Let's Play No Man's Sky Part 10 - Atlas Interface
8No Man's Sky is a first-person, open world survival game. Players take the role of a planetary explorer in an uncharted universe. They are equipped with a survival spacesuit with a jetpack; a "multitool" that can be used to scan, mine and collect resources as well as to attack or defend oneself from creatures and other entities while on a planet; and a spacecraft that allows them to land and take-off from planets and travel between them and engage in combat with other space-faring vessels. With this equipment, the player is then free to engage in any of the four principal activities offered by the game: exploration, survival, combat, and trading.
The player-character can collect information on the planets and the lifeforms and other features of these planets to upload to The Atlas, a galactic database as depicted in the game's cover artwork, which they are paid for with units, the in-game currency. Units are used to purchase new survival gear, tools, and spacecraft with more powerful abilities and defenses, allowing the player to explore more of the universe and survive in more hostile environments. Such upgrades can work in synergistic effects; the scanning feature of the multitool initially starts as a short-ranged directed beam, but can be upgraded to have much longer range, spanning all directions, and locating minerals and other resources buried in the ground.
The player's ability to explore planets is only limited by the range of the hyperspace jump engines of their current spacecraft and how much fuel that the craft presently carries. The player is able to view a galactic map to plot courses between systems, which is updated as other players upload their findings to the Atlas. Numerous features in the space between planets exist, including ships and fleets belonging to various factions which may be hostile to the player or which the player may wish to engage in space combat. The player's actions influence how the faction treats them in future encounters; for example by helping a faction win a space battle against a rival one earlier, they may in turn help protect the players from a different faction later. The player can attempt communication with non-player characters (NPC) from these factions using a dialog tree interface, but this requires them to learn the aliens' language, for which a simple word-for-word translation exists, leaving the player to wildly guess at the start. By frequent communications with that faction, as well as finding monoliths scattered on planets that act as Rosetta stones, the player can better understand these languages, and can gain favour from the NPC and its faction for trading and combat. There are also various space bases where the player can engage in trading of resources and goods in a free market system, with one such base existing in every planetary system so that players always have the ability to buy fuel to make hyperspace jumps to other systems. The player is able to use resources they have collected to craft new goods, though they are required to determine the recipes for these on their own or to purchase from vendors. This can enable players to collect rare elements found in a remote part of the universe and craft them to make highly desirable goods that they can sell. Such stations also sell new equipment to the player with rotating stock.
Taking resources from a planet or harming the lifeforms on it causes the player to gain a "wanted level" similar to that of the Grand Theft Auto series, attracting the attention of self-replicating robot-like Sentinels that patrol the planets. Low wanted levels may cause small drones to appear which may be easily fought off, while giant walking machines can assault the player at higher wanted levels. Similarly, hostile actions towards the alien factions cause aggressive responses based on a comparable scale, ranging from being intercepted by one or two scout ships, to becoming the target of entire armadas. The player-character can die in a number of fashions, such as by sustained damage from a toxic or oxygen-less planetary environment or extreme temperatures, attacks from dangerous lifeforms or Sentinels, or being destroyed in space combat with the space-faring factions. If the player-character dies, they will respawn near their spacecraft if they died on the planet surface, or will respawn at a nearby spaceport if they died in space combat; in either situation, they lose all information that they have not yet uploaded to the Atlas and other resources collected since, but retain all of the gear they have already acquired.
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