I’ve been playing a tonne of No Man’s Sky Expedition Three: Cartographers, and it’s awesome. I love these Expeditions because they provide you with a totally new way to play the game. Suddenly, you’re not the one setting the goals, the game is. I know there are missions to follow, but the Expeditions focus all of that into a single game mode that’s really enjoyable. I’ve had a blast working through all of the Milestones so far, but one thing I’m finding is that this game is all about stops and starts. Periods of going really fast followed by long spates of time doing very little.
For example, the opening Milestones are all pretty easy to complete. You ned to work your way through them in order so that you have the right equipment as and when you need it. After that though, the rest of the Milestones are opened up to you. You’re able to work through them as briskly as you want, but you still encounter points where you need to complete a future Milestone in order to complete a past one. For example, you need to build a certain part for your ship, but to do that you need to produce a tonne of power for your base. The Milestones are two Phases apart, making it hard to tell what you need to do unless you look into it.
However, this only reinforces the fact that you need to focus on the Milestones instead of getting distracted. It’s really easy to spend too long on the wrong tasks in this game, and if you want to complete everything as soon as possible, you need to follow the objectives. If you keep pushing, you’ll eventually get to the point where you’ve got to spend a long time out and about scanning or digging. The Expedition seems like it’s built to give you moments of peace, but I don’t want that. If you time everything well though, you can keep it all at a relatively stable pace and find that you’re completing Milestones at an almost hourly rate, just don’t get too comfortable doing one thing.