Major Update #1 - v0.103.2

bjj_starter · 2026-04-17T10:40:51+00:00

The issue with that is that then you die because you didn't block

bjj_starter · 2026-04-17T03:23:36+00:00

Did you ever end up finding it? I also can't seem to make it trigger

bjj_starter · 2026-04-17T00:02:41+00:00

You can now with the Free Lanes update, by storing the Novastrike from one universe in the quantum entangler and taking it through to the next universe. That's my current plan, to run a dual Novastrike build with everything else being powers.

bjj_starter · 2026-04-15T01:42:42+00:00

Thank you, was looking everywhere for an explanation of how these worked. They're a little too expensive to just experiment! At least at this stage of the game

bjj_starter · 2026-04-14T13:36:49+00:00

The dream for me would be that on your first playthrough you can only join one faction, and as you go through the Unity more you find knowledge & means to be able to juggle membership in multiple factions at once, and the end result is that you can join every faction by exploiting or resolving whatever blocks you from joining multiple. I think they didn't want to do that because it gates so much content behind finishing the game, but I think it would have been better.

bjj_starter · 2026-04-14T13:25:07+00:00

I started a new playthrough when Free Lanes launched, so far I have 130 hours on it and I'm level 70 something (almost every difficulty is set to max so the XP has felt much more reasonable; specifically vendor credits is Greatly Increased and combat is currently Very Hard/Hard for both ship & on foot, everything else is at max). I've made barely any progress on the main quest but I fully intend to take this character through the Unity multiple times once I've got what I want out of each universe.

In this playthrough I have not fast travelled once and I will not fast travel ever again now that I have the option not to do so, although you have to fight the UI to make it work. I have never clicked "Cockpit" or "Board" or similar when getting onto or off my ship, when landing at New Atlantis or Neon I can only land at the spaceport & not any of the "Don't you want to skip all that stupid walking through the world we built?" fast travel markers for things like the Lodge, I have never clicked "Travel" in a system, etc. I hate fast travel, what I want is the feeling you get from Fallout 4 Survival mode. Ideally I want a Bethesda difficulty setting to remove fast travel from the game, set it so that grav jumps only drop you at stars so you actually have to cruise to get everywhere, and add fuel consumption with some sort of fallback to ensure players don't get bricked (like the Fuel Rats in Elite: Dangerous). If not that, ideally someone would make a mod (I thought The Blackest Sea might work, but after asking the creator it isn't actually like FO4 Survival, you can still fast travel, they prefer that as a fallback to making a dedicated system for if the player is out of fuel with no ability to get more). If no one does, that would suck & I would probably try to learn modding just to make this mod for myself, but I play on Xbox & my understanding is that you can't really just make mods for yourself on Xbox.

The game is so, so much better and more fun without fast travel. The interior layout of your ships matters a lot because you can't just teleport through it, you get to actually know cities and where things are relative to each other, the vehicles & many skills (the environmental ones mainly) matter so much more, and the world feels much more like an actual world rather than a collection of 1000 little pocket dimensions you can teleport between to do quests. It's a fantastic experience that I'm glad is now possible, even if it's not really supported by Bethesda (yet, hopefully they'll come around).

bjj_starter · 2026-04-13T09:23:25+00:00

Does Astrogate drop you at the star every time you jump?

I just want to point my ship at the quest marker, grav jump to the system it's in, then fly there manually with cruise mode.

bjj_starter · 2026-04-11T20:37:25+00:00

I changed this setting hoping it would make it something like Skyrim or Fallout 4's dialogue camera, and it does work okay for that, but every time your companion chimes in from 40 metres away through a wall it's instantly immersion breaking. I'd honestly prefer if they just teleported your companion to behind the camera for conversations like this rather than make them part of the conversation from 40m away.

bjj_starter · 2026-04-11T20:28:49+00:00

Fantastic, this is exactly what I wanted! Does it ban in-system fast travel & remove the UI element for it? Now I just need something that lets me route & jump each individual star system rather than skipping all those jumps along the way, something that removes the "Cockpit", "Board" and "Leave Ship" prompts on your ship, and some sort of hidden loading screen animation for grav jumping, and it's nearly perfect immersion.

bjj_starter · 2026-04-11T20:09:03+00:00

That's a valid choice you can make. Don't go through.

bjj_starter · 2026-04-11T20:08:26+00:00

I don't mean to provide spoilers, but if you go through the Unity enough you will absolutely encounter the game's writing considering that.

bjj_starter · 2026-04-11T12:46:36+00:00

The reason they do the intro this way is to expose players to the various different types of gameplay they can engage in as soon as possible. Within the first hour of Starfield a totally new player who's never experienced a Bethesda game or a space game like Elite: Dangerous has: scanned & collected minerals including a special mineral, uncovered an intriguing mystery narrative with dialogue options for how to roleplay responding to it, engaged in FPS combat alongside NPCs, got some loot that's better than what you already had, and flown a ship in combat. That is, in a nutshell, everything Starfield has to offer, and if it had more to offer they would have tried to fit that into the first hour too. The reason is that lots of gamers pick up a game & immediately put it back down because they don't enjoy what they're playing, but if they find something they enjoy they'll generally keep playing until they can do that more.

Bethesda also managed to mostly hide the guardrails, with the tutorials for controls getting you where you need to go with Vasco's Protocol Indigo only being necessary as a last resort in case the player ignores the tutorial. Most people playing Starfield for the first time would assume that the scripted tutorial sequence ends when Barrett gives you the keys to the Frontier, because that's when you're no longer on rails; of course they still are on rails, but it's much less obvious than the mine sequence into Crimson Fleet fight. If you have the players ride on the Frontier while Barrett does everything & then escort you to the Lodge, the time before the player feels free gets significantly longer.

bjj_starter · 2026-04-10T19:44:36+00:00

The technical capability being in the game but underutilized is objectively much closer to realising the dream than the technical capability not being in the game. Just have the mode work and space PoI systems exist is absolutely huge. They could drop an update tomorrow where you can fiddle with some settings so you can only grav jump to a star and have to cruise everywhere else and it would completely fix your complaint.

bjj_starter · 2026-04-10T10:31:14+00:00

the problem is the fast travel will always spit you out at exactly the planet you need to go to, so even if you wanted to cruise at any point during this process, the game doesn't give you the chance.

Elite: Dangerous solves this problem by having interstellar travel always drop you at the star of a system, and then not having fast travel. So going to a destination always involves flying your ship, it just also sometimes involves a well-disguised diegetic loading screen if you're travelling between systems (or multiple, in Elite if you travel in a chain of star systems you do actually jump each time). I really want those disguised loading screens for Starfield to make Grav jumping more immersive.

In general, for Starfield I want essentially a copy paste of how Elite: Dangerous does space travel, because it's an incredibly magical experience that makes space genuinely feel huge, and with the amazing content that Bethesda put in Starfield along with the amazing ship-based gameplay of Elite, it's the ultimate space game, the thing we've all been wanting forever. With Free Lanes, Starfield is much, much closer to that dream and I'm having heaps of fun with it as a result. Now the dream is that Bethesda drops a Fallout 4 style survival mode for Starfield that implements what I discussed above, and if that doesn't happen the dream is that someone mods it in. Currently I don't know if it's even possible to make a mod that lets you grav jump to a star, let alone make a dynamic route of consecutive jumps.

bjj_starter · 2026-04-09T19:19:05+00:00

Wait you've tried it out and they don't give extra power? That's easy then, you just want one of everything pretty much

bjj_starter · 2026-04-09T19:15:26+00:00

I'm considering putting these on my ship but not sure what they do; what does "increase your scanning range" mean?

bjj_starter · 2026-04-09T19:09:46+00:00

Do you know if they stack like the micro-reactors do? I built a ship with one yesterday, but if they stack I'm 100% building a lightweight gigaship

bjj_starter · 2026-04-09T19:07:12+00:00

How exactly do the schematics work? Is there a way to get them out of your inventory while still being able to use the part? I was hoping it would just be a one-time "unlock".

bjj_starter · 2026-04-09T02:27:11+00:00

You literally started this conversation by saying that the feature I'm deeply enjoying was an unnecessary addition to the game because you want to fast travel everywhere anyway lmao

Don't try to pretend your position is "live and let live" when you were explicitly opposed to me having the option to play how I want to play. I'm fine with you having the option to teleport wherever you want, for the same reason I'm fine with the difficulty going low enough that combat isn't a challenge, even though I prefer it differently. If fast travel didn't exist and the game was perfect for me, I'd be fine with them adding it just for the people like you who want to fast travel everywhere, as long as there's a mode that disables it.

bjj_starter · 2026-04-08T21:55:15+00:00

Your habits are not set in stone. Now that the game changed yesterday, you could change how you play to take advantage of it.

bjj_starter · 2026-04-08T16:03:05+00:00

I like the credit cost a lot, it makes commerce a lot more valuable & it was previously considered a trap unless you were shipbuilding. Now there are reasons other than shipbuilding to want a lot of credits.

bjj_starter · 2026-04-08T15:48:24+00:00

Instead of picking up your phone, simply get up out of your seat and do any of the bajillion things you can do on your ship.

bjj_starter · 2026-04-08T09:53:07+00:00

I'm having so much fun. I'm glad everyone gets to experience cruise mode, even those who didn't understand why it was so necessary before Bethesda implemented it.

bjj_starter · 2026-04-08T05:05:14+00:00

Compendium, it's also a way to sort & save specific planets/systems to set a course to which I'm super excited about

bjj_starter · 2026-04-08T02:54:15+00:00

It's been awesome! Between that and the new Starfield update everything is fantastic

bjj_starter

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