The rookie mistake in No Man's Sky almost all of us make with the starter ship

Ten years of free updates have turned No Man's Sky into a game that barely resembles the one that launched in 2016. That, while a blessing overall, has a curious side effect: many of the wonders and secrets the game hides have been buried under layer upon layer of new content. According to Vida Extra, one of those secrets involves something that has been right in front of you from the very first minute of play: your starter ship.

The matter is worth discussing because, as the outlet notes, practically every player makes the same mistake with that ship when starting a new game, although these days the consequences sting far less than they did a few years ago. And for a community like ours, with veterans who have been exploring galaxies since day one and newcomers landing with every new expedition, understanding what that ship is and why it has become such a coveted item deserves an article of its own.

What you need to know

• The starter ship in the current version of No Man's Sky is called the Radiant Pillar BC1 and is tied to the Cosmos update and Expedition 23.
• Longtime players know it by two other names: the Rasamama S36 and the Yakomaku S79, earlier versions that were replaced with the Atlas Rises and Visions updates, respectively.
• The original of them all is the Rasamama S36; the design evolved little by little, but it always kept the base structure that makes it recognisable.
• According to Vida Extra, that ship is now one of the most beloved and sought-after relics in the community, precisely because the current version of the game has nothing in common with the original.
• The mistake almost everyone makes when starting out has to do with how we treat that ship in the first few hours, and the outlet itself points out that it is now a far less painful stumble than it used to be.

One ship, three names and a decade of change

The story of the starter ship neatly sums up what No Man's Sky has been over these ten years. Hello Games has not simply added content: in many cases it has remade entire parts of the game, and the ship you begin with is a perfect example of that philosophy. The Rasamama S36 from launch gave way to the Yakomaku S79 and, later, to the Radiant Pillar BC1 you see today when you wake up on your first planet. Three names for one concept, with cosmetic tweaks piled up over time but always keeping the silhouette that makes it unique.

What is interesting is what that means for the player. If you are one of those who started in 2016, your starter ship is now a museum piece, a tangible reminder of a version of the game that no longer exists. If you arrived with Cosmos or with a recent expedition, the Radiant Pillar BC1 is simply the first clunker you get to fly, and it is easy not to attach any sentimental or collector's value to it.

Why the mistake hurts less now

Vida Extra's headline makes clear that this early mistake, whatever exact form it takes for each player, carried a much higher cost in the first versions of the game. It makes sense: in a game that has kept expanding its systems, options and ways of acquiring ships with every update, the decisions you make in the first few hours matter less in the long run. What was once a loss that was hard to recover from is now, at most, an anecdote the veterans will tell you on Discord with a knowing look.

Even so, the fact that the starter ship has become a coveted relic says a lot about how the community has built its own memory around a game that is constantly changing. In No Man's Sky, the rare thing is not what the game gives you, but what the game no longer gives.

Our take

At Underworld Lordz we look at this topic with a mix of affection and scepticism. Affection because No Man's Sky is probably the industry's best example of a studio that earned its redemption through hard work, and the fact that a simple starter ship has three names and a history of its own is proof of that. Scepticism because the very fact that Vida Extra has to dig up this piece of information reveals a real problem: the game has grown so much that its own history has become unreadable to anyone coming in today. Burying the past under free content is a luxury, but it is also a way of losing it.

For the competitive players in our community, let's be honest: No Man's Sky is not a ranked or tournament title, and a starter ship is not going to change anyone's life. But for content creators, this is pure gold. Stories like this, with a flavour of video game archaeology, work very well in videos and on stream: comparing the Rasamama S36 with the Radiant Pillar BC1, showing what has been preserved and what has not, or simply telling how each update rewrote the game's starting point. It is content with context, and context is what sets a creator apart from plain gameplay.

What we would like is for Hello Games to make an effort to better document its own evolution within the game. Letting a new player know that their first ship is the heir to a legend does not require rewriting anything, just a little institutional memory. Ten years of updates deserve more than a footnote on whichever wiki happens to be around.

What do you think?

If you have been playing No Man's Sky for years, you surely have your own story with the Rasamama S36 or the Yakomaku S79, and if you have just started out with the Radiant Pillar BC1, you might now see it in a different light. Tell us in the team chat or on our Discord: do you still have your starter ship, or did you make the classic mistake of leaving it behind without a second thought?