No Man's Sky 1.1 - one way *not* to update

I considered not posting anything about this, but, hey, it's been a couple of months, ought to put something up, yeah?

Over the past weekend, the folks at Hello Games finally released what they're calling their Foundation Update (as in the foundation on which all their future fun updates will build), also known as version 1.1.  Finally got some play time in on it last night... the changes were a bit disorienting, but not bad per se.  However, it left me with the feeling that, whatever their prior plans and intents might have been, this game is now effectively an unannounced "early access" title.

I don't say that sort of thing lightly.  My last save pre-update was on an extreme radiation planet, but they re-generated the galaxy in the meantime, so I was punted back to the space station.  I went back to the same planet, and it's now an extreme cold planet (fun side story, I originally named that planet after my brother's ex-wife, then named it again for my brother post-update... both tags appear to refer to the same planet now, so, in some way, they're sort of "together" again).  While exploring that planet, I came across some Titanium, and was shocked to discover that I couldn't mine it now, not until I get an "advanced" mining laser.  That prompted me to take a closer look at my craftables and refueling options... most of the crafting seems to have similar requirements (usually adding a minor component where the original recipe only called for one material), but life support looks to charge off of Thamium alone now (as opposed to any isotope including Carbon, which at least made some sort of sense), and the pulse drive now runs on... Iron.  Simply put, an "update" to a game shouldn't alter the base mechanics of the game that radically, if it's a polished end-product.

It's not that the changes are bad or anything... I adapted pretty quickly to needing to gather more Iron for in-system travel, found and claimed a little base on a temperate little planet, landed on a freighter and quickly decided that it's out of my league, price-wise, for the foreseeable future, used my system scanner to get a preview as to what sort of minerals I would find on the various worlds in a system (which is very handy)... but the scope of changes in this first update tells me that I shouldn't invest too much time in this game at this stage of completeness, because things are still in flux as to what it's doing and where it's going, and there's other games I can play while this one works things out.

So, for me at least, I'm going to attempt what I can in the way of a "speed run" for the center of the galaxy now (already got my Atlas Stones), and, once that's done, set it aside until it's a little more fully baked.