Just to be clear, I haven't entirely run Halthor yet. I've gone a few times, and am still in the process of figuring everything out.

But I did run it yesterday. Got a blade and a battery, got some B grade stealth components and generally had a good time.

I haven't done everything in the game yet. I haven't run the contested zones in Pyro, or done the Vanduul smugglers missions. I haven't finished Project Hyperion or done the Vlaakar farm (although I am ON Project Hyperion and the Vlaakar Farm, I just haven't started them, I've completed missions 1-7). I haven't killed the giant Apex Vlaakar either. But I've been dabbling.

And thus far, I think Halthor is some of my favorite content. Its the right mix of PVE/PVP, has an interesting goal, and a valuable reward. Its peak Star Citizen (so far).

I am often critical of the game, and that's because I'm honest with myself. The game is a buggy pile of shit right now - it just is. It deserves its metacritic score of 2.9 - if anything the score should be lower. I am also flabbergasted at how its this bad after 14 years of development and a billion dollars in backer money. That's all true. I will continue to harp on that.

But I think its also worthwhile to point out what the good parts are, for other people that want to dive into this shitpile and see what all the fuss is about.

Halthor is fun. Its scary, its rewarding, its good content.

If you haven't tried it yet, and you've already bought the game, then you should try it.

I know I know, this one is going to piss a lot of people off, but read the whole post. I'm right on this, because I've seen it happen before.

Atlas

I often mention Grapeshot's 2018 masterpiece "Atlas" in conversations about Star Citizen, because its the most Star Citizen like game that's ever been made.

How similar was it? Atlas had:

• Ship combat
• PVP
• Multicrew ships
• Ships (well, land vehicles really) in ships
• Turret gunners
• Multiple non-combat stations to man on ships
• NPC crew
• FPS missions
• Deep PVE content, boss battles
• Base building
• Resource collection
• A strange kind of "server meshing", where maps were stitched together, although they used brief loading screens (which wasn't a big deal) when you transitions from server to server.

So, it was very similar. Did I mention it was a ships and seas game instead of a space sim?

Anyway, I want to focus in on the parts that are most relevant for multicrew. It, had, multicrew.

It had multicrew. Using a large ship, when the game launched, required having several people perform roles cooperatively. You had a person in charge of the rudder manning a navigator's wheel. You had at least one person on each sail. You had one person on each cannon or gun turret. It was a game that featured multicrew ships.

And it sucked.

Just like Star Citizen's multicrew sucks.

Turret gunning in Atlas was no different from Turret gunning in Star Citizen. It was terrible. It was boring as hell - you had nothing to do at all - until you got into a fight. When you got into a fight, you'd be able to fire if and only if you were lucky enough to have an enemy in your field of view, which wasn't very often (its worse with Star Citizen, since its 3D instead of 2D, you really struggle to find targets.

You go on long voyages and you man these stations where you don't do shit for 99.9% of the time you're on the ship. Its the world's most boring job. Then you get a brief 5-10 minute bit of action, and then everything is boring again.

So, Atlas, when it launched, was a lot like Star Citizen is now.

But then Atlas did something that Star Citizen hasn't done yet. Atlas... released... NPC crew.

And on my god, did it change EVERYTHING.

Ships like the Brigantine, which previously required no less than 12 living breathing people to crew, all doing incredibly boring things... suddenly became operable by just one person.

So you can guess what happened next right? Everyone loves multicrew, so everyone kept running 12 men to a boat, and no one ever used NPC crew.

=D Of course that didn't happen.

The opposite happeed. No one ever fully manned a Brigantine ever again. After NPC crew dropped, and people realized they could go off and have their own adventures, and didn't have to serve their Captains in order to sail at all... they dropped "crew life" cold. Everyone ran their owns ships.

A guild which would previously all man the same Brigantine, would instead field a whole damn fleet of Brigantines (really they'd field a wide variety of ships, but that's beside the point). NPC crew changed the game in a very positive way.

And the point of this story, is that THE SAME THING WILL HAPPEN WITH STAR CITIZEN.

Multicrew was always a dumb idea. Handing people boring trivial shit to do in order to run a ship is not a fun experience. CIG knows this too, its why they fell flat so hard with the box stacking mechanics on the Reclaimer. That is a job meant for NPC crew. That's not a serious gameplay loop, its not something they expect to be interesting and engaging content that's going to keep people playing their game rather than say GTA6. They know it sucks, its not there for you to do, its there for an NPC to do.

They just haven't finished the NPCs yet.

Now some of you, many of you... hell who am I kidding, I know this reddit - Most of you will get the wrong idea about this.

You'll shake an angry fist at your screen and tell me that you love being a turret gunner and that multicrew is awesome. You'll pretend that playing with your friends in multiple ships rather than a single ship isn't playing with your friends at all. You'll act like I'm giving you bad news, like I just shot your dog.

But this is good news, because it means that if the game does survive, and CIG somehow works through the dumpsterfire of bugs, and they somehow either cut content or use AI to finish the game before UE6 makes the entire project obsolete... then the game will be a much better game than it is now.

Because if you ask any Atlas player if the game improved after they added NPC crew, they're going to tell you "FUCK YES it did".

Multicrew gameplay was always a shitty idea, and it deserves to die. NPC crew will kill it, if they ever manage to actually add it to the game.

I got to explore Halthor with a friend. The ground sites.

We park 3 kms out, and drive in using an Ursa.

We get there, immediately we find a stealth power core, and two Military grade C shields. Not great, not terrible.

I go exploring.

I do some parkour, and get on top of a large crate. There's a box there, and two small shapes beside the box. I see that I can interact with them.

I pick up a smoothie.

I think, "why not?", and take off my helmet.

I realize immediately that CIG fucked me. The smoothie was a trap.

My character starts dying. I put my helmet back on, doesn't work. I pull out an Oxy pen, that must work in these situations right? Doesn't work.
I jump off the box, and start sprinting towards the rover, but I never even get close, I die.

The Antium Helmet is crafted, using very high tier resources. Its my second one, I lost another one in another "star citizen" incident. I'm furious. I have to go to pyro to make these, and the supply of really good materials is quite low. I hate mining.

I drive the Ursa around the building I'm checking to find the helmet. I go to get out and get it, and start dying immediately. Oh yeah, no helmet can't go outside. I run back into the Ursa, and realize I"m still dying. I jump in the bed, and it heals me a bit, but I'm still dying. I realize that the Ursa is off, so the life support is off... and run and turn it on.

Now i'm okay, but stuck in the Ursa.

My buddy brings me a helmet. Its not the helmet I need - not the expensive crafted Antium helmet, but I'll take it.

He goes to eat. I go out to find the helment.

I find it, - lucky me - but now I have a problem. I can't swap helmets. I have a helmet on, and I need to ditch that helmet and put on the good helmet.

As I'm trying to figure this out, a respawn shows up, and shoots me in the face. I die again.

I've now died twice, I know that the Ursa will run out of Medgel soon. I need to be very careful.

I run back out (the helmet my friend's gave me was on when I died, so it respawned with me), clear the mobs, and again try to get the helmet. It was in my hand when I died.

I try to position myself such that the "F" interact key is available. Its a pain in the ass, because that is just buggy as fuck.

While trying to position myself to loot the corpse, my character fell through the ground into the center of the planet. This is not something you can recover from.

That's three deaths. The Ursa is out of medgel, the helmet is lost.

Star Citizen.

EDIT: I HAVE THE HELMET, IT WAS ATTACHED TO MY BELT, IT WAS SAVED!

So Xenothreat is out, and I'm working on the grind for the shields, and I've been doing Gilly missions between Xenothreat missions, so I'm siting on a big chuck of aUEC.

So I have to make a choice.

I want a heavy fighter for use in PVE, specifically geared to kill Hammerheads. I have a Meteor, but find that its a bit too squishy for my tastes/skill level when it comes to farming Hammerheads. I can do it, but its not comfotable, and it takes forever.

So I want to upgrade to something that deals a bit less damage, but can brawl for longer.

I see three choices:

• Guardian MX
• Guardian
• Sentinel

I do not know which to pick.

The Sentinel I actually have used, although its been years. I remember liking it, I do not remember it being a hammerhead killer, but perhaps things have changed.

The MX seems to be the gold standard S tier PVE heavy fighter recommendation before the armor changes went in and the obscenely OP m80 dropped. Every video I watch, every thread recommends the MX over the base guardian. Shields + Extra firepower trump larger guns and agility everyone says.

The big question, is "Is that true in a post 4.8 world?".

Are four size 4s still better than 2 size 5s?

Are four size 4 deadbolts better than 2 size 5 Leonids, which I understand are better than Deadbolts? I could pull the Leonids off my Meteor, and put them on the Guardian, and see how that runs right?

The the extra shield really worth the lost maneuverability?

I'd have already pulled the trigger on the base guardian, but it seems that every source I find says that the MX is better. Is that true? Is it still better for 4.8?

Recently decided to try Hauling, bought a hauling ship, tried it out.

It seems impossible. Impossible and insane to even try.

Nearly every time I've tried to offload cargo, I wind up with a freight elevator bug. Nearly every time. Out of maybe 5 attempts, I've successfully managed to deliver cargo like once.

How can it be this bad?

I used to know players that did nothing but hauling. Hauling seems to be one of the more popular loops in the game, after ship combat missions and mining. I knew there would be bugs, but this is just fucking crazy.

Are there workarounds that everyone knows that I just don't know? I tried to change servers when I hit a freight elevator bug. I flew up a few hundred feet, and logged to menu, then came back in, and my cargo was gone and I was at the wrong station, and the missions were gone.

WTF?

First, Amenities

I watch ship reviews all the time, and people - everyone it seems - still acts like amenities are important.

So your ship has a shitter/shower. So your ship has a wine rack, or food storage, or a table. How about that pool table and chessboard?

None of that shit works. None of it works, and I've been following this game since 2016. Not only does that shit not work, but CIG would be crazy to devote development time to it given the state of the game, and how ambitious the project is in general.

Amenities should be cut. They should be ruthlessly cut.

We aren't at dog food stage yet, the game isn't really playable after 14 years of development and a billion dollars. Whether your ship has a desk should be irrelevant. You ain't gonna use it.

That pool on the 890 jump? Useless garbage.

And yet whenever I watch a ship review, people take that shit seriously.

Every review should just be honest.

Here's a bunch of wasted space on the ship which will likely never see a use in game.

When you watch a Starfarer review, and they get to the pool table room, the reviewer should be like:

"Here's a large wasted area of the ship where CIG decided to create the impression that they're going to actually bother making this shit work."

Its roleplay garbage. Treat it as roleplay garbage.

Hell, I'll go one step further.

If they spend ONE SECOND, fucking around with the functionality of the shitter/shower, then that's one development second too fucking many. The game is broken as fuck. The game's amibitious goals are five or ten years away on a game that's taken 14 years to get this far.

No ship should have a shitter shower, or kitchenette, or quiet Captains Office. No ship should have any of that, becuase none of it is gameplay relevant, and if CIG has any sense at all, none of it ever will be gameplay relevant.

This game is woefully in need of cutting content. Having you smell like ass when you enter a station is content that needs to be cut. That's the #1 thing the game needs to cut.

And taking a shit on your spaceship is the #2 thing the game needs to cut.

Secondly, Ship manufacturers.

"I really like the RSI asthetics"

No you don't. No you don't. RSI is made up bullshit. You like CIG's aesthetics. RSI was never real, MISC was never real. Drake was never real.

I fly a CIG Meteor, and a CIG Shiv and a CIG Hornet, and a CIG 100i. That's what I fly.

And its what you fly too.

Never done a Xenothreat before, anyone have a guide, any information, any hints as to how one would take advantage of whatever this thing is?

The feature of Star Citizen that I find to be the most in need of cutting is the bot economy, also known as Quantum/StarSim.

The bot economy is a system whereby CIG lets loose literally 100,000 bots per system into the game world, to compete with players in everything we do.

CIG will set prices for things, tell the bots what a normal price is, and if you try to sell your goods for more than what the bots think they're worth, they'll undercut you. In this way, the bot economy will drive opportunity out of the game.

And frankly, I don't get it at all, because player driven economies work.

Player Driven Economies

I've been a part of this community (the StarCitizen community in general) long enough to know that some people don't understand player driven economies, have never played games with player driven economies, and are deathly afraid of them. I know that. I can't convince you if you are in that camp. For some people, the notion of a player driven economy will always result in them peeing in their pants just a little.

But... there are numerous games with such economies out there, and they work. Prices are reasonable, goods are stocked, everything's great.

That is the truth. People will try to convince you otherwise, but a lot of people play Albion Online and Eve Online and Mortal Online 2. Those games have economies that work. I LOVE when I get overcharged for an item in those games, because I know what that means. It means I can go stock that item myself and make a shit ton of easy money. Sadly, it doesn't happen often, because the economies work so damn well.

The Bot Economy

So why bother with a bot economy?

I honestly don't know.

As far as I can tell, the bot economy does two things that you don't get in a player-driven economy:

• It allows CIG to set prices for goods at equilibrium
• It generates explicit missions for the mobiglass

That's the upside of a bot economy I guess, or its supposed to be the upside. However, these upsides... eh... they might not bring much value to the player

Setting prices

CIG gets to set prices, but is this a good idea? No... Its not. Its a terrible idea. The reason is that setting prices is, and I can't emphasize this enough - FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE.

Its impossible for a lot of reasons.

Lets say that CIG says that rifle X should be 1 million credits. Okay, well, next month, CIG has to patch that rifle, or maybe they patch a different rifle, or maybe they buff a creature that is easier to kill with a different rifle.

Now the rifle's value to the player has changed.

CIG must then guess at the rifle's true value to the player, and set the bots accordingly... FOR EVERY FUCKING CHANGE THAT MIGHT IMPACT THE RIFLE'S VALUE.

And that's a lot of changes.

Maybe a new movie comes out, and the Hero uses a rifle that -LOOKS- like another rifle in the game, and so people start to value THAT rifle more. Now the price CIG set is wrong.

This is the fundamental problem with price setting. The value of something, is fucking subjective. People just decide whether they like a thing or not, and people are fickle. People might lose interest in a given product simply because its become too meta and boring. You can't account for that with a price written into a JSON file. You DEFINITELY can't account for the constant, fluid nature of player preferences and patch changes and new added mission that will constantly jostle the true price of goods. Player economies do this, because players set the price. The people that best understand the value items have to them, set the price for the items. The price is constantly changing, constantly in flux. Its a tool that matches the fluid nature of player preference, and the fluid nature of the game state.

Price setting is a stupid idea.

Explicit Missions

The other core "benefit" you get out of a bot economy, is the ability to generate explicit missions. NPCs running an economy know what they need, so they can automatically post missions into your mobiglass for you to do things. Deliver bexalite, defend a factory from invasion, pirate a trade route used by a rival corporation.

This, on the surface seems like the "killer feature", the "secret sauce" to the bot economy... but...

Player driven economies already do all that. All that shit already happens in games with a player driven economy. The only difference is the interface.

In Albion Online or Eve Online, if you need a resource delivered to your hideout, you can put up what's called a "buy order". If you pay enough for it, someone will deliver the resource. They'll do it even if its dangerous, provided that you pay enough.

Defending a factory from invasion is something that you'd naturally do in a guild. You don't need a mission for that, you just need a guild. Piracy/Ganking/Robbing is also an emergent behavior in games with player driven economies.

What CIG is doing, is placing a bet.

They're betting that their system's explicit missions will be better than the emergent gameplay that already takes place in similar games. They're betting that it will provide some amount of value over that emergent gameplay, and they're betting big. Quantum/StarSim is a big project, that's been worked on for years and years. They intend to simulate all the important things that players do in the game in support of this project. That's a lot of work.

And if it turns out that the missions generated are mostly shallow and repetitive - it will be wasted work.

Development time is not an infinite resource, not even for a company as large as CIG. Time spent on Quantum/StarSim is time not spent on creating automated base defenses for players, or programmatic control over base defenders, or... even getting elevators working.

There is a cost for diving down these weird rabbit holes chasing after "Nevah been done befo" tech with little value to the player.

Games like Eve Online and Albion already have the missions that Star Citizen might one day have through the mobiglass, they're just implicit. There's no sign allowing you to take them, instead player's game sense drives them to these activities.

Why build a system like this just to get you to do things you were already going to do?

Out of all the news regarding Star Citizen, the Squadron 42 news is the scariest.

Is Star Citizen a scam?

That, is a hard question to answer, if you're really honest with yourself.

Because there's a lot in the game that points to "Yes".

14 years into the game's development, and the game is buggy as shit. If you merely suggest that the game be less buggy, you'll get confronted with a chorus of fans (or bots) that will shout you down and insult you. We've been trained to accept this. We've been trained to believe that the shit show you play through every day is somehow necessary.

There is no game released as a game as a service that I am aware of, that's been playable for as long as Star Citizen, and is in as bad shape as the PU currently is. I played Rust when they restarted Rust. RESTARTED, Rust. They took their existing game, and said "this ain't gonna work, we're gonna rebuild the whole thing", and restarted Rust from scratch. it was playable like 6-8 months after they started it. Early Rust was - very quickly - less buggy than Star Citizen, and the bugs tended to be less critical, within about a year of them starting that project.

14 years

Even worse, the bugs tend to be persistent. I left this game about 3 years ago, and I only came back to it recently, and the bugs that I remember are all still here. Its all the same bugs. What I expected, was to come back and there would be significant additions to the game. I expected the game to generally run pretty smoothly compared to what I was used to. I expected there to be new content, and bugs in the new content, but the old bugs I knew, I expected them to mostly be gone.

They aren't gone. They're thriving.

Very little change in the general playability of the game between 3.18 when I left, and 4.8, when I came back. More content sure, and good content - credit where credit is due - but little improvement in the general playability of the game.

14 years

I run a guild in Albion Online, and one of the guys in that guild asked me about Star Citizen recently, so I streamed my play session. He watched me do the things that we all love about Star Citizen, like seamlessly transition from a planet into space and back again. He watched me run some simple bunker missions, saw the ships in ships features, saw the FPS combat.

He wasn't impressed, because he also saw all the bugs.

He saw when navigation just wasn't working. He saw when my pulse flipped over and I had to very carefully drive with it skidding against the floor to keep from being ejected into the center of the planet. He watched, and he wasn't impressed.

And he asked me a reasonable question.

He asked "So, when they patch this game, the patches are all bug fixes right? Every patch, they must be spending all their time fixing all these bugs".

And I had to tell him no. No, the patches aren't about fixing bugs. There is some bug fixing, but the patches are mostly about adding new content. The bugs tend to persist over the course of years.

He thinks I'm insane for playing this.

14 years

This is not how development happens for any other game I can think of that is also a live service that is open to the public. I honestly don't think there's ever been as buggy a game that was played by so many. I used to think Bethesda games were buggy. Bethesda games run smoothly compared to Star Citizen.

14 years

But... as bad as all that is, Squadron 42... that says far worse about CIG and about this project.

Squadron 42

Originally said to release in 2016 - literally a decade ago - Squadron 42 is still vaporware.

Unlike the PU, Squadron 42 has none of the excuses that people use to defend the PU.

• Squadron 42 is single player, so no networking, server meshing, PES... development is vastly simplified for it.
• Squadron 42 shares assets with the PU, using the same fucking engine. The two games share assets. This should dramatically shorten the development time for Squadron 42.
• CIG has claimed that its prioritizing Squadron 42 over the PU for years now. That's the project getting the bulk of the work, and its still... just whispers and a few YouTube videos.

Squadron 42 looks like a failed project to me. It will release, at best, 11 years after its initial release target. Except, I very much question if it will ever release.

The problem with releasing Squadron 42

If Squadron 42 is a hit, then CIG will have shipped their first hit game. It will be a tremendous boon to CIG. It will establish them as a top developer, and do much to dissipate the cloud of doubt surrounding them as a company, and around the PU as a product.

If Squadron 42 is a a failure.

• CIG publicly fails to produce a decent single player game experience, despite huge investment.
• The PU will be seen as a dead game walking.
• Tremendous amounts of bad press will attack their already well scarred brand.

The whole project and company, might collapse quickly as backers pull funding due to a loss of faith in CIG's ability to develop a compelling game.

So, releasing Squadron 42 might well destroy CIG.

14 years

Take all this together. All of it together.

• The game is single player
• The game shares assets and code with the PU
• The game is the priority at CIG
• Single player games are vastly easier to engineer than multiplayer games
• Squadron 42 was initially scheduled to release in 2016
• Squadron 42 will not release until - at earliest - 2027
• Squadron 42 was said to be in the polishing phase 2-3 years ago.

It ain't coming out.

I don't think they're going to release it, not now, not anytime soon, probably not ever. So much risk for them, so little to gain, so much pointing towards them being unable to ship. I don't think its coming.

Where's the marketing campaign? If we're really about a year from release, where is the ads? Where is the hype, the build up? The interviews... I'm not seeing it. Its not coming.

And that, is very bad news for Star Citizen fans.

I'm here, I'm playing the game, I'm trying out all the game's loops, trying to judge it. I'm playing it to judge it. I'm not playing the PU for the enjoyment of the PU. The PU is too buggy to be properly enjoyed. Other games don't have me crashing and losing large chunks of time on a daily basis. Other games are delivering complete games, with end games rather than what can best be described as a co-op PVE experience with the occasional outside chance of PVP. Games like Mortal Online 2 or Albion Online are much better than Star Citizen. They aren't nearly as **promising** as Star Citizen, but they're much better, in their current state, than the PU.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm incredibly wrong, and SQ42 will release next year and it will be the game that vindicates CIG and Chris Roberts. Maybe it will be the hit that they need it to be. I hope it is. I'm invested. I not only bought ships and gadgets to play the game, I've also invested a great deal of time learning it. Maybe Squadron 42 is ready to go...

But I'm not foolish enough to believe that's likely.

And if Squadron 42 is a lemon, what chance does the PU have?

I just started playing again after a multi-year hiatus like 3 weeks ago, and I've had to figure out which ships to buy from an almost clean slate of ships, and I made some mistakes. For instance, I wound up buying a Meteor and then went and bought a Shiv, and while the Meteor is an absolutely fantastic ship, I didn't really need both a Meteor and a Shiv so early. I'd have been much better off if I'd just bought the Shiv and skipped the Meteor.

Ships are expensive, so buying the wrong ships... when you're broke, it really hurts. Here's my guide for how to spend your first 20 million in game. This will get you access to the game's core loops for relatively cheap.

First Ship Recommendation: Buccaneer - 1.6 mil

The buccaneer is dirt cheap, and whether you've got a mustang or an aurora, its a significant upgrade for your PVE ship combat capabilities.

The Buccaneer is absolute fire right now. Due to the fact that deadbolts are king, and that it has a size 4, the Buccaneer can shred targets and get out before taking much damage. Its the best thing around for Gilly missions #4 #5 and #6 for under 2 million.

Total so far: 1.6 mil

Second Ship Recommendation: Shiv - 5.5 mil

That's right, we're skipping the Cutty Black entirely. The shiv is just a better ship. About the same cargo capacity, much better guns and combat capabilities. Its the king of starter ships. It can do everything, will replace your Buccaneer and any starter ship style haulers you already own for most content. You can put vehicles in it, you can haul a fair amount of cargo in it. If you buy a Cutty Black, you'll eventually wind up with a Shiv anyway, and it will have been wasted money.

Now, note that this isn't a Corsair. A lot of people really love the Corsair, I prefer smaller ships. Smaller ships are less noticeable, stealthier, better suited for a single person, and are better for PVP since turn rates matters so much in this game. If you really have your heart on a Corsair, if you absolutely need a big ass ship, get a Corsair, but I recommend the Shiv instead.

I just think its better to spend your time learning how to really fly, than flying a big dumb potato ship that isn't going to teach you much about how to PVP. Even the Shiv is really big for PVP, but its more relevant to you than a Corsair.

If you're a crazy person and are playing what is clearly intended to be a cut-throat PVP game with no intention of getting into PVP, then a Freelancer Max is a cheaper alternative to either the Shiv or the Corsair, with more cargo.

Total so far: 7.1 mil

Third Ship Recommendation: Prospector - 2.9 mil

Like it or not, mining is a big part of the game right now. The Golem is signfiicantly inferior to the Prospector, and the Mole is both incredibly expensive and is a three man ship anyway. This means you're going to be getting a Prospector sooner or later. Without it, you can't get into crafting, and you're probably going to want to get into crafting.

Maybe one day, a game economy will be added to Star Citizen, until then, you're going to have to go out and get your own ore if you want good stuff.

Total So far: 10 million

Forth Ship Recommendation: Cutlass Red - 2.8 mil

If you bought a Corsair or Freelancer Max, then you can replace this with a Nursa, but at this point the big hole in your fleet in terms of capability is the ability to respawn at a far off location, and the Cutlass Red fills this role. Buy an STV with it, and you can park a little ways off outside of turret ranges and drive into bunkers and ground based complexes. If Bikes don't routinely eject you into the center of a planet as they do me, then you can buy multiple pulses, so that you don't have to walk several kilometers if you die.

If you went with the Shiv like I recommend, then you can outfit the Cutty Red with disruptors, allowing you to steal ship components for super cheap and leave them on there since you won't be using this for ship to ship combat. Now you have an easy option for getting decent components!

Total so far: 13 mil

Fifth and final ship: The Hermes - 7.1 mil

At this point, you've got the ability to do most gameplay loops outside of refueling and salvage. You can make decent money doing Gilly missions, and due to the Cutty Red you can begin collecting for Wikelo using a mobile respawn point to make that, ya know, not incredibly painful.

What you need, is a faster way to make money than Gilly missions.

To make more money, you're going to want to take contracts out in Pyro, and that means that you have a problem. People routinely sit at stations, often in an Eclipse, and scan people down and blow their shit up if they have cargo for funsies.

That's not ideal.

So you need a plan for that, and the Hermes has a plan for that.

The plan with the Hermes is to move out of your hangar, and quickly hit 1200 m/s in Nav mode, and nope the fuck out of the station in nav mode until you've left everything behind.

Give them no time to scan you, ensure that they can't chase you unless they're in an interceptor (which isn't usually the case). Just disappear into the void before you're even noticed.

That's the plan with the Hermes.

You also get 288 SCU of hauling capacity.

Now my only regret with picking the Hermes, is it means that if you went Shiv, and then Cutty Red, you don't have the ability to run a Nursa, and the Nursa is really, really good. You can't fit a Nursa in a Hermes either, so now you've got two haulers, and no ability to fit a Nursa. Not ideal, but you do have a Cutty Red, so you can make due. If you really want a Nursa, you can pick a different hauler than the Hermes, but if you do make sure you have a plan for surviving murderhobos in Pyro, because they're definitely out there.

Total: 20 mil

I originally wrote this up as a response to someone's comment, but I think its worth posting at the top level to allow for a discussion about it. Enjoy!

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Instancing was not necessary, and is a stupid idea. Like a lot of things, instancing isn't going to kill the game. CIG likes to add fat - unnecessary shit which they could cut. Unnecessary shit that wastes time and takes away from the core loops.

Star Citizen, will be best as a combined arms resource wars simulator. That's the core of the game. Most of the game's main pillars support that.

• PES supports it allowing player structures and items to persist in world.
• Base building supports it by concentrating goods to steal in one location.
• Static and Dynamic server meshing supports it by increasing the size of the battles that are possible.
• The ships types support it by supplying a varied and deep fleet structure to battles with complex paper rock scissors mechanics.
• The land vehicles support it by supplying varied and deep vehicular combat for battles
• FPS supports it by tying into the battles themselves
• The economy supports it by allowing things to be high stakes, you have stuff, that stuff is valuable, you don't want to lose it, others want to take it.
• Physicalization supports it by ensuring that things can be stolen.
• The professions support it by producing valuables that can be stolen.

That's the core of the game. You can see how most of the game's pillars support that type of gameplay.

Instancing is side fluff, like Science or Journalism, or the dumb ass bot economy and explicitly generated bot missions. Its not core to the game. It doesn't support the core game loop.

At best, its core to keeping the Carebears around, giving them something to do if they refuse to PVP or take any risks at all. Instancing is to ensure that the game has zero risk content, and that goes against the game's core nature. Zero risk content sucks. I could write an entire post on why it sucks, and perhaps someone will force me to explain why zero risk content sucks in the comments, but trust me, it doesn't work in a game like this.

Just to give a hint at why zero risk content sucks... for those of you that have played say Albion, Solo dungeons in Albion are zero risk content. If you've played Albion, you understand that it sucks, and why it sucks. You can't have content that is zero risk pay like risky content, and so zero risk content pays like shit, and so no one does it. That's it in a nutshell.

Its a dumb ass idea, and a waste of development effort.

Here's some things that they'd be better off working towards instead of instancing:

• Player programability for base defenses - ala Rust
• Player programable automation - ala Rust
• Systems for directing AI NPCs while players are offline, to protect their bases from raids.
• Deeper ship customization, ships are shallow as fuck in this game.
• Deeper base and station customization
• Better stealth gameplay mechanics for infiltration
• A deep hacking system for stealing things out of player hanagars and bases, to enable infilitration as an alternative to base raiding

See, those are all things that would fit with the game's core, rather than some bullshit to appease carebears and shield players when undergoing the game's core tutorial missions.

Someone has to point this out.

With instancing, in 4.9, CIG added a loading screen.

I personally don't understand why CIG went through so much effort to destroy all loading screens, but also force us to wade through a half dozen elevators and subway rides in every station. I mean, waiting is waiting. Star Citizen loves to make you wait, just never with a loading screen.

I question the wisdom of going through all the effort they're going through to ensure that you never see a loading screen when they force you to stare at an elevator door for 1/5th of your playtime anyway.

(I think the secret is that the elevators ARE actually loading screens, and we're all suckers... that's why sometimes when you open an elevator you see empty space, that hasn't loaded in yet... but whatever)

But... now we have real loading screens. Its a part of instancing.

You stare at some door for a few seconds and something changes color, and... ya know... that's a loading screen.

I mean, does it matter?

I guess it doesn't, except that they went through so much fucking effort to keep loading screens out of the game. They could have made this game so much more simply if they just had a 2-3 second loading screen during planetary transitions or when leaving a station or city.

It wouldn't have been that big of a deal.

What a bizarre design choice.

And people think about this, as if there is no cost, as if the development is all free, and there's no downsides to not having loading screens... but its entirely possible that without the decision to never have a loading screen, this game would have launched in 2020.

Entirely possible.

And now... we have loading screens anyway.

sigh...

Quantum/StarSim has always been a technologically ambitious feature, that has no clear value to the player. People like to dream about StarSim. When talking about the game, people like to explain that its not just a game, its a "simulation".

And my response is always the same. "All Games are Simulations".

Hell, some games are just simulations. Dwarf Fortress being one such example. I love Dwarf Fortress, so its not that I have something against simulations in games. Its that the nature of Dwarf Fortress is simulation management, and the nature of Star Citizen is a survival game. You can see how a simulation benefits a simulation game like Dwarf Fortress. It is much harder to see the benefit for a game like Star Citizen where we are likely not intended to manage several hundred NPCs as a core part of the game.

And I don't think CIG ever made the case for *why* Star Citizen needs this simulation. I watched the old TonyZ video, but that video was about two things.

1. The technology
2. Having bots do things that players already do in the game.

The technology sure sounded "cool", but that doesn't mean it will significantly add value to the game. Doing things players already do... also doesn't sound like its going to significantly add value to the game, unless the game is going to fail and everyone needs bots to play with.

The simulation aspect of Star Citizen seems like a tremendous undertaking to me, they don't just need to simulate everything with Quanta, that's the easy part. They need to eventually ensure that NPCs are doing everything players do as well in front of players. That sounds hard. That sounds really, really hard. And the benefit for doing it just doesn't seem to be there.

And this is the fundamental problem with CIG and this project. They're trying to innovate in too many directions. Just do one thing really well. I feel like that one thing should be Server Meshing. That's the thing they should take the time to try to nail. The simulation should be canned, or if they don't want to can it, they need to do a better job of explaining how it adds value to the player.

This is not a simulation management game, and if it IS supposed to be a simulation management game, then the scope is too large and they need to cut that and maybe do it as an expansion... maybe... if that somehow still makes sense as a thing to add after they've thought about it long and hard.

Because I don't see the value in Quantum/StarSim. 9/10 entities being NPCs instead of players, that's not a goal worth pursuing.

EDIT: Queue the bots immediately dropping downvotes.

Want good crafted armor, but want to spend minimal mining time doing it?

Want to wear something above average without having to grind for a week.

Listen up.

You can grind the vaughn mission "All things come to an end" and get blue prints for:

• Killshot rifle
• Killshot rifle magazine
• Overlord Armor
• Piecemeal Armor

You can get all of that, grinding just that one mission.

To do the mission, you'll want a vehicle that can fit an STV. The mission is always the same, go to a bunker and assassinate some asshole. Sometimes the mission will involve killing a non-criminal, if you get that, abandon the mission and wait for another one to show up.

Why do these missions in particular? Because unlike some armors (cough, antium cough) and weapons, these can all be farmed in just two locations.

As a matter of fact, if you go to the Yela Ring, you can get Ouritite and Iron, you can then go to Vuur in Pyro and get Hephestanite and Aslarite.

Overlord Armor might not be the coolest looking armor, and the killshot rifle isn't a parralax, but who has time for those fucking grinds?

EDIT: Sorry guys, this is incorrect, Aslarite cannot be found in the Yela Ring. If you want to do this with only two stops, you have to go to Vuur, a moon in Pyro that has Aslarite and Hephestanite. I've since corrected the main post. If anyone knows of any other two location farms for a primary weapon and armor set, please let me know!

The game is far too punishing upon death. Far... too... punishing.

The "cinematic ceremony" in the game greatly exacerbates the pain of dying. Dying shouldn't take 10-15 minutes of game time before you can even start doing something. There shouldn't be this much "cinematic ceremony".

You shouldn't have to go through multiple elevators and a god damn subway train before taking a ride through atmosphere with every bug induced death.

The simple solution to this, is to let people set stations as their permanent respawn point. If you leave Everus Harbor, and you bind yourself to the medbed of your Nursa, and the Nursa is destroyed, you should respawn at Everus Harbor, not fucking Loreville.

Some days, I have hope for this game, and some days, I see these kind of horrid quality of life abominations, and I lose it. It is utterly preposterous that you cannot set a station as your permanent residence.

If you want to force 10 minutes of cinematic ceremony on people that spawn in Loreville or Microtech or Area18, that's fine. But you can't also force everyone to have to go through that shit over and over and over again. If you want to make those areas that difficult to play from, then you need to allow us to fucking move out of them permanently.

EDIT: How is this being downvoted? I'm advocating for people to not have to waste 10 minutes multiple times per play session. I swear to god CIG employs reddit bots to hide certain content.

This is another post that a lot of you aren't going to like, but the capstone feature for Star Citizen, is going to be Base Raiding.

And it was always the plan.

How do we know it was always the plan? Ground vehicles have had no purpose in the game forever. Even today, their primary purpose is to allow you to avoid having to take out turrets at a POI and instead just land 2kms out and drive in. This is not a reason to have the wide range of land vehicles that we currently have.

Its worth noting that they started adding land vehicles all the way back in 2013... It was always the plan.

We have two types of tanks, multiple types of APCs, a ground based mobile respawn point in the Nursa, various bikes (which will put you through a planet, but they're there), multiple anti-air vehicles... its a lot.

I predict that before 1.0, they'll also release the following:

1. A heavy transport ground vehicle, for moving large amounts of stuff.
2. A mobile shield generator, to shield your convoy from attack from the air.

Why would they release that? Because it would be useful for what they put those vehicles in for, Base raiding.

End Game

Star Citizen still lacks an endgame. We've got content, that's for sure. The game has come a long way in the past few years for content... sadly not for bug fixing, but certainly for content.

But its the kind of content that runs out. You can only run ASD so many times before it bores you. I imagine that's the same for Hathor and the Storm missions as well.

Star Citizen needs a real end game, and while the new FPS content is better than I ever expected from CIG, its not enough.

Some games have excellent end games. Some games are all end game.

Rust is one such game.

Rust has infinite replayability. Every wipe is completely different from the last. Even if you are a creature of habit, and choose to live by the same monument every time you play, and take on the same exact strategies, you will have a completely different experience every wipe. Different neighbors, different procedurally generated map, different challenges.

And I know that people lose their minds when anyone compares Star Citizen to Rust, but... that's where they're taking the end game for Star Citizen from. They're going to implement a beautiful game play loop:

1. Scan for resources.
2. If you find a base, skip to step 6. If you find a resource, skip to step 3.
3. Claim the area by putting down a base, defenses etc.
4. Exploit the resource as fast as you can, so you can pay for your initial investment costs.
5. Get raided, lose everything. Skip back to step 1.
6. Gather an attacking force, land say 30kms away, and drive in quietly.
7. Kill everyone you see.
8. Turn off their shield generator.
9. Land a big ass cargo ship, load it up, and go back to step 1.

That will be the game.

And I recognize that loop, because its the Rust loop. That's how Rust works, and Ark, and how Atlas worked.

Star Citizen isn't exactly new. A lot of Star Citizen fans think its new, but its not. There were games that came before Star Citizen that did a lot of what Star Citizen is currently doing. One of those games was a game called Atlas.

Atlas

And Atlas, like Star Citizen was a game about ships and exploration and resource wars, but Atlas was a ships and seas game rather than a space simulator.

But Atlas did a lot of what Star Citizen is now doing. Ships with turrets, NPC turret gunners. Base building, resource collection, ships, ships in ships.

Atlas made mistakes.

Atlas should have been the biggest game out back in 2018. It should have dominated the MMO landscape... but Atlas had issues.

First, it had a terrible new player experience. Atlas spawned you on the beach surrounded by powerful predators. Surviving in Atlas for any length of time required phenominal grit. It was not a game for casual players. And once you got past the initial horror show of basic survival, your next step was to find territory to claim in a game where all the territory was always claimed by massive clans.

If you were able to get past that - as I did - then Atlas was a masterpiece. Resource wars, base raiding, great PVP content... your choices mattered. You could get ahead by being clever. Atlas had a tremendous amount going for it.

But it failed due to its new player experience.

I recently read that CIG sees Star Citizen's PVE content as a tutorial. I read that, and suddenly a lot clicked for me.

How Star CItizen will succeed where Atlas failed

High Sec, Medium Sec, that's there to "boil the frog". I've written about how they're going to boil the frog with players before:

https://www.reddit.com/r/StarCitizenUniverse/comments/1u7d8my/how_star_citizen_should_kill_carebears/

High sec and Medium Sec are there - as they were in Eve Online - to allow for a less jarring transition for players entering the game for the first time. It will keep low sec pirates from driving away new players as happened in Atlas.

Then the PVE content is there to teach you about the game. Here's what a comm's satellite is. Here's a mission that forces you to enter a medium security system (which you said you'd never do). Here's another mission that forces you to enter a low security system (which you also said you'd never do).

Those two things solve the problem that Atlas had. Star Citizen's inherent violence, the brutality of the game won't drive away new players. They'll be able to take as much time as they need to transition into the lower security zones.

This is how you build a "Rust in Space" with mass casual appeal.

And I know, I know... you think that if CIG were building Rust in Space, they'd tell you right? Why hasn't CIG stated this plainly?

https://www.reddit.com/r/StarCitizenUniverse/comments/1udlknr/a_story_about_cargo_physicalization/

They never do.

They know not to rile people up about all this. They understand that some people will be at odds with what they're building. When they added in piracy features, back in the Cargo Physicalization update, they knew not to emphasize how those changes would enable better piracy.

They're doing the same thing with base raiding. They aren't implementing base raiding, they're implementing "Base Building". You can build yourself a nice little house if you want. You can have a treehouse you can share with your friends.

They don't emphasize the negative aspects.

But games like this one have existed before, and if you played them, and loved them, you know the signs.

This isn't just Rust in Space, this is the next generation of combat survival MMO. Star Citizen will succeed where Atlas failed.

If they can only fix the god damn bugs.

These are not necessarily the best places to get components, they're just the best places that I've found. If you've got a better spot post it.

Method #1 Pirating components out of gilly missions.

Tried this, and was able to immediately get a military C tier set for my Shiv. Various YouTube videos claim you can get stealth and military grade B components this way too.

To do it you need:

- A ship with a mix of regular and distortion repeaters that has enough room to fit ship components. I use a cutty red.

- A tractor beam, preferably one of the big ones you get at refineries

- Grenades and a weapon

Go out, do the mission, and clear any extra enemies. Leave the ship you want to target alive. Drop its shields, then soft kill it using distortion repeaters. Watch the EM and IR signatures to do this, they'll start dropping as you hit it with distortion repeaters. The ship should be soft killed when they hit zero.

Park you ship such that your primary door is adjacent to the ship you're targetting.

Shoot the door off the enemy ship, board it, and make your way to the pilot's seat. Be aware that there might be enemies on the ship. Kill the pilot, the pilots are sometimes in a position that makes them hard to kill, so bring grenades - plasma preferred - to do this.

Get into the cock pit and unlock everything with right-alt-k. Then open everything by setting a keybinding for "toggle open everything" in your settings. I set this to right-alt-o. Hit the toggle to open all the components compartments.

At this point, all the components in the ship should be exposed, and you can just tractor beam them out. If you can't get them to come out by pulling them into the ship, sometimes you can push them through the ship into the space outside of the ship and get them that way.

I can't say that I've done this a whole lot, so I can't say how good the components can be. I've attempted to rob fighters this way and found that I couldn't get the pilot out of the pilot seat or open the component compartments. Other people might know how to do this. Larger ships like Freelancer MIS's in the 5th mission are definitely robbable. Probably the Connie too, although I haven't tried that. I've heard people say that you can rob the fighters, but like I said, I wasn't able to figure out how.

Method #2

Kit up in your best FPS mission kit, and if possible bring a ship with a medbay. This can be a Cutty Red, or it can be a Corsair with a Nursa. Nursa is better.

Find one of the Cry facilities on Microtech, and raid it. There will be a "no tresspassing" warning, but in my experience you don't get a crime stat so you can ignore it. Either park a ways out and drive in with a land vehicle (not a bike, you'll get ejected into the interior of the planet), or be super careful and find a spot that's close where the turrets don't have line of sight. To find ship components, just... like... walk around and loot. They're everywhere, outside the facility, inside the facility... just laying around on the ground. Yesterday I went and got a grade B military shield and a stealth grade C quantum generator.

You can bring vehicles into the building (I didn't, but I noticed you could as I was leaving) so maybe try that to make it easier to get shit back out.

Know that the mobs there come in two types. Regular normal mobs that aren't too much of a problem, and elite guards (wearing the fancy Hurston security armor) Those guards are pretty tough as they like to throw grenades. Don't stay in one spot, keep moving, keep your health up and bring a friend to ensure success.

The area has pretty good stuff. I haven't explored the whole place yet, for all I know if you go in far enough you find grade A components. Your mileage may vary.

I wanted a pulse because its the smallest bike in game, and therefore you can put it in almost every ship.

I saw a lot of utility in getting one, so I used 4 Wikelo favors to get a Wikelo special Mirai puilse.

I do not recommend it.

The pulse's primary function, it seems, is to eject the player into the interior of the planet the player is standing on. Either that or turn over, and eventually blow up.

Dragonfly also seems to be a piece of shit, tried that a few times, and it works similarly.

Bikes in general just seem to be garbage that need work.

Now I've spoken with other players about bikes, and been told that they work just fine, but this is bullshit. Its stories like that that got me to waste an inordinate amount of time trying to get bikes to work. Bikes are a newb trap, and are trash. STVs DO in fact work pretty well. I assume the bigger variants, Mules, Cyclones, Ursas... also work just fine.

Bikes need a lot of work done to make them worth using.

EDIT: I swear to god CIG uses bots to defend their product. These can't be real people in here.

Cargo physicalization is now in the game. Its been in for a while, but it wasn't always there.

And so there's a story about it that you might not have heard, and its not a story that's often told, but its a fun story.

So back in the day, you didn't have to load cargo. Cargo wasn't a physical object in the game, it was a part of your ship inventory. It wasn't a bunch of boxes in your hold like it is now. Because of this, cargo hauling was really simple, you'd just click a few buttons and your cargo was loaded for you. You'd deliver your goods, and then it would be offloaded for you too.

Easy peasey.

But then CIG announced they were going to add in Cargo Physicalization. They were going to take that inventory, and make it actual boxes that you had to move around.

And when they did that, the carebear playerbase in Star Citizen rejoiced.

People were in reddits and spectrum posting about how CIG was working on THEIR game loop. The haulers were getting gameplay improvements. CIG really cared about them, because they were ensuring that their loop would be "improved".

But... this was all a lie.

If you'd done Piracy in this era, the era before cargo physicalization, then you knew that when you blew up a ship that was carrying cargo, the ship would just explode into 1000 1/8th SCU boxes, making piracy completely pointless. Who wants to pick up 1,000 individual 1/8th SCU boxes. It wasn't worth it, ever.

After Cargo Physicalization went in, it didn't help haulers at all. Haulers had it good before cargo physicalization, all they had to do was press a button to load their cargo. Now they had to fuck around with tractor beams, and freight elevators and frankly hauling became a huge pain in their ass as a result of the changes.

So, the truth was, that when CIG announced that they were adding cargo physicalization, all these carebears were celebrating, because they didn't understand that the feature wasn't for them.

They thought it was for them. They believed in their bones that it was their patch.

But it wasn't their patch.

It was CIG enabling a feature that pirates needed to properly rob them.

Cargo Physicalization should have been called the "Fuck you carebear haulers" patch, because fucking over haulers was what the patch was about. It added a bunch of unnecessary bullshit to the hauling profession, so that pirates could more easily take hauler's shit.

But the community was so blind, that they couldn't see that. Cargo physicalization went in to thunderous applause.

And if you didn't know that, well... now you know.

If you understood, at the time what cargo physicalization was really about, then this whole thing was just funny as shit. All these people praising a mechanic that was there to fuck them over. Truly hilarious.

I think about this story, every time a carebear talks about base building. They think that's for them too. =D