Frontiers is yet another antithesis of what the original premise of NMS was all about: It further encourages you to stay stuck in one place, on one planet, and to explore less.

Settlements are, in my opinion, TERRIBLE. 80% of the choices you get to make, both choices are bad for your settlement. The only way to pay off a settlement's debt is to improve the settlement enough so that it's making more than its maintenance costs, but a single building takes 6+ hours and countless rare resources to construct, and even the production buildings are just a drop in the pond of the maintenance fees.

My first settlement (NMS's one chance to truly impress me) had TWO traits that increased the maintenance costs. It was costing 350,000 units of maintenance, and the settlement was only making 130,000. After building the administration building in no time at all, for next to no cost at all, I decided to build a farm to improve the settlement's production. "Oh, it'll only do 60,000 units of production. That's fine, I'll just build a few more". First stage takes 1h30m, as do all five stages. Now, 6 hours of waiting around and dealing with the random things that happen by interacting with the console and pressing a button to chose A or B, it's asking for materials to finish off the building that I've never even heard of, and crafting this material requires further materials I've never heard of.

There is no way you can do anything to actively improve your settlement. Literally the entire settlement is on forced timers.

HOw to improve your NMS Frontiers experience: Literally ignore settlements, period.

Frontiers is yet another antithesis of what the original premise of NMS was all about: It further encourages you to stay stuck in one place, on one planet, and to explore less. Settlements are, in my opinion, TERRIBLE. 80% of the choices you get to make, both choices are bad for your settlement. The only way to pay off a settlement's debt is to improve the settlement enough so that it's making more than its maintenance costs, but a single building takes 6+ hours and countless rare resources to construct, and even the production buildings are just a drop in the pond of the maintenance fees. My first settlement (NMS's one chance to truly impress me) had TWO traits that increased the maintenance costs. It was costing 350,000 units of maintenance, and the settlement was only making 130,000. After building the administration building in no time at all, for next to no cost at all, I decided to build a farm to improve the settlement's production. "Oh, it'll only do 60,000 units of production. That's fine, I'll just build a few more". First stage takes 1h30m, as do all five stages. Now, 6 hours of waiting around and dealing with the random things that happen by interacting with the console and pressing a button to chose A or B, it's asking for materials to finish off the building that I've never even heard of, and crafting this material requires further materials I've never heard of. There is no way you can do anything to actively improve your settlement. Literally the entire settlement is on forced timers. HOw to improve your NMS Frontiers experience: Literally ignore settlements, period.