There is no way to slice it, the opening to No Man's Sky can be brutal on Permadeath. I have done it a good number of times, but have died many times. Some deaths will be unavoidable, what planet you start on and what resources are readily available to you can really hurt. Get 75 ferrite dust as soon as you can (typically from rocks/minerals) so you can repair your scanner. Once you have done so, scan immediately, and make a beeline for sodium and oxygen, before you even head towards your ship. As you head towards the ship, try to pick up some carbon and some ferrite dust, as you can probably find them easily without altering your path to the ship and you will need good amounts of both.
A lot of the trophies for this game are cumulative, and there is no order you need to do them all in. You may earn trophies earlier than I list them, but you may not want to earn them later, this is just a guide. Enjoy the game at your own pace if you fancy it, it's a big world out there! And another big world, and another, and another 18,000,000,000,000,000,000.
As a side-note, your first planet should be guaranteed to not have extreme weather (this can still mean weather that can hurt you, and will still drain your hazard protection, just not as severely) and will be guaranteed to have no sentinels (the flying robots who will be your enemies). Whenever landing on any other planets, watch the initial information you get as you first leave your ship on a planet. If any of the information comes up as red, either the weather or the sentinels, it means you're on an extra dangerous planet. For the most part, these planets are needlessly dangerous and a risk to your permadeath playthrough, but there are 2 trophies relating to them which we can cheese attain. For this, you're going to find one of these hazardous planets, and once there, land near a building on the planet. The trophies are for surviving in brutal and hostile terrains for certain lengths of time (cumulatively, not all at once). While they are made so that the time will not tick up whilst inside your ship, the time will tick up if inside a building, and both provide perfect shelter for you, and you won't be draining your hazard protection or life support. In other words, go inside the building, and put the controller down. Idling will get you both of the following trophies after about 8 hours:
There is absolutely no need to get these trophies this early, I just thought I'd mention them whilst mentioning hazardous environments.
You will need to complete the Awakenings quest to get started on the Atlas Path, which is going to be our method for getting to the Galactic Centre. The 'Awakenings' quest will teach you the basics of the game and get you things we'll need, such as the blueprint for antimatter (which we will need to make warp cells so we can warp, which we'll need to do at least 60 times for all the trophies, but will probably need to do over 100 times anyway). Doing the 'Awakenings' quest will also lead you to building a Base Computer, which will net you this little bronze trophy
Keep working on the base building quest while you play. Sometimes you will need to pause the game, go to the log, and select the mission from your list to be able to advance it. Each time you complete an objective in the base building questline, you will have to wait 90 real life minutes before you can do the next step, while the computer 'defragments'. These 90 minutes tick whether the game is on or not, so feel free to leave that to happen overnight, or sync these periods up with your hazardous planet idling.
Whenever you pick up a signal from The Anomaly, follow it. You'll get access to some nanites for doing things we'll already be doing for other trophies, and also talking to Priest Entity Nada will allow you to find Atlas Stations. Atlas Stations will give us crafting resources which we'll eventually use to make a quick path to the galactic centre, and also feature lots of white lights on the floor which can teach you a word of an alien language by walking on them. The first trophy for collecting learnt words kicks in at 10 learnt words, and you can easily do that in a single Atlas Station, so go there to get Babel-17.
Your objective for now is to make money and nanites. When you use your analysis visor on foot, you may see yellow things pop up. If they are metal fingers, curious deposits, humming eggs subterranean relics or other things with the 'rare pickup' symbol (3 vertical yellow lines, close together inside a yellow diamond). When you scan whilst on your ship, be on the look out for Abandoned Buildings. These are by far our biggest way to make money. They are surrounded on the outside with these pink bulbous growths called Whispering Eggs. Destroying the whispering egg will release a larval core, which will only appear for a few moments before they disappear. They will also spawn a handful of creatures known as 'Biological Horrors', vicious predators who will kill you easily. There's a couple of methods to mine these safely, and plenty of video guides can be found if you look on youtube. I recommend this extremely simple video guide from Kotaku, which illustrates the two methods I've liked the most involving the terrain manipulator for one method and some basic walls for another.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93uiGWR9otk
Small note: this video lists larval cores to be worth about a third more than they are worth as of the time of writing this guide, but it's still a very efficient and safe way to make money that will last us for our entire playthrough. Let's say one abandoned building has 5 clumps of eggs, and each clump has 3 eggs to it. Let's be generous, and say you miss 2 of the eggs out of the 15. You're still going to make 780,000 units from a single trip to an abandoned building. This is well beyond the needed number for the 'Foundation' trophy (250,000 units). The units trophies are NOT cumulative, meaning you have to have the entire sum of units at one time.
Doing this a second time will get you 'The Space Merchants', which is for 1,000,000 units. A third time will get you 'The Diamond Age', which is for 2,000,000.
When you're on your way to sell all of this wonderful loot, make a point of doing so at a space station. Doing so will let you give you more of a chance to buy what you need with the units (make sure to stock up on those resources I mentioned), but also it'll give you a big gathering of aliens who you can meet and chat to. Encounter 10 different ones to pop 'Contact'
While at space stations, accept as many 'safe' missions as you can. These 'safe' missions involve scanning things, taking photos, and uploading discoveries. When you get the nanites, which you can also get by interacting with little things around space stations, you'll want to pick up upgrades for the shields of your ship, but not before upgrading your starting ship for a few million units. The type of your first bought ship doesn't matter a huge amount, because it won't be your last ship, just try to get at least 20 inventory slots and something with the 'Efficient Thrusters' upgrade pre-installed. It'll help you just to be able to carry more. On that note, get the exo-suit inventory upgrades which are available once for every space station, too. Prioritise your general inventory first, then technology, then cargo. You can stand to fight 1v1 against 1 star ships with no danger if you wanted to pick up your 'Use of Weapons' trophy earlier on, if you don't trust your piloting skills and want to wait until you have a significantly better ship, that is fine too.
Two things about dogfighting in space, one is that you can charge your deflector shield with sodium, sodium nitrate, or pyrite, at least one of which you should ideally have on you already anyway. Charging your deflector shield before it runs out is key. You don't die immediately upon losing all your shield, but it's significantly easier to keep your shield above 0 than it is to play with your shield running out.
We have now established the basic gameplay loop that you're going to be doing for a while. Arrive in new star system, go to atlas station if there is one, go to anomaly find out where an atlas station is if the anomaly's there, go to space station, turn in quests, take on new quests, talk to every single alien, sell off loot, buy supplies, pick up an upgrade if you can, go to new planet, scan the animals, scan the plants, mine the whispering eggs (and any other valuables), take a photo of the planet, build a base, do the next bit of Expanding the Base, do all the safe planets until the system is done, and repeat.
Some of the milestones, you won't have made much progress on. You probably haven't warped an exceptionally high amount of times, you are probably still over 600,000 light years from the galactic center, and that's fine. Continue this loop until you have all 10 recipes from all of the Atlas stations. This will be a fair bulk of time (and by the time you complete, you will be over half way to complete with No Man's Sky in terms of time investment), and you're going to pick up a good number of the trophies doing it.
Between all the aliens on the stations you visit, the planets you land on, and all the lights on the Atlas stations which give you words of language, you have probably have all you need for the language trophies. You need 150 words total for the Citizen of the Galaxy trophy. If you haven't popped it yet, we will still be going to a lot of space stations quite soon, so do not worry about it. I am going to assume you got them both easily in this timeframe, as I did. If you're struggling somehow, or just want these trophies faster, warp to systems where Gek are the dominant life form. They will teach you a word of their language for a mere 10 units, which is a cheap currency you'll always have on you, unlike Korvax or Vy'keen who will ask for things you may not have.
You will also get two more trophies for alien encounters as you do this. The top milestone for this trophy is merely 40 aliens. It's very easy to meet 8 on a space station, so you will get these very early on in your quest to collect all of the Atlas recipes.
If you've been paying attention to the 'Expanding the Base' quest, you'll also have built an Exocraft by now. You won't even have needed to finish the quest, you get to build the Exocraft around 80% into the data terminal's defragmentation. Building the Exocraft gets you 'Navigators'
I said you may not have warped many times, but 3 is enough to get “The Stars, Like Dust”. You probably won't get either of the other space exploration trophies while you gather the Atlas recipes, the next one up is for 30 warps. Don't worry about them for now.
And finally, if you've been taking some time on the odd planet or two, you'll have picked up the trophies for on-foot exploration. It's no great worry if you haven't, any running or sprinting will add on to the total, and we still have some of that to go yet. But also, these trophies tend to trigger particularly early, so I'm going to accredit them here.
After getting all of the recipes, you will want to build your way through them. You'll notice that recipes 2 through 10 require the end product of the recipe that came before it. Towards the end, you'll notice you'll have to acquire 'Cadmium', 'Emeril' and 'Indium', which you may not have naturally found on your playthrough. These elements only appear in specifically coloured star systems. Red for cadmium, green for emeril, and blue for indium. To go to these specifically coloured systems, you will need the respective drives, which are add-ons to be made to a ship. Before you do this, get a better ship. You're looking for an 'Explorer' class ship (as they have more efficient hyperdrives, and you can make do with other stats being lower if it makes your hyperdrive better), ideally of an A or S class. There's no point making modifications to a bad ship. There is no great 'science' to getting a nice ship, just have a look at ships that land on space stations and trading outposts. Systems with higher economies will offer greater chances at higher class ships. Once you get your ship, put at least one hyperdrive upgrade on it, ideally in a 'technology' slot. Each hyperdrive upgrade improves the hyperdrive efficiency by 100% and adds additional light years to your range, and that can be improved with a synergy bonus. Spare no nanite expenses on your hyperdrive upgrades, get S class only. You're going to be using the hyperdrive a lot very soon. Remember, upgrades do not work if you have too many of the same kind in the same place. 4 hyperdrive upgrades in the technology slots will overheat and not work, 3 is the maximum. You can have another 3 in the general inventory, but I would advise against it, for reasons which will soon become apparent. Put the new drives on the ship until you can build a Heart of the Sun, the final recipe from the Atlas stations, and take it to another Atlas Station to gain the ability to see all black holes.
Also with these extra drives, we have the ability to go to systems which have no dominant life. You may have noticed red, green and blue stars do not have a dominant life form. This is great for us, it means that a lot of the planets have a low habitation rate. While you're in a red, blue or green system, scan each and every planet. Each planet will have a one or two word description of it, e.g barren, or frozen. If the description does not seem to describe the weather, but rather the geography itself, you've got what you want. Land on these planets, check the fauna. What we are hoping for, and what is common with these planets, is that there will be exactly 1 type of fauna, and thus identifying 'all of them' will be extremely easy. These planets can be incredibly strange, so expect the 'fauna' to challenge and stretch every definition of what an 'animal' is. If you're not entirely sure if a planet meets the criteria, check the word describing it against the categories of exotic biome planets here:
https://nomanssky.gamepedia.com/Biome_-_Exotic
Do this 10 times, uploading the discoveries each time, to get the zoology trophies in a way that's much quicker than most people get them.
Back to the Atlas. Black holes take us approximately 1,500 light years closer to the galactic center on average (although you will notice this number drop as you get closer) each time you enter one. You will also find that any technology upgrades installed on your ship in the general inventory slots may break. This won't include your hyperdrive, launch thrusters, photon cannon or reflector shield, but it will break the three extra drives you just installed (it's okay, we're done with them), any extra weapons you have installed, and anything like 'efficient thrusters' which your ship may have come with. Such is the price of black holes. We are now going to begin the journey to the galactic center. There is no easy way to put this, this is going to be a process of warping to a system with a black hole, going in the black hole, going to the next closest system with a black hole, and then going in the black hole, many times. I had to do it over 80 times personally, with an A class Explorer ship with 3 S-class hyperdrive upgrades with synergy, but I did start my game particularly far away. When picking black holes, don't focus on what gets you closer to the center, focus on what is closer to you. The distance closed by you is completely counterfeited by the extra time you'll have to stop to make warp cells. Always just warp to the closest black hole, and let the black holes do the work of getting you there. You will definitely pick up the other two space exploration trophies doing this (the last of which is for 60 warps).
When you're getting to the center, take a moment. Once you hit the galactic center, your game will reset. You will be stranded with a ship you need to repair and no technology, a new game plus. We want to do this, but not stay like this, as we still have a few other loose ends to tie up. So remember that once you hit the center, DO NOT SAVE. With that in mind, hit the galactic center, and pick up what are widely regarded as the game's 2 hardest trophies.
Now reload. We have the potentially dangerous things left. I left them until now because, for a cautious player, these are the ones most likely to kill you. Losing the playthrough after we reach the galactic center is not terrible, obviously, we want to avoid it, but we've done the bulk of the work. If we lose from here, we can start over on casual and do these things easier and with no risk, the only downside is the time it'd take to build up a new game. So try to get it on one go. First, try carrying expensive cargo until enemy ships try to ambush you. The larval cores mentioned earlier will do fine. Shoot down ships, accept jobs which have you destroy pirates, and protect freighters when you see them under attack. The gold standard for destroyed ships is 80. This sounds like a lot, but you'll find you often fight them in clusters, and in particular with fights around freighters, you will have help destroying them but they'll still count to your total. If space combat truly scares you, remember you can upgrade your weapons, remember you can have technology in the general inventory (we're done using black holes, so they are no longer at risk) and if that fails, buy defence chits. Defence chits will call other ships to help you if you are under attack, so you will always have 'breathing room' to heal your ship's shield. You'll get the hang of it. Guided weapons like the rocket launcher will also help you immensely in dogfights. These are also the last trophies we need from the base game, so the platinum will actually pop at this point, too!
The final trophy is for visiting a player's base. There can be some RNG with this one, but if you keep joining multiplayer sessions, you will eventually find someone who has built a base. Check in and you'll pick up 'Reunion', as well as the game's platinum trophy, 'Total Perspective Vortex'.
I hope you enjoyed No Man's Sky, and my walkthrough of it.
Find anything you think is wrong with this walkthrough? Help us fix it by posting in its
Walkthrough Thread.
This walkthrough is the property of TrueTrophies.com. This walkthrough and any content included may not be reproduced without written permission. TrueTrophies.com and its users have no affiliation with any of this game's creators or copyright holders and any trademarks used herein belong to their respective owners.