No Man's Sky wants to be a chill game. It's written into its DNA; jumping from star to star, taking in the sights, scanning the local flora and fauna, chatting up some weird aliens, exploring for ruins, space trucking some minerals around, all of it. Sure, there's some harrowing planets, but you can easily hop out of your ship, realize you've landed on a crapsack hellhole, snap a few pictures, and bug the fuck out of there before you get irradiated if it's too much for you.

Barring a few tangles with some space pirates (with no penalty for death beyond a corpse run and a bit of damage to some installed upgrades), space cops, or wildlife, that's it. That's No Man's Sky. It's a chill game. Or, it should be. But it's not a chill game. There's a lot of shit that you need to wade through to get to the chill parts, including (but not limited to):

1. A chronic shortage of inventory slots at the start.
2. Clunky-ass space combat which forces you to dive into a menu during a battle to recharge your shields (all while you are being wasted by pirate assholes). It also controls pretty poorly.
3. Clunky crafting which requires a free spot for the item you want to make, even if you'd naturally free up some space in the process by using up some minerals. You can't stack most products, either, leading to "fun" inventory management.
4. Upgrades that won't tell you how many materials they need after they are installed, meaning that if you want to disassemble one and move it, or buy/find a new ship/weapon and install something new there, you need to remember how much X random upgrade Y requires, or you could find yourself short of something rare or critical. I forgot how much zinc or whatever I needed to fix a pulse engine, and on a planet with no zinc plants, that meant I had to find a trade post and hope to hell the RNG ships would be carrying some, or all my work was wasted.
5. Design decisions which make NMS a better/tougher survival game, but one that I personally find to be less fun, such as refueling thrusters/hyperdrives/pulse drives. It's so easy to do these things (there's always plutonium near most landing sites, always thaumium in orbit, etc), that I wonder why they make us waste the inventory space and time on tasks that bring out no joy or challenge?

And so on. Now, I'm having a lot of fun with it despite all that bitching, but I soon realized that all of this crap is getting in the way of the part of NMS that I actually enjoy, which is the chill exploration game underneath all of this survival stuff. Thankfully, I'm playing on PC, so I've got all the tools necessary to compromise the artistic vision/design decisions/whatever you want to call it, because I paid $60 for this game, goddammit, and I'm either going to enjoy myself, or it's getting refunded. So, let's chop this thing down at the knees:

NOTE: This is going to chop this thing down at the knees. If you think the above is why you are into this game (or aren't bothered by it), that's perfectly fine, and this isn't for you. We're really going to modify the gameplay loop here (i.e. kill a lot of the "challenge"), so if laid back chilled out 420 blaze it space drifting isn't your thing, this will only make the game worse for you.

1. Get Cheat Engine. Sorry, PS4 people, you're already out of luck. I'll name a planet for you in your honor. For everyone else, scroll down to the bottom of the latest release and pick up the .exe. The main website looks like a sketchy spyware site (it's not, but it looks like it), so stick with Github. Install that.
2. Grab the cheat table from here. You can use any NMS cheat table you like (including your own, but at that point you won't need my help), but that's the one I've been using.
3. Fire up No Man's Sky, head into the settings, switch to (borderless) windowed mode (as the game currently crashes on an alt-tab if you are full screened, yayyyy), and then reload the game as it won't take effect if you don't (yayyyy).
4. Fire up Cheat Engine, click the glowing button to attach it to NMS.exe, click the folder and navigate to where you downloaded the table, and load that in. Alternatively, you can just double click on the table to launch Cheat Engine with the table already loaded in (assuming it properly associated that file format), then click the glowing button to attach it to NMS, and answer "yes" when asked to keep the loaded address/code list.
5. You're done! Use the box next to each option to toggle whatever you want on and enjoy, and remember you can just switch them off whenever you like, without reloading.

Here's the options I went with.

1. Unlimited Health: Before this, I never even came close to dying to the space cops anyway, so all this does is prevent a corpse run when the space pirates come from you. I find the space combat to be really clunky, so this is one frustration gone.
2. Unlimited Sprint: The default movement is so slow!
3. Unlimited Jetpack: See above. Combine this with the melee trick (run, melee attack and hit the jetpack for a big speed boost), and you'll be cruising around in no time. Cooldowns aren't fun!
4. Unlimited Selling (aka items aren't removed when sold): I did this to get enough credits to buy a big ship, most of my inventory slots, and a good sized multi-tool, then turned it off. Inventory management isn't fun!
5. Bypass Atlas Locks: I had an Atlas Pass v1 (and v2/v3 don't unlock anything cool), so what this really did (I assume it's this option, at least) was make is so that I didn't have to craft bypass chips every time I wanted to use a scanner. Nothing more fun then going into a menu, crafting, scanning, going back, crafting the same item, scanning, etc. Until they do things properly (allowing you to just use the materials right from the "item required" prompt, or allowing you to craft multiple items and stack them), this is a hassle I don't want to deal with.
6. Ignore Crafting Requirements: I use this for buying a new gun/starship and refilling it with the modules I already have. After the third or fourth time I repaired a down ship, disassembled my old upgrades, and realized I was five iridium short of rebuilding my Hyperdrive Range Sigma or whatever, I said "Nope!" and that was that. This would be mitigated if you could see what an upgrade costs after having built it (so you can just do the quick math in your head), but no, you can't. Write them down or go to a wiki (just make sure you don't alt-tab!)
7. Unlimited Ship Fuel: More bar management I can do without. They don't make it hard to get fuel, they don't make it fun to get fuel, so why put up with the busy work? I could be exploring!

After reading that, you may ask yourself "What's left for you to do, then? You took out like 80% of the game!" Well, exactly what I want; exploration, finding alien words and monoliths, tagging weird animals, talking to space people, and resource hunting because I want to, not because I have to. That might not be enough for you, and over time (and with updates to the combat/survival aspects) I might go back to doing things the old fashion way. But for now, if you are on PC and think that some of this is a bit tedious, I hope I've pointed you in the right direction. Cheaters never prosper? Maybe not, but we sure know how to sit back and relax.