NMS Inventory Explorer
This is an unfinished utility for flexibly viewing character inventories in No Man's Sky, and exploring crafting possibilities in relation to the current state of these inventories. It reads your inventories from the game save file, and thus reflects their state as of your last save. It never attempts to modify your game save file.
I had the idea for this utility while playing the game when I got frustrated sorting through my inventory in the game No Man's Sky, and figuring what chain of crafting recipes I could apply to create a particular product.
This project is a work in progress. Usable alpha-quality releases are available. Download the zip file, unpack the directory tree it contains to a convenient location, and run the executable file in the tree.
Using the Software
The inventory selection checkboxes determine which of your inventories are displayed and used when searching for recipes.
The Inventories tab shows a tabular summary of the selected inventories, starting with a Totals column. There's one row for every item that is represented in the selected inventories. In other words, no row is show for an item unless you have at least one of that item in a selected inventory.
The Item Explorer tab shows you some basic information about an item, including lists of recipes that use that item as an input, or that produce it as an output.
The Recipe Finder tab helps you find recipes for items that you wish to craft. Choose a craftable item from the choice box, enter how many of the item you want, and press the Search button. The program will try to find the "best" sequence of crafting steps for fulfilling that request, based on your currently selected inventories. If the item can't be built from your selected inventories, it will still suggest a recipe chain and tell you what you're missing.
The choice of "best" recipe sequence is based on a simplistic cost calculation that currently looks at the length of the recipe sequence, and the total number of items still missing to use it (which will be zero if the sequence can actually be satisfied by selected inventories).
Future releases may tweak this cost calculation, and/or may show multiple chains for you to choose from.
The checkboxes next to crafting steps do nothing; they're provided just to help you keep track while applying a lengthy sequence.
Startup state, showing table of selected inventory contents:
Item exploration:
Recipe finder after successfully finding a recipe chain using selected inventory:
Implementation Notes
The software is written in Racket, and uses its native GUI library. To run the software yourself, download and install the DrRacket IDE, open the NMSInventoryExplorer.rkt file, and press F5 or click the Run button.
The IDE and its debugging tools are capable but not wonderful. However, you can get programming with it very quickly, and the documentation for the language and its libraries is quite good.
Building
To build a release, simply open the NMSInventoryExplorer.rkt file with DrRacket, and choose menu item "Racket", then "Create Executable...". In the dialog, select "Distribution" as the "Type", and "GRacket" as the "Base". Make sure to check "Embed DLLs in the executable?" Click "Create" and wait. You'll end up with a zip file containing the executable and supporting subdirectories. Total unpacked size is on the order of 45MB.
Testing
The software currently locates your most recent game save file and reads that. Thus it assumes that you have a game save file from a recent version of the game.
Possible future enhancements
- Offer multiple recipe chain results after a search.
- Allow selection of save file (and maybe include a test file in the project).
- Support older save file versions (e.g. without obfuscated JSON tags).