Just finished the Cartographers Redux and what started out as a rough journey ended up being an awesome adventure.

Someone already claimed a base in the vicinity of my spaceship so I thought I was screwed.

I stumbled into a cave and decided to dig my way upwards and I was fortunate to end up right in front of a settlement shop but unfortunately someone already claimed a base there as well.

I wanted to remember the location of that shop and set up a base as close as possible to minimize the grind. The closest spot I could find was in the middle of the desert surrounded by predators.

I decided to use my portable refiner as an arrow to point in the direction of that settlement shop from my spaceship.

Once I got my mech I had to travel at least 30 minutes to find water. I looked at my planet in the Discoveries tab and looked at my marker to see how far I was from water.

Finding the water was a pain in the ass but it’s been a while since a game had me this interested and engaged to figure it out.

*Edited for typos

I used to fight pirates with the standard photon cannon on my Radiant Pillar. I struggled and felt uneasy about dogfights, and since the game occasionally keeps throwing pirates at me and some missions contain killing pirates, I decided it’s geking time to grade up. No regrets.

Long story short: grab the Positron Ejector, fellow noobs.

So I pretty much had stopped playing for about a year, after trying out Star Citizen. Missed a few expeditions and a few major upgrades, and returned when Endurance was released. There was a lot of catching up to do.

One of things I decided to do was to get some new ships. Despite the max being increased from 6 to 9 ships, I still wanted to keep the roster clean and decided I was going to switch my explorer to one with a longer range. But that Explorer that I did have served me so well for so long, that I felt bad about just scrapping it. So I decided not to scrap it; I’ll simply trade it for another ship, and let the pilot fly off into the sunset where my old explorer would continue to live on somewhere in the galaxy. I wasn’t even going to strip out the components; I would leave all the weapons and all the hyperdrive mods and everything, and leave the ship intact.

Then, I had another idea.

So I dismissed one of my squadron pilots and started looking for a new pilot who I thought would be worthy to fly my Explorer. Found one, traded ships with them, and then recruited them to my squadron. So now my Explorer lives on in my fleet as a squadron member!

I might do this with the Golden Vector. Although the Golden Vector is special because it’s one of the few ships that doesn’t have a Photon Cannon built in.