No Man’s Sky: Making it Through Expedition 11 – Voyagers

Posted on September 11, 2023 by Aywren

A couple weeks back, No Man’s Sky dropped the big Echoes patch, and shortly after, released the newest expedition called Voyagers. Syn and I have been working our way through Voyagers over the past two weekends, and finally managed to finish it up.

Bugged Milestones and the Save Editor Workaround

While expeditions tend to be a bit wonky due to the nature of NMS – especially since they’re often coupled with the big patches (that need hotfixes) – this particular expedition had some game-stopping bugs. In fact, I was prompted to download a NMS Save Editor program, something I was aware of but have NEVER touched before, just to be able to complete a bugged objective.

The objective in question was the milestone that requires you to scan a creature with a high acidic PH corrosive blood level. However, due to the way the PH scale actually works (the lower the number, the more acidic), the game was taking the creature you scanned with the highest number on the PH scale (which would make it LESS acidic), and you could never go DOWN the scale. Thus, you could not overwrite the higher number with a lower number and get the actual achievement needed to progress.

The only way players found to work around this was to use the save editor to either reset the raw JSON data value associated with PH scale of creatures you scanned, or to just change the data to give you a number that would automatically finish the milestone the next time you logged in. A number of people, myself included, spent a LOT of time trying to achieve the impossible before heading to Reddit where the only answer was to change the value in your save game.

So far, additional hotfixes have been patched to NMS, but none of the patch notes indicate that this particular milestone has been fixed yet (which is a pain for console players who can’t use the save editor). However, there’s still plenty of time to get things done, so I hope a fix is in the works.

Portals, Glyphs and Main Quest Paths

Aside from the bugged milestones, this particular expedition is interesting because it throws both portals and glyphs straight at the player – something that hasn’t been included in past expeditions.

In fact, if you have only puttered around NMS (like me) and have not gone very far into the Artemis Path storyline (like me), you may not know anything about portals and glyphs at all!

I’m ashamed to say that even though I played the game at launch, and it’s been… what… six years, it’s only now that I’ve actually made progress on the Artemis Path (which is basically the MSQ for NMS). This is mostly because I always got sidetracked on the Ghost and the Machine questline, which branches off into base building.

During the base building quests, you hire on NPCs for your base, and many of these have side quests for you to do. I was following those quests (which are worth doing), unaware that I’d strayed from the main Path quest, and never progressed in the actual game story.

If you’re not careful, it’s very easy for NMS to change the quest objective you’re targeting – which is super annoying, actually, when you’re trying to focus down a certain Path. NMS is basically that dog that gets distracted by - “SQUIRREL!”

Anytime you run across something small that it thinks might be of interest to you – for example, a junkmonger in a space station - NMS suddenly switches your objective away from the main Path that you’ve SELECTED as the quest you want to follow and flops something else in its place.

It’s trying to be helpful and show you interesting things to do, I know. But it’s VERY frustrating to have to go back into my quest log every five minutes just to switch back to the quest I want to stay focused on.

And that, my friends, is why I have never finished the Artemis Path.

Now that I’m a much more experienced NMS player, I recognize that the game is doing this. But for quite a while, I would get lost down the rabbit trails because NMS is notorious for expecting you to do EXACTLY what the quest instructions tell you to do in order to finish things correctly. So I always followed the quest prompts, even when they taking me off the beaten path.

ANYHOW!

All this to say, I was not very familiar with portals and glyphs – I’d only interacted with one before this point as I have been working through the Artemis path in order to unlock the new content.

Ah, yes! The Autophage quest – the new content from the Echoes patch – is locked behind the main Path storyline. I really want those cool cloaks and staffs that the Autophages have, so I have also been working through the Artemis Path in order to get to that point now that I’ve finished the expedition.

More about that later, though, as this post is about the expedition.

The final reward for finishing Voyagers is this neat little HoverDroid Companion pet. Turns out that it comes in different colors, too, if you’re willing to hatch it, then reload without saving to randomize it.

I got the standard orange and white on my expedition save (which is delete fodder eventually). But on my main “Amon” game, I pulled a very Allagan red and blue combination that I was very happy with the very first time!

I also want to note that NMS is now the second most played game on my Steam account, breaking over 300 hours and overtaking ARK. Good job!

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