So I just got done with Expedition 5 the other day and while past expeditions took me ~4 to 4.5 hours total to complete the milestones….this one took triple the amount of time to complete at over 12 hours…but for the wrong reasons.

The first few milestones that took me a lot of time was finding the different eggs and the different milk. It took a LOT of time to hop back from system to system to find everything, even had to resort to coming here to this sub to backtrack to certain systems and whatnot, since I realized I didn’t get enough of some of the egg and milk types (I’ll admit, my bad). And to top it off, when I did finally finish this section, the base decals and posters weren’t showing up for me after I redeemed them on my main save, which gave me a bit of a scare that I went through all that cooking for nothing. But thankfully, this bug has been fixed as of the latest build pushed out today. (Thanks HG! :D)

But the eggs and the milk were absolutely nothing compared to the milestone I hated the most:

Getting the Explorers Guild Ranking up to level 16.

I absolutely hated this part for a few different reasons. First of all; you are often at the mercy of the RNG of each system’s mission boards. And this wouldn’t have been a huge deal if you only had to get the rank up to like 5. But 16? (Yes, I know why it’s 16 but still…) It took me so, so long to find system with Explorers guild missions I could actually do, since I’d often get missions that required too high of a rank to accept. So I was taking absolutely anything I could find.

And here’s the second part why I didn’t like this Explorers Guild Ranking milestone. Because of this grind and RNG based luck; it’s advised to stack certain mission types for them that you can do on any planet all at once. One of the fastest and easiest missions you get early on is; killing animals on the planet. Which I feel goes against the whole purpose of the Exobiology Expedition. And since that was the last milestone I had to complete, most of the final part of the Exobiology Expedition for me is…killing off all the animals. It felt so out of place.

And I fully understand that’s a personal choice on my end whether to pick up that mission type from the board, but due to how hard is was to find these explorers guild ranking missions in various systems, and how advised it is to stack mission types like that, it kinda felt I had no choice but to do it if I wanted to get this done as soon as possible.

So yeah, if anyone at HG is reading this; If you’re gonna do faction standing milestones again on future Expeditions, please don’t make it 16. Make it like 5 or something. Or if you want to do 16, make that for one of the 3 Alien races instead, so we at least know which systems to hop to from the map, and don’t have to play Star System Roulette with the map.

Sorry for the long post/rant. Just wanted to give my feedback in the hopes that it may improve what we see next time. 🙂

TLDR: Overall, Expedition 5 was very mixed for me. The majority of it was a lot of fun, but one or two milestones of it were painful to get.

Bases are great, planets to build them on are different for each player yet almost endless for each player too. And so its a thing people do a lot unless they really just dont like base building.

However there are some limits to the base building, for example. How far out you can extend the base, how many parts can be uploaded to servers, and how much terrain edit data is saved. I believe, to the best of my knowledge, that these values are never presented to the player, when they REALLY should be.

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For example:

At your base computer, it could tell you how many placed parts you have (and the upload limit)

You could see somewhere how much terrain edit you have left.

And in build mode, a wall of light could surround the 1000u radius around the base and appear as you get close to it.

These UI changes would make a big difference in the information the player recieves around base building. One can know the 3000 upload limit, but who is keeping count? And really, should the player be the one keeping count in a physical note, like a tally for each base part they place? NO that’s ridiculous. And so the info would be good to know.

Some people, especially newer players, are really upset when they find out the hard way, and it can even cause people to not use base building for a while because the project they worked on for hours is all underground, or the massive “city” thing they were building only uploads part of the build and so to other people it looks unfinished. And these bad surprises could be avoided if the game gave you the info. I my self remember being really upset when I found these things out the hard way a few years ago. And I can imagine a lot of newer players will feel the same, especially with the updated parts etc…

What are my options? My ship and I landed in one of those giant giant mushroom trees. I exited my ship and fell to the ground. …. now I can’t summon my ship to me. Ugh! I’m now marooned on one of the ugliest planets I have ever seen!

What are my options. I guess if I have enough resources I might be able to build a portal….I hope. 🙁