If you’ve played a videogame before, then you probably know that when you give a player a high-value object with no functional purpose as a quest reward, then the most likely thing they’ll do is sell it. Particularly if they’re starved for inventory space. And especially if you give them ten<\/em> of the damn things. And especially<\/em> especially if they don’t stack<\/em>. That’s basically RPG shorthand for, “THESE THINGS ARE COMMON QUEST REWARDS. SELL THEM FOR MONEY!”<\/p>\n So at some point in a fit of frustration, after I’d heard the computer voice chirp NO FREE SLOTS IN INVENTORY<\/strong><\/tt> one too many times, I sold a couple of Atlas stones to give myself some breathing room. The game was handing them out like Halloween candy, so I figured if they turned out to be important I could always get more later. <\/p>\n Then I got to Atlas station #11 and found I couldn’t complete the game because I was two stones short. I had to step away and find two more stones, and the game gave no clue how to do this. It didn’t really acknowledge my situation at all. The option to complete the quest was grayed out, and it that was it. It’s like it never occurred to the designers that players might do this Very Obvious and Highly Incentivized Thing. <\/p>\n I checked the guides online and found out you can buy Atlas Stones at the market. It took me a long time (many star-hops) to find any for sale. When I did, they were selling for about ten times what I sold them for. Note that this isn’t the case for most items in the game. Most things in No Man’s Sky seem to have their buy and sell prices within a few percentage points of each other. In the worst-case scenario, you might find the prices halved \/ doubled. But for some reason Atlas Stones are sold for a 1,000% markup. (Sold for 230k, bought back for 2.3 million.) That’s brutal and I don’t see a mechanical reason for price-gouging the player over this except to punish them for trying to make their inventory problems less maddening. But whatever. Once I bought the stones, I opened the map and looked for the waypoint to guide me back to the Atlas. <\/p>\n The waypoint was gone.<\/p>\n I didn’t even know it could<\/em> vanish. I just accepted it as part of the interface. I’d never seen the map without a line pointing to the next Atlas system. But apparently the current waypoint is cleared when you arrive at an Atlas station, and using the station replaces it with a new one. <\/p>\n Keep in mind that the galaxy map is a three-dimensional field of indistinguishable dots that stretches on as far as you can see in every direction. I’d visited the Atlas Station the previous day and no longer had the slightest direction which way I’d gone when I left the station. I mean, why would I memorize a pattern of jumps? I expected to have the waypoint to guide me back!<\/p>\n I had the station in my history. I could scroll back to it, see what I’d named it, and review my discoveries there. But the interface provides no way to show you where the damn place was in this endless soup of floating dots.<\/p>\n The first answer people always give me to this puzzle is to visit Nada and Polo, who appear in a different kind of space station. But I didn’t have a waypoint to them either. I jumped randomly for a while until I found one of their hangouts, only to find out they no longer had any guidance for me. Because I’d already visited the final station, Nada no longer had the dialog option to point me to another one. I had everything I needed to complete the game except for the location of where to go.<\/p>\n But fine. It’s a game about space exploration. I can just explore space until I find another Atlas station, right? I don’t know how common they are, but the only thing left to do is look. So I loaded up my ship with fuel and set off.<\/p>\n And for the first couple of hours, this might have been kind of fun. I’d fly around, name some star systems, then stop and spend a couple of hours gathering up resources for the next load of fuel and the next big push.<\/p>\n I did this for four days<\/em>. I’ve visited over 250 star systems since that last Atlas visit and I’m no closer to my goal than when I startedFor comparison, it only took me about 50 hops to get from the first planet to that last Atlas station.<\/span>. I’ve still got these stupid Atlas Stones sucking up ten precious inventory slots and I’d love to be rid of them. I don’t even care about the planets I’m visiting anymore. I just want to turn in these stones and move on. I’ve put in the time – and then some – and I’d like to see the end of this journey for myself. <\/p>\n The whole time I’ve been saying, “I love this game, but the inventory system is horrible and I hate that you can’t re-visit old locations.” It figures that these two massive irritations would combine to break the game for me in the end. I’ve been one mouse-click away from finishing the game for five days and the only reason I can’t is because the travel system is so rudimentary it borders on prototype. In another game this might be forgivable, but in a game about navigating literally quintillions of stars, I think the tools for getting around need to be at least as robust as Skyrim.<\/p>\n This guide<\/a> says to look for stars with the “blue arrow” around it, but I’ve scrolled around examining hundreds of stars and I’ve never seen that. I strongly suspect that the blue arrows don’t denote an Atlas system, but the waypoint you’re given. (Which I no longer have.) Also note in that post that you can see a few comments from other people in my predicament.<\/p>\n There’s also the feature to “search for local discoveries” on the starmap. Supposedly it will show you what systems have been visited by you and other players. That might help narrow the search. But the button doesn’t seem to do anything for me. I press it. I hold it down. I wait. There’s no sound. No animation. Nothing to indicate the game is working or thinking or waiting for information from the server. I’m not convinced this button actually does anything on the PC.<\/p>\n After doing hundreds of fruitless, frustrating warps, I just started scanning the galaxy map, hoping that Atlas systems would be labeled. I could click on a new star about once every three secondsThe interface isn’t particularly snappy, and you have to wait for the fancy-pants popup to fill in to see the properties of the star.<\/span>. I did this for over an hour. Even allowing for taking breaks, I must have scanned well over a thousand stars. Either you can’t identify Atlas systems without a waypoint, or they’re incredibly rare.<\/p>\n
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