Bought this game and the Odyssey expansion as a pack several years ago when it was on sale and didn’t have anything to play it on until recently. I also haven’t gamed since the Xbox 360 days, so needless to say it took me a bit to get my bearings. Let me start this out by saying it’s okay to laugh at me because I’m having a good laugh at this blooper reel.

I’ve largely gotten the hang of it and am now an aspiring space trucker with a slightly upgraded Adder, but I made some pretty hilarious missteps along the way. To put the control fumbling in context, I’m playing with a gamepad instead of keyboard/mouse because I use KB/M six days a week for work and playing with a controller gives my wrists a much needed rest/recovery.

“All crimes are capital offenses” kind of got me on my very first job. Deliver a package to somebody on a moon settlement. Easy peazy, right? Well, I was fumbling with the controls and hit the button that brought out my energy link thing. In trying to holster it, I accidentally switched it to “overload” mode and immediately got shot and hauled off to detention.

I did the tutorial but apparently missed that the FSD has two modes: supercruise and hyperdrive. On my way to the first job where I promptly got shot, I tried to supercruise to the system and ran out of fuel in deep space and exploded. I was assuming 2001 times the speed of light was like maximum warp or something, but that’s closer to “full impulse” in this game.

It took me way longer than it should have to figure out filtering and bookmarking in the navigation system. Until about 18 hours in, I was just scrolling through everything. At least I figured out the jump routes easily enough.

Even on empty moons in the middle of nowhere, the powers that be can apparently sense any crime in real time. After I’d gotten a better grasp of the basics, I bought a Maverick suit and took a support job to bring a refinery online. I guess there was some kind of accident and everyone was dead. My job was to bring the power station back online, extinguish the fires, and do some cleanup. I didn’t realize I already had level 3 clearance (so that’s what that little number is above your energy meter!) so I scanned and cloned one of the dead scientists to make sure I could get where I needed to be. A minute or less later, the AI said my ship had been destroyed. “What the fuck? How?” I asked right before my character dropped like a sack of potatoes and only saw a pair of boots in my peripheral vision.

And I think my last major folly was on the 4th of four cargo runs to the Bruni Extraction Hub (or something like that). It was a good 15 minute supercruise from the jump-in star, and I was on my last delivery (deliver 24 units of whatever, and i could only hold 6 in my cargo bay). I didn’t realize I’d accidentally deployed my hardpoints when hailing them to request docking clearance. On controller, X deploys/retracts the hardpoints, and you have to hold X and D-pad Left to open the external actions screen. So they declared me a criminal and shot me down. I could have gone back for the final delivery and payment, but I swore I would never go back there and just ate the losses and sold the 6 units in my cargo hold.

Now that I’ve gotten the hang of things, I’m basically sticking to freight and support runs and am doing a lot better. Managed to evade my first interdiction attempt and have gotten pretty good at fuel scooping. Was doing a freight job and managed to make both trips on a single tank since I was able to scoop three of the four stars along the way. Not that fuel is expensive, but it makes the jobs quicker than having to constantly make stops at starports or worry about running out.

I’ve got a little over a million credits now, so I think I’m getting the hang of it. Hoping to start an exploration campaign at some point, but I gotta be a space trucker first to fund that.

Now for my rant: Fuck the Bruni Extraction Hub (or whatever it’s called). 15 minute supercruise from the jump-in point, after all that and you’re finally there, you have to deal with landing on a planet and a slow-ass approach, and the facility is always on the opposite side from your approach. They only have like 1 landing pad, so you have to sit and wait, repeatedly requesting docking clearance until the one pad is free.

Edit: Ok, one more blooper I remembered:

I was departing a station, one with the mail-slot docking doors, using the auto launch. The auto-launch got stuck at “Waiting in queue” and there was only 45 seconds left on the counter (at which point I would be loitering and they’d shoot me; already had that happen once lol). So I take manual control and depart and then they charge me with trespassing. I think I got out of there fast enough that it was just a warning, though.