Came but to NMS after about 2 years off. Played a new permadeath game with a friend, no other options changed from normal. But I couldn’t last more than a few minutes.
Had to sprint to ferrus, I had to sprint to sodium, and even then I died about 50% of the time. Three sodium plants got me to maybe 30% hazard protection. My hazard protection was ticking down at 1% per second. Falling from any height (even jetpack softened) meant my jetpack broke.
And after four attempts, I finally got the ship and recharged to max with a good ten harvested sodium plants before going off on the Hermetic Seal quest. Half way there, the game throws a storm at me. Totally open ground, no shelter at all. And my entire stock of Sodium goes in seconds and then I die.
My friend’s hazard protection was going down a lot slower, even when we were next to each other and his sodium filled him up a lot more (he said about 50 to full, I needed over 100 to full).
No idea what I did wrong.
TL;DR: yes.
Your starting planet is random. The environment and resource distribution is also random. It’s all random.
You are just very unlucky.
Permadeath makes pretty much everything harder too. It weights the randomness towards more hostile starting planets and scarcer resources.
You can now, also tailor the difficulty with some very fine grained settings: some of which are around how much resources you need for refueling etc.
Hmmm that kinda sucks, but I didn’t want to play permadeath in the first place haha. I’ll dig into the settings more