Your motivations for each mission lie in physical rewards (exocraft, or blueprints to upgrade weapons) and, more importantly, snippets of lore. The Atlas Rises patch added huuuuge amounts of new lore to find, and the base building received a big chunk of it, allowing you to learn more about each race and your own story.

The basic loop of these quests looks like this:

A beautifully constructed MSPaint diagram

Whilst this loop is quite basic, get quest, do quest, give in quest, the important step is the one in between each of these — the travelling. This is the aspect that slowly grows with each additional quest. Whilst the first few missions have you explore around the initial area of the base, gathering iron to build structures, it grows, beginning to task you with exploring caves to gather a certain plant. Eventually the quests have you exploring all over the planet in order to find certain buildings, contextually related to the quest’s storyline.

The distance growth through each quest, in another elegant MSPaint diagram

In slowly growing the scope of each quest, No Man’s Sky slowly begins to let you become familiar with your surroundings, enabling you to recognise the planet more and more. Each quest slowly pushes you further away from the base, giving you more and more ways to be distracted by No Man’s Sky’s brilliant terrain generation.

In slowly exploring the planet, No Man’s Sky shows you what it has to offer. Serene walks, mixed with quick flights. Lore, abandoned buildings, crashed freighters, strange terrain and happy creatures, caves and space stations. The quests all slowly reveal these, giving you an idea of what future planets may hold. Smaller quests show you the joy of its details, medium travel giving you the knowledge of the density of its treasures, whilst quests covering larger distances allow you to understand the sheer scale of No Man’s Sky.

my child

All in all, the base building has been transformed from something of little interest or importance to a feature which gives the player a tutorial for exploration. When the game was first announced, the main question associated with No Man’s Sky was “What do you do?”. Whilst the answer was exploration, No Man’s Sky initially failed to easily convey it to its player base, leaving some confused and others angry. This update is one of many in bringing the vision of No Man’s Sky to fruition, creating a game of true exploration.

For further reading on No Man’s Sky, try these:

1. No Man’s Sky just wants you to walk and i am ok with this

2. No Man’s Sky: A Poem

3. Colours in games — small memories