Day 4 (Navigation)

Day 4 dawns in-... wait... Are there days in space? Screw it.

So today I tried multiplayer. It was actually not so different from single player except sometimes people talked. Mostly they didn't care to answer newbie questions and when they did they were sometimes wrong (see day 3, R = fire rate). It was generally nice to have some background conversation however and to see other people playing, and it seems to make no difference to the game whatsoever if you're not playing with anyone. You can still pause and everything, which suspends the status of your ship.

Now one of the guys playing actually sort of sent out his own distress call, basically he'd run out of fuel and was prepared to give a big, shiny expensive mining laser to anyone who could bring him a tank. Problem is he was the other side of the galaxy and I had no clue how the navigation worked. I'd worked my way into Olympus after thoroughly researching the subject so I could play taxi (ended up with 90k in my pocket) but travelling that kind of distance was beyond me and again, nobody was keen to help. Oddly enough not even the stranded guy.

So I had a better look at the nav map and found the Quadrant button. This showed me the general path I had to take to get there as it shows each sector and how it connects to other sectors by wormholes. This didn't tell me where the wormholes were however nor do the wormholes tell you which sector they're in. Helpful.

So I returned to Sector view and tried browsing through for wormhole gates - I don't know if you've noticed but there's a slight lag in it loading the next map, which is agonising when you're flicking through them. OH! There's a zoom out button on the left. Let's try that. Okay, now I can see where the wormholes are, but I can no longer get information by hovering over them.

Seriously? My first gripe with this game. True, navigation is difficult in three dimensions and they've done reasonably well with it, but this is just painful. You can zoom out, look for the wormholes, note their position relative to you, and scroll over to them. THEN you can get the details.

Alternatively there's an interactive map, http://mercenary.junholt.se/ which you can search for objects in. Very helpful, but I still couldn't work out where the gate I needed was and then someone else got to the stranded guy. Oh well.

As this is the section on Navigation I will add some more tips I worked out later; You can check the SX, SY and SZ coordinates for each sector from the Quadrant map, identify the one you want, then look for the gate with roughly those coordinates. It's roundabout but seems to work. If you can work out how to use the Junholt map then that's good too, I haven't really bothered with it yet.