Starfield

Not sure if this abandoned Reliant Medical Organics Lab is part of a quest as I came across it in the wild. But I rescued these four garden bots that were locked in a small closet, and now they follow me everywhere. So I guess Sarah and I have a family now, and this is my new home because I can't abandon them again. They keep making happy robot noises at me.

The sun came up as I was pondering the horizon and wondering what to do next. The day must be really short. I vanished into a structure to clear it of spacers, and when I came out it was the middle of the night again. I wasn't in there that long!

For my playthrough I chose

Neon Street Rat

It was nice to feel like I had a history somewhere. It doesn't come up a lot, but when it does it feels satisfying. Especially when questing on Neon. You feel street smart.

Wanted

Kind of mid on this one. I didn't run into a lot of space combat in my playthrough, so having these guys show up here and there was nice. The bit of story you get is ok but I wish there was more.

Parents

Absolutely fantastic, and it is going to be hard to skip on future playthroughs. Its a bit of a bummer they miss your wedding, but between all the free stuff and the unexpecting places you run into them it is 100% worth it.

You may or may not be aware that the perk for starship shields is currently bugged, and working in reverse. If it's supposed to add 20% to your shields, it is actually subtracting 20%. Kinda surprised this hasn't made the first wave of bug fixes.

The bug is (probably) applied when a modifier is added to you or ship. For some reason, the modifier makes a permanent change to your ship's base stats so that even if you remove your perk (via console), the permanently reduced base stat remains on the ship.

If you are on PC, there is a console fix for this. Well, more of as "workaround" than a "fix". This will probably blow your achievements, so be sure to have an achievements enabler installed.

First, go to space and make a save you can fall back on in case you make a mistake.

Next, remove the shield perk. This may not be absolutely necessary, but it makes it easier to keep the math straight. We'll be adding it back later:

player.removeperk 002C2C59

Because this is a leveled perk, you may have add\remove more than once to get the earned level.

While in space, go to 3rd person, hit "~" to activate console, select your ship, and type "getav ShieldMaxHealth". This will return the base value of your shields, to which your perks and your companion's perks are added. So, for my current ship, that number is 630. That is the amount of shields my ship should have with no perks at all.

Now, if you had the first level of the shields perk, and no companion perks, you could check your ship status and find that the shield value listed there is 504, 20% less than 630. (If not, you don't have a bug. Go back to your save.) What you can do is manually bump your base shield value up to some value where the system-applied debuff takes you back to where you need to be. So, again in my case, I took my base value and divided by .8 to get the amount to set as my new base:

630/.8 = @788

In the console, I enter:

setav ShieldMaxHealth 788

Now I check my ship status and the displayed shield strength should match the original base: @ 630.

Now, I add my perk back:

player.addperk 002C2C59

...and the value should bump up 20%.

Reassign my crew to the ship and it goes up even further. I think Vasco or Omari makes it go up another 20% or so (even though they theoretically have different skill levels).

You'll need to keep an eye on your shield status if you're going to use this perk, because while I'm not positive what the exact sequence of events is, further changes to your shields and\or your perk can cause the debuff to be re-applied, and you'll need to tweak your base again. You may also want to make a note of your original base or use an old save to make sure your math isn't getting out of whack

So, yeah, that's a long convoluted mess, but since I went through the effort to figure it out, I thought I might as well share it.

Jumped into a new system today, and a ship hailed me. They wanted me to get the data from a satellite. Only problem was that the satellite was surrounded by mines - the explosive sort, not the asteroid mining sort. And I wasn't allowed to just shoot the mines because any explosion would destroy the data.

I coasted in to about 600m and then, inevitably, BOOM! There was a groan from the other ship, and they jumped out.

Anyone got a better way to solve this than just "git gud"? The mines are tiny and it's hard to see where they are in relation to the ship, especially with a Guardian with the tall fins.

This annoyed me. You can boost pack all the way from your New Atlantis penthouse balcony to the New Atlantis star port. Off a skyscraper, travel for miles. It’s fantastic - everyone should do it. Really gives a sense of the scale and capability of the world and game. It does that better than any actual quest or cutscene… bit of a missed opportunity if you ask me.

So far I'm having a blast with the game. But the food, man...

What is the appeal of Chunks for people living in New Atlantis? Did the post-exodus humanity sign some kind of a Green Pact and decided to go full worms and lab-grown proteins? Isn't the appeal of a home cooked meal some of the most commonly told tales across all cultures? If UC prides itself as safeguard of humanity, then what their refugees could remember of earth's culinary history must also have been archived somewhere. What happened?

Yes, there's New Homestead. Yes, there are enterprises producing grain and synth-meat products. In-vitro meat technology should be incredibly sophisticated and economically viable by then. Even small scale traditional farming and butchering could be practiced in planets under FC jurisdiction. But why is Chunks everywhere then? Cost?

Yes, there are cooking stations in which you can craft custom dishes. But (probably a lore oversight) naming many of them "alien jerky" or "alien stew" tells me that humanity still hasn't accepted those new ingredients as "proper human diet" yet, compared to the "old earth ingredients".

Last time, I reverted a save, and MUCH later, the issue happened again.

But this time, I think I’ve noticed a common thread between these two instances of the bug cropping up.

The last time it happened, one of the things I did involved doing a survey quest on a random planet with life, with an active companion (one of the Constellation companions, in this case).

The second time, I was on a genetic sampling quest (not spoiling how you get that classification of quest) on another such planet with another Constellation companion.

I don’t know how much of this common thread could be causing this bug, but for those who’ve had to revert saves over it, I hope this revelation helps somehow, wether through general caution or further testing.

(Minor spoilers below for UC vanguard quests, mainly a person to speak to)

I posted a while back asking for advice on how to find starship battles easily. Got some good advice including mission tables and exploration, but I think I’ve finally found THE method.

After progressing far enough in the UC vanguard quest line, the original recruiter guy you talk to “Commander John Tuala” at the UC HQ will give you unlimited space combat missions and ONLY space combat missions with the option to take on UC vanguard work.

Each fight usually includes 2-3 easy enemies if you’re trying to level piloting or starship command. Often mission kiosk tasks will send you after only 1. (The sim is better for piloting, but you need something like this for starship command)

Hope this helps folks!

Dunno if my save is just borked and I’ll have to revert or what, but I can’t seem to find Barbacoa Wraps (and possibly other damage-reduction foods) in my inventory immediately after crafting it. If it helps, I’m currently on Sarah Morgan’s personal quest. I was a little further along, but I reverted to a prior save when I realized I might be a tad underleveled (and thus woefully undersupplied) for dealing with some of the enemies in this quest. (I just reached level 50). Thus, I’d need damage reduction food to survive the quest, but it’s problematic that it’s not showing up in my Aid tab.

Credits are explained to be a digital crypto currency in line with things like Bitcoin or Ethereum today. My question is where is my money stored? Is the whole thing stored in a digital wallet with Galbank, or is it in multiple wallets and I just carry around loads and loads of credsticks?

How do you pay for things in Starfield? Do creds work like debit cards where you use your card to transfer credits though some sort of device or do we somehow store these credsticks like coins? How would you know how many creds are in each stick?

My theory was that credsticks are given out by galbank for free in large amounts to represent a particular digital wallet so that ownership of the credstick means ownership of the wallet.

This for me raises questions about the credsticks you can collect during a specific main quest mission which is a spoiler.

That's just my thoughts on this. I haven't looked anything up so I might have missed something obvious. Let me know what you think

Hey, remember that mission in Mass Effect 3, I think.. Where you meet Tali and have to move from shadow to shadow to let the suit cool down between sun exposure? Or Chronicles of Riddick, where they had to get in cover before sunrise or get disintegrated by extreme sun radiation? Or Pitch Black, where some very aggressive animals came out at night? Jedi Knight Academy with its acid rain and having to cover under rocks while shield recovered?

I love Starfield so far, but the suit exposure and suit protection gone warning that barely have a consequence was a bit unimpressive. I was hoping for some kind of game mechanics to it. Instead I just dont care anymore, I just stay away from gas pockets and pop some medicine to fix random unavoidable afflictions as I go. Nobody cares if a suit has slightly less or more chance to get one affliction or the other. The beeping sound from suit protection is barely audible anyway (is there a problem with my sound?). And protection either last infinite or is gone within seconds. And doesnt seem to be related to actual temperature (or wind, or atmosphere).

I hope someone eventually mods in some cooler effects and consequences.

what are your weapons of choice?

So for some reason, I can’t pinpoint what causes this bug, but it seems like the quest log activity that normally appears when you board a hostile ship is no longer appearing, and that may be correlated with the fact that these ships somehow have no crew. Like, at all. No pirate crew, no captain, just an abandoned ship.

I’m concerned this could be a prelude to worse bugs, and others have seemingly experienced this bug, but also been unable to pinpoint the cause.

All I know is, most of what I’ve done prior to the bug becoming evident involved completing the quests “Exorcism” and “Peacemaker”, surveying several planets, and doing this with Sarah Morgan as my companion.