Write up time.
I made a new save that I don't plan to do anything with to get a feel for the starting experience. There's the usual waking up stuff like the HUD coming online and it giving you a diagnostic of what's wrong with your suit, but unlike before you start with low hazard protection and must find a source of sodium to recharge. Sodium, sodium nitrate, and ion batteries now take the place of zinc, titanium, and shielding units to recharge the hazmat shield. It's not a huge deal, and they were conscientious enough to keep the mechanics identical. To refuel life support, you need to get red plants that are rich in oxygen in much the way Thamium9 worked before. Every starting planet is hazardous to some degree and mine was radioactive. You also get a blueprint to build a refinery, which takes planetary metals and turns them into chromatic metal, which is kind of like steel in that absolutely everything important requires some amount of it. If you want to build yourself a base, you need chromatic metal for the starting pieces. Antimatter for hyperdrive fuel requires some as well. Once you're ready to take off, you need launch thruster fuel. To make this, you need ferrite dust, and di hydrogen. You make the ferrite dust into a metal sheet and then combine that with the di hydrogen to make a tank of fuel, as opposed to dumping plutonium into the engines. It stacks now, so you can have up to 20 of these tanks per inventory slot. It takes two tanks to fill the thruster, which gives four launches. A full stack will get you forty launches or so.
Once I was off the starter, I parked in the station and hopped back over to my 50 hour save. This is probably where a lot of the outrage is coming from. Most if not all technology upgrades and blueprints from before the update no longer exist, and show an "obsolete technology" instead, which gives a technology module when dismantled. Tech modules are components to any upgrade you craft yourself but I'll get into that later. The only tech upgrade that carried over were my haz mat gauntlets. Once I sorted out all the obsolete tech on my suit, weapon, and ship, I had a look around the space station I was docked in. The stations got renovated, with open air lounges along both sides of the hanger and more NPCs inside. Some offer jobs, which are sometimes bugged, and others just wave. I noticed that NPC Travelers are more common, finding two in the eight stations I've been through though one was bugged and didn't actually talk to me. Facing the station, the left side of the hanger has merchants for your exosuit, multi tool, and ship. Right side has a mission board and a guild representative. Both sides have a sales terminal. You can now also buy prebuilt tech upgrades for pretty much anything using nanite clusters. Left side also has a terminal for customizing your traveler and you can pick among the three cardinal races, plus the Anomaly and Traveler species.
Once I got done customizing and investing in a few upgrades, I took off and visited the next system to the one I was parked in. I landed smack in the middle of an all out brawl between nine pirates and a freighter. Ship handling definitely feels more sluggish, with my S class fighter slow in the turns and rolls. However, this is made up for by better enemy AI and much more powerful weaponry, with one on ones coming and going much quicker than before. With pirates dead, I landed aboard the freighter and the captain promptly gave it to me free of charge. I'm not going to say no to a free freighter, so I claimed it and started figuring out this too. You can buy small escort craft, frigates, that can complete expeditions for you and land either cash or rewards. I've taken to just parking my ship in the hanger and using the freighter to go places since the freighter has a longer starting jump range than my ship does. If you get in a fight near your ships they'll come to your aid, with combat frigates launching fighters to support you which is quite nice when you've got a bunch of hostiles on your tail. One thing I don't like about frigates is that if they get damaged on an expedition I have to manually go and fix them as opposed to either sending resources across or just waiting for it to be fixed. That's not to say that I don't dislike having to maintain my fleet but it does make me ask why the admiral has to go out and do shit personally. You can buy more frigates and they come in several classes: combat, exploration, trading, support, and fuel. Missions can call for different things, so sending the appropriate frigate is important.
Does anyone have any questions?
