First, a quick recap:
We’re on Titan, on a mission to acquire methane, which is a valuable source of energy in future dystopian Earth society. Our descent from orbiting Kronos station was less than successful, with the descent module crashing, our crewmate Valentina dying and us just barely making it inside the base. Nevertheless, it’s now seemingly business as usual, with methane extraction and various other tasks proceeding as planned. Except not quite – while searching the descent module for Val’s body, we discovered that it wasn't there. What we did find, however, was evidence indicating that the parachutes designed to slow our descent detached prematurely. This could only have been done by someone on board Kronos station. The current inhabitants of Kronos station are:
Karen.
We don’t know much about her yet, since she’s reluctant to answer any personal questions. All we really know is that she’s not a very pleasant person, and we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot with her already. On an unrelated matter we also suspect her of trying to kill us.
Karl.
Certified member of the billion-mile-high club on account of doing our crewmember Val while en route to Titan. Now recently single. We’ve already discussed the sabotage with him, and he wants us to bring it up with Karen since he’s too much of a pussy to do it himself. Other than that, he generally seems like an unassuming guy, which makes him super-duper suspicious.
When we left off last time, we had just been given a set of missions:
- We need to retrieve a lost shipment of plutonium, which crash-landed not too far away from the base. Last time, our… simulations… revealed that this could not be done on foot, so we’ll be sending Wall-E to do it. Remember him? Nice robot. Kind of a Nazi, but what can you do.
- The second mission, and the most interesting one, is to look for the final resting place of the station’s first inhabitant, William. We’ve learned that William committed suicide
because this entire program is a slipshod disaster as a result of great personal distress, by simply walking out of the base and just not coming back. We learned from his suicide note, which command very wisely allowed us to read (Werther effect, what’s that?), that he set out due west. We’ll be looking for him next.
- We also have an exploration mission, to Polelyla Macula. It is what it is. God knows what we can expect to find there. Aliens, probably.
- Finally, there are a bunch of methane-gathering missions for us. We’ll need to have 100 tons of the stuff ready to ship within 10 days. We’ll see how that goes after we’ve taken care of our various vanity projects. Always remember that work comes last.
As we re-join the action, we’re in the process of manually piloting Wall-E over to the missing plutonium shipment.
You’ve seen this journey before. Wall-E doesn’t handle all that well, and the terrain is rough, but we reach the shipment and carry it back to the entrance to the base without too much trouble. One quick EVA out to carry it inside, and we're golden.
The result is that instead of having a mere 3600 Watts of power, we now have over 4000! It makes no difference. We still can’t power any of the more useful facilities at the same time. Still, considering we’re currently in the process of doing some stuff which should improve our RTG’s output, hopefully this contributes to some real results along the line.
Now onto more interesting things: looking for William. Initially I go for using the rover again, since there’s no telling how far away he could be and I’d like to avoid freezing to death (again).
But it turns out he’s just around the corner. It’s fairly dark and hard to see, but he’s standing there with his hand raised in front of his helmet, covering his face. Can’t do anything with him as Wall-E, however. Suiting up and heading out:
I really can’t emphasize enough how close he is to the base. If he really wanted to screw his bosses, the least he could have done is taken the rover. As it is, what he’s done is basically the Titan equivalent of running away from home by going out into the yard and falling over.
On our way there, however, we discover something interesting. Well, OK, interesting might be stretching it:
We perform a cursory search:
We also gain 10 XP for our trouble. Too bad our exploration stat is a solid zero, or we could’ve done something more here. Oh well. Let’s find our frozen Willy.
Check him out.
Turns out old Willy’s got some goodies on him, including a fancy wallet with an iris scanner on it. The only problem is that his irises have a frozen hand covering them. It’s time to put our dumped strength to good use:
Apparently, dumped strength is enough in this case.
Delightful.
And the wallet’s eye scanner is bypassed. Before we can take a closer look at the wallet, though, we're forced to hustle back to base as our oxygen is getting low. We make it all right, though. Safely back at base, we discover that the iris scanner wasn’t the only thing securing Willy’s wallet:
Doesn’t seem like there’s anything we can do with this for the time being. We’ll have to keep it in mind for later. Of course, the wallet wasn’t the only thing William had on him. He also had a thermos full of bona fide Space Hooch:
We’ll save that for a rainy day.
We’ve taken the William thing as far as we can for right now, and with the deadline looming, it looks like it’s time for methane pumping. We need to build another pump to get an operation running in Abaya Lacus.
…Except it takes 15 days, and we only have 10 until our assignment is due. Marvellous.
Guess actually doing our job is right out as well. Maybe we’ll see about this research we completed last time. As you may or may not remember, we decided to research a quick and dirty fix to get our power up to par, which turned out to be more complicated than it seemed. This was it:
As you can see, what it revealed is that we need some McGuffinite in order to put our new research to use. Luckily, our trusty automated system
HAL IPMS knows a thing or two about funky substances.
I need some Cobalt Arsenide.
Skuterrudite is a hydrothermal ore mineral found in moderate to high temperature veins on Earth. Deposits from the nearby cryovolcano are probably your best option.
Where is the cryovolcano?
From the outpost airlock door, walk straight ahead to the south, past the elevator platform . You will run into it before long. It is hard to miss.
Great, thanks.
We suit up and head south as instructed. However:
Uh… yes?
No.
Blueballed at every turn, we head back to base. Our best (read: only) course of action at this point appears to be the exploration mission. Never mind that we don’t have any exploration skills, there’s exploration to be done, dammit. Planning ahead is for suckers. And besides, in a turn of events completely unrelated to this philosophy, we somehow find ourselves out of options.
Luckily there is some recourse as to the issue with the cryovolcano. While we’re away getting our Lewis and Clark on, we can configure the lab to research some improved insulation, which hopefully will make our suit last long enough to complete the mission:
With that process started, we head for our trusty rover, and set course towards Poleya Macula.
Narrator said:
Poleyla Macula, named after a Slavic god, is a dark spot in infrared imagery.
Right. After a quick drive we arrive at Slavic God Crater, and exit the rover. Exploration is go.
Now, as it turns out, exploration is not quite as nail-bitingly exciting as it sounds. It essentially consists of this:
Yep, follow the quest marker over featureless orange rock. For the true experience, stare at the above image for 3-5 minutes, or until you feel you’ve had enough.
Eventually we reach a spot where we can do some observation, although with zero exploration there really isn’t much to learn:
We examine the near and far crater walls, as well as the centre, for a grand total of 3 processable minerals. Mind you, those minerals come in handy, but it’s still a rather disappointing yield for such a long drive. Thanks for the boring character build, fuckers.
Not pictured: me having to do this entire thing twice because I forgot to power up the lab while we were away.
Once we return, we just sort of hang around for a bit waiting for the research to complete, which it eventually does:
Thankfully there’s no Bullshitium required for this one. Let’s hope a 25% increase in suit power cuts the methane, as they say on Titan.
Scaling a cryovolcano, take 2:
Okay, well it no longer says we’re definitely going to die, so that’s encouraging.
We make it to the top, where we find something rather unexpected:
We examine the strange crystal more closely:
Nice. Throwing all our skills at it yields a new research option, as well as a crystal fragment, which we hack off with our pick axe. The pick axe is hands down the most useful item we’ve obtained so far.
Off to the side of the summit is another point of interest:
…which after a few minutes of casual observation yields the material we need, as well as a couple of processable minerals. However, getting them was the easy part. We now face having to climb down the side of the volcano and reaching the base on 14% charge.
Right. Well, there’s nothing for it.
As we reach the base of the volcano, our suit gurgles and runs out of power, which is a message we’ve seen many times at this point. This time, however, we’re actually doing something worthwhile for once, which means it's a problem.
Our temperature drops to 35 degrees as we make our way to the elevator platform. Prior experimentation has revealed that 32 is the point of no return.
The 34 degree mark comes and goes…
There’s the door…
All right, we made it. Even with the improved suit, that was cutting it damn close. It’s all worth it, though, because after a bit of tinkering:
There it is.
That’s right, we can power everything, and with plenty of juice to spare. You'll observe that the thermal insulation is doing work here as well, by lessening the amount of heat needing to be generated. Sure, we might not make the methane shipment in time, but our power needs are well and truly taken care of for the time being. And that’s the most important thing, after all: being able to keep hydroponics and research on at the same time ensures sustainability and growth. Against that, what’s some shitty methane?
It’s not like they can evict us.
...maybe we’d better start researching some heavy plasma. Just in case.