I was on an Ice planet checking out the various animals and came across a ground creature that would dive underground, travel around and then pop up and look around. It was a pretty big creature, and looked like the prehistoric squirrel Scratch from the Ice Age movies, and I very much so wanted it as a pet.

Well I try to interact with it, but the button wouldn’t show up. So I tried to do this over and over for about 2-3 minutes, following it as it travelled. A jaguar like creature suddenly charged at me and I used a plasma grenade to kill it, accidently hitting the ground creature I had been following, for all this time across an open frozen wasteland, and a good long ways from my ship. Well it seemed to take offence to me hitting and and started attacking me.

It would drop under the ground and pop up and hit me and it did a stupid amount of damage. I have fought off hordes of sentinels with no problem, but this thing… it was no joke. I couldn’t hit because it kept dropping under the ground. I tried using my jet pack but it would stay underground until I landed and then start attacking again. I had no shields multiple times as I ran, jetpacked, and shot, geo grenades, plasmas, and everything else I could at the thing, just so I could make it back to my ship.

I finally make it back to my ship and think ok I’ll wait in here for about 5-6 minutes and go back out and do what I was doing… nope it was waiting for me. I had to bounce around get back in my ship. Finally I stood on my ship and just shot and dropped everything I could and finally killed it.

It was a strange and thrilling fight for my life, in a game I have at least 2 saves over 300+ hours on each, that I haven’t had in a while.

I went traveling around planet again and not, 2 minutes later a smaller version of the Ice Age squirrel Scratch popped it’s head up…

Read a post by another traveller a few days back who completed the expedition without dying (apologies to you, Traveller, I’ve forgotten your name). I had actually started a new run of the expedition at that time anyway with the intent to see how much I could do before you HAD to die. Turns out… you don’t. But this post opened the possibility of completing the expedition without dying. Here’s how it went:

I started off by ignoring my ship. I decided I was going to try to find a crashed ship on foot or a trading post where I could buy one. As it happened, that wasn’t in the cards. I did a huge circle that took 10 hours on foot on the starting planet but was never fortunate enough to find either of those things. What I DID find, though was a minor settlement where I promptly bought a couple hermetic seals. I also bought the blueprint for the Advanced Mining Laser.

During my wanderings, I dug up a lot of buried tech modules and found a fair number of clusters of ancient data structures. These yielded some drop pod maps, which are actually reasonably valuable. I sold off both the the tech modules and maps at trade terminals (I found 3 or 4 in the wild). I also encountered a lot of curious deposits. Mined a few of those after installing the AML and refined into nanites while I waited for storms to blow over.

When I finally arrived at my ship, it was 10 hours in, I had about 12 million units and just over 5200 nanites. I’d also found a couple drop pods to add inventory slots and even got a few upgrades for the exosuit and ship from damaged machinery. I also learned 177 words and managed to bag a decent C class multitool with a lot more slots than the starting weapon.

After fixing the ship, I was in a position where I really just needed to make a base on an infested world as the only obstacle and then I was golden for all other milestones in the Expedition. What I did was I went to Uncharted red and green star systems to search for the proper world type (I purchased the drive blueprints on the Anomaly after I got my ship up and running).

I had grabbed maps for commercial buildings to use to search for a base computer in the wild (this is one of the things these charts can locate) and used those on the proper world when I finally found one (actually didn’t take too long. Maybe a dozen systems). Why uncharted? Well, that’s because the planets don’t have any buildings other than shelters and wild base computers. It took a grand total of 2 maps before I located a wild base computer. I flew in, landed, claimed it, and built a base. The game considered that good enough for the milestone.

Now I was all set. I just carried on from there and completed the expedition. I refused to die and did it without doing it on purpose. Dying was the only milestone I had left at the end, and turns out at the very end, the game kind of makes you ‘semi’ die, as it restarts you as if you’d died. But the key here is… you spawn in with all your stuff. You lose nothing. So you never really die at all, but the game gives you that milestone (which was the final unfinished one for me in this expedition) when you spawn in after the end.

Anyway, the grand total play time was about 15 hours. Obviously not the optimal way to play it, but it was a fun experiment and very satisfying.