Apparently I screwed up at the very beginning of the game and missed out on the Atlas Path quest. At my crashed ship site I clicked on this piece of what looked like wreckage and this red ball thing came out and asked me if I wanted to send out a signal or not. I declined because I figured I’d come back later and send the signal once I figured some stuff out. But it went dead after I interacted with it and I couldn’t send it. I’m guessing that was the way to trigger the main story thread? If so, I blew it. Is there any way to trigger it now at this point or am I just stuck?
I think you can still resume the Atlas path, you just need to find the space anomoly by scanning new systems.
However, pretty sure you’ve missed all the tutorial stuff that guides you to find that anomoly, as well as the blueprints it doles out along the way. Which probably incudes important stuff like the warp drive and fuel, which you’ll now have to locate by other means… You’ve pretty much chosen to skip the tutorial and go the ‘free exploration’ path by rejecting Atlas at the start.
Did you still get the Awakenings quest line?
Yes, I did and have been following that. I did get the warp drive and the warp fuel, antimatter, etc. I went to another system to get the antimatter recipe and recruit a scientist there for my base.
When I got back to my home system I was sent to an anomaly which was a monolith that gave me another warp cell after some traveler questions and then it sent me back into space.
Once in orbit I got a dialog that gave me the choice you mentioned (choose free explore or the Atlas Path). I picked the path so now I have both main quests paths showing up in my log. So, I’m good to go.
Now to work on getting that Voltaic cell recipe. Got to say I’m absolutely loving this game so far.
It is pretty magical hey.
I played this again today, after not playing it for months.
So… ship lasers got nerfed big time, didn’t they?
Finally got 3 hours in, there is a lot of grind in this to get anything done. Probably doesn’t help that every planet in my starting area was hazardous. Also so many cooldowns… Stamina / Jetpack / Mining tool… :|
I just made my 2nd warp jump, something better get interesting real soon, as I am not super impressed with anything I’ve seen. The 5 planets and 1 space station I’ve visited so far have been very plain. :|
If this was a $60 purchase I’d of given it a negative review already. D:
About 5 or 6 hours in. Finally found a pretty-ish planet, but it was cold, storms passed through every few minutes, and all of the sentinels were on high alert. So, I guess I won’t be putting my vacation house there.
But, I did find a crashed ship there with 44 cargo slots. Repairing it was a major PITA (but 'sorta fun) as I’d grab materials while dealing with sentinels, get back to the ship to fix something, and run out again for the next batch. Finally got it off the ground and got the heck out of the there, leaving angry sentinels in my wake.
Went next door to a snowy planet that’s chock-full of resources and the sentinels are as nice as can be. They gave me a little gift bag when I landed, and invited me over for dinner. Looks like I’ll be staying here a while to get the new ship fully repaired.
So, is that the way you normally get new ships in this game? Going to 44 cargo slots from my starter ship is a huge jump, and I think the price on the compare screen was something like 44 million. Not sure if I’ll grow out of this one for a while, which is fine, 'cause i like the look of it.
Verdict is still a bit out for me. I’ve gotta’ see what else there is beyond the gameplay loop of fly somewhere to get your gas tank filled up so you can fly somewhere else. I think there are other things to do, but it’s all a bit opaque to me right now.
Looking forward to playing some more next weekend.
Thanks for the writeup. And very nice find. I was happy to find a 20-slot crashed ship in my starting system and yes, what a pain in the butt to repair them. But so worth it.
That is indeed the best way, IMO, but you can also buy them from NPCs landing at a space station. They’re very expensive, but at some point you may find yourself feeling rich and buying an upgrade won’t seem nearly as bad.
Also discovered something super simple and cool that I wish I’d found earlier. If you revisit the same NPCs at space stations, they may randomly gift you with a massive multitool upgrade (phrasing, sorry). I just replaced my 5-slot with a 16-slot one thanks to a friendly Vy’keen.
The problem is that you need to pay escalating costs on every slot you free up on that ship so it’s not the gift horse I thought it would be. I believe you will eventually pony up the full amount of the ship albeit in installments as you free up each slot.
Ah. That makes sense. I opened up a few cargo slots, and didn’t really pay attention to the price. When I was hovering over the broken slots, the price was around 20k which didn’t seem to bad, but based on what you are saying it sounds like every time I repair one the cost for the next one jumps up. Which is fine. I’ve already cleared out more room than I had in the old ship. I can wait on the others.
I believe that total value is still going to be lower than the station price.
Currently having a bastard of a time finding a Korvax Convergence Cube. Searching crates on planets, visiting traders, nada.
I hope so. I have about maybe 15 slots to go and the next one is going to cost me about 400,000 to open up so I’m not holding out much hope that it will be cheaper.
Don’t forget to turn in your research from scanning flora, fauna and landmarks. I forgot until several hours into my current play session. Pretty good source of cash.
Not sure when they added this but it’s a great improvement from how it used to be. In the earlier version crashed ships always had maybe 1 or 2 more slots than your current ship, and a big repair bill to get flying. Not worth the effort, so really buying them from stations/trading platforms was the way to go. Which was a massive outlay.
But now, you can get a ship with some potential on the cheap, and slowly fix her up as you go. Great change! Same goes for the multi-tools.
Also build the visor upgrades that give you more research cash.
And I just learned the hard way. Store nanites in your suit inventory. :P
Play through the Atlas and Awakening stories, they teach and reveal the things you can do as you go.
One thing I still don’t like is that the planets are kind of mono-culture-ish meaning that every squarekilometre looks kind of the same and if I would go on a different part of the planet, like on the “backside”, it would have the same topography… did they fix this in the last 12 months? I am still on my way to my ship, but this time I know I can make it… (lots of caverns on my way)
It’s not a bug, it’s a design decision - so I doubt they’ll ‘fix’ it. :)
If you want a different biome you go to a different planet - there’s 16 quintillion of them after all. Though mind you, base building seems to fly in the face of that exploration encouragagment design anyway so hey who knows…!
I put some time into playing survival this weekend as well. Same experience as well. I thought that if I jumped away from my home system I might find some better planets but no joy. I know that they are trying to do a trade off so that the “habitable” planets have some challenge but the sentinel level is just silly. You can’t go more than 30 seconds without attracting one. The pacing is off there.
Not sure if I am going to stick with survival. Finding my ship, repairing it and blasting off of Hoth was fun but I’m not sure I want the whole game to be like that. I’m just scraping by with enough credits to buy plutonium and shielding so that I can make it to a planet, do some mining/exploring and then make it past the predictable pirates when I want to change planets or go to the space station.
Yeah, that was why I dropped survival mode and switched to normal. I’m glad I did. I know they wanted to make survival mode challenging but it just makes it too much of a constant grind for me to enjoy. Once I saw that one takeoff used up 200 plutonium and emptied my tank completely, that was it for me.
I think the game on normal can already be somewhat of a grind so, to me, making survival mode even grindier is not exactly the solution to compelling/challenging gameplay.
What I would like to see is a kind of hybrid mode where the fauna and flora are a lot more hostile, and resource and structure frequency are as scarce as they currently are on survival mode, but everything else is like normal mode. That would provide a lot more challenge than normal but still allow you to take a breath now and then. I wonder if something like that could be created via a mod?
Is there a way to have no mission selected? I don’t remember the bottom right corner of my HUD being permanently devoted to telling me which mission I have selected, it’s kind of obnoxious. Can I clear that somehow while I’m just poking around on a planet?
As far as anyone knows, are all the sales over today?