PermaDeath Guide + Invetory Limit Rant.

[ignition]

Hey Guys, I wrote a guide to PD Mode.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3083843335

My General Thoughts:
I think that inventory restrictions on survival and pd are totally useless. They add nothing. Someone said it made it harder, you need to unlock more inventory slots. I disagree.

I can unlock as many slots as I want by simply using the Excocraft radar - no need for navigation data. Its just tedious and time consuming.

Someone also said that you can install the matter beam on your freighter - this does not change the refining limits. And this is where I've got a problem. 250 is just way too low. 250 C.Carbon + 250 Oxygen = 1500C.Carbon, but only 250 at a time, means 6 times you have to empty the refiner. No way that adds to survival, just tedium.

Base building, I mean proper building, with multiple prefabs (they are 250 pure ferrite each) take a LOT of time.

I did enjoy the PD mode but am going to playing on Custom: Survival with expanded inventory. People give it a try - its a really fun (and perhaps the best) way to play.

thanks.

[Lystent]

I'm not sure if I'm just lucky, but sometimes I would come upon multiple drop pods over the course of flying over a relatively short distance of a planet, scanning until i get a building marker whilst keeping an eye on the ground.

But I still feel that exocraft scanners are a tad OP.

[umop-apisdn]

The inventory limitations do make things more interesting, for me; if nothing else, it pretty much destroys any interest in picking up goop, slime, or even curious deposits; with all the difficulty options maxed, it's simply not worth it to spend 3+ minutes refining 150 at a time for a whopping 30 nanites. I've learned many better alternatives for sourcing large numbers of nanites, such as hyaline brains acquired by farming sentinels... which is actually more nanites per stack even when you can carry 9,999 runaway mould per slot. It also gives a sense of value to larval and hadal cores, because of their super-shoet refine times.

It quickly becomes apparent that there are certain things you should prioritize your inventory management around (especially in the early game), and most of the obvious cheese simply doesn't make the cut.

Adding in any "personal challenge rules", like the "fugitive run" that has become popular lately... makes it even more apparent. It definitely puts a different spin on what's "important" when a "stack" is 300 instead of 9,999... and for me, it's a nice change of pace.

That being said, I've been playing "custom" a lot, lately, and I find myself doing the same thing you described; max out the actual difficulty settings, but crank the stack size back up to the defaults. Once you've learned how to go about surviving in a truly minimalist fashion, there's nothing to be gained by sewing your pockets shut except tedium.

[Guyver8]

for myself the inventory limits aren't about making the game harder, just more challenging ...and yes i understand some don't get it and only find it tiresome or worse, but for me limited inventory actual adds another strategic aspect to gameplay that i can enjoy ...just as wot others call 'grind', i luv

[Lystent]

Originally posted by umop-apisdn:

The inventory limitations do make things more interesting, for me; if nothing else, it pretty much destroys any interest in picking up goop, slime, or even curious deposits; with all the difficulty options maxed, it's simply not worth it to spend 3+ minutes refining 150 at a time for a whopping 30 nanites. I've learned many better alternatives for sourcing large numbers of nanites, such as hyaline brains acquired by farming sentinels... which is actually more nanites per stack even when you can carry 9,999 runaway mould per slot. It also gives a sense of value to larval and hadal cores, because of their super-shoet refine times....

I try to avoid MMB clicking items as much as possible, and as such, I process all the goop I acquire. I also prefer thoroughly laser washing derelict freighters. So I end up with tons of goop. And because I often to not want to be tied to a base for a while, it often goes to my personal refiner. Of which I worked out can carry 5 minutes of fuel.

Goop processes at 100 a minute, with mould at 500 a minute. So that is me still tapping into my refiner every 5 minutes to turn over 500 goop/nanites as I put in more fuel, while I'm off on a cave dive expedition for that loathsome final rare/underground/always active that is the last thing between me and a fair nanite payout. (Massive payout when compared to goop refining, even at extended stack size.)

[Gaxel]

That inventory limit was the original one from No Man's Sky at launch and for the first years. However there was no refining and only a fraction of the resources and the technologies there are today.

In my opinion inventory limitation in permadeath (or if someone want to use it in a normal/survival playthrough) should affect only exosuit, ship and exocraft inventories (maybe freighter ones), Container and not portable refiners should have the limit to 9999 even with slot limitations.

So someone can store resources at bases, however on the wild he must manage the limited size, and also for example one could put in a large refiner 250 silver, gold and copper and obtain 1250 of chromatic metal in one step.

[ignition]

Originally posted by Vardyn:

That inventory limit was the original one from No Man's Sky at launch and for the first years. However there was no refining and only a fraction of the resources and the technologies there are today.

In my opinion inventory limitation in permadeath (or if someone want to use it in a normal/survival playthrough) should affect only exosuit, ship and exocraft inventories (maybe freighter ones), Container and not portable refiners should have the limit to 9999 even with slot limitations.

So someone can store resources at bases, however on the wild he must manage the limited size, and also for example one could put in a large refiner 250 silver, gold and copper and obtain 1250 of chromatic metal in one step.

exactly. well said. this is what my problem was.

I'm never bothered by ship/exoosuit limits as I always call in the exocrafts, but refining ...oh god. And Industrial Mining too. 600per hour, come back next day got 14,400 = that fills up 14/50 storage slots - way too much.

[Lystent]

Originally posted by Vardyn:

...In my opinion inventory limitation in permadeath (or if someone want to use it in a normal/survival playthrough) should affect only exosuit, ship and exocraft inventories (maybe freighter ones), Container and not portable refiners should have the limit to 9999 even with slot limitations....

That reminds me about when suit cargo slots were a thing.

[umop-apisdn]

Originally posted by Vardyn:

That inventory limit was the original one from No Man's Sky at launch and for the first years. However there was no refining and only a fraction of the resources and the technologies there are today.

Which inventory limit? 300 per stack, and 150 in the refiner? No, it's not. Those numbers are from the maximum-difficulty "custom" game I was playing yesterday.

Note1: "custom" does not mean "modded"; this is strictly vanilla, with the maximum difficulty settings; some of those settings (like inventory restriction) require a "custom" game mode.

Note 2: "Survival" (and "Permadeath" for that matter) is not actually the highest difficulty setting... and perhaps I should have remembered that, myself, before talking about the even more restrictive inventory limits I play with when looking for a challenge.

Having said all that, let's put some numbers out there, to get everyone on the same page:

"Normal" difficulty:
9,999 items per stack / 9,999 items refiner input / 4,095 items refiner output

"Survival" difficulty:
500 items per stack / 250 items refiner input / 250 items refiner output

"Custom" difficulty with maximum inventory restriction:
300 items per stack / 150 items refiner input / 150 items refiner output

Playing the "custom" game mode with the maximum inventory restriction, mould is not worth picking up; it takes 90 seconds to turn 150 mould into 30 nanites, and that's before considering having to refine goop>fluid>slime to get mould in the first place. Even "standard" Survival with its 500 stack size and 250 item limit in the refiner is a bit much for anything more than straight-up mould to be considered as a viable resource... the carbon you'll burn turning residual goop into viscous fluid into living slime into runaway mould into nanites gets cost-prohibitive in a hurry, if nothing else; it's really only "worthwhile" if it doesn't cost fuel, and even then the time investment is pretty ridiculous.

So with all that being said, I can get to my point:
My go-to for nanites is now Hyaline Brains. At 230 nanites per brain and a refiner time of just a second or two, it's even more efficient than Hadal Core or Larval Core... even if you can only "cook" one brain at a time. So long as you don't get stupid, fighting Sentinel ships in space is relatively simple... and the Salvaged Glass is good stuff, too.

As for storage containers, I agree that the limits on those, if any, should be huge. Given that we can only carry 60 stacks of 300 on our person, we should be able to cram an absolutely absurd amount of stuff into a cargo pod.

Edited to add: forgot to mention (in case anyone hadn't thought of it yet) that the freighter is actually a ridiculously large personal storage device, all on its own. Add a matter beam, and you can summon your freighter even from a planet's surface... and then you can access all the storage containers as well as the "core" storage on the freighter, so that's an additional 500+ stacks/slots available at your fingertips.

[knighttemplar1960]

At one time stack sizes were all the same for all difficulty levels (ie: inventory was the same for every difficulty as it is now for permadeath). In one expansion the devs decided to change the caps for creative and normal.

You don't "need" the extra inventory space from the expanded normal and creative to play the game especially since the devs increased the amount of inventory slots your ships can have and then increased the number of ships you could have and also added more exocraft that can be used for storage. People successfully played with the lesser inventories for years.

The issue isn't space its hoarding. The only thing you really need inventory space for is to hold items that you can't mine or buy from the galactic exchange.

Marie Kondo your storage.

[umop-apisdn]

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

Marie Kondo your storage.

To be honest, Konmari does not spark joy. Also, she quit being such a neurotic clean freak when she popped out her third kid.

[Lystent]

Originally posted by umop-apisdn:

...As for storage containers, I agree that the limits on those, if any, should be huge. Given that we can only carry 60 stacks of 300 on our person, we should be able to cram an absolutely absurd amount of stuff into a cargo pod....

When I started playing (some time before that update that made it so we had to power our own bases), on normal, cargo containers had slots comparable to freighter cargo slots, but had far fewer slots than they do now. Now it is slots galore.

[umop-apisdn]

Originally posted by Lystent:

Originally posted by umop-apisdn:

...As for storage containers, I agree that the limits on those, if any, should be huge. Given that we can only carry 60 stacks of 300 on our person, we should be able to cram an absolutely absurd amount of stuff into a cargo pod....

When I started playing (some time before that update that made it so we had to power our own bases), on normal, cargo containers had slots comparable to freighter cargo slots, but had far fewer slots than they do now. Now it is slots galore.

Sure, but we can have twice as many slots in our exosuit as we get in a cargo pod. I'm not complaining, mind you, merely pointing out facts and having an opinion about them. To be honest, capping our exosuit cargo at 50 slots seems reasonable; that's all that fits on the screen without scrolling, and it's the same number as in a cargo pod. Yes, I'm arguing for reduced inventory capacity.

If I were complaining, I would talk about how stupid it is that the inventory menu seems to always open the screen you would least like to be on when you press TAB... and once you get enough slots in your exosuit to need to scroll, the game always seems to show you the top of your inventory if you want the bottom, or vice-versa. it's almost like the devs deliberately went out of their way to make inventory management as inconsistent and inconvenient as possible.

[Lystent]

Originally posted by umop-apisdn:

...Yes, I'm arguing for reduced inventory capacity....

I'm mostly reciting how the balance was different back then. As someone who:
A: Sticks with just one character.
B: Happened to make that character a "normal" at the time
I've seen inventory go from a limited factor to a non-issue with my character. Not just from unlocking slots, but mostly through all these game updates. The loosening of the stack limits on "normal". The loosening of the upgrade limits to inventory. Especially the multiple expansions to the cargo pods.

Admittedly, I don't know too well how things are in the other two style settings, but it does seem as though that aspect of the game has radically changed over the years.

[Sound Zero]

Originally posted by umop-apisdn:

Originally posted by Lystent:

When I started playing (some time before that update that made it so we had to power our own bases), on normal, cargo containers had slots comparable to freighter cargo slots, but had far fewer slots than they do now. Now it is slots galore.

Sure, but we can have twice as many slots in our exosuit as we get in a cargo pod. I'm not complaining, mind you, merely pointing out facts and having an opinion about them. To be honest, capping our exosuit cargo at 50 slots seems reasonable; that's all that fits on the screen without scrolling, and it's the same number as in a cargo pod. Yes, I'm arguing for reduced inventory capacity.

If I were complaining, I would talk about how stupid it is that the inventory menu seems to always open the screen you would least like to be on when you press TAB... and once you get enough slots in your exosuit to need to scroll, the game always seems to show you the top of your inventory if you want the bottom, or vice-versa. it's almost like the devs deliberately went out of their way to make inventory management as inconsistent and inconvenient as possible.

If you use the inventory button, all your slots will fit on the screen without scrolling. And it depends on your screen resolution if it's only 50 that fit without scrolling, without using the inventory button.

[Brma]

My PermaDeath guide: Don't die