The last time I seriously played was during the previous expedition. Jumping back into it now to do the redux of Leviathan, I’ve noticed that a GREAT DEAL has changed via updates. Not the least of which is how storage works. I don’t know whether to be ecstatic about this or a little frustrated. With 300+ hours on my main save, I spent a lot of time collecting the ships that I wanted, upgrading them to S class and maxing out their storage. Now it seems they have the ability to have twice as much internal space, which is great and all, but now I’m going to have to spend a lot more time (and/or units) re-maxing those stats. Not to mention that I’m going to have to rearrange everything with the addition of the overcharged technology slots. Once again really cool, but just a bit annoying in that I have to rework my layouts. How does everyone else feel about these changes? Am I the only one who’s a bit conflicted?

On a very positive note, the constant update that they’re doing to the visuals are gorgeous. The new ground effects underneath my living ship when it’s landed are visually spellbinding…

It really needs some sort of “stop being so annoying” cleanup. Just QoL things, like being able to make more adjustments to the HUD. I’d love to be able to move around where messages appear, or even turn off my active quests entirely when I’m not pursuing one at the moment. Or maybe just having it stop randomly cycling through my quests when I AM working on one? Please? And stop telling me about my planetary chart. I know! I’m busy! I’ll get to it!

It’d also be nice to have the ability to look at multiple owned ships and multitools at once. Like a “garage” building that lets you compare the things you own. It could also serve as a way to repair broken ships, maybe? Because once you can afford to do so fixing broken ships is lucrative, but it is a giant hassle clicking every square and clicking every box in that square. Maybe the garage could be set to just repair the ship automatically over time, spending the resources automatically if they’re in storage. I wouldn’t mind just coming back later to pick up the repaired ship to keep or sell.

Oh, and could we please have the ability to hand off multiple relics at once? It doesn’t take long, but it feels silly and unnecessarily annoying to have to talk to the same guy 5 times and give him a single item every time. Just take all these, share with your friends.

Once I have the matter beam the ability to quick transfer to storage would be amazing as well. It only seems to work when pulling from the refiner and stellar core on my freighter right now?

The ability to name save points! And see a list of them somewhere, as well as the ability “forget”(delete) them from there, since inevitably I’d end up with 40 pointless markers that seemed interesting at the time but stopped mattering. Sometimes I want to mark an area, but without the ability to label them it’s basically useless. I don’t want to throw down a base every time I find something to come back to later, even if it is more convenient.

The ability to see the galaxy map from the ground. It’s a small thing, but sometimes I just want to see where that darn quest is.

The ability to mark a waypoint to travel to from my discovery log, both in system and not. Sometimes I know what planet I want, but having to physically get eyes on it in space can be a hassle. A marker would be handy.

Why do freighter fleets stalk me? The second I leave a planet or enter a system, suddenly an entire fleet just drops in near me. My OWN freighter doesn’t do that, just random ships hunting me like they want to talk about my ship’s extended warranty. I wouldn’t mind so much except they have a way of blocking my pulse jumps. I know you want other fleets to be around, but they could at least appear further away, and not between me and the space station. Please?

Could we get an analysis visor upgrade that actually tells you what a nearby building is? Say, within 300 or 500 units? Or just label beacons as something other than a building, because a flag, two boxes of geknip, and a beacon makes for a disappointing find when you were hoping for a trader, haunted terminal, or something.

And this last one isn’t a quality of life feature, but more things like derelict freighters! This game makes a surprisingly fun dungeon-crawler, so how about some more of that? Corrupted space stations, abandoned buildings on the ground, weird spatial anomalies. Whatever, I’m down.

So, inspired by a couple posts I saw about doing this expedition the “hard way” on its original run, I decided to give it a try.

First issue is by avoiding the early dieing milestone, I don’t have the hermetic seal plans. On the other hand, you can buy seals from any minor settlement, so I repaired the manipulator off the bat and started tunneling. Got lucky and stumbled into a cave early on so I milked it for every bit of cobalt it had to make a full stack of Ion batteries. After that I tunneled to my ship, since it was near a monolith POI, and started heading north.

The trick here is that POIs such as minor settlements tend to line up in North-South lines on planets, so going directly north from a known POI increases my chances of finding one. The prep plus the run took a good few hours probably, but I got my seal, and I’d already repaired the launch thrusters before I left the ship so I could call it in on the landing pad and finish the repairs. Hard Part 1 done!

Second issue is the “build a base on an infested world” milestone. Since I didn’t die early, no base computer plans. However, all planets(I think?) have what’s known as “wild base computers” – pre-placed base computers anyone can claim. The kicker is that you can find these using the commercial maps from the space station – they count as a Shelter slot. So, I went and grabbed a whole bunch of nav data from hopping between POIs with save points over on a more hospitable world, grabbed a bunch of maps, then headed to the nearest infested world.

I actually had to go get a second set of maps once, as it kept finding other Shelters first that I had to clear, and I had to mark all the other types of waypoints without clearing them to eliminate them from the selection. Once I found one though(which has a purple base icon like other player bases), I laid down my base and checked off that milestone. Hard part 2 done!

(Quick note here: If you don’t plan to keep the save, delete your base after getting the milestone, or at least once you’ve finished the expedition. If you delete a “wild” base it restores the wild base computer so someone else can use it. There’s still only a limited number of these per planet so be considerate!)

Everything else is no different from a normal run of this expedition, and while I haven’t actually finished it yet, from what I read on those other posts when you finish the final milestone it “kills” you so you still get credit for that leftover milestone back in part 1 without any extra effort. I don’t expect that part to have changed, given it’s plot-relevant.

Main reason I haven’t finished it yet, though the finish line is in sight? I want to get all my memory fragments upgraded, so going to see how far along we get those first. If I want to keep this save around later, having a full set of high end gear would be nice.

One tip in general I’d like to add: one of the anchor planets(or systems at least) has beetles. Tame one! Since they fly, they’re perfect to ride across some of the crazy vertical terrain in this expedition without risking any fall damage. Plus, you can summon them anywhere and don’t have to plop down a geobay or fuel it up(other than via life support). This made some of the regular stuff so much simpler without having to go mole-man(which in itself doesn’t help as much when you have a deep valley to cross).