Finally, the Odyssey I wanted!

[JTKETH]

Long post. You have been warned! Edited to clean some things up.

407 souls aboard the Catalina crossed into Forever Space. Stinking, starving, loosing their minds but alive (barely).

The journey started by nursing power, water and biomass infrastructure gradually up to face the challenges ahead. Focused initially on the quarter deck to conserve resources. Collected survivors for every system heading out of regency. Got our first jumplight upgrades for calibration and range on line. Skipped last system in Regency Space and began long jumping to gain distance. Zutopans were too close. Biomass rapidly becomes critical requiring black and yellow alerts to expand into lower deck. Power and water expansion soon follow. Prototype turrets are burning out the synapses of my marines at an alarming rate. I start to depend on fighters and let the Cat tank what gets through. She is a shockingly tough ship! Crew is reduced to survival rations and black coffee to survive. All potted pants stripped to conserve water and provide biomass. Ham, is notably absent. Did those crew just lick their greasy fingers!? Officer quarters are gutted for addition sanitation, bunks and corridor space. This helps break up the mosh pits that keep forming on the promenade deck. Starvation and dehydration inevitably set in. Crew begin to pass out all over the ship. Some never rise and their bodies begin to litter the corridors. Speed becomes of the essence over range. Rig engines for speed. Jump and grab survivors. No time for salvage, jump again. Final stretch! Long range radar upgrades prevent some bad jumps. We are not fast enough, they're closing! Tear apart the bridge. Save the engineering and supply panels, everything else needs to speed up our calibration. Still not enough! We will have to fight, no way around it. Everything that can be spared is torn apart to make fighters, lasers and helmets. Targeting arrays and designators are rigged. The crew begins to crack under the constant pressure but we are so close. The last jumps are under the cover of relayed fighters and blazing ships guns! 5...4...3...2...1...

My first completion after stubbornly insisting on saving as many people as possible! It got nasty and I had a great time! Snowpiercer in space!

The saves for this run survived both hot fixes. Only one corrupted manual save that was fixed by loading an auto save.

The fixes done for hydration are game changing. Much better.

Crew over all feels noticeably more responsive to priorities and get the job done during yellow alerts.

Ham never showed up. Strange.

The marine eating turret bug is brutal. Edited because of mistaken attribution of a turret bug for a helmet bug. Brought to my attention by a post from brooks.lastinger. Nice catch by them!

Robots are still very depressed but I saw they do have friends! Maybe buff connection from crew interaction? Apparently does't do much now. I did cure one with the princesses inspiration early in the run but lost track of what robots were doing during late game chaos.

Therapy booth is presumably working. Actually saw some people with scientists in it on occasion. I know I had arsonists but had no fires. Plenty of extinguishers just in case.

Robot shuttles in bays 1 and 2 are MVPs. Not waiting for crew to scramble to the shuttle saves a ton of time. Especially in those first two bays. Speed is life!

Thanks to everyone here for tips! Developers, you're awesome and this game is something special! I'm obsessed!

[Chan]

This is the BEST. What a fantastic read! I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. My god. Thank you so much for sharing. <3

[CptSnuggles]

407 people? That's some serious Princess Euphora roleplay. Very impressive!

[JTKETH]

Thanks!
My screen shot says 411 because I'm a dumdum and didn't take a screen shot the first time. Pictures or it didn't happen I'm told. Canonically I had a mysterious loss of pressure event just before jump that killed four crew. I suspect someone freaked and opened an air lock.
My utility in gaming is usually some narrative or idea I'm interested in, even if it means some sub optimal game play. I was racing against the crews death from deprivation as much as the Zutopans in the end! Glad I couldn't smell what was happening in the Catalina.
I was also curious to see how many crew might break the game. The manifest screen was beginning to struggle. It never froze but it started to take it's sweet time thinking about it. I avoided opening it at that point if I could. Other than that, some occasional clots in narrow corridors. Especially on the starboard side of the promenade where everyone wanted to go to the ships mess.

[CptSnuggles]

Originally posted by JTKETH:

Thanks!
My screen shot says 411 because I'm a dumdum and didn't take a screen shot the first time. Pictures or it didn't happen I'm told. Canonically I had a mysterious loss of pressure event just before jump that killed four crew. I suspect someone freaked and opened an air lock.
My utility in gaming is usually some narrative or idea I'm interested in, even if it means some sub optimal game play. I was racing against the crews death from deprivation as much as the Zutopans in the end! Glad I couldn't smell what was happening in the Catalina.
I was also curious to see how many crew might break the game. The manifest screen was beginning to struggle. It never froze but it started to take it's sweet time thinking about it. I avoided opening it at that point if I could. Other than that, some occasional clots in narrow corridors. Especially on the starboard side of the promenade where everyone wanted to go to the ships mess.

Neat! I was wondering how the game engine and the Catalina's infrastructure would handle so many people.

[JTKETH]

Looking back, I suspect the sick bay was key. Therapy booth, six beds and two diagnostic scanners. Scanners give 50% health recovery boost. In spite of nearly 200 starving or dehydrated crew at times, didn't start experiencing significant casualties until med gel levels tanked and first aid station wasn't being restocked fast enough. They'd lay down to die and the scientists were apparently swooping in to bring them back to shamble around some more lol.