I’m tackling the scaled down version of Expedition 1 and it is fun. Going to do all three of the ones I missed over the holidays.
Some pro tips for Expedition 1 : (I’m going to spoiler tag them even though I don’t think they contain any real spoilers, just solid advice that can save a lot of time and units)
Captain on Deck. Don’t spend money on a freighter. You can complete the freighter milestone by receiving the free freighter from the “save the freighter” combat event that happens after you’ve warped a couple of times. The first free freighter will be a system freighter, go ahead and turn it down (decline or take the resource reward instead). Next freighter battle you encounter will be for a capital ship version (Star Wars destroyer looking one or Star Blazers battleship looking one). Feel free to claim that one, as it will be much larger and cooler.
Mission Control. The free freighter will come with a frigate. It should also have enough supplies in the hold to build a Control Room (for frigate missions). Building that room will reward you with the recipe for frigate fuel, and give you some as well. You can then send your single frigate out on three missions (time consuming), or, head to a system off of the expedition path and see if a fleet in that system has frigates for hire. If you have the units you can pick up two more frigates of different types, then send all three frigates on two or three missions (you’ll need a control room per mission) to knock out the milestone faster.
The Good Ship. No need to spend units on a Class A starship for that milestone either. While you’re doing one of the many milestones that require activity on planets, keep an eye out for ship crash sites. You can find these randomly, or you can exchange 1 navigation data at the space station cartographer for a planetary map to a distress signal, which will often lead to a crashed ship. If the crashed ship is an A or S class, claim it and bam, milestone done without spending a dime. The reward for that milestone is another A or S class ship (nicely outfitted), so once you’ve claimed that you can salvage the crashed ship for units and or parts.
Farmer. The plants you harvest do not have to be YOURS. There are dozens of player bases in systems all along the expedition path labeled “FARM” or “PLANTS”. Head to one. Harvest 20 of its plants. Milestone complete.
Rocketman. Many of the milestones reward you with S-class movement upgrades (jetpack upgrades). One you have a couple of these, find a planet with superheated storms. Jetpacks aren’t depleted as fast in high temperature environments, so take flight in an environment like that and you’ll hit 30 seconds hangtime easy. Milestone accomplished.
The Collector & Jackpot. Cash in 3 navigation data at the space station for 3 planetary charts showing alien artifact locations. These will guide you either directly to an artifact site (ruin) or to a monolith/ruin that will give you the option of “seek knowledge of the past” which will pinpoint an alien ruin. The chest at each site contains an Artifact. It is likely you’ll get lucky and discover a rare artifact worth more than 500,000 units, in which case simply sell it at any terminal and you’ve completed the Jackpot milestone. If you only get common or uncommon artifacts worth less, then find a Colossal Archive on a planet and run around to the three Artifact Vaults in the Archive, inserting your artifact each time until it is upgraded to a value above 500,000.
Boundary Failure. Want to kill 25 Sentinels without triggering a wanted condition in your system? Simply go to a planetary settlement (lots of them are marked by other players on planets all along the expedition path) and trigger the sentinel attack. You’ll kill 5-8 sentinels without triggering any wanted condition. Move on to another settlement and repeat until milestone is achieved. Grab a kill sentinels mission or two from the mission agent on the local space station beforehand. As long as you’re killing sentinels, may as well get paid to do it!
Navigator. This one can easily be completed on any planet, as all you’re really doing is moving from point of interest to point of interest touching the save waypoint at each one. Shelters, Drop Pods, Buildings, Beacons, anything with a save point works. Build and use a signal booster to easily locate your next point of interest, and maybe purchase some drop pod data too so you can upgrade your exosuit while you’re at it. Note that doing this milestone on an extreme world should easily net you the Survivor milestone (walk 5000u on an extreme planet) as well, and probably cap off The Pilgrim too if you hadn’t already achieved it. Find a world with extreme storms and you’re likely to find Storm Crystals, which can knock out Stormy Skies while you’re at it.
The toughest milestones to get in Expedition 1 are the exploration ones. Finding undiscovered systems is going to be next to impossible when following the expedition path as thousands of explorers have preceded you and they’ve charted every system around the path for 1000+ LY. I recommend upgrading your warp drive with S-class modules as soon as possible, and then either warping away from the expedition path in a different direction for several jumps, or finding a black hole (also a milestone) and hoping it leads to an unexplored region of space. If you have a base with a teleport ring you can always port back to your base (and thus the expedition path) from any space station once you’ve completed the milestones. Finding an abandoned system seems to be dependent on simple luck, and is probably the most time consuming milestone. Note that the first undiscovered system you enter will complete the First Contact milestone, which rewards you with Cadmium Drive plans. Build the Cadmium Drive ASAP, as visiting a Red system is another milestone (which in turn leads to Emerald and Indium drives/systems/milestones) but the red/green/blue stars are far less likely to have already been explored by other players, meaning they can help you achieve the exploration milestones more easily.
They’re just waypoints, you should see them on the galaxy map and when you jump into the system they’re in.
The expedition goals/waypoints have very little to nothing to do with the base game.
Edit: Also in your main menu, the Expedition log, lists all the steps to finish all of the ‘phases’. You have to do everything, even if it sounds ridiculous.
Yeah, good to know. I don’t think I’ve come across any rendezvous points yet then, or maybe I’m just not looking in the right spot. Regarding phases, I’ve unlocked quite a few just bopping around doing random stuff, but I see that several of them involve finding rendezvous points so they stuck out to me at an activity I just haven’t done yet.
That’s quite a lot of content, and to be honest I don’t understand all of it. But that’s ok! I’m good with doing my own thing and figuring it out as I go.
Take a very careful look at the galaxy map when you jump from system to system. There are options there to change the view, including some to highlight paths to different objectives depending on your log quests. If you select the Expedition milestone for “Rendezvous One” or whatever as your active quest in your Log, the path to the Rendezvous system will be highlighted on the galaxy map. It will take several jumps to get there…then you’ll figure out what to do when you arrive.
You need to have that task selected for it to show up. The galaxy map will show you the path and when you get to the system where the waypoint is you will see it on a planet. However, this is not the exact rendezvous point, it will be close to the waypoint. Your scanner (in it alternate mode, which it will likely start in when you are landed and have the task selected) will indicate the direction you should be going.
Or do what I usually do, and when you arrive at the correct planet, fly around the “Approximate Location” icon until the relevant structure renders in. Hard to overlook when it does. The structures to look for are: RDV1: Planetary Archive, RDV2: Planetary Archive, RDV3: Planetary Archive, RDV4: Monolith, RDV5: Portal.
Ah, you guys were right, I didn’t have the quest highlighted for the rendezvous point. I was just bouncing from place to place doing stuff. Once I focused on locating the first rendezvous point I was one system away and just bounced over and landed pretty much on top of it, no problem.
So - at this point, I’ve got all the milestones for the first set, maybe 3 or 4 for the second, and several others I’ve managed to complete incidentally while doing other stuff. And man, I am loaded! I’ve got a ton of inventory spots opened up, lots of crazy tech added to my tools, and lots of money and nanites. I’m still on my first C class ship, and still carrying my first C class multitool. I was hoping I would just stumble across new ones in my travels but so far not yet. I should probably buckle down and follow @SlainteMhath’s advice, buy some specific maps to get my closer to that stuff. Maybe next session.
I almost wish I had seen the advice to hold out for a later frigate because flying around in a star destroyer sounds cool. But I kind of like the one I have because it looks a lot like the Discovery from 2001. And! I don’t know why I didn’t think of this sooner but I realized I could put a teleporter on my freighter and go pretty much anywhere! I barely need a spaceship anymore! Except for I guess exploring places I haven’t been yet, which, yeah, probably important. Still fun!
One more question and I don’t think it’s terribly spoileriffic, just something I’m a little unclear about. Every time I go to a space station, I run into several folks that want to join my base. Like a vykeen warrior that wants to, I don’t know, kill a lot of things with me? Or a gek that I guess probably wants to build more stuff? But I can never accept their offer even though I do have a couple of bases. Do I need what they’re offering, and if so what do I need to be doing differently in order to accept?
Those base NPC’s are part of a quest path in the main game. NMS likes to give you tutorials disguised as quests in your log. Outside of the Expeditions, when you build your first base computer, choose a spot and set up shop, the quest line that was guiding you through the process up to that point will tell you to go hire a Construction Overseer (the Gek NPC) for your base, and inform you that you can find him and other aliens willing to work for you (each alien has a specific task within the base) on space stations.
Since you built the base via the Expedition, and not by following the main path of the game quests/tutorials, you can’t hire those guys until you initiate “Expanding The Base” in your quest log. This is done by building a Construction Terminal inside your base. If I remember correctly, the blueprint for the Construction Terminal is granted for free as part of the game’s base building tutorial, which I’m not sure how to start if you’re playing an Expeditions save character.
I play this game from time to time, but generally get kind of tired of the planets looking so similar.
But a couple days ago I went through a black-hole and found a paradise planet, minimal sentries and no storms. But best of all, the planet actually seems mountainous! No rolling hills here! Big mountains with lake filled valleys below. And they also spawn these massive, flat floating rocks above the lake. I’m building my permanent base on one such rock. Super exciting.
Last night I warped back over to the third rendezvous system (I’d been one system over doing Explorer’s Guild quests) and landed on my freighter. I figured before taking on the black hole and uncharted systems milestones I would finally swap out my starting expedition ship for the shiny S-class I got as a reward for finding the A-class salvage ship. I started out by fixing the pulse engines and the shield on the A-class junker (damn thing was literally still on fire in the landing bay of my freighter!) then flew it over to the space station and melted it down for scrap, scoring about 2 million units and a couple of nice modules for doing so.
Then I flew my original ship back to the freighter and transferred the inventory to the freighter. I then jumped in the shiny new S-class and transferred inventory back to the ship, installed a few mods I’d purchased for this moment and flew the new ship over to the space station. I don’t want to scrap my original ship, mostly because I’d feel bad doing so, as she was a trusty little ship. At the station I accessed the upgrade drones and applied all 12 of the storage upgrade modules I’d collected thus far in Expedition 2, which pretty much maxed out my S-class in Technology and nearly in cargo as well. I moved all systems to the Technology grid to protect them from the effects of Black Holes (equipment installed in Technology slots cannot be damaged by Black Hole travel), and applied a couple of S and A class Hyperdrive modules to expand my jump distance out to 750+ LY.
From that point, it was pretty easy to summon the Anomaly (from the X menu), chat with Polo about Black Holes (lights up the path to the nearest one) and Hyperion about upgrades (to snag the Emeril and Indium drive plans for visiting Green and Blue stars) and warp over to the Black Hole system. 350,000 LY later and I was on the other side of the black hole and boom, Black Hole milestone completed. Unfortunately that system has already been charted, but I figured as much given the odds someone had jumped through that particular black hole previously. So I brought up the map and looked for systems that were not part of a larger cluster (more likely to attract explorers) and found one about 750 LY out with few neighbors around it. Warped and discovered my first uncharted system. Woot! Installed the Cadmium Drive (reward for discovering an uncharted system) and jumped to a distant Red star. Uncharted system #2 down. Jumped to a third system nearby and the Visit 3 Uncharted Systems milestone was history.
Along the way I stopped at every space station to check for upgrade modules, add suit inventory slots, sweep for nanites and offload some junk for sale. At the final station I used the stargate portal to zap myself back to the third rendezvous system (somehow your ship always goes with you) and flew back out to my freighter to stash some stuff in inventory while collecting all the rewards from the exploration quests. Next up tonight will be visiting a green and blue system and more Explorers Guild fun. I think I only have about 7 milestones left now until the Expedition One is completed.
I too have made progress, though in a much more haphazard way. I did come across someone selling a class A starship, which I bought with all this money I’ve been sitting on, and realized that then unlocked a class S ship, which seems kind of funny to me. So I did two hops up to the new class and I love it. It recharges takeoff fuel! Funny how the little things make a difference. It’s much much better in a dogfight too.
I’ve also come across a couple of new freighter rescue situations but oddly, neither has been a step up from my class B capital ship. I’m ok with that though, since I mainly just use it for storage and forget where I left it half the time. I’ve cleared three rendezvous points by now, just kind of bopping through the cosmos looking at shiny objects.
I did finally get a distress call to rescue a settlement, which I did. I knocked back the sentinel attack, then my guy muses that maybe I should just become their leader, because that’s basically what I do, just take over everything. It said to log into some settlement console, but the checkpoint it gave me for that was on some other planet. That struck me as odd, but I went along dutifully. Except at that checkpoint I found a different settlement, also asking that I save them from sentinels! Which I did because why not. I then decided I should lead this settlement instead, and got the checkpoint for a console and holy crap, it was three hours away. At that point I said you settlers can just go to hell, and I took off to look for black holes.
That’s pretty funny. The Settlement mission is supposed to stick with whatever settlement you initially find. It’s possible the Settlement mission steps were disrupted/confused by the fact that you’re in the Expeditions game mode, with other players in the lobby. Or you might have simply been seeing HUD markers for other player settlements. In any case, it absolutely doesn’t matter what the mission is telling you to do. Just pick a settlement that you like (and/or one that’s on a planet you like). Once you accept one, the Settlement mission will stop trying to steer you elsewhere.
Regarding the Honmatan OQ5 (that S class ship you received as a reward), how are you finding the weapon it comes with (the Cyclotron)? It’s the one ship weapon I’ve never really spent time trying to master. Supposedly it’s pretty great once you get the hang of it.
Oh, just a friendly reminder: the current Expedition (Pioneers) ends Dec. 7 @ 2pm UTC (4 days, 16 hours, 23 min from now). Might want to make sure the more time-consuming milestones are done soon (namely complete fleet expeditions, earn Explorers Guild standing, discover star systems, chart waypoints, plant/harvest plants).
Nice. I’ve gotta fire this up again sometime. Played it like crazy for a while a few years back, but just got tired of the grind for materials+base building. I’m more into the exploration aspect.
The big claimable reward is a new S-Class ship, the Golden Vector. I claimed it on my main save, but forgot to take a pic, so here’s one of the reward being bestowed while I was landed in an abandoned space station. The “find an uncharted abandoned system” was probably the most time consuming of the Expedition tasks except perhaps for the 16 Explorer’s Guild missions. I had to find and jump through a black hole, then warp several thousand LY out from the Black Hole system to find an abandoned system that wasn’t already discovered.
When I stopped by The Anomaly to chat with Polo about black holes (while looking for an abandoned system) it was a little obvious that everyone there with me was on Expedition One.
