space station.
You can kind of replicate this mode of play by giving yourself a couple of glyphs and an exocraft tech with a savegame editor on a new save. Ignore the broken ship, just go stargate all the way.
Yes. That is the beauty of NMS. You can play any way you like. However, the story does center around why you are suddenly awake on a planet, seperated from your ship, with no idea how you got there.
I actually create my own story. On my main save, my starter planet is just the planet of my birth and then one day I happen to see a starship crash on the horizon and I go to investigate and find a ship. To immerse myself in my own story I will turn an NPC settlement close to the crashed starship into a base, which would be where I have lived for all of my life. On my particular save, I’ve turned a trading settlement into a base. There are two NPC geks who I think of as adaptive parents who found me as child and raised me.
It’s great to see how people adapt the game to their play style. YouTuber Kanaju even created Procedural Mission Generator to add interest for himself.