New stop, the city-planet ArcCorp, and its cyberpunk capital - Area 18. If I had to pick a modern equivalent to ArcCorp, I would view it as a future version of Amazon as a sprawling conglomerate across multiple sectors.
I admit I was impatient with the pace of the game, and after hearing so many people talk about the Cutlass Black ship, I indulged in an upgrade from the Nomad I started with. it is very easy to sink a lot of real money in this game, so this will be my only purchase for a long time.
Even though I was a fine starting ship for both trade and fights, I didn’t like the sharp angles and the weird shape of the Nomad. The Cutlass gives off that Firefly vibe, with exposed panels and pipes, and a very rugged and functional design. I feel this is going to be my home ship for a long time.
Moving to ArcCorp was also the occasion to practice combat more and get a better feel for guns in the game. Missions to defend mining outposts are a good way to start. You can wait out most of the mission and let local guards pick off hostiles, and walk in at the end to take care of the last two, which are usually holed up behind a crate.
It doesn’t work all the time though - sometimes guards are killed very early, leaving a mine overrun by hostiles. Sometimes hostiles get close to where you are and kill you very quickly. And the bugs don’t help here - hostiles that spawn out of nowhere, or never spawn, NPCs stuck against a door or a barrel, there are many reasons to cancel these missions and start over.
An alternative to these missions are mission to track down wrecked ships. These can be as buggy as bunker missions (most corpses are not clickable for example) but the loot can make them worth the trip.
A word of warning about Area 18 - it can be prone to crashes with very 3.17, which can be a problem if you are trying to land with a full cargo to sell and lose the whole lot in the process.
