Is there any way to find a system by name?

[[DarkmindGames]♟SLIVER]

I once founded a system on an old account, would like to find it again if possible, but...I don't have any coords, just the name. Is it possible or is it lost to the Void?

[Jaggid Edje]

I could be mistaken, but I'm fairly certain the answer is "no". Across the entirety of the game's galaxies there are 100's of billions of star systems. That's BILLIONS. A search function for that would be incredibly resource intensive; probably why the game doesn't have that feature. And that's before you factor in that players can rename them when they are discovered, so the data set isn't even static.

What I do so I can find 'special' systems again is to always take a screenshot with the portal coordinates.

[Zak]

I wish, but nope. Unless it's on your list of your visited systems then you're mostly out of luck. Your computer would generate a small black hole inside your room and swallow your neighborhood if you tried to search 18 quintillion randomly generated system names. That's billions times more than all Google results in the world in a single year

See if you can google it up, if you know the name, maybe someone else visited it and noted the portal address. But with 18 quintillion star systems it's unlikely to say the least.

[[DarkmindGames]♟SLIVER]

I warped to this system, founded it, renamed all of planets and most plants and fauna, did it all manually. No stargates, nothing like that lol.

[Zak]

Originally posted by DarkmindGames♙SLIVER:

I warped to this system, founded it, renamed all of planets and most plants and fauna, did it all manually. No stargates, nothing like that lol.

Each planet has a portal on it an a portal address. You need to locate a portal and request the planet's address from it and take a screenshot of it. Then you can warp to this planet from any portal, on any planet from any save, any game.

[Jaggid Edje]

You can actually get the portal address for a planet without finding a portal. If you go into photomode, the portal coordinates show in the lower left corner.

[[DarkmindGames]♟SLIVER]

Originally posted by Zak:

Originally posted by DarkmindGames♙SLIVER:

I warped to this system, founded it, renamed all of planets and most plants and fauna, did it all manually. No stargates, nothing like that lol.

Each planet has a portal on it an a portal address. You need to locate a portal and request the planet's address from it and take a screenshot of it. Then you can warp to this planet from any portal, on any planet from any save, any game.

Therein lies the issue though I'm afraid, I founded this system on an old Game Pass account and now I'm on Steam and this system is basically lost and just a memory at this point lol.

[Zak]

Originally posted by Jaggid Edje:

You can actually get the portal address for a planet without finding a portal. If you go into photomode, the portal coordinates show in the lower left corner.

Good point. I keep forgetting that as I don't use photo mode. For some reason screenshots taken with photo mode look awful. And the portal address doesn't get saved with photo mode, you need to take a Steam screenshot while in photo mode to save the superimposed portal address.

[Zak]

Originally posted by DarkmindGames♙SLIVER:

Originally posted by Zak:

Each planet has a portal on it an a portal address. You need to locate a portal and request the planet's address from it and take a screenshot of it. Then you can warp to this planet from any portal, on any planet from any save, any game.

Therein lies the issue though I'm afraid, I founded this system on an old Game Pass account and now I'm on Steam and this system is basically lost and just a memory at this point lol.

Move on then. Find a new adventure.

[Jaggid Edje]

Originally posted by Zak:

Good point. I keep forgetting that as I don't use photo mode. For some reason screenshots taken with photo mode look awful. And the portal address doesn't get saved with photo mode, you need to take a Steam screenshot while in photo mode to save the superimposed portal address.

What you need to do is open photo mode to frame the shot, but then use F12 to actually take it. That way you get the quality of a steam screenshot AND the portal coordinates are in the shot.
For even better quality use your GPU's screenshot function (if it has one). The Nvidia overlay's screenshot quality is like 50% better (dpi and compression-wise) than the Steam Screenshot function, for example.

[Zak]

Originally posted by Jaggid Edje:

Originally posted by Zak:

Good point. I keep forgetting that as I don't use photo mode. For some reason screenshots taken with photo mode look awful. And the portal address doesn't get saved with photo mode, you need to take a Steam screenshot while in photo mode to save the superimposed portal address.

What you need to do is open photo mode to frame the shot, but then use F12 to actually take it. That way you get the quality of a steam screenshot AND the portal coordinates are in the shot.
For even better quality use your GPU's screenshot function (if it has one). The Nvidia overlay's screenshot quality is like 50% better (dpi and compression-wise) than the Steam Screenshot function, for example.

Yup. That's what I do, use F12.

But that would require GeForce Eperience an I don't ever install that. Steam screenshots are good enough for me.

[Captain.Jartyk]

Originally posted by DarkmindGames♙SLIVER:

I once founded a system on an old account, would like to find it again if possible, but...I don't have any coords, just the name. Is it possible or is it lost to the Void?

Originally posted by DarkmindGames♙SLIVER:

I founded this system on an old Game Pass account and now I'm on Steam and this system is basically lost and just a memory at this point lol.

If you still have your save files from your old Game pass account, it is possible to transfer them to work in Steam, and then you can probably find your missing planets that way.

NMS on gamepass saves the games in the following path,
c:\Users\ (name) \AppData\Local\Packages\HelloGames.NoMansSky_(xxxx.....)\

and NMS on Steam saves the files here,
c:\Users\ (name) \AppData\Roaming\HelloGames\NMS\(st_xxxxx.....)

But unfortunately you can't just move the files over, the format of the files are not compatible, so they have to be converted, but there is an editor that can fix that.

[Simons Mith]

Originally posted by Jaggid Edje:

I could be mistaken, but I'm fairly certain the answer is "no". Across the entirety of the game's galaxies there are 100's of billions of star systems. That's BILLIONS. A search function for that would be incredibly resource intensive; probably why the game doesn't have that feature. And that's before you factor in that players can rename them when they are discovered, so the data set isn't even static.

I suspect Hello Games has fallen for this counsel of despair too. But it WOULD be possible, and significantly less demanding, to search the few hundred systems in range on the galaxy map. After all, you get partial system info without having to visit. It would be feasible to search the nearby area in the current galaxy, at least. The game doesn't HAVE to search through its entire universe if it doesn't have the processing power to do so.

And if all the game galaxies were subdivided into named regions of manageable sizes, those regions could be searched. The game would have to generate the names for all the systems, then check for player renames within that region, but it would be feasible to search through thousands of systems without excessive processing load. Probably tens of thousands, but that's too many search results to wade through anyway.

Edit: Searching for player-named systems would be feasible. That's a much smaller database, and would quickly narrow in on what OP was after. I think that's worth a feature request.

[Xautos]

as stated there are 100's of billions of systems and what are the chances some systems are named the same as others, what if some systems have the same planet names and same amount of planets. a simple search would be insufficient, you'll want more details, that means a search engine that is significantly more powerful to look more in depth at specifics.

Users can rename themselves to other users and impersonate them, it has happened before on steam, so searching by player name is also not enough.

[Simons Mith]

Yes, there's probably dozens of Tatooines. So what? And dozens of player name clashes. So what? Real-world searches aren't perfect either. But if you can search for Tatooine and then find the particular Tatooine that you named, that's good enough. There are many feasible options in between 'No search' and 'SEARCH THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE'. A partial search facility is better than none, and it's better than the overwhelming data firehose that an all-universe search would bring.

[Jaggid Edje]

@SimonsMith, the game already does have things sub-divided by regions and galaxies. But, you do understand that there isn't a master database that has all of this tabulated by galaxy-region-system-planet already, right?
Other than things that have been renamed, that's all just stored just as procedural tables, rather than directly as data. So any search would have to first generate the actual data, then pull in the renames from the discovery service, and then search it.

You are right that only searching 'nearby' would make it much less resource intensive, but at that point I'd argue that if that's all it could do, it would be a useless feature. If I'm already 'nearby', then it probably was something discovered in my current game, in which case I can already just find it and add a waypoint.

Personally, I do wish they would have a search feature just on our "discoveries" for the currently active game. That would not be resource intensive and it is kind of sad that we can't already do that.