Cheating in 'No Man's Sky' Is Worthless
The game is the grind and the grind is the game.
Gamers have discovered a cheater-iffic exploit in Hello Games’ No Man’s Sky, but what makes the duplication exploit so notable is that it’s essentially worthless to most people.
Cheating is Easy in No Man’s Sky
In order to use the cheat, you just have to save your game (by hopping out of your ship), then make sure you’ve got whatever item you want to duplicate in your ship’s inventory. Then, jump into your ship and get yourself murdered. When you revive, you’ll see your grave (and your former belongings) floating out in space.
Load your previous save, and — voila! — you should still see your grave marker on your HUD, however, your ship’s inventory will contain everything you had before you died. From there, simply head to your grave marker and pick up your stuff. You should be gifted a duplicate of everything you had in your inventory before you got killed.
Once you get some valuable crap in your inventory like a warp cell or an Atlas Stone, you can simply dupe the hell out them and you’ll have a nearly infinite supply of both cash and hyperdrive fuel.
By Why Deprive Yourself a Journey?
Armed with the duplication exploit, you can easily manufacture enough warp cells to get to the center of the Universe with little to no problem, bouncing happily from Atlas interface to Atlas interface while learning the secrets of existence with little to no effort whatsoever… but that undercuts the entire point of the game.
As Emerson once said, “Life is a journey, not a destination.” The same is true for No Man’s Sky. You can skip to the end if you want, but you’re depriving yourself of the immense satisfaction of getting their on your own steam.
Cash Isn’t as Important as You Think
Once you’ve spent several minutes spamming your way up to millions and millions of dollars, you’ll find that there’s not a whole lot to do with it. You can travel from trader to trader picking up resources without having to mine them, but that takes about as long as actually getting out there and mining resources. Also, you don’t get to shoot anything. What’s more, you’re still limited in the amount of stuff you can have in your inventory, so it’d be remarkably easy to accrue a ton of base resources that do nothing but clutter your vehicle.
“So just use the excess cash to pick up a sweet, new ship that’s got plenty of storage space,” you say. Well…
That’s true, you absolutely can. If you drop about 2 million units, you can pick up a sweet trading ship with 25-plus inventory slots and sweet weaponry. Of course, if you get murdered in that ship — and you might, because bigger ships draw more attention from pirates, especially when they’ve got some dope gear on board — then you’ll re-spawn in the nearest space station. Your ship will stay with you, of course, and it’ll still look big and pretty on the outside. However, once you open the inventory, you’ll find that all your ship’s weapons and all those valuable inventory spaces are gone.
When you die in No Man’s Sky, not only is your inventory emptied, but you’re reduced to only the most basic stats. So, if you’ve taken the time to unlock new ship inventory slots, then you’ll keep those upon death; however, if you buy your way into a Rolls Royce space cruise, when it’s destroyed, you’re extra space will be taken away.
TL;DR
Sure, feel free to cheat, but you’re essentially bypassing the most important part of No Man’s Sky. Even if you do cheat, you’ll just spend a bunch of time witnessing your own death without getting as far ahead as you’d hope.
In No Man’s Sky, the only thing you really take with you from life to life is knowledge. Ship and suit upgrades are ephemeral, at best. So, while you can cheat your way into a vast fortune, you can’t cheat your way into knowing more shit, which means that vast fortune is only as good as your lifespan.
