PSA: it is not true that No Man's Sky discoveries disappear after two weeks
No Man's Sky discoveries won't be reset. It was all a great big misunderstanding.
No Man's Sky is pretty divisive and has its share of problems, but this weekend's hot story hinges on a criticism Hello Games doesn't deserve.
Late last week, a Redditor wandered back to their No Man's Sky starting location and found that all their discoveries were wiped. All those custom names, gone forever.
Sometime later, they realised that they were wrong - they'd actually just not been connected to the No Man's Sky servers. Once they reconnected, all their discoveries were back in place.
What happened is a product of how No Man's Sky seems to work. It doesn't maintain a persistent universe of your explored environments, the way Minecraft does; it assembles new areas around you as you encounter them, and disassembles them when you move away and don't need them any more. Everyone sees the same world because it's generated from the same seed, and to preserve your progress, your discoveries are uploaded to a central server, and then repopulated to your game world (along with other people's) if you return.
That's one of the things that makes No Man's Sky so clever, and how it can front such a sodding ginormous universe. But if your Internet connection is down, the PSN is offline, or the No Man's Sky servers are out of touch for some reason, it falls over temporarily. And that's what happened this weekend.
The original poster realised this pretty quickly and deleted the text of their post, and No Man's Sky fans have done their best to spread a correction - but thanks to social sharing, people are still telling each other "your No Man's Sky discoveries will be wiped after two weeks" without realising it was all a bit of a mix up. Since the permanency of discoveries in a shared universe is one of the game's major selling points, you can imagine how this is providing gloat fuel for detractors.
So, there you go: your No Man's Sky discoveries won't be wiped, and the star you named after your own arse is still out there, provided the info uploaded correctly. If you're determined to be upset about this, "No Man's Sky online services are patchy" is probably a more reasonable position.