September 5, 2024 (Originally posted on Cohost)
Starfield Play Journal #18 - Suit Up and Bug Out
Went back to Starfield to see if I want to finish that up before my Game Pass runs out later this month. Mainly decided to focus on the space pirate stuff for this round, so this has later spoilers for the Crimson Fleet questline.
I picked up right where I left off on that questline to get aboard a fancy cruise spaceship where some rich jerk award show was happening in order to rob them. Specifically this was to get further info on the lost pirate treasure, with the side objective of stealing the rich jerk award for one of the pirates. I did both in a fairly diplomatic way, using my corporate mind control powers to just get access to the trophy which was exactly where I thought it'd be, while also swiping all their booze and a few weapons since those were the main valuable items on board. I then had to visit New Atlantis to get to the bank vault where the treasure location info was stored and the usual hired Ecliptic people were a very brief encounter once again.
The quest after that involved getting into a secret UC base to get a special antenna or something to find the treasure ship. I had to ride along in the partner's ship to get there, then it was mainly just following basic puzzle logic like checking the uniform I swiped to get the right passcode plus getting lucky enough with a speech check later to just take the ship it was attached to by their standard procedure. The space pirates were even nice enough to valet the Stargle back to The Key once I showed up with the special ship.
Then one of those notorious Bethesda Bugs happened and the questline got softlocked. Honestly, that I've only encountered a quest getting stuck like this to my memory this late in the game is somewhat decent for their track record. Because I had taken the undercover route through UC SysDef into the Crimson Fleet quests, each quest in that had the additional objective of "check in at the Vigilance" at the end. This time the Vigilance wasn't showing up where the quest marker was and I had no idea where it would have likely spawned if it did. I checked around Mars because that's where I remember it being before, and then poked at random environmental things while I gave the game time to attempt to fix itself. I even found a supposedly stranded ship of schoolchildren, but scared them off by telling them I was a pirate even though there was no mention of attacking them. After searching for whatever workarounds to ideally not involve the usual console command fixes, I read a post marked as a fairly recently updated issue in the unofficial bugfix patch GitHub, so this particular issue might be a new bug from a recent patch if not one that was outstanding that long. So even if I was modding the game to fix things it's likely I'd have still run into this.
The post said an existing workaround was to visit Procyon B-I and shoot at the SysDef ships there, the ones that should be alongside the Vigilance that went missing, to forcibly betray that faction and return to the Crimson Fleet quests directly. I was already planning on going with the space pirates on this one so this just pushed that major decision up a bit. I did just as it mentioned and the game finished the stuck quest immediately and put me at the new one. I then just had to figure out how to fast travel without specifically fast travelling, because fast travel is disabled during combat, but it turns out setting course to a planet without picking a landing point allows jumping mid-combat to fast travel anyway, but different somehow. I just had the grav drive power maxed out before shooting at things so it'd be nearly instant, and I went to whatever planet Neon is on since that's where the next quest was.
The mission was another infiltration sort of mission, so that went over fairly decently aside from having to reload once after stealth randomly broke toward the end and rendered the target character unable to be spoken to. When I returned to The Key, I thought I'd ended up in another softlock as the character I had to talk to was only giving generic lines, but they just had to show up at the correct spot in the base after I hopped down to the planet and back to get time to move. The technology I got from the previous couple missions became ship parts I could slap on the Stargle, which apparently also have bonuses for combat, which any edge in space combat is appreciated.
While having to hop to each individual system on the path to the target for the pirate's haul planet, I got another level, so I decided to use that to upgrade my weapons. While swapping some out for some more powerful weapons, I noticed there was something called a Mystery Gravis Suit in my Lodge room, and it turned out to be an overpowered all-in-one spacesuit that's replaced all my previous armor, as well as my extra chameleon helmet due to the suit itself having that property, and freed up some carry weight because of that. The only main downside is it can't be modded and I suppose I lose whatever perks were attached to all the previous set of armor I had, but it's likely all I should need through the rest of this thing, balanced boostpack included. I also figured out it was from one of the free Creations I downloaded, which the rest of those I think are just black tacticool weapon skins they release gradually.