With a bunch of mining ships working and a starter station, I take the helm once again to expand my empire!
I wasnt totally sure how to best configure the station, so I leaned towards a setup that dedicated sides of the station to various purposes. Docking, production, and storage. My initial setup consisted of 1 of each – 1 dock, 1 storage, 1 meat, and 1 solar panel. I thought the one dock was enough to start with, but I noticed after playing for a bit that there was a lineup of ships wanting to trade. My transporter was large enough to take up the entire dock, so no other ships were able to land. Awks.
Mining Operation
Ive found a good way to check how each mining ship has been doing by using the ships naming convention. By indicating who they are, what theyre doing, and where theyre working in their name, I can filter by each code in their names in the economy page.
Ive noticed that every so often, one of my miners will report that they cant find a buyer for a resource it was mining. But the odd thing is that I can usually find a station thats pretty close that would buy the resources. Ive been temporarily fixing the problem by issuing a command for the ship to go to that station, sell the wares, then go to a different region to continue working.
As I write this ship log, I now realize that I havent been checking if the ships had trading computers or not. I wonder if that would solve the issue.
Station build
I expanded the station so it has a bit of everything. A bunch of docks, solar panels, meat factories, water generators, and storage.
The Great Escape
After expanding the base to include a dock, the main mission progressed and I got a call back from my buddy. Instead of asking to help him with dropping antimatter bombs, he asked me to break him out of his prison. 🤷♂️ I guess I cant say no.
I picked up a gunship, went to the ship yard to give it some upgrades, and set out to the prison break.
The mission was an escort mission. The captive alien had arranged a ship to take him to my base, and a bunch of decoys. I was tasked with escorting one of the decoys.
As expected, I ran into resistance. 2 very small ships which didnt have much firepower. Having a gunship with a bunch of turrets made it so it wasnt too difficult, but also the devs probably wanted to make sure the player didnt totally get wrecked so early into the game.
After dispatching the 2 bogeys, the captee made it to my station and decided to claim the research department as its own. As a compromise for housing them, they now became my slave that researched new technologies for me.
I took a prek at the research tree and immediately went for teleportation. That way I dont have to walk onto each ship thats relatively close by, I can just magically appear there.
With my new buddy on-board and Teleportation being researched, I figured this was a good place to call it.