No Man's Sky Players Are Pranking Each Other With Illegal Goods (2024)

Highlights

The No Man's Sky community is friendly, but beware of trolls pushing contraband into your inventory.
New players may unknowingly carry illegal goods and get in trouble with the Sentinels.
Changes to the player trade system may be needed to prevent mischievous players from causing problems.

Tons of gamers have recently gotten their hands on No Man's Sky for the first time after the recent launch of the game's major Worlds Part 1 update, but a few fresh faces are finding themselves the victims of some lighthearted trolling involving the distribution of contraband. Make no mistake, the No Man's Sky community is famed for its friendliness for the most part, though the ability to for players to forcibly push items into other Travelers' inventories has proven to be something of a double-edged sword.

For those who haven't kept up with No Man's Sky since its perhaps overly-discussed launch, the game does feature fleshed-out multiplayer mechanics now. This multiplayer still isn't perfect though, with the game's default PvP settings constantly getting players killed by trolls, and unalterable item trade settings allowing any player to dump whatever items they like into the inventories of total strangers. No Man's Sky fans tend to be a generous bunch though, thankfully, and while this does allow veteran players to gift valuable items to new players, it also allows trolls to clog up others' inventories with space garbage - and sometimes, much worse things.

Why Horror Game Fans Should Actually Give No Man's Sky a Go

No Man's Sky has enjoyed a wealth of updates over the last eight years, and the most recent one adds an Expedition that horror fans need to check out.

A few No Man's Sky players new to the space exploration game have even become unknowing carriers of illegal goods after other players placed them into their inventories as a prank. While contraband can be smuggled across the galaxy and sold for quite a lot of cash, this practical joke can quickly result in unaware players getting blasted out of the sky by Sentinel forces if they find themselves caught red-handed with illegal items in tow. Smuggling mechanics and contraband are yet a couple more features that have been added to the game in recent years as part of free content updates, with the universe of No Man's Sky now featuring pirate-controlled star systems where galactic authorities hold no sway.

How No Man's Sky Players Are Getting Each Other Into Trouble With The Interstellar Authorities

Many players have called for changes to the player trade system in No Man's Sky for this reason, as the game makes it easy for mischievous players to cause problems for newbies in particular. It's quite likely that some of these highly-requested tweaks to No Man's Sky's multiplayer experience are likely to be introduced in a future update, though many players believe something as simple as an option to accept or reject traded items is all that's really needed.

Many new No Man's Sky players are likely to encounter many fellow Travelers if they decide to take part in the game's latest expedition event. Expeditions are usually notably multiplayer-focused, and inexperienced players may wish to ensure that PvP is disabled in their game's network options before starting. Players can also completely disable multiplayer capability if they wish to travel the universe in peaceful solitude.

No Man's Sky

Lose yourself in a vast sci-fi odyssey as you explore a near-infinite, procedurally generated universe.

Set out from the edge of the Euclid galaxy and carve out your own interstellar existence in a vast universe teeming with life, danger and near-endless mystery.

No Man's Sky is a hugely-ambitious, heavily-stylised, sci-fi adventure that spans entire galaxies all brought to life with procedural generation. Travel through an endless array of increasingly diverse and dangerous star systems, prospecting for rare materials, trading with alien life, populate planets and searching for clues to the meaning of the universe's mysterious existence.