No Man’s Sky Waypoint: Game Modes & Custom Difficulty (4.0 Update)

No Man’s Sky Waypoint’s new update 4.0 is released and one of the first things that you’ll see once you launch the game is new Game Modes and Custom Difficulty.

In this guide, we’ll go through the newly added Game Modes and the Custom Difficulty in No Man’s Sky Waypoint’s new update.

Gamemodes & Custom Difficulty

For the starters in the game mode screen, you no longer see Permadeath directly available instead, you’ll see Normal, Relaxed, Creative, Community Expedition, Custom, and Survival. All of these are presets of the game modes except Custom. After clicking on Custom, you’ll be represented with an array of options. The Custom option is now the only way to start a Permadeath save, you cannot activate or deactivate permadeath once a save has been made. All but one other option can be changed for most game modes in the Custom option. The options are split up into a few sections and the options are the following.

• Survival Elements
  • Survival Elements control whether you need to recharge your Life Support or Hazard Technology, you can choose to not have to recharge either, only recharge health, the need to recharge both Health and Hazards, or full.
  • Survival Difficulty
• Survival Difficulty controls how quickly how your Life Support and Hazard Protection are drained from use and hazards. There are 3 difficulties, Relaxed, Standard, and Challenging. Normal should be like it’s always been in normal mode, Challenging will be akin to survival and permadeath, and then relaxed is quite calm and chill. You’ll have a lot of time before the storm starts taking down your health.
• Natural Resources
  • Natural Resources cover what you get when mining minerals, foraging for Flora, and culling Fauna. There are 3 options, Abundant, Standard, and Scarce. Abundant will be the new one likely doubling your yield, Standard will remain the same according to the normal playthrough of the game mode, and Scarce is how survival and Permadeath were.
• Sprinting
  • Sprinting doesn’t have much effect and it has three options, Infinite, Relaxed, and Standard. Infinite would be way better as it always sucks to run out of sprint energy and in the normal or relaxed option, the sprint will be normal and it will not cost any life support.
• Scanner Recharge
  • How quickly your scanner recharges is a great change too. You can choose from four options, Very Fast, Fast, Standard, and Challenging. Standard will be just like the normal mode, Challenging will be similar to Survival and Permadeath. The Fast and Very Fast are just the great two options that you can change according to your preference.
• Damage Levels
  • Damage can be controlled by1 taking no damage at all to the Survival and Permadeath modes. There are four options for damage, None, Minimal, Standard, and Challenging. The Standard will be the same as the normal mode and the challenge will be double the damage of the standard.
• Technology Damage
  • Technology Damage is a somewhat new thing, previously we could damage our tech on death or by going through black holes but now, even fighting pirates and taking any environmental damage will damage your technology. There are three options, None, Minimal, and Challenging.
• Death Consequences
  • Death Consequences cannot be fully changed after a save has been started. There are four options from which you can choose No items loss, Standard, Items Destroyed, and Save Deleted. You’ll get to look for the items or not based on what option you have selected before starting the save.
• Crafting
  • The crafting option is nice and simple. There are only two options in the crafting, you can either set it to free or Standard. Free will require no resources for the crafting and standard will require resources like in the normal mode.
• Recipes & Blueprints
  • The recipes & Blueprints option has two settings in which you can set it All Unlocked or Learnable.
• Purchases
  • The purchases can be changed in difficulty making items worth more or less, this does not affect the basic value of an item but does affect how much it costs or it can be sold for. The Purchases option has four options which you can select Free, Discounted, Standard, and Expensive.
• Enemy Strength
  • You’ll be able to select the Enemy’s Strength as well. This option will have three different options which you can select Weak, Standard, and Challenging.

There are some other options as well in the Custom mode from which you can set all the main aspects of the game and make the mode the way you like.