Okay, been a couple weeks since the last update. Apologies for anyone that was interested in my adventures. So, here's where it's at:
I eventually found a paradise type world with green grass and blue skies. Regular sentinels. This absolutely shocked me, as I'd found verdant world after paradise world with nothing but frenzied sentinels. I was beginning to think Permadeath afforded no lush worlds with calm sentinels.
Anyway, it's not perfect, as there are very infrequent superheated rainstorms, but it's damned close. The storms never last more than a minute (many of them literally less than 30 seconds) and occur maybe twice in the day/night cycle. I found a nice little spot beside a minor settlement that had a small grove of star bramble right there beside it. I decided this was as good a place as any to build a base and really start on the base building quest lines. So that's what I did.
I ran through the base building quests, the Atlas quest and the Artemis/Apollo quest. Finally got to the The Purge (the last quest in the Artemis/Apollo line). I sat on that one for several nights while I explored and got myself prepared to finish the quest line.
Over this time period, the Abyss dropped. It adds a lot of cool content to underwater exploration and really beefs up the underwater visuals. However, I'm not all that keen on underwater exploration in the first place, so I wasn't nearly as excited for that as I was to see if there were performance and bug fixes. There were, but unfortunately, the performance on my rig took a hit. It's not terrible, thankfully, but it's slightly worse. There's some intermittent stutter when I swing the camera view quickly and once in a while a split second freeze. Not even close to game-breaking, but annoying.
I digress: I'd been looking for new ships, and an S class freighter, as well as a new multitool. Mixed success. Managed to score an S class Experimental multitool (Yay! Super yay!), and added a couple Exotics to my collection. No luck on an S class freighter (I refuse to reload and do the force-spawn grind), but that's not a big deal. I jump with my Explorer anyway, but the Abyss update did add back hyperdrive upgrades for freighters, so jumping with them is at least a viable option again.
Also amassed a small rainy day fund of 200,000,000 units. Ended up swapping out the first Exotic I'd obtained (the one with the tall top wing) for a tier 3 Explorer. I just didn't have enough storage, so went from 19 slots to 38 slots with that trade. So I currently have my Tier 2 S class Explorer (which I've upgraded a fair bit) that I use as my main ship; three of the 'guppy' type explorers (a red, a white with gold trim, and a light blue), and a non-symmetrical tier 3 A class Explorer (has the big keg pod on one side and nothing on the other - looks like its left 'arm' was cut off). My freighter is the original 'lucky score' that I got as my freebie: an A class large Venator with 34 slots.
My exosuit is tricked out with a crapton of S class mods and everything from rocket boots* to the Remembrance and Star Seed.
*I'm not sure how I feel about these. They sometimes annoy the hell out of me, and and sometimes I love the damned things.
My multitool is loaded with S class mods as well. I get about 450,000 units for scanning a rare fauna (regular fauna run just over 150,000) and just over 74,000 units for scanning plants. For weapons, I've got only the boltcaster installed on my multitool with 3 S class mods. Regular sentinels are now trivial, quad sentinels are easy, and walkers are only slightly more than a nuisance. I'll admit that I did do a reload grind when installing the S class upgrades for the boltcaster. I find the ricochet effect so incredibly annoying that I almost consider it a game-breaking bug. So I installed and reloaded those upgrades to make sure I didn't get that stupid bloody ricochet effect. It's the only 'cheating' I've done in this Permadeath run.
Oh, I actually found another paradise type world with normal sentinels, and also found a base computer out in the wild. I was excited enough to claim that base, even though I really didn't need it. Also found a paradise world with low sentinels and another free base computer, but left that one alone. There was a really cool looking alien pistol there, but this planet had superheated rainstorms that rolled in every few minutes. It was too annoying to even consider setting up there.
Fast forward to last night. I thought about it and decided it was time to complete The Purge. I won't go into spoilers for anyone that doesn't know the full quest chain, but I now reside in the Hilbert Dimension. The quest for a new home is now underway, and I have new starships and hopefully a new freighter waiting out there somewhere among these new stars. Hurrah for Permadeath run #9! The Interloper has finally succeeded.
