I’m stuck on a very small island without rocks or dihydrogen around me. I cannot build a portable refiner, can’t make starship launch fuel (that’s why I’m stuck), and there isn’t a nearby island within miles. There are zero rocks underwater, radiation is a big problem, no matter what I do, I cannot find anything for me to get off. And despite uranium supposedly being a huge resource here, there is none in the vicinity.

Stuff constantly disappearing. When I move something in a room, the entire room itself is deleted leaving all my objects floating in the air, leaving me to find more materials to rebuild the room everytime I want to move a god damn plant to a different location.

My door to my landing pad just decided to vanish. Then my landing pad vanished, leaving my ship floating in the air.

I’m so tired of losing stuff I spent time and materials creating. Its making me want to either just stop playing or ignore the base building entirely because I feel like I’m wasting my time. Why build something if its just gonna vanish 5 minutes after?

I’ve been making my floating island base bigger and better before I move on with the storyline, and the thing that absolutely tickles me the most is fiddling with the electrical systems.

The core of the base is a 4-story tower made of round Deepwater modules with lots of branching arms connecting other rooms in a series of stacked figure-eights. Top floor is my office, big teleport portal, and save point. Bottom is entrances and a short teleport to the top. Middle floors have staircase access from the outside and one is the “power room” with 8 batteries. Those batteries are charges by a collection of 11 solar panels mounted on the roofs of 3 of the outlying modules. But you see, that’s only the backups. A measely 275kp!

No, waaaay down below my floating island, and on the shore of the lake beneath it, there was a power hotspot just barely inside the base range. That’s where I built the “power plant.” A gorgeous wooden building with sail roofs that houses nine Electromagnetic Generators pumping out a combined 1300kp. This feeds into a distribution panel with control lights that lets me switch the main power off and on at will. And then this runs through a single battery acting as a test rectifier, and then flows down a cable on the lakebed until it runs right under the edge of the floating island, where I built an underwater “power sub-station” in a natural crevice at the bottom of the lake. This facility is a single deepwater chamber holding six batteries and a short range teleporter that connects to the power plant for maintenance. A small, T-shaped tower projects just above the water’s surface with ladders and an access hatch from the lake itself. And in the upper section is a set of 8 Biofuel Reactors that can supply emergency power.

And then I ran miles of wires and complicated circuits that let me control all of this energy flow from my desk at the top of the base tower. Switching from main, to auxiliary, to backup, or even putting the whole base on lockdown. There’s even a booby trap for prisoners. It’s a short range teleporter that looks important but only turns on if the base is in lockdown mode, and if anyone steps into it they get teleported into a single glass cuboid on the bottom of the lake, where a proximity switch circuit sees them and shuts off the teleporter inside so they can’t get back out.

As much as I like cruising around the galaxy with my fully kitted-out main character, I really like the beginning stages of the game. I guess it was partly because of doing the achievements and expeditions, but I got addicted to the first few days of game time when your resources and abilities are limited, and I tend to start new characters and level them until I got bored and delete them.

But lately I’ve been setting challenges for myself. It started simple; get to an S-class multitool, ship, and freigter. Okay, that was fun. Full explorer run, maxing out the Explorer’s Guild rep? Cool.

So then I started getting a little more elaborate.

Neural Assembly
You are a stranded alien life form who’s managed to weld themselves to a robotic body, and you’re desperate to re-connect to your people. Put the Ares head on an Autophage body and get to the living ship as fast as possible.

Octopus’ Garden
You are a grumpy octopoid being who just wants to be left alone to make things and get wealthy. Build a base that includes a fully functional production line making fusion ignitors and stasis cores, deep underwater. Wear the Iteration: Gemini head. Use the bubble trail.

My next one’s going to be fun.

Rebel Scum
You are a robot, and that makes you mad. Full-on Autophage run. Get a sentinel S-class ship, an S-class autophage staff or sentinel weapon, and a pirate frigate. Make a seriously badass autophage getup. Max out pirate reputation.

Does anyone else do these little self-created kind-of story-like expeditions? Any other suggestions?