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.

It was a rollercoaster. I rage quit a few times after dying, some due to my own incompetency, some due to glitches. I finally found a way to easily backup my saves, but after that I only died once after being ambushed by a bunch of pirates in space.

Other than the frustration of permadeath it was really a lot of fun. The real joy to me in this game is improving things: your character, your ship, your mechs, your base, etc. When you have all of that stuff close to maxed out the game becomes boring. Prior to the expedition I would log in, collect my spoils from my frigates, fight sentinels for a bit to get Walker Brains, maybe farm some mats and then log out because there is nothing else I really wanted to do. It had become rote.

The expedition brought back the olden days when I had nothing and didn’t really know what I was doing. I look forward to the next one.

So obviously I’m still in Euclid and was thinking about is it really worth jumping to different galaxy? Will I find something new/different there or can I just stay in Euclid and be amazed on daily basis by generated worlds?