Well I finally did it. Last night I found an extremely well rolled sentinel interceptor so I went all out and duplicated all of my best pulse engine mods and put them all on the super charged slots. Mind you these are just S-class mods and not X-class and I’m playing on Series X which is no slouch when it comes to performance. 3 super charged pulse drive mods and one super charged sublight amplifier. My ship is so fast it now breaks the games ability to load properly. It seems that extremely fast speeds somehow breaks the engines ability to properly load assets. For example if I pulse drive to a planet my ship can make it from the top of the atmosphere to ground level in only a few seconds but for some reason my console will now spend the next two minutes before it finally loads the blank terrain beneath me. Having a slower ship doesn’t create the same problem for some reason. I could imagine that installing well rolled X-class mods would make this problem even worse. I guess the moral of this story is that speed is only good up until your system craps out on being able to load the game properly at which point the wait time for loading offsets the time you saved traveling. Its funny that I have now had to downgrade my ship somewhat so it doesn’t break the game so badly.

Despite being a Day One player, with several hundred hours on the game (and all expeditions) I never attempted a Permadeath run.

My first day one “clear” was on hard difficulty and, depite the game being very basic at the time, it was challenging and never unfair. I almost always played normal during the years.

I have to confess that the harder difficulty settings of Permadeath is a lot more fun. I don’t mind about the fear of losing the save (I died 7 jumps from the core because I fell down a cliff) both all the balance setting that Permadeath implies. It was about the fact that despite a normal game, the event density (and their variety) is higher even if the difficulty is not so much challenging.

Being chased if you have valuables in the ship is fun, encountering lots of bounties is fun (you can never be sure they will evade or come after you), there’s more variety in fauna attitude towards the player and so on. Having the system patrol ships or the freighter fleets doing something useful is fun. Almost every jump lets you have an event. I completely forgot, for example, that pirates may attempt ground raids. It was so rare in normal difficulty that I was suprised to have 3 raids in a very short game (about 15 jumps, including a black hole hop that brought me at about 4K LY from the core).

The only mildly frustrating element is the material scarcity and the inventory limits (but is mangeable if you know the game very well).

Maybe the only part that is unfair is the starting tutorial. It has the same dilated timing of the normal run but in PD you don’t have time to lose: usually the starting planet is just a deathtrap you struggle to survive due to resource scarcity or very harsh environment. When you regain player agency and can plan your next move carefully and choose the risks when going afterresources in the next planet, everything becomes fun again.

I’m the only one that was surprised by how the permadeath difficulty settings makes the game more enjoyable?