Joan’s recreation of Guildford was featured in a Twitch stream by LordFrobozz, who also tweeted a clip at Hello Games today. The company’s Discord replied to say they thought what Joan built was “beautiful”, and it even managed to catch Hello Games founder Sean Murray’s attention. I’ve never been to Guildford myself, but I feel like I ought to now. When I chatted with Joan earlier, they said they’d never been to Guildford either. Instead, the recreation was built using Google Maps and Google Earth, mostly. Navigating to Hello Games’ offices in Streetview shows Joan’s managed an impressive recreation with No Man’s Sky’s base building tools. Before working on Guildford, Joan said they’d started with Spain’s Sagrada Familia months ago, as a personal challenge to construct “something gorgeous" and test their building skills. No Man’s Sky’s Guildford features the Hello Games office and the nearby Three Pigeons pub. The pub gave Joan a bit of trouble at first, but that was soon resolved. “Something I was really scared of, and this is where most of the tricky stuff appeared, was the base limit,” Joan told me. “I reached 3000 base parts before finishing Hello Games’ office. However, I managed to save some base parts and finally furnished the interior.” Although the build began a few months ago, Joan’s PC had some issues and it was set aside. The project was only restarted a few days ago. You can take a peek at Joan’s Guildford below, a bit like how Sean Murray did: No Man’s Sky is available on Steam and GOG for £40/$30/€28. You can visit Guildford in No Man’s Sky on the planet Distira in the Euclid galaxy, at the galactic co-ordinates found here. If you want to visit the real Guildford then it’s probably worth catching a National Express.
