Funnily enough I was talking to my teenagers on this exact subject last night. At a basic level, nms appears to have what Minecraft does, plus spaceships. Why doesn’t it work the same?
For us, we decided that nothing in Minecraft is difficult to get at the level you need it. Wood is easy, always there. When you learn that you need coal for torches, it’s just in that rocky outcrop. Start digging, here’s some iron for you.
In Minecraft you don’t need to understand anything complex, until you’re ready to understand something complex. And if you want to spend a week running around on the surface and collecting chickens, you can do that too.
I restarted a nms game the other day and remembered that constant “warning, warning” as the planet inevitably tries to kill me. It was disheartening.
Just as a heads up: No Man’s Sky has the creative mode where the whole survival stuff and the mindless basic material collecting is pretty much turned off. My daughter and I went on relaxing treasure hunts just the other day, jumping between solar systems and walking around on dangerous surfaces without grinding stuff first. It is a do-what-you-want game at this point.