Much to the disappointment of more than a few early adopters of No Man's Sky, there isn't a whole lot to do in the vast universe created by Hello Games: fly from planet to planet ... blast plants and rocks to acquire resources ... rinse and repeat.
However, for many, the sense of discovery the game conveys is enough. Upon finding a previously-unexplored planet, players have the ability to name the planet whatever they wish. From there, they can land of the planet and meticulously document all the new forms of plant and animal life present there, uploading their discoveries to the game's servers. No Man's Sky does at least succeed in that way, allowing players to truly feel like a lone explorer in the vast frontier of space.
With that in mind, what happens when the game starts erasing player discoveries? That appears to be exactly what is happening to several players, and they've taken to Reddit in an attempt to find some answers.
"So as I got closer to the center I thought to my self I should head back home good thing I set a waypoint on my starting planet to find my way back," writes user Dark_Nexus on the No Man's Sky subreddit. "I finally made it back after many hours and I found out all my discoveries were wiped and it said I discovered it on the 11th when I started on the 9th."
Dark_Nexus goes on to write that all of the plant and animal discoveries they made had been erased from those early planets, with only the planet names themselves remaining. The same wildlife that they previously discovered on those first planets was still there, but their names had reset as if they had never been discovered in the first place.
The thread is filled with similar stories, and there's at least one other thread on the subject to be found on the game's subreddit. Here's how another user describes their experience.
"Yesterday I browsed my list of discoveries, and went all the way to my starting planet," writes Ultrasilvanus. "The system and all the planets I've ever been to are clearly marked as being discovered by me, the planets list 100% completion for animal scans but I can't see any animal or plant in the gallery and all of them appear as ???????."
It's currently unclear what exactly is causing this to happen. Some postulate that each player only has so much discovery "data" to use, and that the data starts to be overwritten at some point, the more discoveries a player makes. Others say that it may have to do with the game's servers, with the possibility being that the discoveries being lost were uploaded at a time when the No Man's Sky servers were experiencing issues.
As of right now, it's impossible to pinpoint the exact origin of the problem. All that's clear is that, for many players willing to look past the flaws of No Man's Sky, the ability to document their discoveries as they explore the universe was a major selling point. Having the game then fail to remember, or flat-out delete those discoveries kind of goes against everything that makes the game worth playing.
