September 20, 2024 (Originally posted on Neocities)
Starfield Play Journal #23 – The Last Mystery
The bulk of this post gets into further main quest spoiler territory, following up on a previous quest I’d gotten along with a massive exposition dump prior. But first, business stuff again.
I was looking for more sidequests and found one back at the Lodge. Talking to the businessman again sent me to a ship manufacturer who was having issues with making their next ship. I ended up convincing them to just spend as much as they could, after I found a computer unlocked downstairs to just automatically approve a big budget, and then told everyone their idea was great to further complicate things, and after dropping off a couple random people on Neon, had them recite a bunch of stock positive phrases of sorts. The end result was a gigantic ship full mostly of cargo space and expensive parts, and I also got one for free. Now that’s business.
After that, I finally set off to check on the moon base I was told about, specifically on Earth’s moon, Luna. It turned out that the base was a test site for the initial grav drive stuff, where they needed a supercomputer on the moon (supposedly because it being colder there helped, even though that’s apparently not how vacuums or near-vacuums work) and it took over 5 minutes for the grav drive to warm up before the ship was able to appear all the way out at Jupiter. Also the scientists on the moon base kept messing with the supercomputer to simulate every duck quacking at the same time and other better ideas.
This ended up leading me down to Earth at a new spot that was for whatever reason not obliterated when the atmosphere fell off, a NASA launch site. While I was looting random things from the abandoned facility, the objective marker led me through the base, landing at computers describing the story of how humans managed to figure out the whole FTL thing in the first place. Long story short, a scientist went to Mars, found one of those artifacts, and went crazy from it, coming up with these ideas and math that somehow worked and changed the whole understanding of physics. They kept running these tests but also eventually found out that Earth’s magnetosphere was going to implode in about 50 years as a result of the grav drive not being totally figured out yet and causing some other effects, and only one scientist audibly objected to the tests continuing despite the impending desertification of the planet. It also turned out that the crazy scientist had a vision from the artifact of Earth being obliterated but a future space city on another planet thriving, in addition to all the equations and such needed to make the grav drive work. Apparently this was justified by figuring humanity would destroy Earth anyway, so might as well destroy it in a way that would let them spread to other planets.
As that weird story that seemed to back up my view of the setting being a pessimistic take on an optimistic future came to a close, I grabbed the last artifact and ran back up through dozens of Starborn with my useful explosive shotgun tearing through their ranks. On the surface, the Emissary and Hunter were standing not far from the base. This time however I could fire at them and was able to just get them stuck in their downed poses, so after reloading I actually talked to them. I decided to agree with neither of them on what to do with the Unity thing, therefore picking the third “deathwish” option, which hopefully I can get the probably inevitable space battle onslaught to go in my favor following this.
After all that, I went out to do more sidequests and activities. I did things like finding the remote fancy house of Vlad, the guy who lives on the Eye, helped an older kid put up a bunch of space frog drawings around Mars and got the ability to put more of those anywhere I wanted so I stuck a few in the Stargle, and randomly went to the Schrodinger system to find an abandoned ship with a demon spider on board, but only behind a hardest level locked door so I was really free to just run around until opening that door, and managed to take it out with the usual weapons. I also stole a tablet back from a guy who stole it from a space DJ. Really just cleaning up some random sidequests I’d had for a while at that point. I even encountered someone who had gotten the overproduced ship I helped design, and they weren’t enjoying it. I was going to offer to take it off their hands by force but they left before I could do that.
At this point, I suppose all that’s left is to finish the final quests, provided I don’t need to grind out a bunch more levels to survive the mess ahead. I’m hopefully at least fine on foot thanks to the OP shotguns I’m pretty much using exclusively now, it’s more seeing how the inevitable space battles go this time.