Polestar Expedition: Complete

I should’ve checked before loading in — but I expect it has been close to, if not over a week since I last logged into No Man’s Sky. That’s no slight to No Man’s Sky; I’ve just not really played anything over that time, except for the hour or two I took out for the impressions piece on The Ascent.1 Oh… That was much longer than a week ago. Wow.
No wonder I’ve been running dry and letting you know about my napping troubles instead of having anything to say about actual games.

Tonight, just for something different, I used the hour or so I had between finishing work and needing to get ready to head over and take care of Mum and jumped into my Polestar Expedition save in No Man’s Sky.
I had an inkling I was probably not too far off complete, as I knew I’d just about finished Phase 4 other than actually going to the bother of flying to the rendevous.
Turns out, I had one more goal to complete for Phase 3 — but I got it on login. I’d already set it up before I left. (Yay, past me, doing things!)
The series of expeditions I’d sent out were remarkably profitable too, which was good, as I was just one frigate short of hitting the 8 frigate goal for fleet size, the last non-go-to-the-place-and-read-the-thing goal I had left in phase 4. Purchasing a ‘C’ class (bottom rung of the ladder) frigate costs just slightly north of 1.5 million units.
I had that and then some now, having made over 1 million units on the returned expeditions before even selling any of the goodies they brought back with them.
So off I went!
Zooming through space, making several hyperspace jumps to find the latest computer terminal under the sea.

Immediately after turning up in the Phase 4 system, reading the log, and finding the sunken PC, I swanned off to the Phase 5 system.
Phase 5 I’d essentially completed already too, save for some of the more special and specific tasks. But through luck or planning (definitely wasn’t the latter) I already had the things on hand that I needed to make the remaining steps of Phase 5 zip along at a decent clip too.
I won’t lie — I was expecting something a little… more… from the final phase. One of the last steps had wording such as, ‘Perform a gravity slingshot manoeuvre’. What could this be? NMS, to my knowledge, didn’t really have a coded system of gravity at all. So how…?
Turns out, it’s by way of a special hyperdrive blueprint.
If you hadn’t kept hold of one of the Warp Hypercores rewarded along the way, this might’ve been a little painful to build.
Since I had though, in it went, hit the button, and bingo-bango, across the universo!

This ultimately rewarded me with ‘The Seeker’ title, which I can now choose to use on any of my characters, and a new cape design. A new pet egg too, but I didn’t have time to open that up and take a look yet.
I did jump into a nearby station’s appearance modifier, though, to take a look at the new cape with a red and black design, and I think it’s not too bad.
I’ll have to take a look at the pet another time though, as it was very much time to go get ready.
But now, with No Man’s Sky behind me (at least until another patch, at least), I’m free to look ahead to X4.
I’m not 100% sure which start I’ll take yet. No idea which race or faction, nothing! I probably won’t get to it today, but, perhaps the next?
Certainly this weekend if not. :)

This was posted during Blaugust 2022, the annual blogging event hosted by Belghast. Blaugust is an event aiming to welcome new blogger blood into the fold and revitalise those who’ve been at it a little longer.
The Blaugust Discord is still available to join in year-round!
Footnotes
- Woo Blaugust team events!