Astra hub, RV parks and visiting friends in Aniimo

Start with the rule that governs everything else: other players are visible only when you are grouped in the same party, inside the main city, or within camp and RV areas. Everywhere else, the open world is yours alone. That is worth knowing before you wonder why a friend who is definitely online is nowhere in sight.

The upside is that the places where people do appear are dense. You run into other Pathfinders, along with their trailers, in shared public hub areas such as open-world settlements and RV campsites. Those are the crossroads. If you want company, you go to one.

Voice chat is in the game, including open-world voice chat, so meeting someone at a campsite does not have to mean typing at them.

Astra is a floating city, a metropolis in the sky, and it is the central shared multiplayer social hub. It is where players congregate and where you see other Pathfinders without needing a party invite or a campsite.

It is also a working city rather than a lobby. There are shops, NPCs and egg-hatching facilities, so the trip up is rarely wasted even when you are only there to restock. Egg incubation is a system of its own and gets its own guide; the point here is that the facilities sit in the place everyone already is.

Astra also has a stage area where players can gather, which gives the city an actual meeting point rather than a vague spot near the shops. Separately, the game runs special events that provide limited-time rewards, exclusive quests and temporary map zones. Things appear, and then they stop being there.

Every Pathfinder gets a personal, customizable recreational vehicle as part of the homeland system. It is a mobile home base parked at an open-world campsite, and it does two jobs at once: it is your headquarters, and it is a multiplayer social space. It also contains a portal connecting to your homeland area, so your private space and the public one are a few steps apart.

You can park mobile homes and trailers at open-world campsites and outposts to meet others, with customizable platforms in front of the vehicles. RV parks proper are designated shared social zones where you park alongside other players, visit their RVs, rest and decorate camping platforms. Upgrades and the parks themselves are covered in the RV guide.

You can invite friends into your world and visit each other's Homelands. Personal home plots are entered through co-op invites, so nobody wanders into your base uninvited. The gate is the invite, not a queue or a matchmaking screen.

This is the part of the game that works best with people you actually know. Party grouping already makes you visible to each other out in the world, and the invite extends that to the space you have built.

Visiting is not just sightseeing. You can visit other players' homesteads to assist them and farm on their plots, and tilling soil or assisting on another player's farm rewards you a portion of that farm's harvest. You are paid for the help, out of the crop you helped along.

Visiting players can also help accelerate egg hatch times inside another player's base. So a friend dropping by is worth something concrete to you, and your visit is worth something concrete to you as well. Two people with farms and eggs running should be visiting each other on a schedule.

06Where to start

Treat Astra as your default meeting point, park somewhere with neighbours, and trade base visits with the friends you play with. The helping is where the social systems actually pay out.