Technical discoveries and food for thought:
http://3dgamedevblog.com/wordpress/?p=836

Thanks for posting that here :)

The end is worth thinking on: And it nice to see that come from someone that has just been looking into what the game engine can do, and what we got. In a few years the Modding scene for NMS is going to be pretty incredible :)

Thanks a lot! That adds to my claim that NMS is a technical milestone any discussion-worthy game-publishing tactics aside.

It is, and despite some design issues, it will set the bar for next procedural generation productions, no matter what reception it had.

So people will say: "wow, a new procedural game...how many planets? Does it have caves? Can you explore underwater? And what about underwater caves? Because 'even' No Man's Sky, which was (insert anything offensive here) had them..."

Can I add a link to this 'Recommended reading' topic?

It is a pretty comprehensive list of all the places that have people talking about NMS, and a pretty good resource for finding discussions and further info about the game:

https://www.reddit.com/r/no_mans_sky/comments/58cgck/quick_guide_to_the_no_mans_sky_community/

Don't put too much hope into the modding community creating a new game out of this. Most things are hard coded in the game and modders can't change it. They can change the surface of it with textures and effects, but they can't change - for example- what you do in the game or add content.
Even with the HD clouds and low-hover mod, you are still flying planet to planet to harvest elements, and that's the whole game in a nutshell.

Modders are also just gamers with some technical know-how and the motivation to change things in the game. So modders as gamers also loose interest and without an official update (or mod support like Bethesda does), modders will move on and abandon it in favor of another game.
Don't want to sound pessimistic, but NMS will be abandoned by modders within a year if Hello Games doesn't crawl out of the rock they've been hiding under in the last 2 months.

Guessing it's pretty unsatisfying to add a model and not actually see it in the game until the 9th millionth planet as well. Would be pretty cool, though, to add a variant of a part of a model, and have it turn up.

But yeah, probably more likely we're going to see official addons than any game-changing mods. The tech-piece makes all kinds of good points about how adding resources would be possible as well. But adding or enabling planet rotation, changing how factions work, inserting trade-routes for ships, battles between systems, how planets are shaped, modifying regions on the planet, inserting new high-level organising parameters, trade in some way that makes sense, things like that, probably is way beyond what you can hope to do with slotting in new resources. Even if you manage to reverse-engineer the scripting language, you can probably not add function calls and the events you need to use them in the game, etc.

I still think that it's not actually a problem for HG to add any of these things technically, though.. like the guy speculates as well, something probably happened to this game with feature-locking in reverse that has something to do with Sony. That then HG can't do much about for the time being. Also a good point here that adding some static planets with handcrafted model selections, geometry in a particular way, etc., is possible - but sort of defeats the whole purpose of the game. If I made this, I probably wouldn't have resisted adding a system somewhere that was the e3 system, though. But adding hand-crafted and specific models would be pretty silly. Is a good sign, imo, that they don't seem to have done that.

Rearranging how the universe is built as well, or changing how the travel works, how warp is done, way the clusters are arranged, adding some criteria that makes some extreme parameters more likely and dependent on variables you can predict, a way to gather resources that's more of a hunt than a grind, etc... sort of wondering if that's in a sequel more than in updates down the line, if that's going to happen at all. But maybe not because of limitations with the engine.. like the tech-piece points out, it's like a tech-demo with infinite promise.

I do not. We were writing D&D loot tables in Freshman Comp Sci lab, and we did not have over 5 years to finish them, we had a weekend. Anyone can write a decent check for an already completed tech advance, and instead offer units, or some such other thing of = value. This is good design. This was published, by the smell of it, without 1 cent, going into creativity, art, or a play tester feedback reviewer to promote good design. It is as tho, they gave it to their friends, for free and called them beta testers. There is soooo much wrong. I can understand the hardcore, RPG, discovery types, not wanting anything spoiled, or any help. But that should have been a toggle, on a userfriendly GUI, not a "guess as you go" GUI. Not all Hello Games customers are quarky Brits with low expectations, we've seen good code. Not showing rep tables for the 3 races, is amatuerish. Hell, stealing carbon, indoors does something, but without a paper doll, skills sheet, its meaningless. Looks more to me like it was over edited and features snipped out, not hurried, at release.

This is a really good read as well. An article/review on NMS from Jeff Minter, a game developer for the past 20-30 years (i played some of his game growing up!). He actually understands what is great about NMS and what is less then great, and has some good, mature and adult (not juvenile typical 'youtube' review standard stuff) thoughts on the game as we got it:

http://minotaurproject.co.uk/blog/?p=380