Starfield

I just think it’s a neat little addition that gives you that, “ahhhhhhhhh, I remember that!” feeling.

No spoilers, but man, did it just seem to drag on and on or was it just me?

Here I thought it was going to be a fun little one-off... go to the kiosk, send in a job application... this might be good for a laugh... then it just... never... ends...

I'm glad I got the operative level, but jeeze louise, the mission board quests afterwards are more interesting than doing the questline.

Starting my 3rd playthrough, I felt like it was time to do something completely different. Everyone has their own head cannon, but I was struggling to envision a life path that had me joining Constellation, doing assorted heroic and adventurous things, and then becoming a corporate spy. For that reason, I’ve yet to do the Ryujin faction quests. At least for me, the opposite path, from street rat, to spy, to adventurer, made a lot more sense. So anyway.

In order to make that happen, I decided I wanted to try a non-Constellation start. I’ll get there, eventually, but not immediately. I thought others might want to consider this path so I’ll share how it went for me.

I started the playthrough like normal, all the way up to the initial dialog with Sarah. She’ll invite you to join Constellation, but you have a “not ready for that” dialog option. She’ll understand and offer you a place to stay while you mull it over. At this point, I just left. I had returned their ship, handed them their weird alien doodad, and gotten paid. I did not see the need to join their fancy clubhouse. For RP purposes, from this point forward, I did not return to The Lodge or use the Frontier. Those choices have some costs associated with them. For starters, I no longer had an infinite storage box for my resources, so I sold pretty much all of those. I also didn’t have a place to sleep, so I used a sleeping bag I found in The Well, on the upper level across from Jake's. Most importantly, I had no way off the planet.

Job one, then, way to buy my own ride because, for me, The Frontier did not exist. A base model Rambler, the VW Bus of starships, costs around 57k credits. If that sounds like a lot for a starting character, it is, but it’s not unsurmountable. To get the money for that, you want to have hoarded as much as you could possibly carry from the first pirate attack and the Kreet excursion. I wish I had hoarded more.

Next you are going to want to do every single New Atlantis side quest you can. Some of them are off-planet, and some (like the UC guard contraband one) are locked behind inaccessible quests. This will get you tantalizingly close, but you’ll still be maybe 12k away.

Take two levels of Commerce to knock 10% off the price of the Rambler and now you’re within spittin’ distance. From here, you can try a little larceny, but there isn’t much to steal lying around New Atlantis. I made it up by jumping the walls and exploring the surrounding area. Sadly, while there are things to see and do, I didn’t find any pirate compounds or Spacer groups to take out and loot. And, while the planet is settled, the fauna are still deadly to a low-level character. Worse, they use up irreplaceable bullets to kill them. In one rather unexpected encounter, I ran into a freakin’ terrormorph fighting it out with some Va’ruun Heretics. I thought I’d wipe them all and loot their corpses, but it ended up costing almost all of my ammo to finish off the terrormorph, and the heretics had nowhere near enough to make up for the loss. Lesson learned: avoid the wildlife. The juice ain’t worth the squeeze.

I was also accosted by a squad of Ecliptic looking for me due to my “Hunted” trait. They had a lot of good loot on them, and that really helped. Sadly, for whatever reason, I couldn’t steal their ship, which would have been a nice shortcut.

I finished off the last few credits just collecting resources outside the walls and getting that second level of Commerce. I was able to buy my Rambler in just under 5 hours of game time. I was 8th level and lifted off the planet with about 2500 credits and 200 rounds of assorted ammunition. If I had anything to do over again, I would have hoarded more on Kreet and I would have completely avoided the terrormorph (as most people would).

So now, I’m free to explore the galaxy on my own terms. I’ll have to keep my inventory low until I build an outpost or go back to Constellation. My selection of companions is also drastically gimped, but manageable. I’m looking forward to this. I think it’s going to be an interesting run.

Am I better off carrying one melee weapon or investing in stagger resistance perks to fight off melee attackers? As it stands, I often have to either shoot melee attackers before they reach me or beat them back with a Va’Ruun Painblade because they probably won’t give me enough time to reload my shotgun.

Pretty much just the title. If you "unequipall" on the "Citizen" NPCs, it removes their human skin clothes and reveals that they're actually all identical.

The entire population is made of clones of a single black man and woman.

I'm currently on NG+8 (at 120 hours played) I think and it's funny how i'm becoming like the other starborn just rushing all the artifacts and not caring about anything. I could probably do it in two hours per but I do get distracted.

Currently level 75-ish (can't remember exactly) and I do get sucked into at least upgrading weapons, and in the Starborn Guardian the final space battle can be rough so I also end up getting the Razorleaf and working on getting it to C class stuff. But realy the upgraded weapons aren't necessary, can usually find a good-enough weapon getting the artifacts.

But the artifact chase means there's no point in building anything as it'll just be gone. Sometimes I think I'll chill on this run, but then i've gotten all the artifacts and it's close enough to finishing one more time that I eventually just go for it.

I've become just like the other starborn - building relationships is pointless, interacting with merchants is annoying. Phased Time VII is godlike - these stupid mortals need to get out of my way.

Behold, my new ship, built completely from scratch, designed to rival arguably the best default ship in the game (you could get the latter as a quest reward), but almost entirely using Nova Galactic parts. …Granted, it’s not nearly done yet, because it needs a buttload more engines, more weapons, and everything needs to be upgraded. But it’s got a bunch of amenities and about as much cargo as the aforementioned quest reward ship!

Note: Since taking this photo, I replaced the White Dwarf engine with another Supernova engine.

I am not far enough in to have some real QOL thoughts. so if the below is in the game but I haven’t gotten there yet…my bad!

I spend a lot of time in inventory mgmt.

some nice to haves, to start:

• consume item along with pick up (game changer for food)
• split food from medicine, eat all button
• split magazines from notes; can we get a bookshelf? A
• places that I have visited should have a vendor $ amt based on the vendors I have visited.
• I should be able to fast travel to key POI - my homes, outposts, vendors, lodges, etc from some sort of grid view with sorting (including $$$)
• location variants — seems like a biggy
• trenchcoats (for hiding my shotty from the po po) & capes (for my crimson drip). I love the poncho & farm hat, very very nice.
• shoe cosmetics (we see slippers…) - how about a Mikey Dunx shoe designer?
• A more fine tuned method to place clutter, both in and out of base mode; lockers, fridges & desks should auto stack instead of “toss the orange…oops”
• an option to keep ship clutter, demotivating to clutter a ship then…poof
• ship hab door placement but I get why there is an autopather…
• …how about a walk ship mode in ship builder to change hab door placement?
• Resource cargo that stays in a specific ship.
• NPC feet on coffee table animation; NPC bathroom usage?
• basic ammo manufacturing in an outpost
• an aliens style radar sweep BECAUSE why not
• my watch should have some craftable bitz, like a communicator for talking to my peeps back on the ship, or they can tell me what their ship scanners are picking up. Maybe as a drone controller, other cool stuff.

There is a ton in this game and I feel guilty, so much is done so well. The above are relatively minor — I imagine things to do over QOL in DLC.

However a few seem like low hanging fruit….

I haven’t seen this with any other characters (lvl 46), but Sam Coe does this all the time. It’s so very creepy.

I'm further along in the game and have an outpost set up where I can easily dump resources, along with production from other places providing all kinds of resources.

Thing is, what was I supposed to do with it all? I started making quite the tower of solid storage along with a good amount of resources, but 6 stories later, I shut down my mine and disabled the resources coming in from other planets because I got tired of trying to keep up with the intake. I still have more than I know what to do with and even if I start automated production of components, what do I do with that?

Am I missing something?

I mainly just want to dump all the resources from my ship and have most of the stuff when I'm building something (which I do).

Resource drop-off had been sketchy lately. It works sometimes, sometimes not (stuck in the output hopper). Any advice on that would be fantastic.

Couldn't be bothered to spend the time to sell them

I'm in my first NG+ run. I've skipped the story, thinking it makes sense to grind out the temples first until you've maxed your powers and equipment but after finding 14 temples Vlad does not give me any new locations anymore and there's still 10 of the powers at level 1. I found a planet that has anomalies, but no temple quest triggered there either. So, can you only upgrade a limited amount of powers per run? If there's only about 14 temples per run, then I would need almost twice as many runs than the ones needed to get the last armor, no?

Or is this just bugged and I'm basically stuck on that save?

Edit: Bigot mods love to censor me I guess.

That ain't no way to treat a single malt.

At this point I’m ok with finding a stupid cheese for this. I’m so over this.

I sided with UC, got past the 3 batteries, and am now duking it out over the Key. I’ve taken out the turrets, but the ship keep shredding me.

Had I known this battle would be such a massive jump in difficulty, I would’ve grinded longer to go into the battle with a better ship and better flight skills.

Any tips on how to get past this? I’m not having fun anymore 😔.

The spoiler warning is just a formality since I’m sure everyone knows about temples and what they hold within.

My particular issue with temples is that they’re just so simple and repetitive. They feel incomplete or as if they just peppered them in during late stages because they needed a way to explain powers. If you ask me they could have taken two routes.

ROUTE A:

They could have taken the Skyrim route. in Skyrim you’d head to a dungeon or cavern, fight some bandits, drugars, and the occasional dragon priest until you hit the end and- “Oh look. A shrine that holds a word of power!”

They could have had temples with winding paths and waves of starborn trying to stop me and then in the center I’d do the puzzle and get the power.

ROUTE B:

They could have just had the already implemented random encounters with landing starborn but add waves like they did in the ground pounder mission and a heavy boss enemy that, when killed, his essence is the one that contains the power.

Idk to me they could have been great, but they ended up “meh.”

I'm having some trouble with the challenges for Rank 2 Concealment, and for Rank 2 Boost Assault .

Cor concealment I have to make 30 sneak mellee/unarmed attack. Well, I just went through Ground Pounders and I mist have killed half the spacers there from stealth with a barrow knife, and I only have one kill credited.

Boost Assault is even worse. I'm supposed to knock down 20 enemies. I had the reinforcement squads in Ground Pounders all rolling on the ground from boosting at one point and my official count is still at zero?

Anyone have the same problem? Or am I misunderstanding the instructions?

I mean, like incompetent. For the record those organs I just stole? literally on the desk in front of him. Time to hike on over and sell it. To the Trade Authority.... all 20 feet away...

(this was in the UC security in the Well, new atlantis)

I've watched a lot of YouTube videos claiming to help gain fast XP, this is without doubt the best. I started out today as a 91, a few hours later I'm nearly 130.

Am I supposed to be getting a companion’s initial commitment conversation almost immediately after completing their personal quest and romancing them?

For context, I’ve been doing Sarah’s personal quest and the latter half of the Vanguard questline concurrently.

Immediately after I romanced her and then fast-travelled, I got the option to commit. Not that I mind, but I don’t know if the relationship moving that fast was intentional game design lol