No Man Left Behind

Star Citizen continues to make headway, although not as quickly as many people would like. The recent 3.7 patch introduced several new features like caves, ship rentals, and other quality of life improvements. On its face, there’s really nothing that causes non-fans to sit up and reexamine their opinion of a game they’ve probably never touched, but progress is progress. I suppose it’s like the adage “seeing the forest for the trees” in that respect. Those who are outside of the forest don’t see trees, they see the whole expanse of the landscape. More importantly, they don’t see trees, nor do they see the ecosystem beneath the canopy. Those who are inside the forest, then, can only see trees, one after another, stretching off into the distance. They can see and touch and experience the activity that is going on in every corner. While they might not have the “big picture” that those on the outside believe they have, their experience is, in my opinion, far richer and more informed. So there’s that.

With each patch, conditions have been improving. My usual bread-and-butter cargo missions have decreased in payout with 3.7 (a whole 1,000 aUEC per run!), but I usually have enough opportunity to make a leisurely 20k or so picking up boxes and driving them to the other side of the system. Since 3.6, we have a chance to get interdicted either by the cops (if we’re still under a factional jurisdiction) or NPC pirates (in between these patrolled zones), so while I always submit to a scan from the former, I’ve been looking at upgrades for my Titan in the event of the latter. After a few cargo runs I headed to Lorville on Hurston to pick up a Devastator 3 scattergun to replace the Mantis chaingun that is affixed to the nose of the ship. I had once rented twin Devastator 3’s for the Sabre and was impressed with the…well…devastation they unleashed, so I hope this one will serve me well should I need to defend myself when shipping packages.

Last night Mindstrike and I took the Titan on a short delivery run because we wanted to test the new mission sharing feature. This is something that had been painfully absent because while some missions such as the delivery runs were really simple enough to solo, other missions such as bounty hunting required backup. Now everyone who participates in a group can get a piece of the overall payout so no one has to be the fifth wheel any longer.

This isn’t to say that everything went swimmingly, though. At one point when we dropped out of quantum travel at CRU-L5 R&R station for the package pickup, Mindstrike was inexplicably launched from the ship. The closed and locked ship. In days gone by this would be a lost cause, but here he was only 1100m away from where the ship had stopped. I was able to slowly approach his position so he could EVA back into the cargo bay.

On the way to delivering the package to Daymar, we literally ran into another issue. I found a “bug” (I assume it’s a bug?) whereby the forward thrust applied before entering quantum travel is immediately resumed when leaving quantum travel. As I had opened up the throttle limiter to full blast prior to making our final jump, when we were interdicted in an asteroid field, the ship was immediately plowing ahead at 1113m/s — straight into a massive space rock. While we survived this encounter, the repair bill basically wiped out my part of the mission proceeds.

We’re All Wizards Now

During the “survivalbox craze” a few years back I picked up an early access game called Citadel: Forged With Fire. Rather than focus on post-apocalyptic or zombie world tropes, it was heavy on the magic aspects. You are a newly awoken wizard who has to re-learn everything you knew about wizarding in order to survive on this landmass filled with your standard high-fantasy NPC fare like hogs and wolves to start, and ramping up all the way to dragons and demons in the more dangerous and higher level dungeons. You collect rocks and sticks, level up and unlock recipes, and can build housing and crafting tables to equipe yourself to better survive in this untamed wilderness. The kicker is that you can craft magic wands, assign spells from the Holy Trinity spectrum, and eventually get yourself a broom so you can fly around.

As this is a multiplayer game, yes you can play a thinly veiled version of Quiddich.

I only bring this up because I heard that the game was leaving early access next month and is available for PC, Xbox, and PS4. While I believe the game has already hit its v1.0 milestone, this announcement clears away any lingering cobwebs of assumption and kicks the lodger out of the house.

I got so hyped that I rented a server for a few days on the hope that folks I know might have it or might be interested in buying it. I never play on “official” survivalbox servers and like to limit my exposure to only those people that I know, but as the game is still selling at full retail price ($40), I don’t think it’s got enough mindshare in the public for friends to consider picking it up. It seems to be a solid game, although I did run into some bugs last night with mission progression not…eh…progressing, so it might be an item to wishlist for the impending seasonal Steam sales if anyone wants to, you know, waggle their wand.