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.

Honestly, I’ve played Facebook “City Sim” games with more depth and interactivity.

They bring literally nothing to the table except a time and resource sink with no real return or fun.

Nothing you build can be interacted with or do anything unique, except the “Starports” which require you to pay materials to build a roof, but then just turn out to be a single “Alternative” landing pad that random ships can land on, and have no roof in sight

Nothing you build creates related items that can be harvested, or sold. Markets are completely empty and don’t house traders. The hazard control building is literally just an empty 1×1 box that doesn’t do anything or cause your settlement to act differently if their are hazards. Every building is filled with storage items and nothing else. No unique living quarters.

All the buildings are literally just made from the players base building kit and are incredibly uninspired and pop up with no structure or thought to pathways and lane flow. Citizens just amble around doing absolutely nothing except looking at data pads, hovering 4 feet above the places they try to sit, and have the least inspired Sims style mood indicators that also cant be changed or interacted with and have no actual meaningful purpose.

The output materials your base generate are randomized, un-customizable, and have nothing to do with the building you build or the citizens you hire and they accrue incredibly slowly at rates that make worthless for selling or building.

My base has a Jelly Donut Farm as a status modifier. Is there a farm? No. Is there a restaurant? No. Is there a chef npc somewhere I can talk to to buy donuts from? No. Does it switch Settlement production rewards to donuts for me to sell or eat? No.

Settlements are ugly, hollow, shells that sit around and wait for arbitrary decisions that cost you both resources and hours of your life as it can take up to 4 hours per tier of a building to complete, with each building having 3 tiers. 12 entire IRL hours and decent amounts of resources to build a landing pad that isn’t even a unique asset, that I can plop down in 6 seconds in base building mode for like 25 pure ferrite.

It feels so under-baked, it’s basically raw.

But thanks for the base building overhaul I guess… even though its incredibly buggy now, it was a semi-thoughtful overhaul but still left the base building at “Pretty much pointless after a certain progression and lacking decorative assets.