What are the parachute icons? Are they some kind of supply drops?

[Darth Cervantes]

I noticed whenever I watch people's BZ videos on youtube they have a lot of these parachute beacon icons. I have never seen them in my game, NOT ONCE, and I am pretty far (built Al-An's bod already). Am I missing something here? Thanks

[Coops]

Earlier stories had your partner dropping supply pods from orbit. That narrative was scrapped quite a while ago. Old youtube videos still have info on the partially built early access game.

[bongerman85]

there is only one parachute icon that appears very briefly at the beginning of the game. when you arrive on 4546b you can see the icon indicating the location of the lifepod. once the pod arrives at its destination it will change to just a lifepod icon.

also it is kind of cool if you are fast enough to watch it land.

[AuldWolf]

Caveat lector, this post contains early-game spoilers.

As I understand it, the original story was an odd little thing. It showed Alterra in a peculiarly positive light, and the antagonist was a stereotypical villain with an Eastern European sounding name who wanted Al-An... because reasons. Evil reasons.

They didn't really know where they were going with that story. It had a lot of moving parts but no real exploration of character, motivation, or why anyone was doing what they were doing. Sam didn't even really react to having Al-An in her head. It was all very strange. I don't mean to be uncharitable, but it felt like the prior writer was making it up as they went along—which as someone who's worked on creative projects can inform you, that's not a great way of doing things. Not even a little bit.

You need at least a general outline of your story or you're going to run out of steam. That's exactly what happened, they ran out of steam. So they brought on a new writer. It's clear with the changes in the story that they saw many of the same problems, especially in regards to motivation, so many things were overhauled to give what the characters were doing some semblance of sense. Alterra was no longer the capitalist paragon of good—which isn't all too believable to begin with—and Sam was flying under their radar to find out what happened to her sister. This meant, of course, that supply drops from alterra had to go too.

That's what you were seeing: Supply drops from the earlier story. I know hte first post mentioned this, but I just wanted to add some context.