9 Ways Hello Games Should Have Made No Man's Sky

6. An Actual Map Of Landmarks & Progress To Fill

There's a weird balancing issue in terms of forward momentum in No Man's Sky. It feels as though Hello Games deliberately don't let you chart where you've been to encourage pushing ahead and discovering new places, things and items.

That's mostly fine, it certainly does its job as you're not tied to one planet over the next, but all the same, having the ability to either lay down a set of markers on a given planet with custom labels ("Gold deposit here", for example), or an actual map we could bring up, would be ideal.

Now, given the size of NMS, it's going to be impossible to chart every last planet the more you play - which is why I'd have this screen reset and wipe itself whenever you leave a given star system. Have your ship pipe up and mention something like "Charted space is limited to current system - are you sure you want to leave?" or whatever, and have these icons be mapped to the planet-generating algorithm already in place for each planet.

The way No Man's Sky generates content all comes from mathematical formulae; thousands of on-the-spot calculations that create the planets you see before you. Once you leave, they're reduced down to code once again, repopulating and reconstituting in the exact same way, should you return.

As the game is already locking in a thought process of, "This bunch of numbers resulted in X planet", add in the map coordinates, and if you ever return to that specific system, all your progress would reappear alongside.