I've seen many where the captchas are generated by an AI...
It's essentially one set of humans programming an AI to prevent an attack from another AI owned by another set of humans. Does this tecnically make it an AI war?
I give a lot of advice to new players (although I only have 470 hours playtime), and these are some of my suggestions, in order of importance.
Suggestions
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Try not to look up guides or videos very often. No Man's Sky is partly a game of exploration and once you know everything there is to know, it'll get boring pretty quickly. There's plenty of time for minmaxing, metagaming, or modding later on.
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Do the tutorials, the main missions, and the side missions early on. They will guide you through the various aspects of the game in a reasonably sensible order. They may also give you blueprints or materials that are hard to get initially, but trivial to obtain later on, meaning it's better to do them earlier than later.
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If you have a screen recorder that doesn't have a watermark, I'd suggest using that. If not, take the occasional nice screenshot of the landscape or your base. If / when you are several hundred hours in, it's nice to look back at how you first started for the memories.
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You can bind number keys to quick-menu items, for example I have "2" bound to change from 1st to 3rd person, and "0" to photo mode.
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A significant part of NMS is the lore. If that's not your thing that's fine, but I would recommend reading through the logs and story elements because some of them are very deep and a little dark, and it really shows the artistic side of the game design.
Additional Important Notes
- Turn PVP OFF in settings
- If you get trapped by a base or need to access something behind someone else's base, go into the quickmenu and report it. It will disappear and not cause any harm to the person who owns the base.
- The current expedition will last for another ~4 weeks. They only come once every few months and once you've missed it, you can't do it again. There may be a short-version re-run at the end of the year, but don't count on it.
There are many different ways to make nanites. Refining Runaway Mould is one option favoured by many players. However this is often inconvenient in Hardcore mode, where it is time consuming to refine mould due to the reduced stack size.
Here is a short guide to making a large amount of nanites, assuming that money is not an issue (it may cost several million units).
Step 1. Fly to a Pirate space station. This guide works best if you have already visited the space stations of many different pirate systems before. Pirate stations are marked in the Galactic map with a skull icon.
Step 2. Talk to the Black Market trader. They are found to the left of the damaged hauler in the space station. Buy all their Suspicious Packets (Tech) and Suspicious Packets (Arms). !
Step 3. Using the space station teleport (or your ship's warp drive), warp to another Pirate station. Alternatively, wait for the trader to restock later on. Repeat steps 2 and 3 until you have run out of units / have spent enough time gathering packets.
Step 4. Unpack all the Suspicious Packets you have bought. This may take a little while but it's very satisfying. !
Step 5. Go to the Black Market Upgrades dealer (in the tent to the right of the damaged hauler).
Step 6. Sell off all your upgrades for around 300 nanites each. !
Expected Results: I have given this a short trial and was able to make 38000 nanites in 11 minutes at around 500 units per nanite. Scaling this up gives around 200k nanites per hour.
If anyone tries this for longer, please let me know how well this method works!
edit: archive.org link
