This may or may not be good advice ‘cause although I’ve got 300 hours on my main save I am not a “good” or “optimum” player by any stretch. I think you should start with the Singularity expedition in expedition mode. There’s a lot of hand-holding as far as what to do next, where to go, and it keeps everything a bit more linear than a regular start does. Plus, theres the option to get one or more pretty good sentinel ships right away without too much difficulty. And at the end of the expedition it turns into just a “normal” save (or so I’m told). It’s what I’d do if I was just starting out today.

When I started myself I put in like 24 hours on a “relaxed” mode save just to sort of get the hang of things and the only noob guides I used was just searching up where to find particular resources, or early game farming methods once I felt like I had learned the ropes I started a “normal” mode save and haven’t really looked back.

I give a lot of advice to new players (although I only have 470 hours playtime), and these are some of my suggestions, in order of importance.

Suggestions

• Try not to look up guides or videos very often. No Man’s Sky is partly a game of exploration and once you know everything there is to know, it’ll get boring pretty quickly. There’s plenty of time for minmaxing, metagaming, or modding later on.

• Do the tutorials, the main missions, and the side missions early on. They will guide you through the various aspects of the game in a reasonably sensible order. They may also give you blueprints or materials that are hard to get initially, but trivial to obtain later on, meaning it’s better to do them earlier than later.

• If you have a screen recorder that doesn’t have a watermark, I’d suggest using that. If not, take the occasional nice screenshot of the landscape or your base. If / when you are several hundred hours in, it’s nice to look back at how you first started for the memories.

• You can bind number keys to quick-menu items, for example I have “2” bound to change from 1st to 3rd person, and “0” to photo mode.

• A significant part of NMS is the lore. If that’s not your thing that’s fine, but I would recommend reading through the logs and story elements because some of them are very deep and a little dark, and it really shows the artistic side of the game design.

Additional Important Notes

• Turn PVP OFF in settings
• If you get trapped by a base or need to access something behind someone else’s base, go into the quickmenu and report it. It will disappear and not cause any harm to the person who owns the base.
• The current expedition will last for another ~4 weeks. They only come once every few months and once you’ve missed it, you can’t do it again. There may be a short-version re-run at the end of the year, but don’t count on it.