Ah, I've been avoiding going planetside for the most past, as I can find all the resources I need in asteroids, and I don't like leaving my CV behind in potentially dangerous areas. So I suppose it's entirely possible that I've missed a whole lot of diversity in POIs on the surface. Maybe a lot of the traders are down there instead of in orbital stations? I think I saw an alloy synthesis plant once but assumed it wouldn't be anything special. I might have to go back and find it again!
Spent a bit of time in a Creative RE game seeing which blueprints of mine will work. It seems like most of them will, with a few minor modifications here and there. Also been working on putting together a good SV with cargo space, interior ventilated space, and overall something I can spend a fair bit of time in, scouting around and mining/salvaging stuff. One thing I've been thinking about is scenario starts. It seems like every start, even in RE, has somewhat similar progression: find resources in your starting environment, craft a vehicle, use that to go further afield to find more resources, craft a better vehicle or upgrade your current one, etc. What I've been wondering about is more non-survival starts: like start as a Pirate Clans recruit with a small ship that you must use to attack Traders Guild ships to earn rep or credits, which you use to buy ammo, fuel, oxygen and stuff for your ship. Or start as a Traders Guild recruit and take missions to transport specific goods to specific POIs, sometimes through dangerous areas. Any sort of playtstyle that doesn't involve digging holes into the terrain and mining rocks for the first several hours. I know it's Galactic Survival and all, but it seems like once you get a few ducks in a row, the challenge is essentially gone, and the survival aspect sorta disappears in favor of exploration.
Having continued with my RE Survival game, I realized I made a big mistake. I set up a BA rather early, armed with what I thought would be sufficient defense: a Cannon Turret. I soon learned that this was not adequate when a Zirax attack arrived. First it was just a Light Bomber, which sorta flew around and didn't do much. I took a few shots at it but did little to no damage. Then the two troop carriers arrived. No problem, last time I played (a couple years ago) they didn't actually do anything. Well, they do stuff now. They landed and offloaded a squad of troops who quickly blasted a few holes in my BA and shot me dead. Welp. Lesson learned. I then read the tooltips for the cannon and minigun turrets and realized that I used the exact wrong turret type. Started a new RE Survival game, same start on Omicron and all, Mass/Volume enabled. This time I built an HV first instead of a BA, and was happy to find that the HV constructor provided a good number of recipes, including Harvest and Drill attachments for the HV. Used the Harvest thing to gather a bunch of logs to turn into biofuel, then salvaged it and replaced it with four Mechanical Drills, and went off to start mining the nearby deposits. Next plan is to build an SV that can ferry the HV around, and avoid building a BA until I can built one with at least three minigun turrets. I figure until then, I can use the survival constructors at my base camp as sorta magic infinite-storage chests of holding for a while.
Morning! The Ventilation thoughts and applications by Furious Hellfire just solve a problem for today. Just started a fresh creative in the Unknown Skies and started in orbit. Vermillion's Creative center - always copied and remodeled by me - was so crisp and tangible. But the Titan - turned and saw, even as I just recalled that it would be there. Spectacular! I have seen this pair for years, remodel each for lore (vanilla scenario} friendly play on USG. - but now it is all new again. The Creative Center is a great Station to make cozy - spawned dozens in game Galaxy wide. Then, because my pc loves this game now, renamed the Titan GCRN Bananarama and started gutting her out. Joy! BTW - Furious H has a ASUS P6TD MB - I just lovingly pulled the same from my PC {Thirteen Years of Hard Use} for a ROG STRIX. The P6T is now mounted on the wall with SLI'd 480's - to hold my coffee cup. Still works - but analog you know. The Best Mother Board really, or was that is. All the Best to Y'all
Continued with the new RE Survival save, did some underwater salvaging to start with, got some decent components there. Found the UCH Wreck or whatever its called, with a Damaged UCH SV (Dart?) next to it. Realizing that it could be repaired and used, I managed to dock it to my HV and return it to my makeshift camp. Built and installed the missing thrusters (about 5 or so), then built a Harvest Container and several extensions so it would have a bit of storage space, then attached two drills to the front. Added two extra thrusters to the front so it would have the same lift capabilities while nose-down as it would parallel to the ground. Having done all this, I took it over to one of the Omicron Moons to collect some Titanium. The SV worked great, but the Titanium deposits were Very Small and yielded less than 100 ore between two deposits. Not gonna be good enough to build my CV, so I scouted around and found a few wrecks with Hardened Steel Blocks, which I know contain Titanium. I marked the positions then headed back to Omicron to build a better Salvaging SV. Spent a bit more time collecting resources and finally built my STS Cartesian. Has a fair bit of cargo space, an Oxygen Station, Fridge, Constructor, and enough walking space to be comfortable as a small mobile base on other worlds. Headed back to an Omicron Moon and did a fair bit of salvaging, hoping to build up enough for the eventual CV. Also, while walking about on Omicron, I found a giant hole in the terrain. First time I've seen this bug.
Continuing my RE Survival on Omicron, I decided to see if my current SV was capable of ferrying my HV to mining locations and bringing it back, ore and all. Turns out I can, with a bit of effort, but the carrying capacity drops quickly. I abandoned the idea, instead deciding I would scout for locations with an SV, then take the HV over at a later time. Went off mining with the HV, which has no turrets, and partway into an ore deposit I started hearing weird sounds. Assuming I was under attack by drone, I tunneled away from the sound and turned around to figure out what it was. Apparently this Ignidon took great offense to my trespassing. He made for some good Grilled Steaks, so that was a win after all. Realizing that I would need a BA in order to build a warp drive for my SV, I bit the bullet and built a prefab I had made for RE. Spent a bit of time just transferring stuff into storage. When I checked the statistics, I saw a Zirax attack was coming in less than a day. As opposed to last time, I think I might be ready. Minigun turrets should be more effective than the Cannon turret, and I have 3 of them as opposed to 1. So I shoul be able to output about 6x the damage of the last attack. I also made a plan to take off in the SV and use the turrets and fixed miniguns on that to help with the defense, which should act as another force multiplier with any luck. Not wanting to go too far from the BA with an attack immenent, I decided to shore up the defenses and add a layer of concrete walls to the side of the BA that I anticipated the attack would come from. I built some Reinforced Conrete Blocks, and realized that they have about 4000 HP as opposed to the Steel Blocks I was using, which had only 200 HP each. I quickly started replacing Steel with Reinforced Concrete, and turned a few single-thickness walls into 2-layer walls. So ultimately, I improved the defense by about 40x (assuming they come from that direction...) Also spruced up the insides a bit to make it feel a bit more homely. The updated base, (hopefully) ready for the incoming Zirax attack. After work, we'll find out if the upgrades were worth the effort. Hoping I survive this one! And if not, well... it's a learning process. Can't expect to learn everything in the first (or second) attempt!
Hear ye hear ye, my friends! After hundreds hours of playing - literally - today, the Reforged Eden middle game in Survival has been reached: look at this beauty, the FUSION REACTOR. It's really a bad ass energy generator Play to Empyrion, play REden and work to have your wonderful reactor
Logged back in with the Zirax incoming "Now." A bit panicked, I hopped into one of the minigun turrets to help with the defense. I had to wait what felt like an eternity before they actually showed up, but it seems my preparation were well worth the effort; we shot down the incoming drones and troop transport with little issue. Success! Finally I can move forward a bit. First order of business was to expand the base a bit to add a farm. I figured a simple 3x3 would be enough to keep myself going, at least until I can get a better farm going somewhere. Feeling a bit safer, I made a few modifications to my current ships. I turned the HV into a tree harvester, and put the drills on the salvaged dart for use as a miner. Docked it to the larger SV to do some mining and build up towards my first CV. As opposed to my last game, I figured I would start with a small CV and work my way up to a larger one over time. The small SV/big SV combo worked decently well. The Dart is small enough that it doesn't get stuck in caves (often) and the Cartesian has enough storage space to make the trip worthwhile. Dig with the Dart til the boxes are full, hit F4, transfer from Dart to Cartesian, continue digging. The Dart is lighter than the HV, but I added several extra thrusters to the Cartesian regardless. While taking trips afield and returning to base, I fought off a few more Zirax invasions. Deciding the Minigun turrets weren't enough, I added a Flak Turret which really turned up the damage output. In fact, the Flak would often destroy drones and dropships before they even got into minigun range. I decided it was time to take the fight to the Zirax, and built what I called a Light Bomber. Consisting of 4x miniguns (for drones) and 10x Rocket Launchers (for the Bases themselves), I figured it was packing enough firepower to take down the Drone Base and stop the attacks. Well, it turned out the Drone Base had a shield. After several passes with rockets, I realized I wasn't even making a dent in the shield. So, I instead turned the attack to some nearby defense platforms. Those didn't have shields, and I was able to disable 2 of the 5 or so, which helped open up a safe attack corridor for the future. During the next Zirax attack or two, my HV, which had been parked outside, took a few hits and required repair. Deciding I didn't want to keep repairing my ships, I dug out a cavern next to the base and parked them in there, where I hoped they would be safe from attack. Feeling that my base and ships were reasonably secure, I went further afield and continued collecting resources towards the first CV. I would load up the Dart onto the Cartesian and warp off to local planets to gather what I needed. While doing so, I started getting annoyed at the attacks, and made a plan to destroy the Drone Base, which would, to my understanding, prevent future attacks here on Omicron. I went into Creative for a bit and came up with the STS Heavy Bomber. 6x Lasers for destroying shields, and then 4x Bomb Launchers for destroying blocks. Shield generator with the quick charge thing to accomodate a boom and zoom type strategy: fly in at full speed, fire munitions, change vector and continue past at full speed to escape returning fire. Once out of range, loop around and line up another attack. The first pass was excellent: dropped the shields with a few shots from the Lasers. After the first pass, I don't think the shields ever went back up. I made several passes, dropping bombs on the tower, hoping to take out the core and disable the base completely. Well, I eventually did take out the tower. And the turrets. And a lot of other blocks besides. Yet, even after going back several times with all the ammo I could build, after dropping literally hundreds of bombs, the Drone Base refuses to die. I may need to develop another strategy here, because while the Drone Base is decidedly neutered (except for the dozen drones that swarm around it), it is still sending attacks to my base. I'm hesitant to try going in on foot, as that is likely to result in many deaths. I may have to build a tank HV specifically for finishing off POIs like this. Deciding I'd wasted enough resources and time messing with the Drone Base, I finally managed to finish my CV, which I dubbed the Cortes. I docked the Dart miner to the top and headed out into the unknown to collect whatever resources I would need. I soon upgraded the two front turrets to Tool turrets: one for Salvage, one for Mining. Did some quests for Polaris Megacorp, involving making and delivering fuel packs, and helping mine Ilmenite, and eventually reach Honored status, with a few hundred thousand credits in the bank. Thanks to the new rep status, I can mine in Polaris territory, which I think will be useful in the future. I also spent a few hours modifying my Starstrider CV blueprint in a creative game to adapt it to RE. I plan to transition my Base and current CV to this ship once I've finally got the resources to built it. I've changed the interior to be a more consistent theme of white and blue, and started adding some RP crew areas with crew bunks, bathrooms, rec areas, etc. Also started moving some of the cargo areas to more sheltered interior areas, and spread out and armored in the fuel and oxygen tanks. The CV shield should prevent the Hardened Steel shell from getting cracked by enemy fire, but it's good to keep the explodey things separated regardless. During the building, the Starstrider is nearing Size Class 10. Which seems ridiculous for a single player, but hey, if I'm going out into the deep dark galaxy, I'd like to have a nice big island of stability and sanity to take with me. Plus, being this big means I can store lots of specialized SVs for various tasks. Being (in my mind at least) an exploration vessel, I've been adding a lot of Crew to help fill it out and make it feel more alive. Just wish I had a wider variety of crew at engineering stations to choose from, and less office workers. Maybe eventually!
Today first fancy parking on a serious lava planet... ehm no I should have said some other more smart thing, well d'oh
You know what they say: any landing you can walk away from is a good one If you survive the parking, then hopefully you can survive long enough to get back to space!
Having collected a fair amount of Pentaxid, and using my Polaris paychecks to buy even more, I set out to do the UCH Habitable Planets Survey. Found it a bit annoying at first, looking at the starmap trying to find specific types of stars. After a while, however, I finally noticed the "search systems" button, which allows me to search for stars based on type. I went here and there, scanning and whatnot, and just exploring the galaxy. I did find a few things that brought up questions, however. For example, I found this blank resource or something? The text suggests that I need to visually determine what resources are present. It's kinda cool feature, but the blank image is a bit confusing. Would be cool if you could put a '?' there or something so it seems less glitchy. Continued on and found something I thought was not supposed to occur in RE: a planet with both Erestrum and Zascosium. I mean, it is a 4g world, but still. I thought that was never supposed to occur. I also found another system that had Zascosium on one planet and Erestrum on a nearby one. Also thought that wasn't supposed to happen, but I guess I must have misread something. Having collected some extra resources (but NOT from the 4g planet... I decided to avoid that one) I made a few fixed weapons for my CV, and changed out a few turrets. Then, I went off to see if I could take on any other CVs. Found a Zirax freighter of some sort, and managed to knock it out after a few minutes. Salvaged it and got some mediocre loot. During the salvaging, another Zirax ship pulled up and started opening fire. Luckily I kept my shields up so I switched from the salvage turret back to pilot seat and started blasting. It headed away and tried to escape, but I kept up and managed to blast through its thrusters and finally disable the ship. As I destroyed most of the turrets, there wasn't a lot of loot left over. Stoked that my current CV was not entirely defenseless, I headed back to Omicron to continue stocking up supplies towards the bigger CV. Also hopped into Creative for a bit and continued fleshing out the insides of the Starstrider.
I'm not one hundred percent sure about that statement on the pentaxid ih ih oh well at least not quite until you'll install the warp engine upgrade, but no spoiler. Well anyway I like a lot exploration missions: those are definitely missing in the vanilla game and I wish to discover what'll happen when you'll finish those and believe me there are a lot after the habitable planets: that is just the beginning let's say. I must admit I'm curious to see your CV: how is it? Considering your previous screenshots I can only guess how cool it could be so let's post I must redesign it unfortunately because RE gave to me the impression (I may be wrong of course) that a wondering base is definitely better than one hundred bases in one hundred planets and it's a different way of playing I like to try. Good luck!
I agree, I LOVE the variety and quantity of missions available in RE. The sheer amount was a bit intimidating at first, but over time I've looked at them and found several that I like to pursue. I really like the Polaris quests: relatively easy with good payout, and a nice boost to reputation! Pentaxid has been sort of a struggle. When I find it, it is in small amounts. So I used my credits to a lot from a Polaris Station. Spent 200,000 credits or so! But this should keep me going for a little while at least. I have two CVs in design: the small Cortes and the big Starstrider. Will have to post some pictures of them tomorrow! The Cortes is a little boring and basic though, not very exciting to look at But I try to make the Starstrider more interesting! Also agree on moving base instead of having a hundred on different planets. It's easier to keep track of fuel certainly! Plus with a big moving CV base, I don't have to worry about leaving stuff behind: I can take everything with me wherever I go Edit: Plus, ever since I was a child, I've always dreamed of exploring the stars in some big mobile spacecraft that also doubles as a home. So a big CV fits that perfectly!
Spent a fair bit of time going around and harvesting resources for the upcoming size 10 Starstrider CV. The small size 1 Cortes CV has been a good runabout for time being. It's just big enough to have everything I need, but without a huge amount of cargo space, nor any hangars for safe docking of SVs. It has a 3x3 farm and two constructors. I usually carry the Dart miner SV around, but it just sort of sits on top like flea, where it is exposed to enemy fire. Luckily it hasn't been shot up too much yet, but it's come close. One time I came up out of the resource pit and came under fire from two cannon drones. Instead of docking on top, I docked sideways on the side of the ship and entered through the bottom ramp. The Cortes CV is not a pretty ship by any means -- I didn't really put much time into the exterior, But hey, it gets the job done! What with a small shield, about 5 turrets, plus a Drill Turret and a Salvage Turret, it makes for a good harvester for the time being. While waiting for tens of thousands of ore to smelt in the Furnace, I scooted about on Omicron, looking or potential things to trade. I stopped by the two Talon areas and picked up a large number of Stone Deco blocks for a good price, which I hope to sell elsewhere and turn a nice profit. If it goes well enough, I may use some of the extra credits to buy resources for the big upcoming CV. I think after another day or two I should be able to start actually building the next CV, the Starstrider. It has about 10x as many blocks, a much larger farm area, and a hangar more than capable of carrying all the SVs I';ve build so far. The only remaining question is what to do with the Cortes once the Startstrider has been built. --- This is the size 10 CV I am still building, the Startsrider, in 'clean' mode with all turrets and weapons retracted. Can't wait til I can fly it again! Been putting final touches on it here and there in Creative mode before I build it in RE Survival.
Thought I would do some building today. Initially was going to do an SV, then I thought HV, then I went back to SV, then I finally landed on CV. My goal is to set out making the most compact combat CV I can with hardened steel blocks. One of my central premises being that I usually make interior hangars in my CV's but then never use them preferring to land the SV I typically have on the exterior(also HV when present.) So CV with minimalist interior:
Constructed and installed the Scanning Station in the Cortes, and finally learned what the green triangles are in some star systems. I rather like the Scanning missions. While I wish the mini-game was a bit less click-centric, I imagine that it's difficult to create mini-games in Empyrion to start with. After collecting some exploration reports and data pads and such, I decided to continue gather resources for the Starstrider. I came to the conclusion that for the 120,000 Iron and Titanium needed, mining and smelting was going to take too long. Instead, I decided to go around and put my CV Multi-Tool turret to use by salvaging a couple wrecks. Found a decent number of wrecks without too much difficulty, only having to dodge a Pirate or Zirax CV here and there, and finally, as of this morning, I have enough nearly resources to start the Starstrider! Just need about 9 more Human Crew and I can start building the prefab. Thanks to using a lot of components, the crafting time was reduced from 24 hours to about 10 hours. Once it's been deployed, I plan to load up everything my my Omicron base so I can cut ties there and head out into the dark unknown without an anchor holding me back. I also gathered enough resources to convert my Warp Drive to an Advanced Warp Drive, so I will stop chugging Pentaxid as quickly. Next time I write one of these, it will likely be from the Starstrider. Finally!
