No Man’s Sky Naming Convention – Odin’s Convention

Flora

I hope I can be forgiven for saying that I don’t have much incentive for naming flora in No Man’s Sky. While some can be quite distinctive and really add to the air of “alienness”, I think that discussion of lifeforms in No Man’s Sky revolves around the fauna.

There are, additionally, so many types of flora that one would be left forever naming them. While it’s interesting to peruse a recent backlog of fauna, I rarely stop on a type of flora to take a second, closer look.

What really clinches this for me is the fact that none of the data associated with flora actually impacts the appearance or behaviour of the species in the game. One can’t see the root structure, the nutrient source has no connection to the environment, and the notes (such as “Combustible Fruits” and “Luminous Bulbs”) don’t actually affect the plant morphology.

The only way I can think to name flora is according to their membership of one of six broad categories:

• mushroom,
• bulb,
• tree,
• fern,
• coral fan,
• carnivorous.

Flora don’t always obviously belong to one of these categories in the same way that fauna do to the identified genera. This is a huge violation of rule 3.

I hope that, in a future update, flora are given a little attention on this front. At the moment, there’s no easy way to name them, so I’d rather just keep the randomly-generated names. If anyone reading this has a suggestion for a floral addition to Odin’s Convention, please let me know!

Waypoints

Waypoints are best named, in my opinion, according to the facilities available or objects located at the waypoint. Given that no information is actually available to this effect in the Discoveries log, the waypoint name is potentially the only reliable way to retrieve information about the location (depending on the quality and extent of the thumbnail stored in the log).

Some waypoints are mostly empty, save for a few resource caches, in which case I tend to name them according to a nearby object of interest that is otherwise without a waypoint, such as an alien plaque.

The convention I use is as follows:

1. Keep the auto-generated waypoint suffix (e.g. “Badlands”, “Flats”, or “Valley”).
2. The name is composed of two parts, with a hyphen between the parts. The first part uses an Icelandic-based descriptor (as for the planet portion of this No Man’s Sky naming convention) depending on the waypoint type (see table below).
3. The second part uses a randomly-generated name, with a different theme for each waypoint category (e.g. “Alien Antiquities”, “Transmissions”, or “Shelters”). I use Fantasy Name Generators to do this.

Examples of the randomly-generated second part:

• jotunn: Byng, Mygno, Vaezoti;
• troll: Razi, Jabir, Kazko;
• lich: Mhox’ricaidh, Omduk, Vrythos;
• Valkyrie: Sveginleif, Thodul, Adjold;
• nephilim: Dezen, Qosimris, Eqazi.

I might therefore find a Holographic Comms Tower in some Plains, and call it the Heil-Oczugno Plains.

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