Definitely worth considering then!

Just gotta remember to craft the tags before warping into a system or you'll be scrambling to jettison the goods!

Yeah or scrambling to spin up the grav drive, lol

It makes raiding the Ecliptic HQ worth it for all the contraband. Otherwise I never bother with the Jaffa system.

Last night I deleted any save games and cleared the reserve space in preparation for the update. I didn’t get very far in the save games I had so no big loss.

I'll be in offline mode on Steam for the foreseeable future, haha. Andromeda in her 9th or 10th trip through the Unity and is over level 100.

Goodness, girl been busy lol

One of longest saves for sure. She's been through a lot and is very overpowered. Phased Time IX or X makes most fights trivial.

Is Phased Time , and if so, how do you raise its power level?

Yes, as the name implies it functions like the Slow Time shout in Skyrim. Starborn Powers level up each time you visit their respective temples in a new universe. It can be very grindy to collect every Artifact and visit every temple each time you go through the Unity, which is why more mods help! This one levels your powers up automatically the moment you enter a new universe.

Ooooh ok. That explains why I’ve never been able to upgrade anything, lol

And I don’t know, I can see how going to the temples over and over could get old, but I kinda feel like it would be a sort of “ritual” that I’d want my characters to perform. That’s just me though.

It looks like the new update will let you upgrade powers without all that song and dance, BTW. I think we'll be able to use the quantum essence we get from killing other Starborn instead.

Yeah I was kinda surprised that wasn’t part of the game from the beginning! I kinda like the sort of “vampiric” theme of that, lol

Or maybe it’s like Highlander? Lol

Oh, that tagged contraband mod sounds pretty cool. I don't ever pick up contraband but that makes for a cool roleplaying opportunity.

RE: outposts again real quick: I think having a settler beacon similar to those for settlements in Fallout 4 would go a long way toward making them feel useful. So many things that you'd want to see people using, and AFAIK the only way to get people to your settlement is to get them in your crew and then assign them to an outpost. And it could potentially lead to putting more meat on the lore bone for L.I.S.T.

Great that we'll also be getting quantum essence from destroying Starborn ships. It was very annoying not getting anything for destroying those before. (Also would really like to sell or discard the Starborn ships in my fleet, since I can't make money off of them and the ship I use is way better than even upgraded Starborn ships.)

I really like how they are adding more uniqueness to the legendary enemies as well so that there is more strategy to the fights.

Yeah it would definitely be cool to recruit LIST settlers to our outposts using some sort of radio or beacon.

I may be in the minority, but I honestly don’t like the design of the Starborn ships. They work as things to target but I much prefer the regular ships


I think the traits for enemies is a great idea. I’m very curious to see how they work during combat. The Martyr one sounds siiick! I can see it being used most frequently by the VZ.

Freelanes and Terran Armada today innit?

Heh, I almost forgot. Must've been why I was so motivated to get Andromeda's next chapter out. Still, I probably won't update until all the utility mods get updated.

I cleared all of my mods and stuff on Xbox since I didn’t care about resuming the current play through at the time, so I might fire it up and play through the first couple of hours to see how different it is.

Looks like SFSE updated already, so hopefully the other stuff will fall in line behind it.

I played for a couple of hours last night and an hour or so this morning. Still haven’t been able to try out the super cruise lol.

To be fair, I spent way too much time in the character creator, as usual.

Based on what I've seen, BGS really underpromised and overdelivered this time. I think more than a few mods I use are now part of the game!

Oh? Like which ones?

Tried out the cruise mode around Alpha Centauri, which if you are starting a new play through you can’t do until you have met with Constellation (no using cruise mode to get to Kreet from Vectera). I think it works pretty well, but there is a little jank with it. When you enter cruise mode, you aren’t going that fast. The longer you fly in cruise mode, the more speed you pick up and soon you’ll see planets zipping by. You can also boost in cruise mode to go even faster. There are two modes of flight while in cruise mode: free flight and autopilot. Free flight allows you to steer your ship towards things while in cruise mode and with auto pilot you select a destination and the ship does the rest. I found entering a planet’s orbit in free flight to be a bit wonky, so I started switching to autopilot when closing on a planet or moon. This worked much better for me, but your experience may vary. Maybe I just didn’t fully understand how free flight and entering a planet’s orbit works. I didn’t get interdicted during my time with it today, so I was not able to experience that aspect.

Astrogate is the big one, but at least one other would be the mod I use to upgrade gear qualities. It's a base game mechanic now to re-roll legendaries, or upgrade standard armor to superior or advanced.

Ah gotcha