Hopelessly stuck on Ripple Effect

[Poobah Gorg]

I suck at twitch games, I was hoping this was a bit more the RPG it was billed as.

I went through the earliest instructional missions and then went directly to Ripple Effect because it was the least travel distance away. The baddies don't seem to be doing any real harm to me, and I never seem to run out of ammo. But I never see that gravity core that they are supposed to drop, and whenever I apparently kill something there's another a second later. Sometimes that one grey ship pops up for a second or three, but I don't know how to beat it or if that's even the point.

This quest seems like it's not well enough described so that you'd know what to do to get the gravity thing. Am I waiting for it to drop as loot? Is it going to appear when something or everything's killed? Am I destroying it stupidly by shooting at it when it drops?

What's the key to beating this mission? Should I start my game over and pass this one by? I can't seem to get out of it or get past it.

[sɹɐʎA xɘlA]

It should take 3-5 kills tops to get the gravity core to drop as loot. It's not destroyable, just needs to be picked up.

We did receive one report a few months ago of someone getting stuck at this encounter, it turned out that their their tractor beam (Short Range Tractor) was missing from inventory (the tractor beam item is required for mission completion). I was never able to reproduce the problem, and am not sure what caused it. I was able to fix their save file to get them unblocked, though -- if you want to send your saved game file over to [e-mail], one of us can take a look. Instructions for doing so are over at:

http://forum.zigfrak.com/index.php?p=/discussion/32/how-to-export-a-saved-game

[Poobah Gorg]

Thanks. I since started the game over (since I was so early on within it). I know that I had a functional tractor beam at the time.

Odds are pretty solid I was doing SOMETHING wrong.

And now for some compliments. While this game is incredibly beautiful, it has never overheated my laptop. I've got a Toshiba laptop with a reasonably decent video controller that overheats when I'm running games that are glorified 2D games with 3D trappings. This game (wihch has awesome 3D graphics) runs like a tank on it.

[sɹɐʎA xɘlA]

Thanks for the compliments, and sorry for the trouble! There's definitely a weird sporadic issue going on there which I haven't been able to track down -- I don't think it's anything you specifically did wrong while playing.

[Poobah Gorg]

One thing I've learned by accident is that some problems in the game can be solved by saving/quitting and reloading. I had gotten stuck on that one quest in the system I just referenced where you have to restart some security platforms. Mine had disappeared completely (and the system had stopped restocking meteoric loot!). I saved it, and went back in to check the name of the quest for you and the beacons (as well as the respawn) had gone back to normal.

I'd send my saved game to you, but I'm sure it looks decidedly normal now.

Whatever you've done to make this game easy on my prone-to-overheats laptop is amazing. Seriously, I'm not gushing here. The first thing I enable in ANY game (even TBS and RTS games where 3D is largely ornamental) is auto-save. My computer had this game running (foreground and background) for a good 24 hours without a lockup or reboot. The room it's located in got into the 80s F for much of the day (sadly it faces west) so that's really awesome.