Here’s how to fix No Man’s Sky and make it scientifically realistic: use timers for your craft materials.
0/ antimatter is used to jump between systems. So when you arrive you set up an antimatter generator (particular accelerator) whose collection speed depends on the stars brightness. Time to jump = enough antimatter for the size of your ship.
1/ Space thrusters are all metastable helium rockets. Again, helium is collected via stellar traps. This behaves the most like fungible fuel. You can find helium all over.
2/ Launching off planet needs metallic hydrogen rockets. Hydrogen is everywhere but converting it into metallic hydrogen takes time. So you have to spend time after you land waiting for this. Launch requirement depends on planetary gravity=enforces time on ground.
3/ Life support needs oxygen, but O2 goes directly into the life support until it’s full. No recharging. If you want more capacity, fit another tank to the suit. So your suit has only technology upgrades, not resources (at least directly).
4/ Weapon types need carbon (chemical laser)/silicon (free electron laser) /iron (bullets) /nitrogen (grenades) / boron (particle accelerator).
5/ But since these are common elements, planets that are poor in one just prevent that weapon type. This means each weapon has to be a different weapon slot. Which is a good thing.
6/ Again, your suit defines carrying capacity and suit upgrades increase total bullet capacity for a weapon.
7/ Also you can do fun stuff like have the nitrates and carbons on a particular planet change weapon effects. Once you get enough of them you can use that as a permanent weapon upgrade (by seeing how the compound is modified through the food chain).
8/ Add fluorine in there as a gas grenade.
9/ And beryllium for sniper rifles.
10/ And then every other element is your skill points. You gather it up to 100%, every planet has a mix of common/uncommon/rare elements, you stay on one until you get max out all the elements available on that planet and move on.
11/ Designed so you get all the commons after 10 planets, all the uncommons after 100 planets and all the rares after 1000 planets.
12/ And you can buy your way up to 100% when you arrive in system if you have the cash which you can get from missions, wild life, exploring, ie the actual fun part of the game.
12/ Base-building and portable technology just requires you get the blue prints and a certain amount of lithium in order to power it (I was saving this for last).
13/ Base building and portable technology requires you spend lithium to power it (notice how I carefully skipped it before :).
14/ Get of the visor and scanner completely. You scan automatically whenever you’re not running, you get infinite run, and when you photograph something you can name and upload everything in the picture.
15/ And farming allows you to grow skill points to sell to other people when they arrive in system and trade on the galactic market.
16/ In casebook it’s not clear, skill points allow you to get your suit/ship/weapon upgrades.
0a/ antimatter also gets trapped in radiation belts around planets. So travelling through those to get antimatter makes sense. And while you’re near the planet, you may as well pop down...
13a/ And vehicles.
5a/ But they’re all common asteroids, so just go through an asteroid belt to recharge your weapons.
5b/ And more importantly, make the colours distinct so you know to shoot eg black asteroids for lithium, white ones for beryllium and so on. That makes space combat more interesting as well.
8a/ Eh. Actually missiles.
16a/ An easy upgrade may require any halogen, but higher level ones require rarer elements.
16b/ There’s seperate repair existing and build your own (which is tougher) levels for each upgrade. And you can find equipment with pre-existing upgrades and upgrades not fitted to weapons as well, without needing the skill level, as random drops.
2a/ And how wet the planet is. Small and wet allows fast re-launches. Dry and large can have extended launch wait times (15+ minutes).
17/ Lets talk distribution. Plants and rocks are now ammunition (but not necessarily carbon and iron). Everything else is a secondary, which means you need to figure out fairly quickly where your oxygen is coming from. But oxygen plants and crystals are possible.
18/ The water is made of something. Which means sometimes you get a skill to 100% because you went for a swim.
19/ Lithium free worlds have no vehicles. Oxygen free worlds are super dangerous. So I think we let you charge oxygen in habitats and your ship.
19/ But we don’t have to guarantee anything which means there’s much greater variety in what you can get.
20/ This is the world where I shoot trees for missiles. But in this word I just have to go for a swim to get more missiles.
