Do Gooder Press

I almost think the games No Man’s Sky and Starbound are mirror-universe versions of the same basic game premise: You get a ship, you improve your gear via crafting, you can go through a story-based quest, and when you think you’re ready you can go explore a vast universe of procedurally generated planets.

They also encourage you to build bases on these planets. These planets which you’ll probably eventually leave far, far behind you.

While I didn’t really like how Star Trek Voyager was handled, I appreciated the feeling of isolation. Unless you have the JJ Abrams poorly thought-out and totally universe-breaking concept of transwarp beaming, giving you access to every place in the galaxy you could want to visit, distance feels like it matters when you’re in a spaceship. Otherwise, you might start wondering why you bother with having a spaceship in the first place.

Starbound uses a kind of transwarp beaming system, in that your ship has a teleporter on it that can send you to any other teleporter you’ve bookmarked (usually you build them yourself) or to any flag you’ve placed as a marker. That flag you planted on your first humble shack and farm when you started the game means your “home” planet is only as far away as the nearest teleport booth. Also, as long as you’re on the surface of any planet, you can always beam back up to your ship, no matter how far away it might be.

This might irk a few sci-fi buffs who are already annoyed with the easy availability of FTL drives, but you’ll be thankful for this if you sink several hours into building the base you’ll need to house all your crafting materials and show off all of your stuff. You can craft/loot furniture, decorations, attractive wall and floor materials, etc., and naturally you’ll need a gallery of mannequins to display those costume sets you’ve been picking up. And then you can have colonists living in this wonderland you’ve built, paying you rent to do so, which is always good even if you’re so rich that money has become meaningless. And you’ll still want to travel beyond the stars to find the right kinds of planets with the right kinds of biomes and structures to pillage and loot acquire new decorative items from or solve quests for your tenants, who often reward you with otherwise unobtainable furniture.

You can also dig for fossils and assemble them into museum displays. That takes a lot of room.

No Man’s Sky works with a similar setup. You have your ship which can warp between planetary systems. Later, you’ll probably grab a freighter that can hold six ships total as well as provide some space for storage, crafting stations, and a mobile base of operations for sending out frigates that will earn cash and find stuff for you. They’re kind of like the colony tenants in Starbound, but they’re bigger, metal, and require fuel to get income from. Your journey in this game will definitely take you away from where you start. Planets are fleeting things, fun to explore for a bit, but ultimately left behind as you either just wander about, go on the main story quest, or head towards the galactic core.

You’re also encouraged to build bases. Needless to say, you can easily leave them in the space-dust in short order. That’s what the game’s Gateways and Portals are for.

Portals exist on every star system’s main space station. You can visit any station you’ve previously set foot on, so the list of systems can get rather long. You can also build portals on your ship as well as in any base, so they can be connected to this network as well. The strange thing is that when you zap yourself through a portal, you’ll drag whatever spaceship you’ve got set as your current ship with you. This is because in No Man’s Sky, you always have a spaceship with you, though it can be damaged and require repair.

The Gateways are another beast altogether, though if you’ve watched Stargate, you’ll get the idea. It takes some doing, but every star system has a gate code, so if you find it and the system’s gate, you can always “dial home,” as it were. And yes, your current spaceship will come with you.

What kind of breaks the game’s rules for me about this setup is that once you have a freighter, you can summon it to your current in-space location. This is handy if you’re done with a system, you’re out at the farthest planet, and you don’t feel like taking the five minutes and pulse engine fuel needed to go back to your capital ship and warp away. This summoning works anywhere in the galaxy. You can be on the edge of the galaxy, go look up the gate code for the system closest to the galactic core, jump all the way there, then summon your freighter instantly. Normally, the fuel required for the multiple jumps needed to get to the core the long way around is a pretty big pile of antimatter. For reasons of “video game,” however, you can get around that by finding the gate codes and whistling for your freighter to follow.

Contrast this with Minecraft, a game that has a nearly infinite landscape to explore, but no easy way to connect distant places without modding the game. You can use the Nether as a kind of hyperspace dimension, since it’s 1/8th the size of the overworld, making Nether Portals a great way to cross oceans or vast tracts of land you’re not interested in. You’re more likely to be tied to certain areas just because once you build a base, city, or giant habitable dragon-shaped mountain, you’ll want to be able to get back to it at some point without spending hours in transit.

Now, I’m not dunking on Starbound and No Man’s Sky for how they’re doing what they’re doing. A more realistic virtual universe would result in players just making a string of abandoned structures or restricting themselves to a handful of systems if they were enamored of their construction projects. That would make the exploration part a lot less appealing. What I find interesting is that while No Man’s Sky seems to have two sets of rules for travel (one with fuel as a needed resource, one where it doesn’t matter at all), the game manages to make me feel more like I’m really leaving things behind, even if I’m not breaking a connection with them. In my Starbound game, I think I have three main colonies that I occasionally tinker with, but they feel connected to my ship, almost like they’re just through a door somewhere in my cargo hold.

Unless someone hits on a better set of mechanics, I think this is how a lot of space-exploration-with-crafting-and-building games are going to go if they have nigh-infinite universes. For most players, it’s likely not fun to end up in a situation where they’re 100% stranded and can’t ever get back to the stars. It’s also not usually fun to have to play a round of Kerbal Space Program with realistic orbital mechanics when you just want to get to the next planet and see how much chaos you can cause while depleting its resources (unless it’s a game of Space Engineers). We gladly hand-wave a lot of things so we can get to the good stuff, and when the good stuff involves vast cosmic spaces while putting down roots… Well, you kind of need a macguffin to get between Space Base Awesome and the final frontier.

But trans-warp beaming in Star Trek was still a bad idea.