This week, we continue our space adventure by murdering a bunch of people. Among other things.
Okay, well, they are NPCs; I would not willingly initiate a PvP combat situation because knowing that I am doing harmful against another human being puts me off. I will not hesitate if it's in self-defence though. I am a vengeful person.
We returned to civilisation briefly to prepare our ships for collecting Guardian ... artifacts? I don't actually know how to categorise what we are collecting; it's like, downloading a file from an ancient USB that's stuck in concrete (kinda like this but very old, and the USB is a circle, and there are robots shooting at you).
Anyway, the Guardians were an ancient civilisation that had developed some technologies that are super effective against the aliens (Thargoids) that are currently invading the human colonised space. Apparently there's been this Guardian-Thargoid feud thousands of years ago, and for some reason the Guardians have disappeared but the Thargoids stuck around? I know there is a book (real life book tie-in) that talks about Thargoids but man I don't wanna read about them if I am just going to kill them, you know?
Speaking of killing. I bought a combat ship (like I said I would), put guns and lasers on it, and went out bounty huntin' with my friends. We went to an asteroid belt and looked for NPC ships that are scanning our ships - to check for valuable goods (pirate behaviour), or attacking the other NPC ships which are mining the asteroids to get them to drop their cargo. With 2 bigger, better equipped ships looking after my teeny little rat of a ship, there was not much danger. The benefit of having more guns! We made 13 million credits easily. I doubled my credit balance in one night.
Soon, one friend left and the other switched to a different ship. We were now 2 rat ships; my little rat ship with small pew pews and a slightly larger rat ship that packs a mean punch but heats up quickly (smh plasma). We went back to the asteroid belt to look for more fights. This time, things were a bit more tense; we had less DPS and short a tank. No healers either. At one point, we picked a fight with a team of 3 NPCs whose combat rating heavily outranked mine. A 3v2 but 1 of the 2 was me.
We took out their most damaged ship first, then my friend went for their leader while I danced with the other small ship. At one point, my ship systems shut down and I was breathing from my oxygen reserves. I didn't know what happened, I just saw the 4 minute 59 seconds countdown pop up on my screen. I couldn't move my ship, because my thrusters were shutdown. I panicked for real. I thought I was gonna die. I JUST bought this ship, and I'm playing with a friend. I can't afford to embarrass myself now.
My ship rebooted and I went straight back into unloading bullets and lasers into the other ship. They were flying my favourite ship btw. So I had extreme biases against this NPC. Once again I was sweating and shaking in my chair, death grip on my controller hard enough to take some screenshots by accident.
I also have a shit microphone (apple earbuds that has fabric tape over the volume adjust + microphone) so I probably tried to ask for help but there was a 60% chance that it did not get through. That's okay because to my friend I probably seemed either very cool and capable, or too scared to speak. Either way works because both were true simultaneously.
The ship shutdown because my power distributor module was shot to shit. Not enough power was going to the places I needed, so things had to reboot to try and fix itself. It was really scary though.
I managed to finish off the pesky NPC and went over to help my friend with the other ship. The fight ended quickly after. We made 5 million credits for our efforts, and I had to take a shower to wash away all that sweat on me before I went to bed.
Later in the week, we travelled to a Guardian structure and took out some keys that would unlock the the terminal we needed to scan. We get blueprints from scanning terminals, and hand it in amongst an assortment of resources to unlock whatever Guardian invention the blueprint is for. The process to getting the Guardian blueprints are as such:
After a bunch of grinding, I went to a nearby NPC-owned carrier for repairs and resupply. I docked on The Conduit, a civillian megaship that travels around in space, much like our own player-owned transport. If you docked here and forgot about this game for a little while, who knows where you'll end up? At least you'll have a bunch of NPCs to keep you company. The travel schedule is posted on the carrier's local news board.
The Conduit is equipped with rings that rotate to generate artificial gravity. The slightly green domes in the rings you see are probably 'parks', or as close as you can get to one in deep space, anyway.
Check out the gallery for some more space pics!
See you later o7
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2023