Stories and Experiences

[fragger]

Cheers Art, thanks for the tip :) You probably saved me a lot of grief.

A 30-slot ship isn't much more expensive that a 24-slotter - only one and a half million or so. I'm making dough fairly quickly despite not being able to pull off the "get rich quick" ploy at the station. Prices for 24-slotters average around 1.7 mill, while a 30 can be gotten for about 4 mill. So it's not that much more of an earn to get the bigger ship.

I'm glad you posted that :-X I'll hold out for the 30 as an intermediate ship.

[Art Blade]

welcome :)

however, it surprises me that you seem to get ships for about half the price as mine. I indeed got a 24-slotter I think it was, for like 2.5M but the 30-sloter cost me just under 10M.

Maybe it has got to do with what D_B suggested: play the poor guy and pay less. If your ship isn't equipped well (dismantled, mostly) maybe you'll see a lower price for that reason.

[fragger]

Possibly. Maybe I'll go for a 24 and see what the price of a 30 then does. In my last game when I had a 24, a 30 cost about 8 million, so maybe the smaller a ship you have now, the cheaper a much bigger one will be. Upgrades in your current ship may indeed play a part. I haven't upgraded my ship at all yet, despite having the blueprints. because there's no need - there are no pirates and I'm only hauling minerals and trinkets back and forth between the station and the nearby planet.

[fragger]

(sound of tearing hair) You've noticed how when you're in space and you point your ship towards a planet, the name of the planet appears connected to the planet by a line with a dot at each end - one dot near the name and one on the planet's center. When I first went down to the resource-haven planet right below the space station, there was a Trading Post very close to that dot at the planet's centre. The second time I went down from the station, I re-entered almost right over that same Trading Post.

Now, do you think I can find it again? I've tried re-entering all around that dot and I can't find the Trading Post for the life of me.

It would be really, really helpful if there was a key you could hit that would waypoint the nearest Trading Post to your position. Trading Posts don't have to be "discovered" for money or claiming rights - they're just there, and freely available for anybody to use.

So why do they have to be so bloody difficult to find? :D

[Dweller_Benthos]

There are many complaints on the waypoint system, not only is it bugged, it's essentially useless.

[Art Blade]

At the same time, Hello Games are aware of it and promised an overhaul of the waypoint system.

[Binnatics]

On the subject of ship prices, may it also be of any influence from which alien race you buy?

Since fragger commented the low costs of big ships as Well as the poor trading conditions on bis system / alien race?

[Art Blade]

good point, needs further investigation :)

[Art Blade]

Ever since I saw a hyper drive upgrade on a trader's ship during my last career, I wanted to get one of those. I assume that you have to jump at least once in order to see those because I haven't seen any of those during my current career during which I haven't yet jumped anywhere.

However, I decided to go back to my start planet (around a little over one minute away from the space station, on pulse drive) and there I found a trading post for the first time on that planet and the alien there gave me a blueprint of said upgrade, a warp reactor :) At least I could build one now but I need a ton of copper which appears to be next to impossible to come by in this system.

I want it because it lets you get from one system to a distant system with less jumps. Or, just one large jump rather than two small ones because it reaches farther.

I want more (better ones) of those :)

[smg id=9047 type=preview align=center caption="hyper drive upgrade"]

[fragger]

I actually built one of those Hyperdrive upgrades in my first game shortly before I did a restart, but never got a chance to use it because - well, I wanted to start over.

For your copper, have you tried mining one of the big asteroids? I've found many of those to be composed of copper. And I think they respawn once you've mined them out, you just need to look around for another one if you don't get enough out of one.

[fragger]

I decided to compromise on the "transitional" ship and went with this 26-slotter, for about 1.8 million.
[smg id=9048 align=center width=600]

I've dismantled all the upgrades it came with, of which there weren't many. Plus they were all over the place in the inventory and they were all low-level Sigmas. Since there are no pirates in the system, I won't be needing those upgrades for now as they were all weapons ones - I want to get my tech up before I start upgrading the weapons prior to jumping out of here and contending with the pirates. I'd like the Sigmas to have Taus and Thetas for company when I put them back in :-()

I'm considering this to be a transitional ship because I want to see what gets offered now and what sort of prices I'll be looking at for something bigger (so sue me, I want a big ship :-()) I've only looked at three or four so far, but I'm seeing 30-slotters going for about 4.7 million and 34s for about 7.8 million. Considering I paid just under 8 million for a 30 in my last game, these prices are comparatively low. I'm wondering if it's because I stripped all the upgrades out of the new ship - I should have looked at prices before I did the stripping but I didn't think of it. Even so, I noticed before that the prices for ships are lower in this game than they were in the last.

It's hard to say what factors are involved in determining ship prices. Maybe which race you buy from, how many systems you've jumped to already, what your current overall tech level is, maybe all or none of these things.

The new bird on the pad. Ungainly-looking beast, I'll grant you. At least the colour stands out.

[smg id=9049 align=center width=600]

Check out the hit points at upper left - eight of them.

[smg id=9050 align=center width=600]


It seems that the bigger, bulkier ships have higher defensive strengths than the little fighter-type birds. As far as speed and handling go, I can't detect any difference between this ship and the first one, they seem about the same.

Btw, do you guys get those random messages popping up in the lower-right corner of the screen, like the one in that last picture? I find them annoying, and they get in the way of a good screenie.


EDIT: Saw a few more ships. A 35-slotter for just over 10 million and a 39-slotter for around 18 million. So I might save for a 39, get it, visit a crash site, do a swap out and repair for an even 40 slots (unless I happen to see a 40, but judging by the trend I imagine a 40 would cost well over 20 million). 40 should be more than enough, surely.

Incidentally, I found a wrecked ship which had one slot less than my current ship, so it seems they don't always go up by a slot, unless it was a glitch.

[Dweller_Benthos]

Nice ship, my new one is one of the small ones, but has more slots than my old one. I just find wrecked ones and repair them. I'm too cheap to buy one, heh.

I really wish the "Activate Hyperdrive" message would go away. I mean, if I'm walking on a planet, I can't very well activate my hyperdrive, can I? The tips that at least pertain to the current situation are OK, but the constant reminder about the hyperdrive is very annoying.

[fragger]

It would be nice if there was a way to turn those messages off ::)

I like this ship but I have to be careful getting out sometimes. Like the one you had D_B, it's a bit of a ways to the ground and I don't so much get out as fall out. I seem to come out on the roof of the thing, then I immediately fall, and if the nose is sticking out over a drop I can get hurt if I don't activate the jetpack in time.

I've looked at a few more ships. The biggest I've seen is a 41-slot number for 23.4 million. I'm holding off on putting any upgrades in this one unless I get engine ones as I full intend to go for a bigger ship yet. With nobody to fight, it's kinda pointless to spend the resources on weapon upgrades just to rip them all out again later. I might upgrade the shield though if I go for that free-flight mod, which I probably will. It sounds like that might be prudent :-()

[Dweller_Benthos]

yes, that's probably a good idea, upgrade the shield, I might do that as well. I don't do anything with weapon upgrades, or anything really, as I know I'm not going to have a ship for very long.

[fragger]

The evolution of my Multitool, thus far.

[smg id=9052 align=center width=600]

I'm not bothering with the Boltcaster at present as I'm concentrating on mining clout. With this baby upgraded to 3 levels of Coolant, 3 levels of Beam Intensity and 2 levels of Focus, I can whittle a big pillar down in a minute or two with just two or three continuous sweeps (then a few short zaps to mop up any little hanging bits). I can lase down a dome of something like Aluminum or Gold in a single back-and-forth sweep before the Multitool gets too hot.

Funnily enough, the wall crates offering new Multitools this time around have continually increased in size by at least two slots each time. I started with a five, then was offered a 7, then a 10, then a 12, and then this 14. The next one offered was a 16, but I had something else I wanted to do first and I forgot to go back and get it :D Now, every time I see a new one offered it's one slot less, at 13. I guess I should grab a 13 and hopefully the increase in slots on offer might resume. But I really like the way I managed to get this one set up and I don't want to mess it up :-()

[Art Blade]

Considering I paid just under 8 million for a 30 in my last game, these prices are comparatively low. I'm wondering if it's because I stripped all the upgrades out of the new ship - I should have looked at prices before I did the stripping but I didn't think of it.

I did :)

The price is dependent on how geared-up your ship is as the ships coming in will try to reflect your current level. Meaning they'll come loaded with upgrades if you do. And the other way around: if you strip your ship, the others will mirror that and come with just bare bones, so to speak  :-D -- the lack of upgrades makes them cheap. I also noticed that the more military ships look, the more upgrades they'll have and that makes them more expensive than cargo ships of the same cargo bay size (amount of slots)

Which means that D_B's tip for the multi-tools (remove upgrades first, trade in cheaper) works for ships, indeed. Ships cost almost nothing (by comparison :-() and I too saw ships as cheap as you described it, fragger) if you dismantle all the upgrades there are and only then check for ships. It is remarkable, the ship in the pic below is one slot bigger than the one I showed earlier (see spoiler below) yet it still costs 20 millions less ???

pic in here

[smg id=9046 type=preview align=center caption="really expensive stuff"]

Compare the lack of upgrades, however :)

[smg id=9053 type=preview align=center caption="cheap 40 slots"]

[fragger]

Nice w@&k mate, that's good to know :-X

[Binnatics]

While at it, I was watching Art Blade through Steam and encouraged him do go on trading until he got the sufficient for the 40 slotter. Amazing how easy that trading seems, as he mad over 9 million in a couple of hours while I was watching :) :-X :-X

Unfortunately it was too late already to stay and wait for the exact right ship to roll in, although he already had slightly over 20 m. We'll see that today I guess :-D

[fragger]

It seems that this is the only way to make a decent amount of money in a reasonable time. You could go down to a planet, do a ton of mining and fill your ship and your suit with a gold-star commodity, and even when you bring it back to the station you might get several hundred grand for it. In the same amount of time, you can make millions just hustling on the space station's hanger floor.

I made just over 800,000 with a suit full of Emeril and four ship slots full of it as well (since each ship slot holds twice as much as a suit slot, that added up to a lot of Emeril - about 4,000 pieces in total), but it took me about an hour to mine it all. It was selling for the regular price though, not a gold-star price, but there was a good dollop of it in one area on the planet where I was so I thought why not. Most of it was in the form of a single colossal pillar that was so high I couldn't reach the top of it with the laser. And it was thick through as well, massive. I had to go to the top of a nearby cliff, and ever then the laser couldn't reach the far side of the pillar. So I cut out a ledge at the top on the nearest side, jetpacked over onto it (just made it across) and began whittling it away beneath me, moving down with it as it shrank. Even with my super-duper mining laser, it took ages. And then I fell off at one stage and had to go all the way back to the top of the cliff and jetpack across again.

The point is that I could have made a lot more doing the space station shuffle in the time it took me to get that 800,000 units' worth of Emeril, so the only real incentive to mine is to get the materials you need for your upgrades. So I'll be making the money for my next ship through hours of dealing in the hanger, broken up by trips dirtside to find techs and blueprints for upgrades, find the resources I need for those upgrades, and learn more Korvax words.

The nice thing about starting in a system with five planets is that any resource you need will probably be found on at least one of those planets. I'll be needing some Gravitino Balls at some stage though, and some other exotic elements, which I haven't yet come across. I may have to buy them if any are for sale, and they'll be pretty dear.

Speaking of cliffs and jetpacks, you guys probably know this already but I'll put it here anyway - if you use the jetpack while going up the face of a sheer cliff or pillar, the jetpack won't use up any fuel as long as you stay in contact with the face.

[Dweller_Benthos]

I've seen the same thing, fragger, one of the planets in my system has giant globs of aluminum, the only place I've seen that in the wild. Otherwise, you need to buy it. Another has crystals of that Christo-something that you need as well, so I grabbed a bunch. I think I'll just keep a stack or so of the rare stuff like those and Iridium, for ship repairing, as finding them and fixing them more suits me than buying them. Oh yeah, Zinc as well, can't find that hardly anywhere.

[fragger]

Zinc only seems to come from those little brown plants that you find occasionally (it's kind of odd that you can just pick zinc and platinum off plants, but it is a game). I've never seen a big dome or crystal growth of Zinc. Agreed, it seems pretty hard to come by.

I tend to try reserving a space for each of the most commonly needed but harder to come by minerals in my ship, like Zinc, Titanium, Chysonite, Iridium, and the like, and whenever I happen to come across any of those I snaffle them up. Other stuff I generally grab as needed, or I keep a bit on me in my suit. Thamium9 is easy enough to get from the asteroids that drift around every planet, and Plutonium crystals seem to pop up everywhere. Each planet has more Iron-yielding rocks and Carbon-yielding plants than you can shake a stick at, never a problem getting those.

There nearly always seems to be at least one big Iridium-bearing asteroid floating around among the smaller Thamium9 ones, and often a Copper one and an Iron one as well. I found an Aluminum one once.

[Art Blade]

I made nearly 10M in just under 2 hours, a couple of breaks included. So yes, I said it already, "it beats mining" :-()

And as you guys were discussing, I had already set that plan in motion (carrying around rare stuff for upgrades and repairs) some time ago. I too keep plucking platinum and zinc from plants and got quite a lot of units each in my spaceship.

Only I don't have copper asteroids, no copper at all, so far. Only from dismantling.

[smg id=9055 type=preview align=center caption="collecters and hunters"]

[fragger]

That's really odd how your Hyperdrive is in the third row down, I've never seen one in that sort of location before. That's great because it will allow you to have upgrades for the upper row of systems without the Hyperdrive getting in the way.

Man... I put in a marathon session in the space station getting the money up for a new ship. Unfortunately I don't have the luxury of ten million in two hours, it just isn't possible in my station - the ships are just not there. I can spend up to ten minutes just waiting for the one guy who buys at the gold-star rate to show up ::) The best that can be done is about 2 million per hour.

What race are you with, Art? I'm wondering if it's a race thing, or if some stations have more traffic than others. I hit every single ship that comes in and buy every single Dynamic Resonator I can get my hands on (I can have up to 22 of them in my suit at once, and often do), but there's no possible way I can shorten that rate of exchange pure and simply because the frequency of ships limits it.

But anyway, back onto the gist of this post :-() Of the dozen or so different ship types that come into the station, only one ever has the 40 slots I'm after - and it's the type that comes in the least often. Some of the types come in with monotonous regularity - sometimes there'll be up to four of the same type in the hanger at once, while others are rarer. The one I need is the rarest of the lot.

It took me five hours to raise the 10 million units I needed to get me up to the 20 million required for the 40-slotter. Since then I've spent 2 hours waiting for this particular ship type to show up with the right number of slots and a decent layout. When one does eventually come in, it either has 16 slots instead of the usual 39-41 (and once it had 14 slots - who the hell would want to buy a ship with two less slots than the one you start the game with?) or it'll have 40 slots but the arrangement will be lousy, like having the Hyperdrive right under the Photon Cannon with blank spaces on either side so there's no possible way of connecting the cannon upgrades to the cannon in order to get the adjacency bonuses. That sort of thing.

The exasperating thing is that while I was getting the money up, whenever one of these ships came in I'd have a look at its layout and I saw a couple that would have been perfect, but I couldn't yet afford one. Now that I can, they're all crap - when they show up at all, like about one every fifteen minutes or so. I don't get why some types of ship have to be rarer than others, that was a really dumb call on the part of whoever came up with it. They should all have an equal chance of appearing - this isn't GTA V.

How I wish you could customize your ships instead of being at the mercy of whatever the program throws up at you. At least give me a choice between a couple of 40-slot models instead of just one that deigns to appear only three or four times in an hour, and always sucks in layout when it does :D


(EDIT: Fixed ridiculously worded sentence :-())

[fragger]

Okay, I just did some rather expensive experimenting (expensive because I'm going to be dismantling everything I crafted for the experiment :-()) I believe that your upgrades don't in fact have to be adjacent to the thing they're upgrading, as long as the upgrades themselves are adjacent to each other. I put four ship Photon Cannon upgrades in a square shape with the levels like so:

1 2
2 1

Two of these were Accelerated fire (1 & 2) and Increased Damage (2 & 1), and none of them were adjacent to the cannon itself. Yet the cannon spat out the shots super fast and I obliterated a big asteroid in no time.

So It seems that the all that's needed for the adjacency bonuses is for the upgrades to be together. Doesn't matter if they're different types of upgrades (such as Accelerated Fire and Increased Damage, as above) as long as they're for the same piece of equipment. This explains why you can't put your jetpack upgrades next to the jetpack - the devs probably put the jetback where they did as a clue to this.

Right - the next 40-slotter that comes along is mine :-() Now I just have to wait for one to come along... again...

[fragger]

Finally, I have my 40-slotter with some good upgrades for weapons, shield and Pulse Engine, with room for yet more. Cost just under 20 million.

[smg id=9058 align=center width=600]

She's a biggie - I call her the Spruce Goose :-D (with apologies to Howard Hughes)

[smg id=9059 align=center width=600]

Well, I did say I wanted a big ship... I guess I got my wish.

[smg id=9060 align=center width=600]

Here's something I like. If I jetpack onto the top of the cockpit, I get a nice high vantage point to scout out any nasties when landing on a new planet, and unless they're really big nasties or can fly, they can't get at me.

[smg id=9061 align=center width=600]

But this - this is awesome. Check out the speed - 168u at 174ks, with no boost.  And I can get it down really low, I've had it down to 65ks. Maybe I won't need that low-flight mod after all. Landing on pads is now a breeze. And not only is she fast, but despite her bulk she's very nimble. I can almost turn on a dime.

[smg id=9062 align=center width=600]

This sweetheart was well worth the wait. Oddly enough though, I have three Deflector Shield upgrades - a Sigma, a Tau and a Theta, yet they all have a number 1 in them. Don't know what the story is there.

I saw my first 48-slotter today for a cool 74.5 million units.

[smg id=9063 align=center width=600]

But I think 40 slots will be plenty. I also now have 36 slots in my suit, so I should be okay for inventory space, I think. Anyway, I don't want to part with this gem of a ship.

I also just picked up a 19-slot Multitool, but I haven't planned out or crafted the upgrades yet. That's the next job on the list.

So I should be ready to deal with the pirates when the time comes to jump (the ship also has eight hit points). I haven't finished exploring this system yet and I want to pick up more Korvax words and try to get some more blueprints, such as Hyperdrive upgrade and the ones that let you create your own Suspension Fluid and Antimatter for Warp Cell crafting (I haven't come across those ones yet - I got them fairly early in the first game).