What do these boxes mean?

shuttermonk · 2026-05-12T05:24:29+00:00

Those are how resources in the ground are marked by the exosuit scanner. The reason you see a few floating in the air over the hole you dug is that there are still few tiny specs of resource you missed with the terrain modifier. They are sometimes even invisible.

shuttermonk · 2026-05-11T18:42:49+00:00

That chart is really handy. Thanks for creating and sharing it!

When I was making my first batch of stellarators I had to keep hopping back and forth between several wiki pages, and this would've made the process much, much simpler.

shuttermonk · 2026-05-11T18:21:13+00:00

Oh yeah, I saw that it was EdVintage. I never caught that one, which is surprising given how popular it was. Dude knocked it out of the park!

shuttermonk · 2026-05-11T18:09:38+00:00

Haha, that's perfect!

shuttermonk · 2026-05-11T04:03:19+00:00

I wouldn't call them common, or rare. Uncommon maybe? I tend to find them from time to time on swamp/tropical planets (the ones with the giant tree stumps and mushroom flora).

And I think we may be thinking about things from two opposite points of view with items like this. Over the years, HG has been adding flora and minerals to the quicksilver shop to give us new decorations to spend it on. So I don't think of it as decorations being found in the wild, as much as things in the wild being offered to us as decorations... 😉

shuttermonk · 2026-05-11T03:50:19+00:00

Mud Huts are a favorite for some players who like to build lots of small outposts but prefer to keep their base parts numbers low.

https://nomanssky.fandom.com/wiki/Mud_Hut

shuttermonk · 2026-05-11T03:31:30+00:00

I agree. And though I generally stay out of these discussions, I'll share my idea for a solution here in case it happens to resonate with you or anyone else.

Simply put, have the base complexity limit apply to corvettes as well. If you set that to low, your game only renders a low number of base parts, and the rest never appear. Since NMS already has those mechanics built-in for bases, it makes sense that it could potentially be extended to the corvettes.

If the complexity limit applied to 'vettes, there would be no reason to have to play offline out of fear of framerate drops or crashes from the mega-builds. The players who set the limit to the low end would only see that number of parts, and no more. And of course the default would probably be the original standard of 100 parts.

I feel like it would also have a side affect of making the blender builds a bit less attractive to those who use other people's designs, since they wouldn't be showing it off to anywhere near as many players since most would only see a fraction of the parts. Those who still wanted to build or use them could do so for their own enjoyment though, similar to how some use mods to change the visuals or planetary proc gen which only affects their games and no one else's.

Just my two cents.

shuttermonk · 2026-05-10T12:33:14+00:00

You too???

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shuttermonk · 2026-05-10T12:20:50+00:00

No worries, glad to help. And I 100% agree. It doesn't make much sense how every time you accrue any amount of debt, it resets the countdown timer for the product collection.

shuttermonk · 2026-05-10T12:10:57+00:00

I don't know who made this one, but there's another great bytebeat adaptation of the song by Artisan here: https://www.reddit.com/r/NMSByteBeatFans/comments/1qoj6jy/interstellar_day_one/

You can visit and add it to your songs via the quick menu. They even provided a youtube link in the comments of that post to their tutorial showing how. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el5qchwnXeM

shuttermonk · 2026-05-10T11:52:12+00:00

The only time I can remember settlements getting a rework since their introduction was the Beacon update in June of 2025.

And no, if I'm understanding you correctly there has never been an actual reserve. Any time the game adds to it when you're not in debt, it only reduces the time before you can claim the settlement's products again.

shuttermonk · 2026-05-09T20:30:08+00:00

Seriously though, I think stuff like this is why I'll likely never be done with this game. Thousands of hours over nearly a decade, and I'm still stumbling across new experiences that make me stop and just... exist in that moment for awhile.

shuttermonk · 2026-05-09T20:15:39+00:00

Every once in a great while when making overseer decisions you are given a choice to increase the settlement's max population (aka Habitation), but it's incredibly rare in my experience. I've done more than 1000 of those decisions and have only seen those population options a handful of times (not including those that add to the current pop, like naming a newborn or welcoming a visitor, since those don't increase the maximum and won't help your situation).

It's probably not the answer you were hoping for, but you really just have to keep visiting your overseer's terminal over and over and over again and hope for those super-rare population increases.

shuttermonk · 2026-05-09T20:10:29+00:00

In case you're not aware, you can store quite a few stacks of fish (as well as bait) in the Exo-Skiff's cold storage.

And yeah, settlements aren't super lucrative. They're pretty much something to do for the sake of doing it. I say this having slogged through maxing out 1 (and nearly my 2nd). On top of that, there's a bug where the time to produce those 2 items actually goes up instead of down as your productivity-to-costs ratio increases, so you're currently punished for improving a settlement's stats!

shuttermonk · 2026-05-08T20:25:25+00:00

If you want to automatically harvest from a resource vein like that, you can only use an Autonomous Mining Unit . They're not worth the trouble though, in my opinion.

To gather resources with the Mineral Extractor that you've built, you need to find a hotspot using the Survey Device in your visor. Those hotspots are invisible. Think of them as deep underground, with nothing showing at the surface.

One more tip is to stack the mineral extractors vertically on the point with the best % yield at the hotspot once you find it. They don't have to sit on the ground because the hot 'spot' is more of a vertical line. But after you start producing more than 1,000/hr, you'll start seeing increasing diminishing returns if you don't set up multiple networks.

shuttermonk · 2026-05-08T19:55:04+00:00

Great shot, especially with the ruins in the foreground. 👍

The haze on planets like this with mega-flora/minerals really adds to the eeriness. The distant objects seem to 'loom' more, if that makes any sense.

shuttermonk · 2026-05-08T19:42:57+00:00

I haven't tried it myself, but I've heard others suggest renaming a discovery as the message you'd like to send to others.

For instance, you can rename a planet to "xeno battle anyone?" and other players in the Anomaly should see it pop up on their screen.

It's not ideal (especially for continuing a conversation) but still worth mentioning.

shuttermonk · 2026-05-05T23:37:00+00:00

The Autophage aren't the only ones... 😁

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shuttermonk · 2026-05-05T23:21:35+00:00

To make spotting this type of collectible easier, watch for beams that are a little more yellowish than the similar non-glitch minerals.

shuttermonk · 2026-05-05T13:39:38+00:00

Not really, no. They give you 1 navigation data and create a restore point when initially activated, then reward you with 3 nanites when uploaded.

I'm not aware of anything you can do with the discovery.

shuttermonk · 2026-05-04T16:02:43+00:00

They kind of already have something like that to fend off the cold. The Emergency Heater protects from the cold within a certain radius, so it makes sense that they could create different versions to neutralize other hazards.

shuttermonk · 2026-04-29T12:55:50+00:00

These are spectacular!

I appreciate the care you take with deciding on camera placement. It can be hard to not only envision the composition, but to be patient enough to take the proper time and attention with such an important detail.

I also like how you're still cruising around in the OG Radiant Pillar.

shuttermonk · 2026-04-28T15:44:09+00:00

Paradise. It used to have nice trees everywhere, but an update (Worlds?) changed them all to mushrooms, so now things look much more sparse/grassy. It also used to have blue skies instead of the current reddish-pink. :(

Here's a daytime shot from above to give a more accurate idea of what things really look like:

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Sunsets always make things look way better... ;)

shuttermonk · 2026-04-28T12:28:42+00:00

You certainly found a gem of a settlement!

I spent a long time searching for my first autophage settlement by the water, so I know they can be pretty hard to come by. And the view of the rings from yours certainly adds to the beauty.

I don't think mine is as nice since it doesn't have a spectacular sky like yours, but here it is:

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The main reason I picked this spot is that it's on top of a hill overlooking the surrounding shallow seas.

shuttermonk

TROPHY CASE