As I’ve been finding my way through No Man’s Sky there are a great many things that are not well explained in the game — one of the biggest to me was the ultimate utility of following the Atlas Path in the game. Now that I’ve completed it and am still 160000 or so light years from the centre of the galaxy, I have to say that the benefits it affords are well worth the lateral jaunts you have to make at the beginning of the game to follow Atlas’ guidance.
I won’t spoil the story of the path or anything, but I’ll just give you a quick outline of its mechanics and then the reason it’s highly suggested.
Essentially, instead of starting on a mad jaunt to the centre of the galaxy right off the bat, the Atlas path leads you more laterally between Atlas Interfaces each granting you an Atlas Stone, a pair of Warp Cells (at the first few anyways — if you have unused warp cells or warp cell ingredients on you then they won’t cough them up), and a bunch of words for the three alien languages (providing you run around and pop all the shiny floor light/bubbles in the Atlas Interfaces). While you’re doing this all you’ll probably be beefing up your ship and equipment, upgrading your warp drive, etc. and making yourself more prepared for interstellar travel.
Once you’ve amassed 10 Atlas Stones, your 11th Atlas Interface is special and special stuff I won’t talk about happens at it. What you also get though, which is just mentioned in passing and took me personally a long while to figure out how it works exactly, is the power to see which systems have black holes in the Free Roam section of the interstellar warp map.
Systems with black holes show up with black anchors like this on the map:
Once you have the power to detect black holes for yourself, you’re as ready as you can be for the sprint to the centre of the galaxy — depending on your feelings for Nana and Polo you can just flip them off as you zoom by too since you no longer require their black hole finding powers.
Speaking of them though, until you’re done the Atlas Path I highly recommend using their powers to find additional Atlas Interfaces to speed up the process.
I personally have my Warp Drives Sigma through Theta all linked together and I can jump in excess of 1600-1700 light years in one shot now, so I typically use free roam aiming toward the centre of the galaxy and try to jump to the furthest black hole system I can find and then I take the black hole and rinse and repeat.
Remember that a random piece of ship equipment gets damaged each time you jump through a black hole and if it damages a higher level warp drive it can be a real pain to try to find the resources to fix it before your next jump.
Any other good tips I might have missed? Feel free to share them below! I have a feeling I won’t be able to make it to the centre of the galaxy any time soon so I plan to do a review up just from the dozens of hours I’ve played so far in the coming days.
I’ll leave you with a couple of pictures of the more interesting animals I’ve come across so far. The Stubby Deer Cow-typus and the flying Heffalump:
