Starfield - Bethesda Next Big IP

Sorry, she's terrible.

Yeah, somehow I doubt it really matters in the big picture -- probably just a moment to have your companions share their thoughts to show how they think about things.

Also, the fact that so many people seem to be making the choice that angers the companions

1. Makes it seem like maybe it is a lot closer to the right choice than the companions reflect.
2. Again, makes it baffling that there wasn't more variety in their reactions.

I agree with kborom. Please stop talking about our wife in that manner!

Her middle name is Karen.

You can, just toggle the setting when you equip a spacesuit or helmet, it appears right below it in the inventory menu and it reads something like "hide in settlements / show in settlements"

Loving the game, hating the bugs episode #999:
Built an early outpost on Leviathan IV that drills and stores aluminium, wanted to build a second one on the same planet to mine iron and connect them with outpost links so I can have aluminium on second outpost. Turns out the game decided that I don't want two outposts on the same planet after all and deleted - hid - retired my original outpost. I can't see it on the map anymore and even thou I have 3 followers in there, including Adoring Fan, there's no trace of it to be found.

I would be uninstalling if I weren't having such a great time despite this incredibly annoying "feature"

Nope, original base is down south, second base is far up to the north, I read something here about not building bases too close to each other and avoided that by separating them as far as possible.

Edit: "down south" and "far up to the north" meaning the entire planet, two different landing spots.

I was doing some outpost additions yesterday and I tried going to the outpost on the planet map even though I was already there. And after loading screen everything was gone. Maybe it was just a graphical glitch but I didn't wait to find out. Immediately went back to a couple saves before and rebuilt items.

Seems to be key with outposts, ship building, and ship capture here in version 1.0. Save often, between steps, multiple times, and make sure everything still works before you go back to playing the game normally.

Ships disappearing from your fleet, ships literally disappearing and becoming invisible, ships renaming themselves, and some weird ass bug where you can't land at the Den. There's a lot of issues with ship building and captures right now. Delicate system.

At least the game *knows* I have two outposts built, when I open up the scanner it shows I can build 6 more yet, here's hoping after reloading or returning to the system this issue gets sorted out.

Apart from that, not liking the way you can't tell what the interiors of a particular ship look like without buying it, I'm currently running on a Shieldbreaker that I really liked from the outside, with big cargo and big crew, but for the interiors you can't (in my experience so far) tell whether you'll like it or not. This ship is huge, yet it has no room for an armory, or a research station. Bethesda, I need to know if a ship has these kind of features before buying it.

Bethesda's games, janks and drawbacks and all, are the very epitome of PC gaming comfort food for me, and I would seriously be disappointed if they were to ever veer too far away in trying to "shake things up" just because of online discourse.

Starfield 100% met my expectations, and as I continue to play more I find subtle ways in which it exceeded my expectations and has proven more addictive and compelling than I anticipated.

The only concern I actually have regarding the game is the challenge that procedurally-generated planetary surfaces may pose in the creation of robust mods.

Yeah, both outpost and ship building are definitely a duct tape and bailing wire situation right now, especially as you start working on larger outposts and ships.

Same, except that would be a VERY conservative hour count for me.

To that point, having spent the majority of another evening building another ship, I have discovered a bit of predictability to the way things can frequently freak out in that department which might be useful to share for anyone else who also feels super compelled to brave the bugs and spend a lot of time building ships.

One of the most devastating category of bugs seems to involve the game not fully unloading the previous version of your ship before loading in the new version of your ship when you edit it. Sometimes it seems to have been the whole ship, other times only certain parts.

Obvious signs this has happened include:
- Shimmering or other visual artifacts visible from the exterior, caused by multiple copies of your ship existing on top of each other.
- A complete inability to load into your ship, or being trapped in a bugged state where you cannot move after entering it.
- Loading into your ship, but having visual artifacts and other issues inside, like barriers being visible in passageways between habs, but being able to pass through them.

Additionally, often the issue will persist even if you reload (particularly if you reload while inside the ship), giving the impression that your saves might be corrupted, which makes it feel orders of magnitude worse (ie, you might have throw out all the editing work you just did to get back to a clean state).

Thankfully, this is not so catastrophic as that!

Saves made external to the ship do not seem to be corrupted, at the very least. Reloading them might allow the issue to persist, but this seems to be an issue with a reload not fully resetting the memory state for the game. Exiting the game and reloading a save made before entering the ship seems to consistently clear the issue and make everything good again.

Additionally, these kinds of issues seem to happen MUCH more frequently when you are editing your ship from a world cell where the ship exists -- ie, from a ship services terminal or worker at a dock/landing pad. It happens much less often (if at all) if you're editing your ship via a terminal or helper inside a separately loaded cell, like the manufacturer showrooms on Neon (for Taiyo and Stroud) and at Hope Town (for HopeTech). In both cases, this means going through the loading screens to use the showroom vendor rather than the more convenient workers near the dock, but it also means you probably won't have to exit and reload the entire game quite so often while working on big ship edits.

Not quite certain what the situation is if you visit the showrooms at space stations for Deimos and Stroud, since technically your ship is loaded outside the windows of the station, and you're definitely out of luck for a similar mitigating workaround for buying Nova parts at New Homestead (which are ONLY available via a landing pad vendor) -- you're likely just going to have to exit the game and reload more often there.

Finally, this might be anecdotal, but it feels like I would trigger these bugs much more frequently when I was trying to break the connection algorithm and force loops into my ship using hab connectors, so just be extra careful with save management if you're trying to use the parts from Nova or HopeTech to do similar things.

Having now done two full teardown and rebuild operations (in addition to a TON more work making smaller edits) it's very fun and rewarding to take a total disaster of a layout with one or two good/expensive parts you want to reuse (most of the default ones) and replace it with something truly good, but you have to be very methodical about avoiding bugs for sure.

I'm also getting a bit better at knowing how to use placement order to control the connection algorithm -- still not an exact science, but I'm taking more control. Still cannot weight for a modder to build tools to fully control connection points (heh or for an official solution, but not holding my breath there).

Ironically, there's actually a UI precedent in the outpost builder that almost no one will have found -- if you stand inside a hab and look at the wall in outpost edit mode, there is a control to toggle the wall between various states. You can add windows to blank walls this way, as well as add and remove doorways. Of course, the outpost editor and the ship editor are COMPLETELY different beasts, but I could see a solution where you were able to open the more limited version of the outpost editor you get inside purchased apartments to edit the interior of your ship.

So i rolled credits on the game after ~150 hours or so.

Overall i'm happy. The 'public' discourse is across the board in typical for a Bethesda game, but this game gave me what i wanted out their games. A dense place to explore and experiment with. They didn't over promise this time around and unlike FO76 they didn't blatantly lie about what to expect. Plus for the first time they took feed back before the game launched and actually fixed things before launch.

I know everyone's experience is different, but i had very few bugs. Some were self inflicted from leaving the game open for extended periods of time, but nothing game stopping or fixed by a reload and very little time lost.

My favorite part of the game was the exploration, the bulk of my time was exploring other planets and clearing out outposts and getting100% survey data, which i eventually found out you can sell for a very good price. Between this and ship hunting i was able keep up with my credit demands and get decent xp. I was level 54 at the end.

I didn't do anything fancy with outposts... just enough for basics and fulfilling contract requests from shipyards. It was annoying at first, but once i got everything working as intended the first time around i was able to repeat the process in just a few minutes.

I had an absolute blast ship building, and my other big time sink was hunting down ships and rebuilding ones to fit my needs. I had built multiple ones from scratch. My biggest gripe is that there's no way to save ship pieces for different builds. I had none of the bugs that folks here and elsewhere talked about in building ships.

Combat was surprisingly fun. Felt leagues better than FO76. With the higher level planets actually becoming challenging.

Story was decent... nothing spectacular and a bit surprising. I didn't expect some of the avenues they went down. Nothing award winning there, but it served it's purpose. The cool part which is always a bethesda cornerstone is all the side stuff you can find. You'll here a snippet of a conversation and it will flag a side quest that will have you bouncing all over the place and doing surprising things.

So for me that it works and was relatively bugged free was the winning combo. I wasn't expecting that and was surprised. I know thats not everyone's experience.

In row 1, only Research Methods is relevant, and you'll probably want at least rank 3 of that. I personally left it there and took one level of Scanning, but rank 4 is useful so you don't have to feel quite as compelled to save scum for bonus results when doing higher tier research that requires rare materials.

Then, most of what you want for a crafting focus is in row 2 -- Spacesuit Design rank 3, and Weapon Engineering rank 4. (Spacesuit Design rank 4 doesn't unlock anything, so you can skip it unless you want to save materials and don't have anything better to a skill point on.)

Finally, you'll need Special Projects rank 1 to unlock many of the highest tier of modifications. That is in row 4, so you'll need to spend at least one point somewhere. Ie, you could take that last rank in Spacesuit Design if you wanted. However, I'd say getting the first rank of Outpost Engineering is worthwhile. It's not strictly required for anything you need for gear crafting, but it unlocks outpost recipes that are generally a bit more efficient (and obviously it, adds a bit of variety to what you can do in general). Probably most notable is that you can make the next tier of storage, which makes managing resource inventory a bit less annoying.

But, Spacesuit 3, Weapons 4, and Special Projects 1 is what you need to be able to craft everything.

I've had a lot of fun with it and the modifications you can make towards the end are absurdly strong and often quite fun (like, hornet nest rounds for shotguns). How it compares to instead spending those points in direct weapon damage boosts in the combat tree, I couldn't say -- but, I CAN say that it's good motivation to interact with a wide variety of systems in the game that the combat tree wouldn't encourage, and depending on what you find fun, that's honestly the biggest benefit (it was for me).

Want to keep up on this thread but don't have a PC graphics card strong enough to play the game right now. Looks like fun.