It felt like I’d just barely finished the previous expedition in No Man’s Sky, but before I knew it, there’s a new patch and a new expedition to go along with it. This time, rather than scramble to get it done at the last minute after almost forgetting about it, as usual, I spent a good chunk of this weekend going through it right away.

This expedition was focused on finding fossils and assembling them into display skeletons. I’m not sure about the scientific veracity of these skeletons considering it lets you mix-and-match whatever pieces you find… Overall the expedition was fairly chill though, with only some light combat required against some guardians of the fossil beds. As usual, I did a bunch of faffing about and completed a scattering of the objectives while prepping, and then blitzed through the remaining ones fairly quickly.

A few objectives were a bit annoying, though: the ‘bonefish’ you had to fish up had unclear requirements and took quite a few casts, and the objectives for finding fossils and excavating dirt felt like their targets were a bit excessive. Doing the rest of the objectives only took those to about halfway to their goals, so a bunch of time at the end was spent just grinding the remainder of those out as busywork.

Yesterday I finished off the Titan expedition in No Man’s Sky. It didn’t really take too long, this was one of the expeditions where you can knock out a bunch of the goals just in the course of regular play, and then it’s a quick sprint to clean up the rest of them and rush through the checkpoints. The main new experiences in this expedition were going really-deep-sea diving, and learning that gas giants kinda suck. I would recommend building your base somewhere that isn’t a constant raging storm…

I only intended to do the expedition, but after finishing it and converting back to a regular game, I wound up playing my regular save for quite a bit longer than expected. I restarted recently, so I’m still pretty early game, and haven’t found somewhere good to set up a base or claimed a freighter yet, and am mainly just running around doing the Artemis quest. But I did find a trade terminal that was selling drop pod locations, so I bought 30 of those and just ran around claiming drop pod upgrades for a while. The stuff I brought back from the expedition had left me short on inventory space, but after getting all those upgrades, I’ve got space to spare in my suit, at least. Now if only it was as easy to get ship inventory upgrades…

I need to start clearing out some of the stuff I bought in the big Steam Xmas sale, so today I played Clickolding. It’s more of an ‘interactive experience’ than a game, where a strange man in a hotel room insists on watching you click a tally counter, occasionally interrupting to dictate how you should click it, other tasks you should do in the room, or to reveal little bits of his personal history and needs, and…yeah, it’s an allegory for sex work. It’s creepy and uncomfortable and goes some unexpected places (it gets a bit metatextual too, though that seems like more of a bonus), but it’s worth experiencing.

I also got around to starting the newest Titan expedition in No Man’s Sky. This one’s mainly about experiencing the new features added in the new world generation, like the gas giant in the system you start out in. I still haven’t left that first system yet because I got hung up on trying to complete the fauna scanning on several moons, but got stymied by rare underwater creatures that I just could not get to show up. It doesn’t help that the gas giant moons tend to have very shallow water, making it harder to get underwater creatures to show up at all.