No Man's Sky player spent 28 hours building a beautiful base, then learned firsthand that people who like to ruin other players' builds exist
Endless space looks like the perfect place to be left alone. A player can hop between stars for years without meeting a soul. But build something beautiful and show it off, and the infinite universe suddenly shrinks to a single neighbor who buries your home under giant mud huts.
That is exactly what happened to one No Man's Sky player. Around 28 hours went into a base on the planet Aetolia, four hours every evening for a week, and then the coordinates went public. Soon the build was literally buried under decorative "swamp" huts, which are sold for quicksilver at the Anomaly. The objects blocked every entrance, even though the base settings prohibited anyone else from editing it. The author of the Reddit post couldn't take it and asked how this was even possible and why anyone would want to do it.
The answer to the first question turned out to be far more mundane than any hacking story. The base protection system in the game holds together, essentially, on a promise:
Start the game completely offline and purge the discovery cache, and a base computer can be placed anywhere
Even online, the game only checks for other players' builds within 300 units of the computer, yet allows building up to 1,000 units away, so the area of a new base easily covers someone else's
The discovery server doesn't check for base overlap on upload
The number of uploaded bases in a star system is capped, and griefers mass-upload new builds to push out the oldest ones
A build can be reported through the quick menu, after which it disappears. The catch is that it vanishes only for the person who reported it, while every other visitor still sees the defaced base until they file their own report. According to players, Hello Games does almost nothing with these reports.
The same griefer username turned up among victims on Effigy IV and in the Eissentam galaxy. The capital of the Galactic Hub, the largest player community, deals with the same thing daily, according to its members. One particular "craftsman" has been trapping people in the Anomaly for roughly a year and a half, so blaming it all on newcomers who recently joined the game doesn't hold up.
Why won't the studio close a hole that looks so elementary? Hello Games employs around fifty people, and that counts all staff, not just developers. Sean Murray has admitted before that things that look hard sometimes get fixed in a minute, while simple ones can turn into a real nightmare. Still, the complaint sounds fair enough. One player put it bluntly:
It's like a town with no form of law enforcement. Sure, most people will do the right thing, but what's stopping someone from deciding not to? Nothing.
Until a patch arrives, veterans advise turning off PvP, disabling modification of base objects, hiding vehicle and walking location markers, and above all not uploading bases to the server, since owners can see them anyway. Some have simply moved into a freighter base, where a nomadic life means no neighbors. In a universe of 18 quintillion planets there is room for everyone, yet the griefer always seems to want the hill next door.
