No Man's Sky Players May Want to Wait Before Claiming the Preorder Bonus Ship

[UPDATE] Hello Games has now responded to this issue.

The original story is below.

Those who preordered No Man's Sky received a special bonus ship that can be claimed in-game. Doing so can potentially create a serious hurdle, however, so you may want to be careful about how and when you do so.

When you have a reward waiting to be claimed (like the preorder ship), the game features a somewhat obnoxious notification in the bottom-right corner of the screen. The only way to make this go away is to switch to the new ship, as some of us at GameSpot have found. Doing so before completing the tutorial is inadvisable, however, for reasons documented in a post on Reddit (via Eurogamer).

Part of the tutorial involves learning how to craft a hyperdrive, which is what lets you move from system to system. The preorder bonus ship comes with one already equipped, and by using that ship, the game skips this portion of the tutorial. Should you then get rid of the bonus ship in favor of one that doesn't have a hyperdrive, you're stuck with having to build one--only you don't have the blueprints necessary to do so. This problem has been encountered by a number of players, including Giant Bomb's Jeff Gerstmann.

It is possible to then find the blueprints through other means, but it doesn't sound like you're guaranteed to come across them in a timely fashion. However long it takes, this is something you're intended to start with early on by completing the tutorial.

This problem was encountered by PS4 players, but it's possible it will also occur on PC when that version is released this Friday, August 12.

Developer Hello Games has not yet commented on the issue. It looks like this is a glitch; if it's a deliberate difficulty adjustment for those starting out with the bonus ship, there hasn't been any official indication of that. Similarly, there's confusion about whether or not a technical issue is to blame for two players who ended up on the same planet but couldn't see one another.

For more on No Man's Sky, check out our roundup of everything you need to know.