Teleport Terminus - Base screenshots not working?

[Arthmoor]

There are probably several of us out there who have played NMS for quite some time and as a result have a sizeable list of bases to tend when we're in the game. One of the nice little touches that was added along the way is a small screenshot of your base that is displayed in the teleporter terminus menu. However, sometimes this screenshot just refuses to display and no amount of poking and prodding seems to help.

While updating some of my base earlier today, I got tired of those images not being displayed and stumbled over one possible cause: The name of the base has an illegal character in it preventing it from being saved on disk. For me, it was because some of my bases had a forward slash (/) in them to separate elements they process. A simple matter, renaming the base without those forward slash marks in them fixed it right up, but only after figuring out one other very stubborn bit of information - the cache files the game stores.

There is a folder: C:\Users\[your Windows username]\AppData\Roaming\HelloGames\NMS\[Windows profie ID or Steam user ID]\cache

In this folder will be a number of files named in the format [ID Number].[Game Mode].[Base Name].[Second ID Number].DDS

The first ID Number appears to be system and planet IDs, because they will have very similar numbers with more than one base in a system.

The "Game Mode" is literally which mode you built the base in. Creative, Normal, Survival, or Permadeath.

The second ID number so far appears to be identical for each base you build so that may be your game user ID on the Hello Games servers.

If you can't get a base picture to update for some reason, find it's file in the folder and delete it while the game is running and it should update itself on the terminus menu. This appears to work as expected for any base you haven't yet uploaded to the servers. If it doesn't save and quit to desktop and it'll update itself when you launch the game again.

if you HAVE previously uploaded the base, this is why it's important to delete the cache data while the game is running. Otherwise it will simply reacquire the old picture (if you had one) from the Hello Games servers.

You may also notice that there are loads of other cached images in this same folder. Those are very likely to be other player bases you've run into over time. Despite this being labeled as a "cache" folder, the game clearly expects the data to be persistent.