Suzy Wallace is acting pretty casually, considering that she’s about to show me the way to the center of the universe. She’s the Senior Producer on No Man’s Sky

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The Search For Silicates

“ Exactly what kind of video game lies behind No Man’s Sky’s seemingly impenetrable veneer of procedural sci-fi exploration porn?

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Under the Sea

“ From the hill’s peak, I look down into a verdant valley filled with grazing animals of all sizes, most of which defy description. It’s a Jurassic Park moment.

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“ I switched my weapon from its boltcaster to its mining attachment and began to slowly break the tree down like the nature-hating industrialist I am.

“Think of it like a galactic GPS,” Suzy tells me. She points to a yellow star. “This is where you are, and that,” she says as she gestures towards where the line fades, “is where you’re headed.” I drag my cursor to the next dot over from the one I’m currently in, and a “hyperdrive required” message appears. I ask her if I can get to that next system in this demo build, but she seems unsure. I secretly made it my goal to find out.Here's what I did, and what I learned over the course of the next two hours with No Man’s Sky.The big question on many people’s minds, the one left unanswered by virtually every trailer and even the recent round of first hands-on impressions, is this: Exactly what kind of video game lies behind No Man’s Sky’s seemingly impenetrable veneer of procedural sci-fi exploration porn? I’ve read most of these previews, and while they shed some light, they stop short of filing the experience of playing No Man’s Sky down to a point. Perhaps it’s foolish to even try, given how many different things it does, and the grand scale on which it’s trying to do them, but here’s my attempt:No Man’s Sky is a survival game.If you want to shoot things, you’ll need ammo, and it doesn’t come in little boxes or clips that drop off enemies. You need to harvest an element that can pass as an energy source and make it yourself. And when the things you shoot invariably start shooting back, taking hunks out of your protective energy shield, it isn’t going to magically regenerate; it’s powered by processing the silicates found in much of the space flotsam you see lying around on a planet’s surface. Finally, if you want to go jet-setting from celestial body to celestial body, you’ll need a hyperdrive made from components that don’t exactly grow on trees. You’ll be braving harsh environments or fighting dangerous foes to get them; either way you’re burning through precious resources in the process, and they'll need to be replenished.This perpetual need for resources drives the minute-to-minute of No Man’s Sky more than any other element. You start to learn unspoken rules about where you’ll find what. Planets of a certain biome type, or distance from its sun will be more likely to have this element or that one, so you trek from one planet to another, mining asteroids along the way. The trip might be longer than you think. Even in this compressed demo star system, my nav computer estimated my travel time from my starting planet to another planet in the same system to be 30 minutes at impulse speed, or 5 minutes at maximum boost. Using an in-system jump engine, I could be there in seconds, but that’s if one is installed, and if you have the fuel to engage it. Thankfully the demo provided both, but ordinarily, that would be one more item added to the shopping list.With the icy plains of Balari V (where most of our March preview took place) far in my rearview, I land on the lush, temperate planet of Cavil, which thankfully isn’t immediately hostile to my fragile, fleshy form. Without having to worry about a harsh climate, I’d be able to explore more freely on my hunt for the two components I needed to build a hyperdrive and take one step closer to the center of the universe. A quick pulse of my scanners revealed traces of silicon, carbon, and plutonium over the next hill – not the stuff I’m looking for, but as good a place as any to start.For now though, I'll settle for glancing at all the flora and fauna I've catalogued in my discovery journal, which I'm sure will give any Pokédex a run for its money in no time at all. I ping my sensors again to see if I can pinpoint some of the resources I detected earlier. The bundle of blips that pop up on my hud are color-coded to indicate what kind of resources they’re leading me to, a luxury of the particular scanning suite I have installed on my weapon. I follow them to some jettisoned supply containers and space debris at the far end of the valley, where I start picking through them.One of the larger ones yields something perhaps more valuable than raw materials: a blueprint for a new tech upgrade. This one is a suit attachment that increases my oxygen capacity when exploring underwater. At this point I think back to when I first entered the planet’s atmosphere, recalling that large swathes of it were covered with blue oceans. Maybe the components that had eluded me on the surface would be found below it? I shifted focus to scrounging up the materials to build my new toy, and once I had, I headed straight for the nearest body of water I could find.As I approached shore, I noticed for the first time that as I hovered my reticule over trees and crystal deposits, an indicator would come up on my HUD to indicate what kind of resources could be harvested from it. Unsurprisingly, trees were rich in carbon, which I had precious little of, so I switched my weapon from its boltcaster to its mining attachment and began to slowly break the tree down like the tree-hating industrialist I am.And what an ocean it was. Teeming with exotic creatures and plants that looked like nothing if not alien, I was at a loss to even choose where to begin. I dove as deep as I could and just picked a direction, scanning every other-worldly fish I could along the way. Eventually I happened upon a yellow crystal deposit that looked quite unlike any I had seen up on the surface. I mined it out and as luck would have it, it was one of the two minerals I needed to build my hyperdrive. I was halfway there!My elation was short-lived, though. I had suddenly started taking damage, and a quick glance upwards revealed two Sentinels hovering above sea level while taking pot-shots at me. In a panic, I swam back the way I had come and just hoped they’d stop pursuing me. One of them did, but the other followed me all the way back to shore, where I had no choice but to defend myself.