Getting Started Guides

No Man’s Sky drops you next to a broken starship on a planet that is usually trying to kill you, tells you almost nothing, and expects you to work it out. The first two hours are the steepest part of the game, and they are steep for a reason that is easy to miss: almost every early problem is a resource problem wearing a costume. Life support draining, hazard protection failing, a jetpack that will not recharge, a launch thruster you cannot fuel — all of it comes down to knowing which four or five substances matter and where they sit on the surface.

The order you do things in matters more than most guides admit. Repairing the ship and leaving is the tutorial’s goal, but leaving immediately with a 20-slot suit and no scanner upgrades makes the next ten hours harder than they need to be. Exosuit slots compound: every drop pod you find early pays off for the rest of the save. So does learning the Analysis Visor properly, because scanning flora and fauna is the most reliable early income in the game and costs nothing but time.

This category covers that opening stretch and the systems you meet during it — game modes and difficulty settings, saving, inventory expansion, hazard protection, the Atlas Pass, and the main story from Awakenings through the Artemis Path. If you are coming back after a long absence rather than starting fresh, the beginner hub is still the right first stop: the mechanics you remember from launch or from NEXT have mostly been rebuilt since.