On Aug. 9 explorers will begin racing from the edge to the center of the galaxy, cataloging alien life, unseen suns and the 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets of No Man’s Sky. The procedurally generated universe has carnivorous plants and giant animals, robotic Sentinel defense systems, space stations, science vessels and a crafting system. What it doesn’t have is lies, so we’ll need to bring them ourselves.
Every new discovery in No Man’s Sky is entered into The Atlas, a mysterious and massive construct at the center of the game’s story. While everyone will contribute to The Atlas, you’ll only be able to read back your own discoveries. The Atlas is not open to you.
Just as archiving is an essential component of No Man’s Sky, our typical reaction to big open-world games is to dissect them, putting out guide after guide until the whole big butterfly is pinned down and gutted. There isn’t an inch of Skyrim unknown. Unbelievably complicated GTA 5 Sasquatch conspiracies have been mapped, step-by-step.
This won’t work with No Man’s Sky. GameRant estimates that it would take five billion years to visit each planet in No Man’s Sky for a single second. There will never come a time that all of No Man’s Sky is known. And if the map is never filled in there will always be room for monsters.
On the No Man’s Sky subreddit people are imagining the “inevitable creepypasta” that could come of a virtually infinite universe. It’s an idea that fires the imagination.
With so much attention on its staggering scale it’s been hard for many to grasp what actually playing No Man’s Sky will be like. Sony has put out a series of trailers, each focusing on a different aspect of No Man’s Sky : Explore, Fight, Trade, Survive.
But these trailers don’t cover the layer of information we’ll collectively build atop No Man’s Sky, like an upside-down Pokemon Go. In the remoteness of space we’ll encounter new life and new, strange situations to which we will be the only witness. Tall tales, conspiracy theories, cryptids, daredevilry and outright lies will spread here on Earth, with none of the normal checks available (GameFAQs ain’t gonna cut it).
There is so much room for lying and inventing horrible, monstrous, strange, funny and frightening encounters. Though you have a warp drive, No Man’s Sky allows players to fly at impulse power from planet to planet. Anything can happen out there in the black. And there’s so much more than the darkness of deep space. You can dig up ancient monstrosities 128 meters below ground. Mysterious portals can take you to dangerous uncharted zones of the galactic core. Unseen Edens — stalked by blood-smeared beasts — are just over each new horizon.
No Man’s Sky can never be diagrammed and never be tamed. Just as in our world, conspiracy theories, supernatural mysteries and outright bullshit will always have the immensity of possibility to defend it. There will be lies told about No Man’s Sky that will never be disproven. So forget the guides, No Man’s Sky is for the liars.
If you’d like to start lying and contributing to our new universe’s collective mythology, study up at the NMS Information Repository.
