Game 9: X4: Foundations Part 1 - Chipmunk

Next up - a game one of my friends has played and replayed for a truly ridiculous amount of hours, so I've decided to see what all the fuss is about: X4 Foundations. X4 describes itself as 'A living, breathing space sandbox... thousands of ships and stations trade, mine, and produce, all realistically simulated.' Let's jump in and see what it's like to be a small fish in a big pond.

The tutorial ship looks like a fine vessel.

There's a walk-around mode and a fly-the-ship mode, and happily you can seamlessly switch between keyboard and controller for this.

I suspect that 'travel technology looks very pretty' is a universal trope of space media by now.

Basic tutorial done, I see there are a lot of starting options and I appreciate that they list how much 'help' and guidance you get with each.

Based on the descriptions I think 'Stranded' sounds great!

We're going with the 'Stranded' start: 'You have always been a trouble maker, so it is not unusual for you to find yourself in the occasional sticky situation in the pursuit of easy credits. This time, however, it seems like your schemes have maneuvered you into a total dead end, and you will have a hard time getting out without help.' Our story opens in a jail cell - I have obviously made someone angry. Isn't this is more of an 'arrested' or 'captured' situation than 'Stranded'?

My cellmate however lets me know that the previous occupant was already planning to escape, and had made some preparations to do so before she was 'disappeared'.

Someone named 'Axiom' is helping me out.

At least I have a room with a view.

Normally in a prison you wouldn't want to include a window that appears big enough for a prisoner to crawl out of, but I suppose that's no longer an appealing escape option in space. Escaping consisted of lightly pushing aside a grate and flipping a switch just behind it which opened the cell doors. Unless the prep-work involved someone installing a whole electrical panel for the prisoner to access needing only a screwdriver, this is a poorly designed jail. I meet Axiom, my cell neighbor, and he offers to help me if I can get him out too.

Some lucky alien species get extra arms, Axiom got extra knees.

In the halls nearby there are no guards or other security measures besides the retractable bars of my cell - the doors are already unlocked.

This is not a maximum-security facility.

The game says I should get into a spacesuit but I don't see one to get into. I mess around with the airlock until I can go outside anyway and it turns out that I'm already wearing one, thankfully (Which means they really shouldn't have put me in a cell with a window!). I do a little spacewalk and some light repair work on a panel causes Axiom to be released from his cell.

There are minimum security prisons, and this ranks somewhere below that. Whoever runs this place has clearly contracted out to the lowest bidder.

Searching nearby cell blocks I find a laser weapon just sitting out on this desk, unattended, right outside the prisoner cells. There's another prisoner here but Axiom urges me to leave them, we can come back later and don't want to risk being caught.

I'm very unclear on who might catch us, there's been no guards of any kind.

With the hand laser I can cut my way out of the structure and drift into open space where Axiom's friends have a ship waiting.

Someone just happened to innocently park their vessel right next to a prison.

I get on board, Axiom joins me and hops in the pilot seat, and we've escaped without incident.

The real hero is the subcontractor mismanaging the prison.

People in space are trying to murder each other nearby when Axiom warns that we are 'about to enter' lawless space.

What good is 'lawful' space if people are already killing each other there?

We arrive on what I assume is a capital ship and disembark. Axiom says I should go talk to Maestro, the captain, and then offhandedly mentions that I can have the getaway ship as a gift.

I'd probably have been loyal just being given a lowly position on the crew.

The view from the bridge is pretty cool, we're in an asteroid field. Some distant people on comms sound like they're probably fighting, I'm pretty sure I heard someone tell someone else to 'Eat Space'. I meet Maestro, who refers to himself in the third person as 'Split'. He claims they're a band that want to achieve independence and need folks who don't mind breaking laws - guess I fit the profile. He wants me to smuggle spaceweed. This might sound like a risk, but let's keep in mind that last time I was caught and jailed for something illegal I easily escaped and someone gave me a spaceship.

Sounds like a win-win situation.

He's leading a pirate group called the Empyrian Curs. He refers to both himself and possibly his entire race or civilization by 'Split', bringing to mind the Marklars of South Park.

This is my gun with a small ship attached to it, the 'Misfit'.

I need to figure out the map and mission objectives, which the tutorial didn't cover. I need to bring this spaceweed to a HAT defense platform but it's unclear where that is.

My name appears to be 'Emry Sloan'.

I manage to figure out that the fuzz is already closing in on me so I get the hell back out of the system though a jumpgate, but there's no indication on the map where this defense platform is so I'm going to head for the highway in Silent Witness and cruise around looking for it.

There's a lot going on in the map interface and I'm trying to figure it out.

Ah, my radar has a bright yellow line showing where to go - I didn't see it at first, either because my ship hadn't found the platform or when I entered the system the delivery location might have been very close.

Help me glowing yellow line, you're my only hope.

After successfully docking by accidentally afterburnering my ship into the defense platform while trying to target it, Maestro lets me know that he's set the deal up real nice for me.

By attempting to dock I learned that X4 is very forgiving when it comes to collisions.

Mission complete, I just earned 50K credits - which is 50K more credits than I had. I explore the station a bit before leaving - there's nobody I've found to talk to but there are terminals with some intriguing hacking options for the sort of folk I is.

Nobody in this Universe takes security seriously, anyone can just walk up to terminals that control essential station functions.

Maestro says the Curs don't do names and decides that I should be called 'Chipmunk'.

Delightfully I find that I can actually change my name in my profile, so that's going to stick.

Leaving the station, there's a space battle nearby - Xenon ships are coming through a gate piecemeal and getting absolutely crushed by about 10 defending fighters. I decide to fly over there and help attack the Xenons, they're already hostile anyway. The defending vessels thank me for the assistance and some of the Xenon ships drop stuff I can scoop up - I find some spacefly eggs and the game lets me know I can make caviar with them.

Some of the stuff I picked up is illegal so I hightail it away from the patrol ships.

I'm not sure if the enforcement vessels I just helped would be willing to overlook my illegal salvage but I'm not sticking around to find out!

I return to the Arcadian Endeavour (The Empyrean Cur's capital ship) and their ace pilot (Ace) is waiting for me.

Ace wants to find out if I'm any good at straight-up piracy.

We tail a freighter after it picks up a load from a station and when it's alone we pounce. After shooting it for a bit it drops its cargo and I load up my ship with stolen microchips. I find a place that looks like it will buy said microchips and proceed to offload the goods.

The autopilot is very nice in this game, you can set it and forget it.

I check out a ship dealer to see what else is out there - the cheapest is way out of my price range but this one only appears to sell large ships, nothing like the one-man fighter I'm flying.

Welcome to McChonk's Custom Freighters, we only sell the chonkiest!

Looks like these are built-to-order, they have a limited selection of equipment options they can pre-install for you. Feels very much like a dealership, actually. Maestro now wants me to do go make some black market connections with him. Since this is a space sandbox where you can choose your own way to play, I was considering being a pirate of some sort before I even chose this start, which is pretty harmonious with how it's playing out.

The Empyrian Curs are my kind of Aliens.

The universe doesn't feel very populated, there's just stations to visit and there aren't a lot of people / aliens on them.

At this bar there's no patrons or bartender, just my mission contact.

Also for some reason I can't figure out, sometimes when I'm walking around a station I get warped back into my ship, which is pretty inconvenient when I'm trying to go somewhere on it. Back with the Curs, we're moving up to the big time!

I've been running errands and now you want me to take a station for 'all it is worth'? I'm so ready!

Unfortunately, I'm not ready - this mission requires some AGI thingamabobs that I don't have and don't know where to get, so I fly off to explore the galaxy a bit.

I figure out that I can ask random people where things are and find an equipment dealer, giving me my first opportunity to spend the cash I've earned so far on some upgrades.

The shop system could do with an overhaul - each piece of equipment has a link to take you to the in-game encyclopedia if you want to read about it rather than have the equipment info at hand, and you don't get a running total of the purchase you're making until you add the whole thing to your 'shopping list'.

Could we maybe just have all the things I just clicked on go on the shopping list when I clicked them?

Now I'm flying around, accepting random missions for cash until I happen to score some AGI things.

I took a mission to deploy a minefield in the space around a station - it paid a bunch but I wasn't aware I'd need to buy the mines myself - my fault for not reading the contract requirements, so I ponied up.

I assume they probably wanted the mines 'around' the station but it turns out that that volume of space includes the station's flight deck, where I just left the mines in a vertical stack - their fault for not writing it into the contract requirements.

Mission Accomplished.

I flew through a warpgate and on the other end ran into a guy being attacked by Vigor pirates and asking for help. I tried to help out but my weapons aren't nearly beefy enough and I ended up fighting three enemy fighters vs. just me - the guy asking for help was hardly able to damage the enemy and the pirates all switched their targets from them to me. Try as I might I couldn't break one off from the group or get a nearby station mad at them so it was all I could to just to stay alive - I fought them for ten, fifteen minutes before they all just disappeared and it said I failed the mission. There's a lot that's not intuitive about this game and maybe I just need to look stuff up a lot more. For instance, I took a mission to find some items left over from an attacked freighter. I went to a volume of space but was unsure about what to do once I was in it - do I turn on scan mode to look for debris or just fly around? The latter eventually worked but it was a significant volume of space so I was at it awhile. Then I find this lockbox, which needs to be unlocked (why can't I just grab the box and fly off with it?) There's a right-click menu for interacting with targets which lets you do things like scan ships, it would be nice to put up something like 'Unlock (requires key)' on this menu. I have no idea if I need an item or whether to shoot it open. There's nothing in the mission briefing that says how to open it.

My attempt to shoot it open destroyed it and failed the mission.

As it happens, I'm damaged from the battle earlier and I need to repair my ship. Not sure how to do that either but I'll try docking at the places that sell me stuff. I found a casino!

I'm gonna strike it rich!

The place is a little smaller than I anticipated given that the entire station seems to be dedicated to the idea. At least there's almost a half-dozen people here, including me.

There is an actual bar as well, but no bartender.

Unfortunately there appears to be no way to actually play any of the casino games, which is especially disappointing considering the game put me into a little cutscene when I got near the station advertising said games. If you upgrade a ship you need to wait for the station to actually perform the ship upgrade, which is a nice touch of realism but I would like it more if the stations had more things available to actually do on them while you wait.

Just sitting in my ship on the bay, watching the timer tick away.

This three-paragraph encyclopedia entry on the Vigor Syndicate has more lore in it than anything else I've found in-game so far.

I would love to know why water, food, and ice are illegal in Vigor - are they enforcing a monopoly and it's only illegal for non-Vigor Syndicate to have? Are they on a religious fasting holiday? I'm not making a lot of money from the few missions I can find and am actually capable of doing so I load up my cargo full of food rations that sell here at this food ration factory for 4% off market value, we'll see if I can get anywhere trading.

The trading screen is exclusively in your cockpit, there's no trading post on the station itself.

I find the best price I can for them and end up selling at a loss even though I bought at 4% off market price and I'm selling here at 1% off from market price - not sure how that works. If I do more trading I'll have to get better info on the buying / selling prices of the wares.

I don't want my hold to be full of goods and unusable for anything else so I sell and eat the loss. At least there's no fuel / maintenance costs for the ship, so even though I'm hardly making any money I won't go broke. I leave the station and spot this guy - looks like he's a criminal! Anyone else seeing this? Just me? Maybe if I attack I'll get a reward.

How dare this guy be a criminal in space!

I did get a reward! I got some equipment and 500 bucks. I'll take it. Ok, now we're talking. I scored a couple missions for the Argon faction and now that they like me I'm seeing more offers from them. You have to get your foot in the door, so to speak.

The Argon would be down to pay me to help fight the Xenon, which I'd previously been doing for free.

The Argonians seem nice enough, and if I'm going to do piratey-things it probably wouldn't hurt to get on their good side. I'll meet with the representative, take more missions, and see how things go. I see they're at war with the Xenon who appear to just be hostile robots. I meet with the Argon faction representative and she deems me to be a 'Friend of the Argon Federation'. She says there are many benefits that go with this without listing what they are, but it does flash that I can purchase a police license.

Cerise Giorno used to be one hell of a pilot before they put her behind a desk.

This place also sells ships so I'll see what sort of vessels Argon sells - probably better than my scrap-heap Kyd fighter.

The ship dealer's "Showcase" are these blobby, indistinct holograms of ships - maybe invest in some plastic models instead?

I don't like the look of any of the Argon ship designs, but on my way out someone lands this baby next to me, an ECS Vanguard.

Where can I get me one of these?

There's a lot more life outside the stations than in them. The stations have all these small craft flying around in their vicinity. I took an Argon mission to 'restore order' and it wants me to scan these small craft and immediately just shoot any criminals I find (In fact, I have to shoot 4 criminals - always good to give a murderous enforcer a quota)

Argon Federation are not big on the 'Due Process' thing.

This criminal tour bus stands no chance!

Not sure what happened but after blowing up an entire tour bus (that was clearly marked criminal) the station security got mad and started shooting at me. Maybe I accidentally hit the station or was supposed to ask the tour bus to surrender first?

I flew around for a bit and shot down one last criminal for the mission before running away. Argon Federation at large don't seem mad, thankfully. I realize that since the Xenon are intelligent robots, it's likely that destroying their ships might yield the AGI units I'm searching for to continue the Empyrian Cur missions. Argon has a 'Guild mission' to join the fight against them and I feel like I can both improve my standing with Argon and find the AGI things at the same time. I meet with Argon's Xenon war coordinator (She must be very busy if her duties include recruitment of individual pilots) and I finally get to hear some in-game lore about them - ancient machines invented by the original Terrans to help them expand throughou the galaxy but as AI is wont to do, they turned on us.

The Xenons were created by man. They evolved. They rebelled.

Ummm... they apparently painted my ship in Argon military blue while I was agreeing to fight them.

I didn't even think this was my ship at first when I came back. Also, props to the ground crew on their efficiency.

Interesting, these Xenon-hunting missions reward you with parts in addition to money. Oh it's all fun and games on the Argon side of the warpgate, where there's half a dozen friendly ships at any given time attacking the few Xenon ships brave enough to come through and you can just fly in and steal their kills. Unfortunately, Argon wants intel so they send me to the other side... Xenon city.

This mission which asked me to infiltrate Xenon space and operate behind enemy lines had an 'easy' rating.

As soon as I come through the gate I slam on the afterburner and run like hell. I don't get anywhere near where I'm supposed to deploy a satellite before interceptors catch up with me.  I turn around and, badly damaged, manage to escape. "Easy" mission my ass. I abandoned it since that isn't happening anytime soon and headed back to Argon space - I'm going stick to normal missions for now. On the plus side it looks like participating in the war has opened up military equipment, so I try to upgrade my ship but it looks like they don't have parts in stock for the weapons I want - it feels like this game has a fully functioning economy and I'd have to wait for a freighter to actually deliver the weapon parts to build the weapons. Ok, I ended up looking out how to get into lockboxes. Turns out you have to directly shoot and hit what are sometimes extremely small locks on the boxes to open them without destroying the boxes themselves - there's no in-game indication that this is how they work like target-highlighting the locks or mentioning it in the lockbox mission briefings, nor is there an encyclopedia entry on lockboxes. In the process of looking this up I also found out that you can go into 'Long range scan' mode and then hit the 'L' key to launch a scan pulse, none of which came up in the initial tutorials and there's no in-game indication that you're supposed to actively do something while in long range scan mode (also why have an entire mode for it, why not just be long range scanning while in that mode, or just let the user hit 'L' whenever?)

Anyway, based on this I've decided that the game simply isn't intuitive enough for me to figure out a bunch of this on my own, so I'm going to do all the rest of the tutorials first and be more willing to look stuff up online when needed. All right, all tutorials done except for station construction and management, and it let me know a bunch of stuff I wish I'd known, lockboxes and long range scanning included. I wish the game had encouraged me to just do at least all the 'Intermediate' tutorials before starting, but we're here now.  The most important thing I learned is that I can set things up so that I can hire ship crew and commission my own ships, so I save up for a couple missions worth of credits and use it to commission a medium-sized freighter. Argon space has been relatively safe to be in so I suspect it can survive with just a couple defensive turrets and a basic shield. We'll set her to start trading on her own and see how it goes.

My first freighter can haul a giant hotdog anywhere in the galaxy.

I start scanning stations for secret messages now that I know about that. I get one that says I should contact 'The greatest scientific mind in the galaxy'. I assume it's an ambush, but hey, what the hell. The coordinates take me into deep space and I arrive to find this:

My god, it's full of stars.

An entire space-station comes in through the rift and self-proclaimed 'Greatest Mind' Bozo Ta invites me to come aboard.

Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy, but here's my station, come aboard maybe.

The station looks very cool from the outside.

Sadly the inside looks like all the other stations.

The Greatest Mind in the galaxy apparently just decides that he'd rather be sciencing, so he transfers control of the entire station to the first rando that visits him - which would be me. I haven't experienced an unearned promotion this big since they made me Archmage in Skyrim after like three missions for Magic University. Guess I shouldn't have skipped the station management tutorial after all. A true cause for celebration - my new station has a safe deposit box - I've been carrying around random illegal stuff all this time and sometimes it makes station security mad when they happen to scan me.

I was minutes away from stuffing all the illegal things into a lockbox and leaving them in space.

Brainiac has also given me a research tech tree, nice.

I think maybe I needed these techs in order to hack station terminals.

Ugh. The Asimov (My freighter) has been puttering around doing fine under general 'Fill Shortages' orders for all materials. Unfortunately I got a mission to deliver 10 antimatter to a ship that just appeared in the system with my new station, and the Asimov helpfully decided to go buy some antimatter to fill that shortage.

Problem: NOBODY ELSE WANTS ANY ANTIMATTER AND THE ASIMOV CAPTAIN FILLED HIS ENTIRE HOLD WITH THE STUFF.

With this much antimatter you could blow up a planet. Alas, terrorism isn't profitable.

It would be nice if sci-fi games treated antimatter as something super-dangerous, then I could make a bomb out of it or something. Since it' s just another commodity I'm going to have to dump it into a container in space and hope there's a use for it later so I can let the Asimov get back to business. All right, antimatter dumped in space near my station. Once the station has some storage I'll actually put it there but I'm having trouble getting said storage built - I just delivered the resources for it and I hired a construction ship to do the work but it's not happening, will have to figure out why later. In the meanwhile, I found an illicit signal from a guy asking for some unstable crystals, which require you to do a little mining. While the money was just OK, the long-term reward may prove invaluable: I've made a black market contact! He (she?) sells some of the AGI parts that I've been unsuccessfully trying to obtain by shooting down Xenon ships, which has thus far yielded less than a third of this guy's entire supply.

In addition, he buys drugs, so if I can find a cheap source I can start getting into the drug smuggling business.

Also, I've hired someone to fly my own ship for me. You don't appear to actually pay salaries to people you hire, they're apparently happy with an up-front fee, and for an inexperienced crew member that fee is very affordable. This is super convenient because if I just want to go somewhere or do some simple trading it's actually easier to use the map commands to order this person to handle it rather than do it myself, and while they're piloting the ship I can be ordering the Asimov around on the map. I'm getting the sense that much of the game is more about mainly using the map to control ships you own rather than personally flying your own ship around to do stuff.

My pilot is completely happy to work 24/7 in exchange for a signing bonus and zero salary.

The game feels a bit like Kenshi in that I don't really have a clear overall objective at the moment, so I should just decide what I want to do or accomplish - and what I want to do now I think is pick out my own personal vessel for the future - something that looks good and is fast so that when I want to get somewhere - or get away from something - I have the speed to do it. All ships seem to be able to use universal sets of fairly generic components so looks actually play a prominent role in this selection, I'm going to visit the various ship dealers I've found and see what's out there. If it's a military ship I want, we'll see about getting in that faction's good graces. Before I can find my first ship dealer however I stumble across an anomaly in space. I fly into it (because that's absolutely the first thing you should try when encountering an unknown space anomaly) and I get warped far, far away into a sector I've never been to before. I lay a nav beacon assuming it's a two-way portal and fly back into it to go back to where I came from, but nope - I go somewhere else unknown.

Great, now we're lost in space.

This is the known universe so far. It all consists of whatever I've personally explored at this point - you can't buy maps from the factions, and it's pretty odd that Argon wants me to help their military but won't give me a map of their own territory!

Nobody sells a map of known space? Can I go into the cartography business?

I'm going to keep flying through these anomalies and drop a nav beacon at each one so I can map the anomaly network. One takes me near civilized space so I take the opportunity to stock up on nav beacons. I found a derelict station - I would love to be able to land and explore it but I can't find anywhere to do that. I'm really hoping it's more than just eye candy.

I found a similar abandoned structure elsewhere called 'The Aqueduct' but I couldn't get into that one either.

There's a little 'Shady guy' icon for the black markets that I've got access to but sadly the map doesn't allow you to filter by them, so it requires some effort searching the map to re-locate them.

Solution: Drop an inconspicuously named navigation buoy that I can find easily nearby.

'ILLEGAL BLACK MARKET HERE'

During ship-shopping I find this beauty - she's fast as hell. I'm hesitant to make it my personal ship only because a single weapon means it won't be able to fight well, and I'm still occasionally doing combat missions, but I outfit it for speed and it will make an excellent scout. I will definitely have to try it personally at some point.

Speed is life!

Ok, I think the ship I want is a Teladi military fighter - it's got three weapon slots but I'll have to make Teladi happy with me to be allowed to buy it, and I blew my cash on that scout, so before that happens I'm going to go back to the Empyrian Curs missions.

Hi Axiom, been awhile - how have I been? Well, I started a small trading business and am owner of an entire space station, how about you guys?

Time to learn about station hacking. Unfortunately it's a Teladi station they want me to hack, so I hope I don't get caught and hurt my reputation with them. Hacking different terminals in a station has different effects but this one will cause the station to eject some of it's goods, and the Arcadian Endeavour is standing ready to grab the stuff once I cause it to be dumped into space.

Once you have the proper item for hacking, its as easy as pushing a button.

The Arcadian Endeavour sends drones to grab the loot and escapes under fire.

Axiom asks me to defend the ship as they run but that wasn't part of the plan and I don't want to make enemies of the Teladians so I refrain - I think the Endeavour can handle a couple fighters and that proves correct. The Curs are still very happy with me and want me to sign up for more missions, but since those could also be against the Teladians I'm going to wait on them until I have the ship I'm after first. Also, for the first time I'm accosted by pirates in the sector containing my station when I fly there to drop off some supplies. Once I get some capital I'm going to have to see about establishing order in my home system. En route, I was checking the map when something bad happened with the ship. I popped out of the map to find myself repeatedly colliding with a freighter under autopilot control. The autopilot noted that it had 'epically failed'. I think I figured out why collision damage in this game is low. I've found a Split faction called the Free Families that has a ship that looks better than the one I was aiming for. It's fragile as hell so I hope that means it's also fast. I'll try for that one instead of the Teladi.

Success! The Free Families welcome me to the party.

And here's the new (under-equipped because I'm broke) ship - it has minimal shielding and armor so if it gets me killed we'll try to find something more robust, but as suspected it is quite fast.

I love how it looks, it even looks fast!

I initially thought that equipment was generic because they're all named more or less the same - you go to one station and there's 'Combat Engine Mk 1, Mk 2, Mk 3', etc for all sorts of equipment - but statistically they are different, and I have learned this because Split shield generators, which only go up to Mk 2 and don't even have a Mk 3 variant, are complete and total ass. If I ride this low-hull ship around with the best Split shield I can buy I am confident that I will suffer my first death at some point, so I head back to Argon space to get a real defensive shield installed to mitigate the low hull. I set my old ship, the Misfit, to follow my new ship, the Hermes, around - hopefully this means it will assist in combat. I had to use the 'Follow' order instead of a 'Defend' order because for reasons unknown to me, the game wouldn't let me select my new ship as a valid 'Defend' target. One immediately apparent problem with having my old ship play wingman is that it can't keep up at all - I leave it in the dust. I'll still do it for now because if I end up in a fight or stay around a local sector it'll still help, but I think getting ships that can keep up with me will be worthwhile. I get the shield and some of the lowest-quality weapons (I forgot to arm the ship when I bought it) and I'm really broke, time to earn some cash via missions. The Asimov's trading is helping but I'm having to manage it manually for best results and it's definitely not able to keep up with my financial needs.  And then I happened across a Xenon 'Defense platform construction site'. I figured, hey, why not attack it and kill it while it's still a construction site? Sadly, it was not without some protection. The extra shielding did not hold up, and it has ended in disaster.

In hindsight I should have listened to my own concerns about fragility.

This being the first time I've lost a ship, I discovered that you don't just die - you get thrown into space in your spacesuit.

By the time I figured out that I could instruct my fellow ships to help me, the Misfit (My original ship) had arrived and was also destroyed.

Fortunately, you can call out to random nearby ships and ask them to help!

The captain of this drone carrier was willing to come to my rescue under fire!

After picking me up however, the captain apparently felt like taking out some vengeance on the nearby Xenon destroyer.

I don't want to tell you how to run y our ship ma'am but maybe we should run like hell?

It is I, floating once again in space. I had just figured out that you can ask the captain to take you somewhere and my rescuer's ship was destroyed about one second later.

Total casualties for my hubris so far are two of my ships and one good Samaritan.

That scout ship I bought awhile ago? My last hope - she runs across several sectors to rescue me, and after some very touch-and-go attempts to get on board under fire, I get away.

My salvation. It's been a bad day for my bank account and employees.

I use the last of my cash to get a new ship.

This Nova Vanguard was all I could afford.

Between me doing missions and the Asimov finally finding some lucrative trading opportunities, I rebuild my cash reserve and complete my first research project - teleportation. Boso Ta said something about coming back to the station to show me how it worked but I did that and he didn't respond, I eventually found it in a right-click menu.

There's a lot of things in the right-click menu and it snuck in there.

I want to increase my income generation so I'm going to try out a mining ship, I have enough to outfit one now. Hopefully it'll work better on autopilot than the trader has been, there's no way I want to manually manage a large trading fleet. Teleportation is pretty nuts, you can teleport to any ship / station that you own in the same sector or even in nearby sectors. This would have made my recent ship destruction a lot easier to survive (albeit much less exciting). Oooh, I got an insanely lucrative mission (700K!) from Argon to open a lockbox. My current ship has lasers mounted way on the sides, so they don't work well for shooting the locks off. I decide to go in my spacesuit and use my hand laser.... BUT SOMEONE PUT MINES IN IT

In space nobody can hear the mines explode you.

And spacesuits do not stand up to mines.

Chipmunk died doing what he loved - trying to steal something.

Rather than reload a save I'm going to start anew. and try out one of the alternate starter scenarios. I learned a lot from this attempt and I'm sure I can do better.