Portal interference sucks.

[Vitamin Arrr]

I realize some vocal people here don’t like the thought of players having the ability to easily migrate around via portals, rather than having to waste hundreds of hours staring at a loading screen with a warp animation, or be limited to only being able to easily migrate to certain places via making a base in multiplayer in the session host’s area.

This stance is awfully convenient for those of you who are among the leaders/councils of hubs, since it funnels players to your hubs whilst squelching the creation of the competing upstart hubs that were proliferating under Atlas Rises.

But very few players prefer to warp hundreds of times just to establish themselves in a new region in some new, remote, uninhabited corner of the galaxy.

The portal interference thing has also made it prohibitively really time consuming to reach Iousongola and other high-numbered galaxies.

Even if portal interference were done away with, people who prefer warping hundreds of times (like in Elite) could still do so. There would be no harm in enabling it.

If the concern is that people will fill up certain popular planets with bases, leading to crashes, then just put a limit on how many bases each planet can hold, or let players “buy” whole star systems so they can control who gets to make a base there. (I believe the “too many bases” thing is the real reason they blocked the ability to make a base beyond a portal, since there were people spamming that initial community mission planet.)

But of course, I’m sure in the responses below, we’ll get to hear condescending lectures from all the folks who evidently think it “builds character” to warp hundreds of times in the vague direction of where your destination might be. Lets hear all the reasons why everyone else should be forced to play the game like this.

“It should take a long time to reach the center” you might say. WHY? Spoiler: there is nothing interesting there. It just breaks all your upgrades, deletes all your bases, and strands you in a different galaxy without its own Galactic Atlas website and with far fewer interesting player bases to visit. I’m not sure why this is something people are going to rush towards, but if they want to, why impede them?

Black hole travel is not much help if your goal is just to reach the center. It seems slower in terms of LY/hour compared to just warping with a maxed out exotic ship (2600+ LY jumps), because of how much extra time it takes to swap ships between jumps or constantly repair your broken tech.

I really miss being able to just portal around until I found my ideal base planet.

[Alkpaz]

I've only used one portal to get a S-class multitool. You don't need to go 1000s of lightyears to complete ATLAS or Artemis. A few dozen systems at best. Remember it is a simulation. There is nothing wrong with taking it slow, not trying to jump to all 255 galaxies. I don't see the draw in doing that, since it is procedurally generated, I do see that some like lush worlds and would prefer to be in a galaxy that has more of that, or someone who wants a harder game and zips to a barren galaxy.

I equate it with playing Hogan's Alley or Duck Hunt on the old NES, you expect something special after going past lvl 99 but nothing happens and all it does is set you back to lvl 1, no big ending, just a reset, not even a comment, nothing.

[NMSPlayer]

Artemis is exactly 18 star systems LOL The Atlas is 9. That is a really long post that shows a lack of experience. So here's some reallity for that.

I have a save in the 7th galaxy -- it takes about 5 hours, including breaks and commenting on live streams to traverse a galaxy with a hyperdrive that has a limit of 800 light years using the black holes. The black holes are set now - so they go to the exact same place every time and they average about 6000 light years per jump -- they all go towards the center now. The only time you have to get out and push is the last 10 thousand light years the black holes get fragile and often break.

Portals. With some history you might realize the shear and utter havoc that portals were causing. People were getting stuck, losing saves and getting killed by portals. You can do a quick search right here on steam for portals and you'll find loads of posts from ppl who met their demise thru them. HG fixed the portals because of the problem with them ( I forsee them descarding the AMUs for the same reason) .

If you ask for help, someone here (maybe even me) will help you learn to use black holes without damaging your ship and getting to where you want to go.

Going the furthest black hole you can reach is the wrong way to go about it. You have a nice ship that can do 2600 light years -- awesome -- don't use that one for black holes cos soon it won't go much more than 800 light years anyway./

To the rest of the post I can smh and say LOL.

For a list of where black holes go go here: https://pahefu.github.io/pilgrimstarpath/

[Gatun]

A lot of planets have wild base computers you can grab and claim a base after a portal trip, I just posted one planet with 3 that I have found so far. Don't know if all planets have in the wild base computers. They aren't the easiest things to find but they are there.

Then there is the save editor which lets you set up a base after portal anywhere and jump to any galaxy you want. You have to edit the JSON, but it's not hard to do. Ask for help if you want it.

[japp_02]

@OP,

In a system there are only up to 6 planets to explore, including moons. With portals this number goes to a ILLIMITED number if you enter random glyph sequences that you can also memorize and repeat for the same location. Your lifetime isn't enough to explore all possibilities, so what more do you want? And, without spoiling, once you have changed once into a new galaxy you will understand that this action is not so exclusive and game-relevant as you might think.
So it doesn't matter wether portals have restrictions for not allowing you to go fast to the center and change galaxy which is what HG clearly wants.

Portals even with their restrictions are a nice addition, especially if you are looking for a planet type that is currently out of reach for you (e.g. because you cannot afford the special warp drive etc.) and so you can find special ressources in systems that would remain closed to you otherwise. And all other activities including trading with NPCs, stations etc. are still fully open to you. Once you return through the portal, put a beacon there and that's it, you are ready to visit again the location or other locations.

Black holes and ship damages:
Best way not to get annoyed with ship damages when using BHs is: Use an already damaged ship. Can the ship get worse than damaged? NO.

[NMSPlayer]

Originally posted by japp_02:

@OP,

In a system there are only up to 6 planets to explore, including moons. With portals this number goes to a ILLIMITED number if you enter random glyph sequences that you can also memorize and repeat for the same location. Your lifetime isn't enough to explore all possibilities, so what more do you want? And, without spoiling, once you have changed once into a new galaxy you will understand that this action is not so exclusive and game-relevant as you might think.
So it doesn't matter wether portals have restrictions for not allowing you to go fast to the center and change galaxy which is what HG clearly wants.

Portals even with their restrictions are a nice addition, especially if you are looking for a planet type that is currently out of reach for you (e.g. because you cannot afford the special warp drive etc.) and so you can find special ressources in systems that would remain closed to you otherwise. And all other activities including trading with NPCs, stations etc. are still fully open to you. Once you return through the portal, put a beacon there and that's it, you are ready to visit again the location or other locations.

Black holes and ship damages:
Best way not to get annoyed with ship damages when using BHs is: Use an already damaged ship. Can the ship get worse than damaged? NO.

I have a ship that I never put technology on in the first place :) Its actually an S Class fighter that I found but never upgraded so I use it to go thru black holes - it never gets damaged

[japp_02]

Thing is I would not terribly complain if the portal and base-building system would be the same than in Atlas Rises (but with all new building items ofc.). Meaning: 1 Base only, but allowing base-building on a portal system with the backdoor to finally being able to teleport there. This was not a road for the lazy ones, I remember I had to use my Exocraft to travel to a 'Habitable Base' compound and initiate the claim. It was always a suspense to finally go to space to know how far away from center you have moved to...
Also considering that the current base-building on non-flat terrain is a total mess in Visions (at least IMO), we would not lose very much if HG would revert to the Atlas Rises base system.

Now, admitted, there are tons of reasons to have more than 1 base, but these reasons are more a 'workaround' for other missing features like being able to fastly travel from one planet to another one etc., not for the sake of building 50 wonderful bases all spread in different systems.

[Alkpaz]

True japp, I only have 1 base base but several base computers wih terminals set up so I can farm for materials I may need. So really you only need 1 base base, and frankly I haven't gone back to my base in a little over 100hrs, I usually just summon my freighter if I need to store stuff.

[Anga Hakuna]

@NMSPlayer:
Yeah. Looks like no more "Black Hole Roulette" now. That's fine with me; that always seems like a type of cheat anyway.

[MechWarden]

I may not have a dog in this race since I wasn't playing when Portals were added, nor do I use them that much to begin with, but I can see why, from a game design point of view, there is a mechanic that prevents people from using the Portals like a true Stargate (as seen in the movie and TV series of the same name).

The early community events alone showed just how ill prepared a game like this is for such openness; with or without multiplayer. The spam of communication stations alone is able to overflow the entity buffer to a point where my ship's location icon will not show up; which is A Bad Thing™. That kind of a problem can block objective markers, have people lose track of their ships, and who knows what else. Pretty sure a few people here could imagine what the chaos would be if bases were allowed to be built after using a Portal to get to a place.

So why block everything else? If I could use the Teleporter or call in my freighter I could just circumvent the first barrier to building by establishing a different way back, or having a friend do it for me. If I warp away... where do I warp to? And if Teleporters are blocked, it would be an endless void that allowed no fast travel until I went back to the Portal I came from.

Granted, I can just easily hack the save file with the tools that are currently available, but not that many people are willing to look those up; and so the system is relatively safe from being unstable.

This game is just not ready for player based cities. There is an argument for maintaining the epic journey NMS is based around, but pragmatically it is to keep places from being dead zones from over population. Removing the Portal Interference limitation would allow the creation of areas that can crash people's games, and no one really loves game crashes.

[Vitamin Arrr]

Originally posted by Gatun:

A lot of planets have wild base computers you can grab and claim a base after a portal trip, I just posted one planet with 3 that I have found so far. Don't know if all planets have in the wild base computers. They aren't the easiest things to find but they are there.

Then there is the save editor which lets you set up a base after portal anywhere and jump to any galaxy you want. You have to edit the JSON, but it's not hard to do. Ask for help if you want it.

If you go thru a portal and build a base at a wild base computer, it does not get added to your terminus list. So the only way to get back there is to use the portal again. Useless!

Save editing does not help console users like me.

[Vitamin Arrr]

Originally posted by MechWarden:

I may not have a dog in this race since I wasn't playing when Portals were added, nor do I use them that much to begin with, but I can see why, from a game design point of view, there is a mechanic that prevents people from using the Portals like a true Stargate (as seen in the movie and TV series of the same name).

The early community events alone showed just how ill prepared a game like this is for such openness; with or without multiplayer. The spam of communication stations alone is able to overflow the entity buffer to a point where my ship's location icon will not show up; which is A Bad Thing™. That kind of a problem can block objective markers, have people lose track of their ships, and who knows what else. Pretty sure a few people here could imagine what the chaos would be if bases were allowed to be built after using a Portal to get to a place.

So why block everything else? If I could use the Teleporter or call in my freighter I could just circumvent the first barrier to building by establishing a different way back, or having a friend do it for me. If I warp away... where do I warp to? And if Teleporters are blocked, it would be an endless void that allowed no fast travel until I went back to the Portal I came from.

Granted, I can just easily hack the save file with the tools that are currently available, but not that many people are willing to look those up; and so the system is relatively safe from being unstable.

This game is just not ready for player based cities. There is an argument for maintaining the epic journey NMS is based around, but pragmatically it is to keep places from being dead zones from over population. Removing the Portal Interference limitation would allow the creation of areas that can crash people's games, and no one really loves game crashes.

The ability to migrate via portals does not stop anyone from going on an epic journey.

The solution to “overpopulation” is not portal interference; it’s to set a limit on how many bases can be claimed per planet and come up with a way to manage waypoints for comm stations rather than showing ALL of them on the screen at once. Like, have a separate screen with a list of all marked POIs and then a way to select and display one at a time.

[Gatun]

I'll mess around with this over the next few days, see if I can't come up with something. Sometimes you have to bump the darn thing just right.

[Guh~hey~hey~♫]

*condescending tone*
It build character to warp hundred of times to reach blablabla bliblibli bleeeeeeh ! >:O

Joke aside, with how the warp system work and how all "shortcuts" have been nerfed, I wonder if there's anybody in the higher number galaxies (anybody who dont use save editor galaxy warp). Makes you wonder why there's so many galaxies if obviously nobody will have the time and patience to reach them....

The limited number of bases per planet sounds like a nice idea but.... what when all the interesting planets will be filled, eventually with bases of players that no longer play the game ?

Why not instead adding the coordinate of the local space station upon visiting, even if it's trough a portail ?

[MechWarden]

As much as the idea of having a limit on bases makes too much sense, I don't feel as though HG can enforce it with their current system. I like how HG is sticking to their guns and is continually working on improving NMS, but I don't have much confidence in them making a good enough system to handle this kind of a problem within say the next 6 months from now. Maybe if they really focused on it, but they have so many things being worked on at the same time that I doubt it will get looked at unless it is absolutely necessary.

[Vitamin Arrr]

Originally posted by MechWarden:

As much as the idea of having a limit on bases makes too much sense, I don't feel as though HG can enforce it with their current system. I like how HG is sticking to their guns and is continually working on improving NMS, but I don't have much confidence in them making a good enough system to handle this kind of a problem within say the next 6 months from now. Maybe if they really focused on it, but they have so many things being worked on at the same time that I doubt it will get looked at unless it is absolutely necessary.

It would only require a few lines of code. If the devs cannot even be asked to make minor changes to the game to avoid having to remove beloved features, then why should players be expected to keep playing the game?