No Man’s Sky – PS4 Bases Horribly Broken

This particular bug behavior has suddenly broken what, for me, was a major part of my gameplay: my freighter base.  While my planet base is largely unaffected, there are reports that other PS4 players see the same “drift” issues that I’ve experienced on  my freighter.

I can handle gaps in the floors, and the frustration of having to jet-pack-hop through a door is minor.  But when walls show up where they shouldn’t be and block off entire portions of what should be an open room, I get angrily frustrated.  More ranting and screenshots below …

On an academic level, I’m curious as to how this kind of bug occurs – you’d assume some type of coordinate system exists that says that two rooms are actually next to each other, so don’t include a wall between them.  But something is allowing the rooms to “drift” so much that the game thinks they aren’t actually attached.

“Fixing” this by deleting rooms and rebuilding them is somewhat possible, except:

  • This can make new “errant” walls appear
  • I’ve suddenly lost access to things like containers and sales terminals since they were “behind” an errant wall
  • Sometimes when you delete a room, things in it are deleted as well … but you don’t get the resources for the things in the room that are deleted

So, to a large extent, I’ve quit “normal” in frustration (though I keep reloading from time to time to see if something’s rejiggered enough to where I can “fix” the issue with minimal resource loss).  I have no freighter (yet) in “survival”, so I’m still considering playing that, but the game is very stressful to me this early in my play – dying is *way* too easy, there’s a resource cost that I think should be adjusted to be on par with normal (the take off cost), and it’s not really the type of game I want to play.

It does kind of amaze me that a game can have tons of great features, but if one of the potentially smaller features goes horribly wrong, it feels like the game is suddenly ruined.

But I put a *lot* of work into the base.  And I’ve also put a *lot* of work in multiple sessions to fix the issues when they appear, only to have them reappear again later.  And so I’m fed up.

It strikes me so hard when I see this that, as much as I’ve tried to stream something on Twitch that I can later cut into a clip for YouTube that illustrates the issue completely, I just can’t keep a coherent narrative going and I have to leave the base … if not quit the game.

Through this gap you can see the planet below

The door/ramp is offset from the hallway
More space

This is the door leading into the base. When this gap exists, sometimes you can’t “walk” through the door.
I don’t know how clear it is from this screen shot, but that wall on the left shouldn’t be there!

This is minor, but you can see that the planters, which should all be level with each other, are not.
I simply can’t farm any more without spending an hour carefully deleting the planters (which usually “disappear” if you delete the room their in – the plants “stay” though) and then removing/readding cubes to the room.

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