Frostbite Scenario - Pleasantly Surprised

[Farrel]

Well, I had heard that Frostbite was a bad time, and that there would be wave upon wave of unending terror as the skies would be alive with a thousand drones.

What I found was a quite fun scenario which may have been easier than intended due to some of the AI piloting glitching out... But was still a good time if approached slowly.

So... Elephant in the room: No jet-pack... Something I was dreading as I love my ability to fly around a build and fix things up. It wasn't as bad as I thought, though, just have to consider building ramps until you can get a cherry picker going. I was pushed out of my comfort zone, and whilst I still prefer having my jet pack? I can say it was okay to play without... No faffing with hydrogen, very little faffing with oxygen, as the scenario was mostly in atmo... Not bad.

The approach I had seen people take was to immediately jump into vehicles and thunder off towards the objectives, scavenging what they need as they go, and frequently running low on ammo and materials to repair with before quitting in frustration... So I figured I'd take a different approach.

Step 1: Base camp...

There are several damaged buildings at the landing pad area, partly operational, and honestly, it made for a good vehicle maintenance area... I mean, there's a building exactly for that, for starters.

There's also an ore detector on the rescue vehicle... Turn that on, and ... Oh look, we're right on top of iron, silicon and magnesium deposits... We have a basic assembler, so... Yeah, a full refining and assembling setup didn't take so long, as there were plenty of metal grids to borrow in the area. Lo and behold, the ammo problems were solved.

Gold and silver turned up very quickly in my further prospecting... Nickel and Cobalt were a little harder to find, but all the ores except platinum are present in the local area... Oddly enough, there's even a little uranium to be found, even if the ore detector doesn't pick it up.

Expecting the worst, I set up a few extra gun turrets around the area, and hooked up all the buildings to the same energy infrastructure... Plenty of backup power in case it goes to heck... The guns were needed, the rest was perhaps overkill, but fun to do.

Aaand onwards. Fixing up vehicles as I went, heading back for repairs as needed, I broke the intended sequence of events and went up to the weather station first... As it turns out, the weather station is intended to be the second to last area you visit... So the heavy drone strike you encounter there is less of a surprise by that point.

Good choice in making the weather station high up enough to make it out of atmosphere too, but giving you an atmo-flier just before you get there (if you fix it up)... I figured the scenario would be too easy if I just build a hydrogen flier, but it was a good demo of the limitations of atmospheric thrust.

And yeah... Slowly picked my way through the intended path, hating the low visibility snow storms at first, but by the end of it, it was kinda fun to wind my way through the fog on the basis of the GPS markers I laid out, trusting that the guns would take down threats for me.

Probably the low point of the scenario was having to pick my way through the structures with internal turrets whilst looking for medical components to turn on the local respawn. Having to get back there if a turret gets you is just no fun at all.

The highlights? For me, the final drive back with the objective in tow was the best part... Having four objects to move, but a trailer only intended for three presented a fun challenge. If you're good with a fork lift truck (Note: There are some lovely little fork lifts I'm totally gonna take blueprints of) you can absolutely fit all four on the trailer...

The very well designed articulated trailer too was just another chef's kiss moment, with just enough clearance in the base to squeeze some turrets and armour in on top of the load before going outside.

Alas, the encounter at the end glitched out a little and I had to go on the attack to end the scenario rather than making it a defensive crescendo...

But yeah... Great to have a little more direction than just a sandbox game. Highly recommend to anyone feeling a little aimless in vanilla space engineers.

Got the achievement, might play again with mods next time just for fun.

Good job!

[glabifrons]

It sounds like we played that one out fairly similarly.
I have this obsession with fixing things, so I fixed the town right up, tore out the front rooms of the auto-shop to make space for a full assembler, rerouted some pipes to make stuff more available and put a full assembler inside in a way that isn't even visible, but easily accessible.

I don't remember finding uranium ore, but then I played that one quite a few years back.
I'm pretty sure I got all my uranium from all the drones I shot down.

I suspect some of the drone glitching at the beginning was intentional, as the later ones were fairly precise and much more dangerous, although there was one set of drones that kept respawning and not doing anything after their first run. I'm not sure if that was intentional or not.

I avoided watching any videos on the scenario to avoid spoilers and absolutely loved how much effort they put into hiding bodies and notes in fun to find areas... lots of background story in that one.

The ending of mine wasn't glitched and the attack proceeded as it was supposed to. I had fun with that, turns out I over-prepared by a lot.
I was hoping to take over one of the enemy ships at least to check it out, but sadly they seemed to be completely obliterated when they went down.

If you haven't played The Lost Colony, it's got a fun storyline too. It also has jetpacks disabled, but is a lot more sedate in comparison, more mystery solving and less fighting, almost relaxing. There are areas that are booby-trapped with turrets, but I'm not even sure I remember a drone in that scenario.
Frostbite is still my favorite stock scenario I've played though (I've played all the solo ones).

[TheHellKat]

Frostbite is honestly one of, if not, the best vanilla scenario.

The issue people had was with the warfare update, it made the drones very difficult to handle, this has since been fixed thankfully.

[Farrel]

Honestly, it seemed like a lot of the drones had been set up to be one shot... Which did lead to a lovely moment of taking one of them out with a single bullet from a rifle.

I'm pretty sure I hit a warhead, judging from the resulting explosion.

[Dan2D3D]

Hi, good to know some like that scenario, I've started it when it came out and never completed it because I am more a creative player wanting to go in-game just to create ;)

I will surely complete ii at some point :)

[TheHellKat]

It's definitely worth doing, I did mess it up on my first play through and managed to destroy 2 of the units, but I managed it on my second attempt.

If you find the 'snow bike' it's a lot of fun 😊

[glabifrons]

Originally posted by Farrel:

Honestly, it seemed like a lot of the drones had been set up to be one shot... Which did lead to a lovely moment of taking one of them out with a single bullet from a rifle.

I'm pretty sure I hit a warhead, judging from the resulting explosion.

Those would likely be the kamikaze drones as they have 6 exposed warheads and will head straight for you. They do a LOT of damage if you don't shoot them first. They also damage the terrain, which in some cases can significantly add to the challenge.

[Farrel]

Originally posted by glabifrons:

Originally posted by Farrel:

Honestly, it seemed like a lot of the drones had been set up to be one shot... Which did lead to a lovely moment of taking one of them out with a single bullet from a rifle.

I'm pretty sure I hit a warhead, judging from the resulting explosion.

Those would likely be the kamikaze drones as they have 6 exposed warheads and will head straight for you. They do a LOT of damage if you don't shoot them first. They also damage the terrain, which in some cases can significantly add to the challenge.

Yeah, one of those made a nice big crater just in front of me on one section... Pulled some nice air time and amazingly, the rover survived with only a few dents that buffed out reasonably quickly.

... Getting it out of the hole was an interesting challenge though.