Mystic Worlds

Multicrew Mining Ship is a Winner

The 2019 4th quarter content patch for Star Citizen introduced our first multicrew profession ship, the Argo Mole. Mining, the first of the industrial player professions to be implemented, has been a hit. It's chunky, orange, looks industrial and is fabulous. 

The entertainment factor caught me entirely by surprise. Mining was on my 'NO' list based on my experiences mining in other games. After trying it, the tier zero version, when it released in 2018, changed my mind. I don't spend a lot of time game, but when I'm in Star Citizen, mining is what I do the most since I can casually explore/meander while earning money.

We've had multicrew combat ships for a few years. The fun and effectiveness of multicrew combat have been up and down due to turret implementation. In this case, however, they nailed it out of the gate. Coordinated and cooperative mining that requires attention and interactive participation is exceptionally well done. At any given time, you can see someone streaming multicrew mining aboard the Mole.

Here's my review of the Argo Mole if you'd like to know more.

Star Citizen - That Sweet Origin 890 Jump Life

I haven’t had and still don’t have much time for gaming. The amount of work and stress in my new role, at my new employer, is a bit staggering. On the bright side is that I enjoy the work, the people, and my role. There’s a lot of satisfaction gained from achieving the level of work that we’re producing. However, lots of process improvements need to take place to reduce the chaos, on top of every team being over-committed and understaffed. That classic corporate tale playing out yet again.

When I have had time to play, the Q3 3.7.x patch has breathed new life into the game with hand mining, in-game ship rentals, ship purchases, caves, the 890 Jump. For me, the Mack Daddy improvement is consistent ship logout and re-spawn. 

One of the things I’ve despised since the PU arrived was the Super Mario re-spawn at a static point mechanic. It’s anathema to being in a so-called persistent universe and forces players to restart their adventure each time they log into the game. This is the opposite of a persistent world and how MMOs work.

Logging out via the bed in your ship has been in Star Citizen for a while but never worked consistently. 3.7 corrected that issue. Once I verified it was working reliably, I wanted to use the mechanic to become acquainted with the first capital sized ship in the game, my Origin 890 Jump. I’m happy to report that I’m still faring the skies of Stanton aboard the same instance of my 890 since the 3.7.x patch.

Learning My Way Around

The 890 is a superyacht that sails in at a whopping 210 meters of pure luxury with 64 rooms at your disposal. You can hear a small overview of the 890 Jump when it was merely a concept, on my YouTube channel. Amenities include sumptuous captain’s quarters, (4) guest suites, bar, dining, executive conference, sauna, swimming pool, fully decked out kitchen, medbay, crew quarters with entertainment areas, cargo bay and a hangar. That’s a whole lot of ship. My only complaint is the overly sterile style and lighting. I wish the entire ship had the ambiance from the sauna and pool area. I’m looking forward to when we can customize the interiors a bit. My plan for the 890 is to do luxury RP style tours, run Murder Mysteries parties, and dinner theater. My goal, for now, is to simply enjoy the ship, become intimately familiar with the layout and how she flies.

Living Among the Stars

I backed Star Citizen to live among the stars with only passing sojourns to exotic planetside locations. I would have been happy with the initial plan of just having the capital cities and hero landing zone locations. I don’t want an apartment or permanent housing situation on a planet - zero interest. Outposts? I’ll be thrilled to build them for others using my Pioneer. For me, I’d only consider it if I can farm produce to supplement the food production I plan to do on the Endeavor.

Having consistent bed logout has been amazing. I’ve done a whole lot of nothing but enjoyed it nevertheless. I loaded my Dragonfly hover-bike and the Prospector mining ship on the 890. With those two on board, I’ve been roaming the skies and moons of Stanton. I hadn’t bothered with the ArcCorp moons. There was nothing of interest for me to do there until now. With the 890, I set her down where I choose and disembark with the Prospector to scan for hand-mined gems. I use the Dragonfly to drift above the planet or moon surface, looking for the new harvestable items.

What I’ve enjoyed the most, however, is merely parking my ship wherever I want when I need to log out. The next time I have a few moments to play, I have, without fail, been returned aboard my ship every time. The amount of time in between sessions doesn’t seem, or the logout doesn’t seem to matter. I’ve logged out parked next to Port Olisar, floating next to an R&R station, in the middle of space or engines off parked on a planet, and it’s been flawless. I even crashed twice and have been successfully recovered aboard the ship - back in the medbay, which seems so apropos. It’s a small but meaningful step forward that the persistent universe is finally starting to actually feel like a universe.

Trials of Real Life and Star Citizen

The Trials of Real Life

At the start of 2019, I had three big goals in mind. Moving to a larger more diverse job market, leaving the Business Intelligence space and completing a novella. Deciding to move away from my family and friends was a hard decision. I’d been wrestling with the idea of moving for a couple of years at least. Establishing a 5-hour drive as the furthest I was willing to go, didn’t leave many cities I had an interest in moving to. And I didn’t really want to be five hours away. I was hoping for three or less. Career-wise,  I was completely burned out in the BI space. Every paycheck felt like blood money with a drip-drip loss of my soul.

My third priority was establishing a consistent writing routine to help achieve my dream of completing a novella as a step toward returning to one of my unfinished novels.  Writing fiction is what I want to do in retirement at the latest, achieving it sooner would be awesome.

Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been working on these goals. In March I received a job offer that would move me 3.5 hours away, and take me into the banking industry. The act of moving was crushing. I cried when my middle daughter told me that she was devastated by it. Ugh, that’s the last thing you want to hear for your children, even if they’re grown and starting families of their own. We’re extremely close. And it felt like a gut punch to all of us.

READ MORE

Casual Citizen Episode 32

Casual Citizen Episode 32 is available on Youtube. The show discussed my efforts to resume creating content for Star Citizen in the midst of other priorities. It includes video versions of my new 2019 fanfic series set in the Star Citizen universe - Zora's Chronicles and Podcity.

As mentioned in the show, I'll be compiling the content produced during a cycle into an eBook/eMagazine for those who might enjoy reading the articles as chapters with the ability to use bookmarks and whatnot.

eBook Formats

• Download My-World-of-Star-Citizen-Generic (suggested)
• Download My-World-of-Star-Citizen-Print
• Download My-World-of-Star-Citizen-Kindle
• Download My-World-of-Star-Citizen-Apple
• Download My-World-of-Star-Citizen-Google
• Download My-World-of-Star-Citizen-Nook

I hope you enjoy.

 

Star Citizen - Please Stop Destroying My Stuff

Grrr, I have an on-going pet peeve with Star Citizen's so-called persistent universe. They have a wonky way of deciding when to store a record of what was aboard your ship. It requires that you certain checkpoints successfully. Namely, landing at a location that can store the ship. Until then the game can and does disappear your assets if you crash, DC or are forced to restart the game. As you can imagine it being an alpha, having to restart the game because of an unrecoverable state is quite common. So why are they waiting to retain a manifest of items aboard the ship, especially assets that only the game can place or remove? Your guess is as good as mine.

I discuss my frustration with this mechanic on Aly's World.

ArcCorp Area 18 - It's Like Coming Home

The second planet and its moons have arrived in the Star Citizen Alpha. Yet, I only had eyes for Area 18. The first time we saw the area it was a small testbed called the social module. Visiting it now, as part of the 3.5 release of the full planet, ArcCorp, felt like coming home.

Read more on Aly's World.

Trains Belong to Civilian Activity

Trains in and of themselves are cool. However, when interjected into transportation like professions, they’re bad. I mean, really bad. There isn’t a courier or transportation service in the world, that would have a driver disembark their utility vehicle to hop on public transportation in order to complete a delivery. NONE. 

Read more on Aly's World.

Finally, Female Avatars

It's been a long time coming. Star Citizen Alpha 3.5 introduces the female avatar. Combined with the first iteration of the DNA it's pretty darn fabulous. We lack hairstyle variety. They only added a couple explicitly for women until they tackle how to dynamically handle the hair based on headgear - helmets, hats, and accessories. Even so, it's a great first outing. 

You can read more and see screenshots on Alys World.

Star Citizen and Other Stuff

I hope everyone is having a great weekend. For many of us in the US, it's a 3-day weekend and I'm definitely enjoying that aspect. I've been popping out Star Citizen articles here and there in an effort to return to producing Star Citizen Nightbus more frequently. It's always a tough decision when free time rolls around. Do I write, give myself a break and simply play a game or some other form of entertainment? Or deal with some aspect of the on-going reconstruction of the main floor of my house since Hurricane Michael paid a visit? It's always a toss-up. Fortunately, one of these is drawing to a close. My house should be back to normal in the next couple of weeks. I've just learned first hand how stressful and long the road is dealing with FEMA and insurance companies to obtain the disaster coverage you've actually paid to have!!! I don't think they could make it harder if they tried.

Skipping Around Star Citizen

I spent some idle time seeing what casual content I could enjoy in the current state of the alpha. I really really miss having a favorite and released MMO to play. Beyond doing the content, it's all the small moments spent being in the game to enjoy doing absolutely nothing. Seeing what I could partake of along those lines with the limited features currently available in the alpha, I used one my ships earmarked for being returned for credit. Now, however, not only do I want to keep it, I need to figure out what I'm willing to return for credit to obtain two of its siblings when they arrive at the end of March. You can hop over to Aly's World to read more about why and see a little clip of this tiny engine that could.

Formed a Writing Group

One of the more common challenges aspiring writers face is the discipline of making time to write. Even once you're over that hump, encouragement to complete a writing journey is often needed. Writing is a singular activity. Even in writing teams, when it comes down to actually writing, you're doing it alone. It's very easy to have the editor's voice lodged in your head, dogging every step and sentence you complete. If you're taking it on later in life, many years past formal education, when we may have developed many bad habits, writing in a vacuum can be counterproductive.

One of my 2019 goals was to produce fiction more often. Commentary, essays and alike come much easier to me but aren't my objective. My goal is to complete one short story per month. For now, set within the world of Star Citizen. I decided that I didn't want to tackle world building simultaneously with establishing a writing discipline. I'm a month short on my goals having only determined them in January, as I noodled over all the things in life that interest me. There literally aren't enough hours in a day for all the hobbies I find compelling. 

Coincidentally, Sister Julie from the No Prisoners. No Mercy. podcast was contemplating the same. After hearing about what she wanted to do, her concerns and struggles, I suggested we start a writing group. I have other friends who've wanted to give a go as well but they're not ready to put ink pen to paper yet but I didn't see any reason why the two of us shouldn't get started.

We've been going for a month now and I'm finding it a real motivator for sticking to my schedule knowing you need to be able to talk about what the hell you're doing about this dream once a week. So far so good. I think Sister Julie is going to resurrect an old lore site she used to write on. I'll share the link when she does.

Here's hoping you and yours are well,

 

Aly

 

 

Star Citizen - One Profession and Two Ships, Go!

There's a trend in MMOs, even in sandbox games, where a particular group of players declares how they play the game, as the only way it should be played. Anyone who's not interested in the content, interaction and progression that suits their play style must be doing it wrong. They've clearly never heard of, much less read about the theories behind player gaming styles. It really drives me to distraction when this behavior rears its head in a sandbox game. Like what are you ninnies talking about???

I recently posted an article on Aly's World discussing this behavior within the Star Citizen community. I offered a scenario for consideration - my playstyle, that doesn't conform to grinding for crap or beating other players. A gaming experience focused on consuming a diverse range of content and group sizes. You can hop over here to have a read.