I bought NMS 2 weeks ago and I'm having a similar experience so far. I'm on a planet with grass that glows at night, floating bubbles and bizarre flora/fauna hybrids. Don't think it has any clonk though.
Edit: also the next planet over has a cute sort of penguindogs with little moleclaws and a mane of feathers.
I've got several hundred hours in it...I bought it on release, so have been through the whole 'wow...this is it?' bit. Dropped it for over a year until they started that cadence of updates. It gets stale eventually, like all games, but I like being able to come back to it and piddle with each new update.
I treated Elite the same way, honestly, or
tried to. The space between updates after that first Horizons drop was too much, though. I'm not much of a socialite, so a lot of the 'make it up as you go' sandbox of Elite doesn't really work for me because the elements are so shallow. You
have to have a community to really get beyond the grind and have fun in the long run. Once you've got your three or four favorite ships engineered...there's not much else to do. If you dig experimenting, that buys another fifty hours of grind...
I really want to look forward to EDO, but even with a 'smooth' launch...it looks like more of the same. The graphics is the only thing exciting for me, but I dunno if that will translate to console. Space legs seem neat, but also completely exhaustible in about a week of play, at which point I'm back to staring at supercruise wondering why am I spending 50% of my time
traveling in a game that's supposed to be about
doing stuff.