Hobbies

In my free time, I help lead a civilization in the game "No Man's Sky", creating and encouraging others to create social events and in-game assets to be shared in the community. I have been active since 2021 and hold a variety of other admin and leadership positions with other groups. I am also a core contributor and editor of a MediaWiki-based gaming Wiki and have created a suite of online tools to help gamers document and maintain their discoveries and creations.

The following events mostly happen in parallel, therefore they are sorted by category, rather than time.

Civilisations

A civilisation is a player-created community. Civilisations often occupy specific galactic regions in the game, and explore them together.

The game has 256 galaxies with 4 billion regions each. There's enough room for everyone, and most players never come in contact with civilised space at all.

Galactic Hub Eissentam

The Galactic Hub is such a civilisation. The Galactic Hub Eissentam (GHE) is an expansion of the Galactic Hub into the 10th galaxy.

I joined the GHE at the beginning of 2021.

I learned how to create and edit wiki pages. Based on that I then taught myself the deeper logic of the MediaWiki software, like templates, loops, database queries, etc. By doing that, I became "Head of Wiki" of the civilisation after a year. I also already had contact with the wiki admins, because my experiments with templates were using too much server power, and therefore I had to stop pursuing them. Out of that circumstance, I then taught myself JavaScript and ported the logic to an external website: The Wiki Page Creator was born!

After just a month I became moderator in the Discord, which had around 200 users at that point. After 1.5 years, I was the Director of the GHE (the highest role of the civilisation, basically the head of state).

At the end of 2022, I was one of the main organisers for the annual event of "Unification Day", where the whole NMS community comes together in one system and celebrates. The event itself consists of base tours through player-created bases in the system. I had to create a schedule, which base is visited when for how long (which is fairly difficult with 30 bases and just a few hours of time for the event). I also had to communicate with a lot of other people, for example to get permissions to post on certain subreddits and to coordinate the actual posting on these subreddits.

I also created a website with my still beginner web dev skills back then. This website shows the schedule in your local timezone, and also lists all participants and bases. Since we had two events in this year for the first time to target different timezones, the schedule had to be dynamic as well in order to show both event times. And on top of that, the time should also be available as GMT in order to make communication easier.

The website helped enourmously with the organisation of the event and its execution.

In 2022, a small group of the NMSCD found a method of intercepting the network traffic of the game. By adjusting the queries, you could gather data about undiscovered systems without having ever visited them yourself. Unfortunately Hello Games, the developers of NMS, asked us to not share this method, because it could be abused by bad actors. With this method, I was able to write a script that automatically compiled a list of undiscovered systems in the GHE regions. I could then fly to these specific systems and rename them to comply with our naming guidelines.

When I was done with that, I published the whole dataset. I also analysed the data and compiled it into numbers, tables and diagrams.

In 2023 there was a disagreement with the Galactic Hub in the first galaxy. Following that, myself, together with the whole GHE leadership team, left the GHE and founded our own civilisation: Eisvana.

Eisvana

Since many community members came with us from the GHE, Eisvana is almost identical to it, just in another part of the galaxy.

All my software projects were adjusted accordingly in order to fit the new civilisation. The discovery project will be published again when all systems in Eisvana are discovered.

With 30 members by now, Eisvana is the biggest civilisation in Eissentam according to the wiki. Our Discord server is also not exactly small with 700 users. We are one of the most technological advanced civilisations, thanks to my web apps. All our software is open source on GitHub and can be used by any other civilisation.

For example, we have moved our census system from a Google Form to our own custom code. By doing that, we can now directly build the wiki page in the code and can send a finished txt file to Discord without having to manually copy-paste data from a Google Sheet. It also enables direct picture uploads that don't infringe on the privacy of the user in any way. If you upload a picture on Google Forms, it will be named with your name.

No Man's Sky Wiki

With over 80,000 pages, the English No Man's Sky wiki is the biggest collection of knowledge regarding NMS. The German wiki is substantially smaller with only 500 articles, but contains the most important information nonetheless.

German NMS Wiki

In mid-2021 I adopted the German wiki, because I wanted to share my knowledge about the game in languages other than English.

Back then, the wiki had less than 100 pages, was missing a lot of templates and was severely outdated. So my first task was to build the basic framework.

I didn't really know, how the technical side of the wiki works, how the databases get their data, how the data is queried, how it is formatted and displayed.

I copied, translated and adapted template after template from the English wiki. I had to contact the wiki hosting company, Fandom, multiple times due to missing extensions or other weird bugs.

In order to translate the items in the game, I wrote a script that transforms the big nested XML language files (ca. 300MB) into a simple TXT (ca. 10MB), which can be easily searched with a text editor.

While searching for helpers, I also joined the German NMS community "GerMan's Sky". One year later I eventually became an admin on their Discord server.

Unfortunately I don't have that much time for the German wiki anymore, because proper translations take a lot of time. The game is also not always consistent when it comes to translations. I still look at all edits, and help new editors if they want to contribute and need help.

English NMS Wiki

I edit the English wiki since the beginning of 2021.

I started with simple catalogue entries for my civilisation. After a few months I moved on to creating full documentation pages for systens, planets, fauna, starships, etc.

In mid-2021, one of the wiki admins introduced me to the topic of templates. I was very excited, and started constructing huge "logic-monsters" that nobody except me could understand. Since wikitext is quite simple, and the concepts for functions, data types, variables or logic operators are rather limited, the syntax is very "verbose".

Here is a small snippet:

{{#if: {{{discovered|}}} | {{trim|{{#ifeq: {{#count: {{{discovered}}}|reddit}}|0| {{#ifeq: {{#count: {{{discovered}}}|User}}|0|{{{discovered}}}| <nowiki>{{profile|</nowiki>{{trim|{{#explode: {{#explode: {{{discovered}}}|:|-1 }}|{{!}}|0 }}{{#ifeq: {{#explode: {{#explode: {{{discovered}}}|:|-1 }}|{{!}}|0 }}|{{#sub: {{#explode: {{#explode: {{{discovered}}}|:|-1 }}|{{!}}|1 }}|0|-2}}| |{{!}}{{#sub: {{#explode: {{#explode: {{{discovered}}}|:|-1 }}|{{!}}|1 }}|0|-2}} }} }}<nowiki>}}</nowiki>}}|<nowiki>{{reddit|</nowiki>{{trim|{{#explode: {{#explode: {{{discovered}}}|/|-1 }}| |0 }}{{#ifeq: {{#explode: {{#explode: {{{discovered}}}|/|-1 }}| |0 }}|{{#sub: {{#explode: {{#explode: {{{discovered}}}|/|-1 }}| |1 }}|0|-1}}| |{{!}}{{#sub: {{#explode: {{#explode: {{{discovered}}}|/|-1 }}| |1 }}|0|-1}} }} }}<nowiki>}}</nowiki>}} }} }}

Yes, that's all in one single line, with over 800 characters. This line is responsible for transferring Reddit and Profile templates in the "discovered" parameter to the final output without letting them get parsed by the wiki, therefore preserving their original text. Here is the whole script: Archive:Template:PAGECodeCreation. This was the very first version of the Wiki Page Creator. The wiki admins and Fandom denied the use of this template. And rightly so, because nobody could read this "code", and because it required too much server power. From there, I started teaching myself JavaScript, and ported the logic to JavaScript.

In 2022, I was invited to join the wiki admin team. As an admin, my job is to patrol all edits made to the wiki to make sure they are factually correct and comply with our standards. I also revert vandalism as fast as possible and write automatic filters to prevent vandalism and common errors before they can even happen. In addition, I help new editors and ensure that the technical side of the wiki functions properly with all its templates and databases (at least as far as I can influence this). This is also where my "SQL experience" comes from, as the Cargo database extension is based on MySQL and therefore uses the same keywords.

GerMan's Sky

When searching for helpers with the German wiki, there is of course no way around the German Community itself.

Due to my knowledge about the game I am a respected member, and became administrator of the Discord server with 1,000 users in June 2022 (the server has 1500 users by now).

Luckily the NMS community is very grown-up, so there is rarely any moderation work to be done. I continuously work at

Zum Glück ist die NMS Community sehr vernünftig, sodass selten Moderationsarbeit anfällt. Nevertheless, I am constantly working on keeping bots out, improving the user experience and listening to user requests.

AssistantApps and NMSCD

AssistantApps

In high school, a friend of mine showed me the app "Assistant for NMS", which has all NMS items and crafting recipes, and which he helped translate into German.

There's also a Discord server for that app, which I joined back then to help as well.

I was just a silent bystander at the beginning, but towards the end of 2020 I became more active. I found bugs, made improvement suggestions, and helped with translation.

Over time, more apps like this were created, and so the brand "AssistantApps" was created. There are still only individual developers behind the apps, and the apps are only their side-projects that don't make any money.

My help with the translation and the bugs made me a valuable team member, and I am now listed under "Team" in the app. Eventually I also became a moderator in the Discord server, which has over 2,000 users by now.

As a result, I had very good contact with KhaozTopsy, the developer of the Assistant for NMS app, who is a professional senior fullstack developer. He taught me a lot about JavaScript and programming itself, and also helped with difficult bugs. Sometimes with pull requests, but often just by listening to me and suggesting possible solutions. This gave me a role model from whom I could learn very well.

With growing knowledge, I was eventually able to open pull requests to the Assistant for NMS GitHub repo and fix bugs myself.

NMSCD

The No Man's Sky Community Developers & Designers (NMSCD) is a loose collective of developers and designers who develop apps around NMS. Everyone can join the NMSCD GitHub organisation and publish their apps under the NMSCD name. As of now, there are 40 members in the NMSCD.

I joined the organisation in 2022, when I had published my first apps.

In December 2023, the account of an organisation member was hacked and posted malicious code on GitHub. In response to that, GitHub set the whole organisation to private. At the time, only KhaozTopsy, the developer of the Assistant for NMS App, was the organisation owner. Since he didn't notice the bad code when it was published, he added me as additional owner. We then set up a Discord webhook so we can monitor the activity more closely and respond faster, so this doesn't happen again.

Modding

After having played the game for 1,000 hours, it can become boring to do the same task for the hundredth time.

In August 2021, I had this exact problem. I already had experience with datamining, so I already knew the structure of the game files. But editing them was an additional challenge, since the XML structure must be closely adhered to, otherwise the mod can't be compiled.

There have also been tools developed in the modding community that automate the editing of these XML files, so you don't have to edit these text files yourself. These automation programs use lua scripts for defining the edits to the XML files.

I have published over 40 mods by now. Due to my knowledge about the game itself and its files I'm also a respected user among the NMS modding community.