No Man's Sky's huge NEXT update has been received extremely well by players, even boosting the game's sales above the leviathan that is GTA V. One guy who isn't so thrilled about NEXT is Reddit user avaslash, whose favorite ship since day one of No Man's Sky was altered beyond recognition by the update. Now, he's on a mission to find an identical ship to the one he lost, and he's willing to fork out 200 million units the spaceman who delivers it.
The NEXT update brought along all kinds of welcome changes, the most notable of which is fully-functional multiplayer. The update also made a number of gameplay changes and tweaks to the game's procedural generation, a byproduct of these being that many player ships drastically changed in appearance.
Clearly a man of means, avaslash took to Reddit offering the huge reward to anyone who can give him the co-ordinates of a star system in No Man's Sky that is frequented by a similar NPC ship. This will then allow avaslash to travel to said system, buy the ship from the NPC, and compensate the player who found it with the hefty sum of 200 million units.
To those not familiar with the game, this hunt for a similar ship may seem like easy money, but ships are procedurally generated just like most of No Man's Sky's shared universe. Each ship is made up of a randomly-selected hull, cockpit, tail, fin, wings, booster, and specialized storage. Then there's the color system: ships have two main colors and a third color for highlights, which are fixed and can not simply be changed to suit after purchasing the ship.
The reward will go to anyone who can find the closest to avaslash's long-lost original, with a bonus for anyone who can perfectly match the ship's configuration and/or complete the task within two weeks. So far, there have been plenty of close calls, but none have satisfied avaslash's extremely specific requirements. The race is still on.
In many ways, player-created narratives like this one are exactly what the original vision of No Man's Sky is about. The game has a huge universe (a universe-sized one, actually) and it's little things like a wealthy player effectively hiring Ship Hunters that make it feel like a living, breathing cosmos. Whether avaslash finds his ship or not, the search alone is a promising indicator of the future of No Man's Sky.
No Man's Sky is out now for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
Source: Reddit