I found a clever and beautiful ferris wheel-like player base in the Eissentam universe during the most recent Voyagers expedition. It's fantastic! But as you can see I had to tell you that it's in the Eissentam universe for you to use the coordinates on the screen shot. I also didn't write down the surface coordinates so I can't tell you exactly where it is. No Man's Sky needs a bookmarks system to allow players to navigate point-to-point in a sprawling universe.
The game already has systems for letting the player fly a starship elegantly between landmark-like icons -- including easy routing around whole planets to reach a mission landmark, system space station, or freighter. Currently the player's strongest method of bookmarking a location is by placing a base computer and to a lesser extent a save beacon. After that you can only manually write down coordinates that appear when you are using an Exocraft. If a bookmark system included a way of importing or exporting them as codes, it could also fix the shortcoming of the portal coordinates included in screen shots which lack a galaxy identifier. Finally, the underlying mechanisms of a new bookmark system could also be used internally to fix some significant navigation bugs the game has surrounding losing track of quest givers locations.
Each bookmark would store:
- Galaxy
- Star
- Planet
- Coordinates on the planet
- An optional object type (monolith, portal, base, manufacturing center, etc)
The player would be able to:
- add a bookmark when pointing at a an existing nearby landmark (e.g. as a nearby building, a landed starship, a crashed freighter)
- add a bookmark where the player is standing
- rename a bookmark
- delete a bookmark
- import a bookmark code by typing it in
- export a bookmark code as a string of characters (using something like base 36, omitting ambiguous characters)
- easily (with few menu selections) select a single bookmark as Active.
Once a bookmark is selected as Active, the user interface would give different types of directions based on where the player is relative to the bookmark. - The Active bookmark becomes the active quest in the Log. - If the bookmark is in the same universe as the player, the player is prompted to open the Galactic Map to view a path. The Galactic Map will offer a route to the bookmark's star. - If the bookmark is in another universe, the player is prompted to find a portal. - If the Portal destination groups include a location near the Active bookmark that location will be highligted. If a Portal destination is the same star as the Active bookmark, only that destination will be highlighted. - If the Active bookmark is in the same star system, the player will see a bookmark landmark icon that can be flown to.
This new system would let players mark and share particular features for ease of finding them. I understand that over the years changes in the algorithms generating the universe have caused terrain to change -- sometimes orphaning or destroying player bases -- but that is not something a bookmark system could fix.