Some of them just hang out in their outposts, some of them band together a bit more and get risky and assault major settlements and such. It's something that's occured hundreds of times throughout our recorded history with warlords and all sorts of other similar setups. Sometimes the "frontier" is just a bunch of unaligned "others", sometimes a strong leader emerges and unites parts of that frontier and does some actual damage.
Like, grab Sam off my ship and go start some crap at that factory over there on the horizon?
Maybe the UC is supposed to have issues, but they're done a pretty not great job of depicting it in game. The Devs themselves have said the UC is the "Ideal Republic" and NPCs in-universe seem to have a pretty high opinion of it, even Sam begrudgingly admits the UC is a pretty nice place to live.
The FC seems really nice and I struggle to see any meaningful difference between them and the UC apart from fashion sense.
Neon is about the only place that does seem pretty obviously not great for regular people to live. In fact Neon has more character than the UC and FC combined. You can tell where all the Dev's love and labor went.
I hate Spacers as a faction because they are essentially pirates but there is already a Pirate faction, what the fuck. You shouldn't see Spacers outside of salvage sites.
The United Colonies represents an idealized version of the "space republic" and with that it has the flaws/contrasts common in all of them. The UC has "The Well" in their very capital as a prime example of it having issues; there's a few quests that show the disparity there. High rent and barely staying afloat leading to being really good at crime is a backstory for one quest NPC... then of course there is the citizenship disparity. The life of the people on Mars would be another example of the issues the UC has too. It's better than the FC in that at least there's welfare and social services.
Neon is a part of the Freestar Collective. Hopetown is very much a slave camp/cult built around Ron Hope. Akila City has one guy trying to build houses for people, and a lady that walks around donating to the homeless/destitute people in its skid row. The FC is also insular toward migrants, many of whom also wind up in that area.
And yeah, if you're not a part of the factions you are effectively a Spacer since it's a catch-all name for everybody not in a faction that is committing crimes of some fashion.
tastydonuts on
“I used to draw, hard to admit that I used to draw...”
This thread has put more thought into rationalizing the spacers in-universe than anyone at Bethesda did.
I'm just describing actual quests and things that happen in game? It's not some deep read. The game says all of this -- they're generally unaffiliated lawless riffraff that sometimes group up to do bigger stuff.
Fiatil on
+5
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
Just started to delve into the mining/outpost stuff and... wow. What a total shitpile of game design. The game has about three times too many research/crafting/building materials and the basic Outpost structures are trash, so I'm stuck in what feels like an endless loop of daisy-chaining outposts to set up mining to only run out of a new material type and go set up that mining type and so on. And I'm just on the mineral shit, I haven't even looked at the organic stuff.
And there's basically no XP payout on this, so I'm spinning my wheels and getting nowhere character-wise. Really debating just dropping on a mod to give me a pile of everything because holy shit am I getting tired of either looking for a random merchant selling the right stuff or this absurd mining crap.
This thread has put more thought into rationalizing the spacers in-universe than anyone at Bethesda did.
I'm just describing actual quests and things that happen in game? It's not some deep read. The game says all of this -- they're generally unaffiliated lawless riffraff that sometimes group up to do bigger stuff.
I included screenshots of things too. A lot of it is there, if one looks. idk.
“I used to draw, hard to admit that I used to draw...”
Just started to delve into the mining/outpost stuff and... wow. What a total shitpile of game design. The game has about three times too many research/crafting/building materials and the basic Outpost structures are trash, so I'm stuck in what feels like an endless loop of daisy-chaining outposts to set up mining to only run out of a new material type and go set up that mining type and so on. And I'm just on the mineral shit, I haven't even looked at the organic stuff.
And there's basically no XP payout on this, so I'm spinning my wheels and getting nowhere character-wise. Really debating just dropping on a mod to give me a pile of everything because holy shit am I getting tired of either looking for a random merchant selling the right stuff or this absurd mining crap.
My understanding is some planets have wildly larger time dilation than others(e.g. Venus), so if you really want to use outposts to farm exp then you want to build an outpost on one of those planets and go full time chamber shenanigans to rack up exp quickly.
I’m assuming I can’t complete the Burden of Proof quest anymore since I took out the Crimson Fleet? Some areas I can never return since they were quest locked, but it’s still an active quest on my mission list.
I’m assuming I can’t complete the Burden of Proof quest anymore since I took out the Crimson Fleet? Some areas I can never return since they were quest locked, but it’s still an active quest on my mission list.
I think the only ones you can't ever get again are the ones on the Crimson Fleet station once you complete the quest line. Everything else including the ones at sites that the Crimson Fleet NPCs would send you to will be there to collect as long as you know where to go to get them.
This thread has put more thought into rationalizing the spacers in-universe than anyone at Bethesda did.
I'm reminded of how Fallout 4 mostly had a generic Raider enemy type while New Vegas specifically had Jackal, Viper, and Fiends as different raider factions. Plus a few other criminal groups that weren't exactly raiders.
Not to say there wasn't some story/lore with the Fallout 4 raider's. I did enjoy reading the journals inside some raider bases that made it apparent some groups worked with or against each other but you wouldn't know it from the generic enemy type.
But it all does go back to a weird dynamic of the setting feeling both not well settled at some times yet oddly populated at others.
Just started to delve into the mining/outpost stuff and... wow. What a total shitpile of game design. The game has about three times too many research/crafting/building materials and the basic Outpost structures are trash, so I'm stuck in what feels like an endless loop of daisy-chaining outposts to set up mining to only run out of a new material type and go set up that mining type and so on. And I'm just on the mineral shit, I haven't even looked at the organic stuff.
And there's basically no XP payout on this, so I'm spinning my wheels and getting nowhere character-wise. Really debating just dropping on a mod to give me a pile of everything because holy shit am I getting tired of either looking for a random merchant selling the right stuff or this absurd mining crap.
My understanding is some planets have wildly larger time dilation than others(e.g. Venus), so if you really want to use outposts to farm exp then you want to build an outpost on one of those planets and go full time chamber shenanigans to rack up exp quickly.
I just figured you'd get some amount of XP for building stuff that would accrue to something useful over time but if there's any at all from that, I'm not noticing.
And trying to make a supply chain with these tools is... fucking maddening. I can't see where things are linking, I can't name either of the two pads I have to use to daisy-chain this shit together, and the "items distributed" list only shows what is actively being carried which means a linked site might not have its materials included because they aren't being moved right now. The result being that if I drop a stitch and forget something or misconnect something, I'm kinda fucked. Oh, and of fucking course you can only manage the site links at the site you are physically at, so it's a constant mess of fast travel.
Right now I've got better than a dozen resources from half as many sites I'm trying to link up across four worlds and two systems. This should not be fucking hard and instead it's a total clusterfuck. I made one mistake and I'm going to have to go back, unlink everything, and basically draw up a diagram to connect everything properly.
These mechanics aren't even half-assed, they're fully 1/8th-assed.
Ninja Snarl P on
0
AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
I read posts like the above and realize the second I saw the "connect five outposts" achievement and the mine hundreds of rocks one, I knew I was happy with the time I put into Starfield and didn't feel like giving it any more.
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
edited September 18
Yeah, I just wasted like 6 hours today trying to make this stupid fucking transport system work and I'm done. When I feel like bothering with the game again, I'll throw on a mod for unlimited resources or something because I'm not even sure the supply chain system is actually even finished. This is either completely broken or amazingly and terribly obtuse.
The only fucking reason I wanted to bother with the system in the first place was so I could know I always have enough titanium without hunting around shops for it.
EDIT: Seriously, how fucking hard is it to design a transport system where I can move items from multiple sites to a single site without convoluted broken crap in between?
I think the main problem I'm having with the quests in Starfield is the lack of urgency... which may have been intentional as they didn't want to stress out the player having to juggle fifteen world-ending threats at the same time, but they've ended up with the opposite problem; there's not a whole lot motivating me to do one quest vs another. In the likes of Baldur's Gate for example there are a lot of quests that feel like they're time-sensitive even if they're not, and you're juggling "Get the evil brain parasite out of my head before I turn into an abomination" vs "Karlach's heart is going to literally explode if we don't get her this macguffin" vs "the druids are going to kick these refugees out and they'll probably all die unless you deal with the goblins" and they all seem important. Whereas in Starfield its "my shipment didn't come in, can you go check on it" vs "go here and talk to this person" vs "I want some books that aren't dickens".
I'm lead to understand that there's a twist coming up if you follow the main story missions, but if that's where things pick up then they really really should have put it earlier in the chain because so far I've done the same "fly to planet, kill some dudes, get space macguffin and return" half a dozen times and there's no sense that anything is actually progressing there.
Yeah, I just wasted like 6 hours today trying to make this stupid fucking transport system work and I'm done. When I feel like bothering with the game again, I'll throw on a mod for unlimited resources or something because I'm not even sure the supply chain system is actually even finished. This is either completely broken or amazingly and terribly obtuse.
The only fucking reason I wanted to bother with the system in the first place was so I could know I always have enough titanium without hunting around shops for it.
EDIT: Seriously, how fucking hard is it to design a transport system where I can move items from multiple sites to a single site without convoluted broken crap in between?
Yeah apparently they couldn't manage to implement any of a number of possible solutions for how to allow One to Many connections and instead just went fuck it, and also let's add a skill based maximum to how many cargo links you can have in one base.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
IDK, I looked at the outpost stuff and basically concluded that it was boring and not for me and have been largely ignoring it. I think I want to make a landing pad for the build part variety... but other than that, eh.
As I understood the links, containers furthest from the source would fill up first or something, then the others?
“I used to draw, hard to admit that I used to draw...”
0
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
IDK, I looked at the outpost stuff and basically concluded that it was boring and not for me and have been largely ignoring it. I think I want to make a landing pad for the build part variety... but other than that, eh.
As I understood the links, containers furthest from the source would fill up first or something, then the others?
I should add that I've got hundreds of hours in Factorio, Satisfactory, and Dyson Sphere, plus over a decade in Dwarf Fortress. I like the puzzle aspect of setting up supply chains and whatnot, investing some time now to save a shitload of time later. And complex supply chains do not intimidate me at all.
But what's in Starfield is just a broken piece of shit. Whatever magical arrangement you're supposed to use to move multiple things from multiple sites to one site atuomatically was just not something I could figure out.
IDK, I looked at the outpost stuff and basically concluded that it was boring and not for me and have been largely ignoring it. I think I want to make a landing pad for the build part variety... but other than that, eh.
As I understood the links, containers furthest from the source would fill up first or something, then the others?
This may be true but also if you’re not crafting the loot system is abysmal because comparing individual weapons to another is a terrible system.
Sure it’s true you have rubrics for weapon names and qualities. But the modifications matter a whole lot and you cannot tell until you get into the weeds if a weapon works for you.
0
MortiousThe Nightmare BeginsMove to New ZealandRegistered Userregular
Is the cutter the only mining weapon? Some resource nodes on planets can't be harvested with it. I thought maybe that's just where you place extractors for outposts, but I see these same nodes in caves that can't be mined.
There are resource nodes you have to loot directly
Interesting... you know how when you modify a ship all the random clutter gets deleted and moved to your cargo hold? Well... mine seems to have re-populated itself somehow. Which is great, because it looks a lot more homey with the random clutter, I'm just not sure how or why it did that. Do NPCs spawn the junk over time I wonder?
Interesting... you know how when you modify a ship all the random clutter gets deleted and moved to your cargo hold? Well... mine seems to have re-populated itself somehow. Which is great, because it looks a lot more homey with the random clutter, I'm just not sure how or why it did that. Do NPCs spawn the junk over time I wonder?
It always respawns eventually. Every time. So you will end up with just multiples copies of all that junk clogging up your cargo hold.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
+1
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
Interesting... you know how when you modify a ship all the random clutter gets deleted and moved to your cargo hold? Well... mine seems to have re-populated itself somehow. Which is great, because it looks a lot more homey with the random clutter, I'm just not sure how or why it did that. Do NPCs spawn the junk over time I wonder?
From what I can tell, the various habs auto-generate clutter for atmosphere and when you change stuff around in the editor, all the clutter gets shoved into storage and the habs repopulated with new clutter. And when you change ships, the clutter of the old ship gets dumped into the cargo of the new ship, plus you keep any clutter you had in inventory.
It's a pretty fucking obnoxious design oversight because after a little while you'll have absolute shitloads of genuine junk taking up a fat chunk of cargo space and have to manually jettison or sell all of it, one item at a time.
Interesting... you know how when you modify a ship all the random clutter gets deleted and moved to your cargo hold? Well... mine seems to have re-populated itself somehow. Which is great, because it looks a lot more homey with the random clutter, I'm just not sure how or why it did that. Do NPCs spawn the junk over time I wonder?
From what I can tell, the various habs auto-generate clutter for atmosphere and when you change stuff around in the editor, all the clutter gets shoved into storage and the habs repopulated with new clutter. And when you change ships, the clutter of the old ship gets dumped into the cargo of the new ship, plus you keep any clutter you had in inventory.
It's a pretty fucking obnoxious design oversight because after a little while you'll have absolute shitloads of genuine junk taking up a fat chunk of cargo space and have to manually jettison or sell all of it, one item at a time.
StarUI adds an option to sell all of a category which helps a lot. Like... it is seriously worth it to get a mod manager set up and grab some of the quality of life mods because they make the game actually kind of tolerable.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
Interesting... you know how when you modify a ship all the random clutter gets deleted and moved to your cargo hold? Well... mine seems to have re-populated itself somehow. Which is great, because it looks a lot more homey with the random clutter, I'm just not sure how or why it did that. Do NPCs spawn the junk over time I wonder?
From what I can tell, the various habs auto-generate clutter for atmosphere and when you change stuff around in the editor, all the clutter gets shoved into storage and the habs repopulated with new clutter. And when you change ships, the clutter of the old ship gets dumped into the cargo of the new ship, plus you keep any clutter you had in inventory.
It's a pretty fucking obnoxious design oversight because after a little while you'll have absolute shitloads of genuine junk taking up a fat chunk of cargo space and have to manually jettison or sell all of it, one item at a time.
StarUI adds an option to sell all of a category which helps a lot. Like... it is seriously worth it to get a mod manager set up and grab some of the quality of life mods because they make the game actually kind of tolerable.
Just remember to check that you didn't sell all your digipicks when selling all that misc junk.
Interesting... you know how when you modify a ship all the random clutter gets deleted and moved to your cargo hold? Well... mine seems to have re-populated itself somehow. Which is great, because it looks a lot more homey with the random clutter, I'm just not sure how or why it did that. Do NPCs spawn the junk over time I wonder?
From what I can tell, the various habs auto-generate clutter for atmosphere and when you change stuff around in the editor, all the clutter gets shoved into storage and the habs repopulated with new clutter. And when you change ships, the clutter of the old ship gets dumped into the cargo of the new ship, plus you keep any clutter you had in inventory.
It's a pretty fucking obnoxious design oversight because after a little while you'll have absolute shitloads of genuine junk taking up a fat chunk of cargo space and have to manually jettison or sell all of it, one item at a time.
Once the hab is instanced, there's no way for the game to know if that decorative junk was originally there or if it was something the player deliberately placed in the hab later. It's not a design oversight, it does it to avoid deleting player items. Just look at it as free credits at the next vendor you visit.
IDK, I looked at the outpost stuff and basically concluded that it was boring and not for me and have been largely ignoring it. I think I want to make a landing pad for the build part variety... but other than that, eh.
As I understood the links, containers furthest from the source would fill up first or something, then the others?
I should add that I've got hundreds of hours in Factorio, Satisfactory, and Dyson Sphere, plus over a decade in Dwarf Fortress. I like the puzzle aspect of setting up supply chains and whatnot, investing some time now to save a shitload of time later. And complex supply chains do not intimidate me at all.
But what's in Starfield is just a broken piece of shit. Whatever magical arrangement you're supposed to use to move multiple things from multiple sites to one site atuomatically was just not something I could figure out.
The outpost links are straightforward, anything you shove into the outbound storage will arrive in the inbound storage on the other end and vice versa. And the unskilled limit of 3 cargo links per outpost means you want to try to form a branching tree structure to feed a root hub outpost by having 1 "outgoing" link at the outermost leaves, 2 "incoming" links and 1 "outgoing" link at the intermediate branches, and 3 "incoming" links at the root. But cargo links are also fundamentally broken in 2 ways. There is no way to filter output links by resource so you cannot properly separate storage. And there is no storage quotas per resource on the cargo link containers. You could work around the crippling 1-to-1 link limitation if you could properly filter/quota resources those links carried. But as is, trying to ship more than 1 resource over a link will eventually cause it to stall as the link storage will fill up with the less used resources, blocking shipments of the more used resources.
I suggest renaming your outposts (at the beacon) for what resource they are generating. For example "Fe Al Be" or "He3 Cu". Makes it easier to identify in the link setup page even if the link's outbound container is empty or partially full so isn't listing its resources currently.
SiliconStew on
Just remember that half the people you meet are below average intelligence.
The fact that the Spacers, who are supposedly not actually like, an organized faction, are stronger than either of the actual countries continues to really kill my suspension of disbelief.
I mean, they frequently have a nook on planets with no atmosphere where they have a chair and a crate of beer bottles.
They apparently just lift their visor and chug beer or something.
The fact that the Spacers, who are supposedly not actually like, an organized faction, are stronger than either of the actual countries continues to really kill my suspension of disbelief.
I mean, they frequently have a nook on planets with no atmosphere where they have a chair and a crate of beer bottles.
They apparently just lift their visor and chug beer or something.
Emergency Induction Port
Just remember that half the people you meet are below average intelligence.
Well, after complaining that it didn't feel like there were any stakes to the missions I was doing, I finally found some in the UC Vanguard mission chain. Yes! Good! More like this please!
It's pretty funny that sleep time is measured in local time and even says so on the sleep dialog. So when you take a 1 hour nap on Bessel 3-b, you actually sleep for 2.5 days in UT / human time. That's quite a nap
The hold to equip option for weapons and armor out loose on tables and stuff makes it impossible to manually place them in the world like other objects you can hold-to-grab with your interact key binding. Unless there's an alternate way to grab stuff on mouse/keyboard that you can't do on controller.
Interesting... you know how when you modify a ship all the random clutter gets deleted and moved to your cargo hold? Well... mine seems to have re-populated itself somehow. Which is great, because it looks a lot more homey with the random clutter, I'm just not sure how or why it did that. Do NPCs spawn the junk over time I wonder?
From what I can tell, the various habs auto-generate clutter for atmosphere and when you change stuff around in the editor, all the clutter gets shoved into storage and the habs repopulated with new clutter. And when you change ships, the clutter of the old ship gets dumped into the cargo of the new ship, plus you keep any clutter you had in inventory.
It's a pretty fucking obnoxious design oversight because after a little while you'll have absolute shitloads of genuine junk taking up a fat chunk of cargo space and have to manually jettison or sell all of it, one item at a time.
StarUI adds an option to sell all of a category which helps a lot. Like... it is seriously worth it to get a mod manager set up and grab some of the quality of life mods because they make the game actually kind of tolerable.
Just remember to check that you didn't sell all your digipicks when selling all that misc junk.
StarUI excludes those specifically when you sell all in the misc. category! It's pretty fantastic.
On the outposts/crafting stuff....I feel like outposts are largely optional? I'm planning on delving into them more today and tomorrow, but I've been crafting a ton with 0 outposts. I'm in NG+ and was using a custom modded to hell gun pre NG+, and am using another custom modded to hell gun in NG+, which I crafted within the first hour or two of the new run.
It definitely doesn't feel like you need outposts to engage with the crafting at a decent enough level, if that's the concern. You can get rich off of them and get lots of XP and stuff, but I have basically all of the mods I need for all of my equipment by just looting stuff and buying it from vendors.
On the outposts bit, I have 4. One that has He3 and Iron at one site. One for just aluminum. And one for Chlorosilanes. The aluminum one has a cargo link to the Iron/He3 one, with about 2 dozen solid and liquid containers built and linked. The Chlorosilanes one I didn't bother, after not too long it had produced over 200 which is more than I need for weapon mods. If I need more I just stop by.
The Iron and Aluminum quantity is absurd, I have over 2k of each. And by using the containers, they link with the outpost building inventory at that outpost. So my ship isn't chock full of junk, its all in bulk storage on the ground. And I just build everything at the "main" outpost and it takes the materials from my storage habs. The main one now has multiple habs with mannequins, storage, work benches (useless now that I have a Narwhal) watchtowers, a landing pad with shipbuilder, cargo ships flying in and out all the time, just lots of activity happening.
I think where people get turned around is they don't make one big central outpost and then feed it with small satellite bases. Or they don't realize the base is smart enough to use the materials in its storage habs instead of just your cargo hold.
Like this took less than an hour to set up? And I never have had to worry about any of the listed materials again, 50+ hours in. For the copper, titanium, etc, I've typically had enough from world drop stuff and if I didn't I just went and bought a few stacks from either JM or the materials vendor in Akila.
On the ship bit, I don't use the set course menu. I point my ship to what fast travel point I'm going to for my current mission (or planet I'm landing on) click it, select go, it plays a space animation (either flying normally or grav jump) then loading screen and I fly in. Its still not perfect because you have the screen in-between, but if all you're doing is using the menus that's a choice. You CAN do it from your cockpit, in game. Could it be better? Sure. But saying the only way to do is via menu isn't true, by my experience.
The way to execute that would've been to allow the menu (or table) starmap to be used only to set a destination, then make you go back to space and select the star. Would've cut back a lot of the complaints, I think.
I figured out one of the major issues I have with the travel system. Previously you could not fast travel places you hadn't visited. Skyrim you have carriages but that's fairly limited in destinations. So to go to a new quest objective you had to walk. And you could have encounters on the road or stumble across a cool looking building. Here even when going to a new planet you fast travel to within 500 meters of the objective and walk through mostly empty terrain to get there. It won't let you jump through systems you haven't visited, but the space encounters are just not a sufficient replacement. It's just pirate ambushes, literally nothing, random NPC ships that want ship parts, and radio messages about possible quests. And it's only ever once per system at most.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
Posts
"Live free; don't join"
I mean (emphasis mine)....
Like, grab Sam off my ship and go start some crap at that factory over there on the horizon?
Twitch: akThera
Steam: Thera
The United Colonies represents an idealized version of the "space republic" and with that it has the flaws/contrasts common in all of them. The UC has "The Well" in their very capital as a prime example of it having issues; there's a few quests that show the disparity there. High rent and barely staying afloat leading to being really good at crime is a backstory for one quest NPC... then of course there is the citizenship disparity. The life of the people on Mars would be another example of the issues the UC has too. It's better than the FC in that at least there's welfare and social services.
Neon is a part of the Freestar Collective. Hopetown is very much a slave camp/cult built around Ron Hope. Akila City has one guy trying to build houses for people, and a lady that walks around donating to the homeless/destitute people in its skid row. The FC is also insular toward migrants, many of whom also wind up in that area.
And yeah, if you're not a part of the factions you are effectively a Spacer since it's a catch-all name for everybody not in a faction that is committing crimes of some fashion.
I'm just describing actual quests and things that happen in game? It's not some deep read. The game says all of this -- they're generally unaffiliated lawless riffraff that sometimes group up to do bigger stuff.
And there's basically no XP payout on this, so I'm spinning my wheels and getting nowhere character-wise. Really debating just dropping on a mod to give me a pile of everything because holy shit am I getting tired of either looking for a random merchant selling the right stuff or this absurd mining crap.
I included screenshots of things too. A lot of it is there, if one looks. idk.
My understanding is some planets have wildly larger time dilation than others(e.g. Venus), so if you really want to use outposts to farm exp then you want to build an outpost on one of those planets and go full time chamber shenanigans to rack up exp quickly.
I'm reminded of how Fallout 4 mostly had a generic Raider enemy type while New Vegas specifically had Jackal, Viper, and Fiends as different raider factions. Plus a few other criminal groups that weren't exactly raiders.
Not to say there wasn't some story/lore with the Fallout 4 raider's. I did enjoy reading the journals inside some raider bases that made it apparent some groups worked with or against each other but you wouldn't know it from the generic enemy type.
But it all does go back to a weird dynamic of the setting feeling both not well settled at some times yet oddly populated at others.
Steam Profile
3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
I just figured you'd get some amount of XP for building stuff that would accrue to something useful over time but if there's any at all from that, I'm not noticing.
And trying to make a supply chain with these tools is... fucking maddening. I can't see where things are linking, I can't name either of the two pads I have to use to daisy-chain this shit together, and the "items distributed" list only shows what is actively being carried which means a linked site might not have its materials included because they aren't being moved right now. The result being that if I drop a stitch and forget something or misconnect something, I'm kinda fucked. Oh, and of fucking course you can only manage the site links at the site you are physically at, so it's a constant mess of fast travel.
Right now I've got better than a dozen resources from half as many sites I'm trying to link up across four worlds and two systems. This should not be fucking hard and instead it's a total clusterfuck. I made one mistake and I'm going to have to go back, unlink everything, and basically draw up a diagram to connect everything properly.
These mechanics aren't even half-assed, they're fully 1/8th-assed.
The only fucking reason I wanted to bother with the system in the first place was so I could know I always have enough titanium without hunting around shops for it.
EDIT: Seriously, how fucking hard is it to design a transport system where I can move items from multiple sites to a single site without convoluted broken crap in between?
I'm lead to understand that there's a twist coming up if you follow the main story missions, but if that's where things pick up then they really really should have put it earlier in the chain because so far I've done the same "fly to planet, kill some dudes, get space macguffin and return" half a dozen times and there's no sense that anything is actually progressing there.
Yeah apparently they couldn't manage to implement any of a number of possible solutions for how to allow One to Many connections and instead just went fuck it, and also let's add a skill based maximum to how many cargo links you can have in one base.
As I understood the links, containers furthest from the source would fill up first or something, then the others?
I should add that I've got hundreds of hours in Factorio, Satisfactory, and Dyson Sphere, plus over a decade in Dwarf Fortress. I like the puzzle aspect of setting up supply chains and whatnot, investing some time now to save a shitload of time later. And complex supply chains do not intimidate me at all.
But what's in Starfield is just a broken piece of shit. Whatever magical arrangement you're supposed to use to move multiple things from multiple sites to one site atuomatically was just not something I could figure out.
This may be true but also if you’re not crafting the loot system is abysmal because comparing individual weapons to another is a terrible system.
Sure it’s true you have rubrics for weapon names and qualities. But the modifications matter a whole lot and you cannot tell until you get into the weeds if a weapon works for you.
There are resource nodes you have to loot directly
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
It always respawns eventually. Every time. So you will end up with just multiples copies of all that junk clogging up your cargo hold.
From what I can tell, the various habs auto-generate clutter for atmosphere and when you change stuff around in the editor, all the clutter gets shoved into storage and the habs repopulated with new clutter. And when you change ships, the clutter of the old ship gets dumped into the cargo of the new ship, plus you keep any clutter you had in inventory.
It's a pretty fucking obnoxious design oversight because after a little while you'll have absolute shitloads of genuine junk taking up a fat chunk of cargo space and have to manually jettison or sell all of it, one item at a time.
StarUI adds an option to sell all of a category which helps a lot. Like... it is seriously worth it to get a mod manager set up and grab some of the quality of life mods because they make the game actually kind of tolerable.
Just remember to check that you didn't sell all your digipicks when selling all that misc junk.
It's in the Frontier above the bed.
Turns out churning out resources and crafting loads of magnets good quick way for XP once you get set up.
Once the hab is instanced, there's no way for the game to know if that decorative junk was originally there or if it was something the player deliberately placed in the hab later. It's not a design oversight, it does it to avoid deleting player items. Just look at it as free credits at the next vendor you visit.
The outpost links are straightforward, anything you shove into the outbound storage will arrive in the inbound storage on the other end and vice versa. And the unskilled limit of 3 cargo links per outpost means you want to try to form a branching tree structure to feed a root hub outpost by having 1 "outgoing" link at the outermost leaves, 2 "incoming" links and 1 "outgoing" link at the intermediate branches, and 3 "incoming" links at the root. But cargo links are also fundamentally broken in 2 ways. There is no way to filter output links by resource so you cannot properly separate storage. And there is no storage quotas per resource on the cargo link containers. You could work around the crippling 1-to-1 link limitation if you could properly filter/quota resources those links carried. But as is, trying to ship more than 1 resource over a link will eventually cause it to stall as the link storage will fill up with the less used resources, blocking shipments of the more used resources.
I suggest renaming your outposts (at the beacon) for what resource they are generating. For example "Fe Al Be" or "He3 Cu". Makes it easier to identify in the link setup page even if the link's outbound container is empty or partially full so isn't listing its resources currently.
I mean, they frequently have a nook on planets with no atmosphere where they have a chair and a crate of beer bottles.
They apparently just lift their visor and chug beer or something.
Emergency Induction Port
StarUI excludes those specifically when you sell all in the misc. category! It's pretty fantastic.
On the outposts/crafting stuff....I feel like outposts are largely optional? I'm planning on delving into them more today and tomorrow, but I've been crafting a ton with 0 outposts. I'm in NG+ and was using a custom modded to hell gun pre NG+, and am using another custom modded to hell gun in NG+, which I crafted within the first hour or two of the new run.
It definitely doesn't feel like you need outposts to engage with the crafting at a decent enough level, if that's the concern. You can get rich off of them and get lots of XP and stuff, but I have basically all of the mods I need for all of my equipment by just looting stuff and buying it from vendors.
The Iron and Aluminum quantity is absurd, I have over 2k of each. And by using the containers, they link with the outpost building inventory at that outpost. So my ship isn't chock full of junk, its all in bulk storage on the ground. And I just build everything at the "main" outpost and it takes the materials from my storage habs. The main one now has multiple habs with mannequins, storage, work benches (useless now that I have a Narwhal) watchtowers, a landing pad with shipbuilder, cargo ships flying in and out all the time, just lots of activity happening.
I think where people get turned around is they don't make one big central outpost and then feed it with small satellite bases. Or they don't realize the base is smart enough to use the materials in its storage habs instead of just your cargo hold.
Like this took less than an hour to set up? And I never have had to worry about any of the listed materials again, 50+ hours in. For the copper, titanium, etc, I've typically had enough from world drop stuff and if I didn't I just went and bought a few stacks from either JM or the materials vendor in Akila.
On the ship bit, I don't use the set course menu. I point my ship to what fast travel point I'm going to for my current mission (or planet I'm landing on) click it, select go, it plays a space animation (either flying normally or grav jump) then loading screen and I fly in. Its still not perfect because you have the screen in-between, but if all you're doing is using the menus that's a choice. You CAN do it from your cockpit, in game. Could it be better? Sure. But saying the only way to do is via menu isn't true, by my experience.