6 Ups & 9 Downs From No Man's Sky

5. Mining Is Insanely Addictive

A major pillar of gameplay is mining planetary resources to build items of interest, such as warp cells for your hyperdrive or blueprints to enhance your jetpack or running abilities.

This naturally sounds like the grindiest part of the game, and that's not really far wrong, yet No Man's Sky does a great job making mining satisfying and addictive.

For starters, the game plays fair with the player: the majority of minerals can be found on most planets save for the rarest ones, and the in-game economy will throw units at you for even just a small amount of mining. Come across a big deposit of a precious mineral, as you frequently will, and you can easily mine up to 1 million units in around half an hour.

That's without even mentioning space mining, where you can simply fly around a star system shooting asteroids to your heart's content, which is also ludicrously fun. You'll largely end up farming Thamium from the asteroids, which while not the most valuable mineral in the game can still net you some easy cash should you need it.

The end-goal here is to of course purchase a bigger ship that allows you to hold more cargo and warp larger distances, and admirably Hello don't make you work too hard for that. You won't be breaking your back for 10 hours to get that 5 million unit ship: you'll acquire plenty of cash just exploring, and if you take a break to mine every now and then, you'll be there in no time.