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.

Don’t get me wrong – seeing action and life in certain places is great – but it is way too frequent and more importantly, it seems way too random. You discover an uncivilized planet at the edge of the system with a few relics from another era. You want to build your base and discover what is there, but every 2 minutes some spaceships fly around close to the surface… doing what exactly?

I would love it if planets and systems had more meaningful parameters for population/traffic density (for example, there is a huge trading platform, so more ships are flying around). But I also like to discover planets that have not been discovered, where you can have your own “edge of the universe” feeling. It is the same with the frequency of pirate ships or massive freighter spawns when you are in outer space…

it feels like the developers were afraid that the game would feel too empty and as a response just let everything randomly spawn everywhere all the time… Perhaps others like this, but for me, it is killing the immersion