Choose My Adventure: Postcards from the Star Citizen universe

Your votes last week in my first Choose My Adventure gave me a great way to start looking around the environs of Star Citizen by actually… well… looking around! Exploration was the decided activity and the Atlas Avenger was the ship, so I clambered my way up the ladder to the cockpit, chose a destination on the starmap, spooled up the quantum drive, and took off.

On paper, flying around places to look at sights sounds pretty boring, but the sensation of flight and the vistas that space games provide are some of my favorite things to do in this kind of title, so I began my chosen adventure with gusto. While what I found in terms of planets wasn’t exactly astonishing, it did at least give me the lay of the land and provided some great screenshots.

If anyone tuned in to my earlier Star Citizen stream, you know that I’m not exactly running the hottest hardware in the world by any measure, let alone this game’s. Still, even at lowered graphics settings, this game really does provide some awesome views even when the locations I leaped to didn’t.

With the exception of Hurston and the location of Lorville, pretty much all of the planetoids of Star Citizen are barren, dead worlds. They’re overall pretty featureless, with rolling hills and varieties of rock formations. I wasn’t expecting to find any Endor planets, but a bit of variance in the terrain would have been pretty nice. Still, the places I went to did show some potential for a bit of diversity from planet to planet; one location had some pretty sun-baked expanses, while others were rocky, low-grav moons.

As for locations on these planetoids, most of them likely serve the purpose of destinations for missions and the like. The vast majority of places to head to when outside of a moon were either mining locations or aid stations with a small habitat. Neither of these really bore a lot of consequence or use outside of being somewhere to walk around, but I’m interested to see whether they’ll have applications later down the line as trade hubs or even places players can own later.

Once again, Star Citizen’s penchant for minute details made these otherwise static locations seem lived-in and purpose built. While things like the sight of fire extinguishers that appeared to have two power buttons on them made MJ and I laugh during our stream, the array of items and layout of these locations did show a lot of care in terms of worldbuilding, which was appreciated.

Most of my flight time was done solo, but at one point I found a mining location that showed a Hammerhead ship appear on my radar. Naturally, I wanted to take a closer look, but I kept a targeting reticle on the ship the entire time I approached. This brought a new and engaging level of tension to the otherwise standard routine of landing at a destination, as I was constantly shifting focus between the landing pad and what the ship would do. Neither of us made a hostile move, however, so it seemed cordial at least.

I decided upon landing to head over to this ship, just to see if perhaps I could attempt some contact with this other pilot. Once I approached the Hammerhead, however, it took off and hit me with its spotlight, tracking my movements on the ground. I took the hint, decided to walk back, and checked out the mining station’s buildings instead. The ship kept its lights on me for a pretty good length of time, once again making the whole situation tense in a good way. I kind of loved it.

One of the most interesting locations I found, however, was a docking station known as GrimHEX, which looked a lot like a pirate asteroid base. Its automated voice for landing permissions sounded like it was hacked and falling apart, and the amenities and stores within all had this cobbled together feel of privateers and rogues living on the fringes of space.

What was nicer still, though, were the items on sale at its shops. The weapons there didn’t exactly impress with their variety, but the armor pieces on offer had some pretty distinct designs that I just had to snap up, which left me pretty broke… and also leads right into our next series of polls, cleanly enough!

Right now my wallet is looking pretty slim, friends. I’ve only got a few hundred uAEC units to my name after my in-game splurge and refueling costs. So I need to make money.

The most obvious choice is certainly the game’s missions that come up now and again. There’s also mining to be done, though I’m unsure how lucrative that will ultimately end up being even if the activity itself looks engaging. Finally, according to some of the research I did, GrimHEX puts me just about in shooting distance of the unmarked location of Jumptown, which apparently lets me run drug cargo but also has the distinction of being a place where open PvP goes down.

So those are my options. What sort of thing should I do to make that sweet space bread?

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Next up is the kind of ship to use, but this time our options are a bit more interesting. A reader who goes by the name of Ichi has very generously offered me the use of several of their ships to rent, which has significantly broadened my hardware options.

Friend Ichi has provided use of a Cutlass fighter, a Prospector mining ship, a Hammerhead gun ship, and some smaller fighters like a Hornet, a Khartu-al, and a Sabre. I suspect that in either of these cases, the added pressure of potentially ruining someone else’s hardware will make things spicier for me.

I feel that I should mention that if mining does win out, I am pretty much forced into the Prospector as a ship choice, but I can work out a way to use another ship for mining ops. Maybe my benefactor can eat rocks while I use another ship to haul his findings, for example.

So, what sort of ship should I use while performing said money-making tasks?

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As before, all polling will wrap up on 1:00 p.m. EST on Friday, December 14th. I want to thank everyone taking part for your input, and a very special thank-you to Ichi for offering up their ships for use, however foolishly. Until then, see you next week and perhaps we’ll meet out in the ‘verse.

Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Chris each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures – and you get to decide his fate. Which is good because he can often be a pretty indecisive person unless he’s ordering a burger.