The Chosen Undead Posted February 27, 2018 Share Posted February 27, 2018 (edited) I've been playing No Man's Sky for a while now, and I thought I'd do an exploration of a not much talked-about game feature. I've created a rough way to map out one's exact location in the world of No Man's Sky. It is in three steps, and requires the game, skill with a calculator (unfortunately) and access to two websites. Step 1: While playing No Man's Sky after the 1.3 patch, you are not able to craft and place a Signal Booster from 50 Iron and 25 Plutonium. The Signal Booster's main purpose is to show the locations of nearby shrines and places of interest, but it has one other feature. When the Booster interface is opened, at the bottom left corner of the screen will be displayed a chunk of code in this format: XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX. That is, a set of 4:4:4:4:4 characters. The important ones are the middle three. For example, the middle three blocks of one code on my PS4 are 08D4:0080:0115. Take a picture of them or write them down. Step 2: Navigate to the website Pilgrim Star Path website on your phone or computer, or Google search "Pilgrim Star Path" if you can't use the link. When you get to the site, you should see a box asking for your coordinates. Enter your code into it in the same format you see in your game. You'll see another box appear with XYZ coordinates. The "pos" line is your location! The Pilgrim Star Path site does show you a 2D map, but it would be even cooler if you could see what that location looked like in 3D, right? Well this is where the math comes in. Step 3: Navigate to your favorite 3D plotter site (I highly recommend the CPM Plotter) and get out a calculator. See, the coordinates you get from the Pilgrim Star Path site are perfectly fine, but they're a tiny bit too massive to be displayed on a conventional 3D graph. We'll need to shrink them down a bit. Luckily, I've created a pair of formulas that make conversion a snap. Before you start, I recommend that you get comfortable with stored variables on your calculator (or if you don't want to do that, just using raw numbers to 5 decimal places works fine too). You'll need these two numbers: A = (log(5000)/log(15)) or about 3.14514 B = (log(311.355)/log(15)) or about 2.11995 IMPORTANT! The Pilgrim Star Path site displays the galaxy map in an unconventional top-down XZ plane. For your numbers to be accurate, you need to use use the y value for your z coordinate and vice versa. If the site shows you the point (2260, 128, 277), your actual location is (2260, 277, 128). To get your graphable coordinates, you just need to take the A'th root of your x and y coordinates, and the B'th root of your Z coordinate. Once you have your points, you can plot them out on the grapher and get a very nice map of your location in the universe! If you want, you can add a point for the galactic core, which I've calculated lies at the point (7.5, 7.5, 10.81663), if you'd like a reference point. If you're confused about the scale, the world of NMS appears to exist in the first octant where all values are positive. If your graphed points are all in the same wedge of the graph, that's good. This method works because the galaxy in NMS is assumed to be a smushed sphere with an XY radius of 2,500 and a height of ~312. Taking the A'th root of 5000 (the maximum xy value you can get from the Pilgrim Star Path website) returns 15, a perfect corner of a 15x15 graph. The same is true of taking the B'th root of 311.255, so this method works. I know it's a lot of math, but I hope my process seems cool to someone out there. Thanks for reading! Edited May 20, 2018 by The Chosen Undead Images disappeared so I removed the spoilers 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dav9834 Posted February 27, 2018 Share Posted February 27, 2018 51 minutes ago, The Chosen Undead said: I've been playing No Man's Sky for a while now, and I thought I'd do an exploration of a not much talked-about game feature. I've created a rough way to map out one's exact location in the world of No Man's Sky. It is in three steps, and requires the game, skill with a calculator (unfortunately) and access to two websites. Step 1: While playing No Man's Sky after the 1.3 patch, you are not able to craft and place a Signal Booster from 50 Iron and 25 Plutonium. The Signal Booster's main purpose is to show the locations of nearby shrines and places of interest, but it has one other feature. When the Booster interface is opened, at the bottom left corner of the screen will be displayed a chunk of code in this format: XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:XXXX. That is, a set of 4:4:4:4:4 characters. The important ones are the middle three. For example, the middle three blocks of one code on my PS4 are 08D4:0080:0115. Take a picture of them or write them down. Step 2: Navigate to the website Pilgrim Star Path website on your phone or computer, or Google search "Pilgrim Star Path" if you can't use the link. When you get to the site, you should see a box asking for your coordinates. Enter your code into it in the same format you see in your game. You'll see another box appear with XYZ coordinates. The "pos" line is your location! The Pilgrim Star Path site does show you a 2D map, but it would be even cooler if you could see what that location looked like in 3D, right? Well this is where the math comes in. Step 3: Navigate to your favorite 3D plotter site (I highly recommend the CPM Plotter) and get out a calculator. See, the coordinates you get from the Pilgrim Star Path site are perfectly fine, but they're a tiny bit too massive to be displayed on a conventional 3D graph. We'll need to shrink them down a bit. Luckily, I've created a pair of formulas that make conversion a snap. Before you start, I recommend that you get comfortable with stored variables on your calculator (or if you don't want to do that, just using raw numbers to 5 decimal places works fine too). You'll need these two numbers: A = (log(5000)/log(15)) or about 3.14514 B = (log(311.355)/log(15)) or about 2.11995 IMPORTANT! The Pilgrim Star Path site displays the galaxy map in an unconventional top-down XZ plane. For your numbers to be accurate, you need to use use the y value for your z coordinate and vice versa. If the site shows you the point (2260, 128, 277), your actual location is (2260, 277, 128). To get your graphable coordinates, you just need to take the A'th root of your x and y coordinates, and the B'th root of your Z coordinate. Once you have your points, you can plot them out on the grapher and get a very nice map of your location in the universe! If you want, you can add a point for the galactic core, which I've calculated lies at the point (5, 5, 10.81663), if you'd like a reference point. If you're confused about the scale, the world of NMS appears to exist in the first octant where all values are positive. If your graphed points are all in the same wedge of the graph, that's good. I know it's a lot of math, but I hope my process seems cool to someone out there. Thanks for reading! Holy crap! That's awesome!!! This is why you're a SV admin! (even if it's on hiatus) When I get back into NMS I'm totally charting my path! You should totally post this on reddit too if you haven't already! They have a huge following! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Chosen Undead Posted February 27, 2018 Author Share Posted February 27, 2018 33 minutes ago, Dav9834 said: Holy crap! That's awesome!!! This is why you're a SV admin! (even if it's on hiatus) When I get back into NMS I'm totally charting my path! You should totally post this on reddit too if you haven't already! They have a huge following! When you do use my tool (henceforth referred to as the AAB Process by me), remember that the Process takes a field of play that spans about 5,000 coordinate units and crushes it down into 15. A noticeable change in your position is only going to occur about every 8,000 light years of normal travel unless you use a black hole or other method of teleporting. Happy flying though Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Leaderboards Posted February 27, 2018 Share Posted February 27, 2018 (edited) They have really added a lot of features to this game since launch, nice. 2 hours ago, The Chosen Undead said: Before you start, I recommend that you get comfortable with stored variables on your calculator (or if you don't want to do that, just using raw numbers to 5 decimal places works fine too). You'll need these two numbers: A = (log(5000)/log(15)) or about 3.14514 B = (log(311.355)/log(15)) or about 2.11995 ^ When you see stuff like this, you know shit just got real lol. Edited February 27, 2018 by It Is Time To Oil Up 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Chosen Undead Posted May 25, 2018 Author Share Posted May 25, 2018 I've been going over my work and it turns out that, due to a functional problem I didn't consider, this technique is actually extremely inaccurate for most sectors of the galaxy. I'm going to lock this thread until I fix the issue. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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