I remember during some interview it was jokingly mentioned that the player's starting world was random and everyone could have vastly different starting worlds. You might even end up with a radioactive world that's constantly trying to kill you. Guess what I got?

In hindsight I really liked the hellscape that is Golguin Prime because all the radioactive plants and animals were pretty weird looking.

What kind of world was your starting point?

Oh god, that looks like a nightmare! I'm very much looking forward to starting the game at midnight.

Mine was a super-cold world with "sparse" fauna, which had practically zero zinc resources on it. Seeing as how you need zinc to complete the tutorial, schlepping 10 minutes on foot across a mostly barren landscape to press square on a plant and then schlepping ten minutes back to the ship was not the most engaging experience I've ever had.

That sounds frustrating but also awesome to be honest. This is the magic of the procedurally generated game - there is a great deal of variety to be had, even in the starting area. I don't know why but that really does it for me, not only here but as a concept - one of my favourite games in recent memory is Enter the Gungeon. I love to roll the dice and face the consequences and NMS offers that with a constant progression of upgrades. Also I am a sucker for grinding so this one should be right up my alley.

I will come back to this topic and post mine later, I still have over two more hours for my game to unlock. Time to finish watching Starship Troopers I guess!

EDIT: I tried to export the screenshots to get them to this topic, but I had a faulty USB drive and the PS4 just shut down when copying, so no luck so far! I destroyed the drive by the way, but now I have none on hand.

@quipido said:

While I agree that the unpredictability is part of the allure of a procedural experience, it seems like they could tweak the formula a little bit to make sure that people start on planets abundant in the resources needed to complete basic tutorial tasks. Leave the desolate stuff for after players have gotten a grip on the game mechanics.

Yeah this is my starting planet: Dassui Prime (According to Google Translate, Dassui is Japanese for dehydration, since my planet has not water that is what I named it) Plenty of dry plant life, had a bug like thing attack me, and found a lizard dog...feel like I got a good one for sure.

My starting planet was a fucking paradise but I wasn't there for long cause the alpha vector ship came with a charged hyperdrive so I basically fixed my engine and blasted off to a new system in like 20 min. I cannot find that system now and I wish I could go back there.

Mine was horrible. I had toxic rain that was killing me and it took me 30 minutes to find everything I needed to repair the ship. I only saw two dinosaur looking things with feathers, they ran away from me. Took me about 3 hours to get my hyperdrive and I'm out to see the universe. Fun game so far

A very relaxing and lush green/red planet (but no sign of water) with no real danger except my ill adviced jetpack use. Most of the resources I needed were easy to come by. I did found myself getting lost in a cave though, I would advice against exploring caves until you get the omni-tool upgrade that can deform terrain. My problem could have been solved so easily could I have blown my way out of there. That being said, it was an interesting experinece becuse that cave was huge.

My starting planet was great. No bodies of water (it was -30 something degrees at the warmest parts of the day) but expansive underground cave systems which I got lost in at one point.

Despite it being so cold there were plenty of trees, plants, and dinosaur like creatures (think stegosaurus but about the size of a rhino) and I came across one massive creature that was as big as an elephant, had six legs, two sets of big muscly legs and one set of dainty deer legs in the back, and a leopard skin pattern in spots.

I found two or three places to upgrade the inventory slots on my suit which I promptly did. I 100 percented that first planet and got a nice bit of money and some fond memories for doing so.

@golguin: that looks almost the same as my startingplannet, tentacle plants, same treethings and radioactive weather. Did you encounter tentacled land jellyfish as well?

• Weather: Acidic Dust
• Sentinels: Average
• Flora: Full
• Fauna: Regular

Mushroomy tendrilled trees and shrubs, hedgehogs, deers and rams, rakks. Very rainy and the animals are constantly makin noise. Yellowish orange ground, salmon sky. Looks like two other planets nearby. Kinda nice once you get used to the constant acid hazard.

Can't recall the stats off the top of my head, but it was a brownish wasteland with a few hills and a lot of cave networks. Also it was really toxic.

For the record, all four planets in my starting system were either toxic or irradiated, they were all fauna-starved, and the animals skewed towards trying to kill me. Only one of them had water, and the most I found on that planet was a tiny splashing pond. There was a bunch of floating islands on a couple of them, too, so I began to wonder how close to the center I was that I was getting some real bullshit planets. I don't know how close it is in comparison to everyone else but my system is 126K light years from the center so probably not that close?

Desert landscape, acid rain. I fell into a cave in the floor and I couldn't get out. It was terrifying and I wanted to go home but there was no home to go to.

Not too bad for a starting point. Fairly spare vegetation, so you can see a long way off if you get some height. I was rather shocked that the temperature (105 F)was never much of a concern on this srub-brush desert planet. No water....well so far...not even a drop.

About three hours in I lost my ship. I went down into a cave and came out a few miles away and instead of looking g back I walked some more....then its icon was GONE. Luckily, I had some experience with the ship call-back systems and was able to spend a "chit" to call my ship to me after spending 90s mins walking around blindly.

My plan was to totally engross myself in this world for a dozen hours cataloging everything and learning the language off knowledge stones and monoliths. I think I know about 18 words now. That might be the wrong call but I enjoy the nity-gritty of combing the planet for weird objects. Just before I cam to work I landed a large port facility on my planet that has ten landing pads. That was the largest installation I have found so far and was a good view of seeing various space craft come in to land. My planet seems dominated by 'electronic aliens' who wear LED helmets....so Daft Punk. The Daft Punk aliens seems to be into pure science and are a bit skittish if pressed, but I have traded with a few and exchanged some knowledge with them.

Haven't seen anything that looks like land jellyfish. It was mostly just radioactive dinosaurs. I've recently reached another radioactive planet, but this one sports a huge radioactive ocean with most points of interest deep in the ocean.

A ball of ice riddled with rad caves. Which is useful because it's -75 at night.

Also an ice planet. Was tempted to name it Hoth, but it's too rich in vegetation for that. Called it "Ice Station Foenix," a combination of Ice Station Zebra and my PSN gamertag, Foenix654. Took me a long time to find zinc on that planet...

Not shown, Giant bipedal Owl creatures.

My first world was -20 during the day, and -60 at night. Snow world with pretty heavy sentinel population that was slightly angrier than standard. I was lucky enough to find the resources I needed to fix my ship in maybe 30 mins of play time. Spent the next maybe 4 hours exploring it, finding all of the fauna, a portal, a few monoliths, and a few suit upgrades.

@mister_v said:

Not shown, Giant bipedal Owl creatures.

That's nice! Both the planets I have been to have had no trees just giant fungi...I look forwards to some trees.

Man, I dunno if I just lucked out on this, but one of my starting planets was absolutely littered with exosuit upgrades. Got up to 30 slots before I ran out of money and stopped looking (had earned a bit over 1 mill units from mining/exploring the rest of the system). On my way off of it I noticed a moon I hadn't visited that has flying eel manta dragon things and giant hollowed out cubic rocks everywhere. Kinda reminds me of the Black Garden from Destiny, just without all the red flowers.

Really enjoying my time with this, but it really eats up hours. Yeesh.

@theht: 1 mill? You just hardcore grinded or something? I'm about 10 hours in and only managed to get to 900,000. :O

My starting planet was heavily toxic and radiated. I climbed out of the crater and saw nothing but purple rocks and mushrooms. It took me over an hour to leave the planet, due to having to seek shelter all the time. When I saw Jeff's little paradise starting planet I was kind of jealous :p

@dussck: Haha, I should clarify I've probably been playing for somewhere around 10 hours as well (starting planet had a ton of emeril, second planet had a ton of gold, and the space station had heridium at something like +104%), but I haven't moved on from my first system yet. Just seemed weird to see so many exosuit upgrades on a single planet. Got something like 16 slots in, I dunno, an hour or so of just flying around? It was a dead planet so the pods stuck out well enough.

Mine was lush with Fauna and Flora.....Mainly red in colour. Several Large cave systems rich with plutonium.

Really liking hearing other people's story's of starting worlds. Mine was a fairly sparse planet with massive mountains full of cave systems and populated in mass by...what ever this thing is?!?

Mine is pretty cool, it's got lots of peaceful life on it but is also toxic, lots of greenery. The second world has much less fauna but has a jagged, craggy, crimsom landscape that is rising out of many seas. Basically water and these deep red mountains cover the whole thing.

My third and final planet in my starting system lacked fauna entirely but was filled with pretty multicolored caves with lots of resources in them. Overall a decent starting zone.

mine was pretty regular, if only a bit cold, plus I got lucky and found a crashed ship before I could even fix the starting one :)

and there were these lil raptor things running around

Also a giant dog like thing, which I of course then named appropriately

I actually started on a discovered world. I went to "upload" it and it was yellow. Said it was already discovered by some dude named Yelly. I feel like Sean said at some point everyone would start on their own world so I assume this was a bug.

Mine was pretty lush and beautiful with resources pretty close. Also hopping blancmanges and really sweet half dinosaur, half dogs things that whimpered and ran when you got close. Less keen on the giant insects in the caves that meant I had to learn how to put together a gun fairly quickly.

I came to on a planet where a lot of things were surviving without water. I started to worry that maybe I was not one of the lifeforms that could do so.

I passed out again [to tweak the visual settings] and came too with the realisation that -20 C was probably not that bad (in a suit) and plenty of ships were flying overhead. Things were going to be fine, even if the bright foliage was only offering brief respites from this dried desert world.

As night fell, I repaired my ship.

Yeah I got a radioactive wasteland too for my first planet, made good friends with a creepy giant aardvark covered in boils though... Just made my first warp to a different solar system that is toxic, barren and full of pirates. Need to refuel hyperdrive here to try and find greener pastures.

Pretty happy with my first planet, was a ton of gold here, so I am doing pretty well for cash already.

Firstlight was an amazingly lush garden planet that I spent way too much time on. After fixing my ship and hopping around a bit I decided to get out and walk in one direction until I hit one of those beacons that let you call your ship, 3 hours later I had holds full of weird stuff I found and a whole bunch of Gek words.

@rht992: If its unnamed, may i suggest Deviled Legs?