What was obvious to me during the storyline but it seems that no major sites/guides/reviews/etc are picking up on, is the identify of the Hunter. I've only seen one lowly reddit post with maybe 3 replies and only a single poster who has put it together.
So help me out here, do you see what I see or am I taking crazy pills?
Every starfield site/wiki/whatever just refers to him as Father Aquilus, or a version of Father Aquilus who became "evil" after becoming starborn? This is literally ass backwards.
Father Aquilus is a version of the hunter who's gotten tired and given up the pursuit of the artifacts. He's settled down and started a new religion, universal sanctum or whatever.
The idea that father Aquilus is just an elderly priest who in one universe, one day decides to go artifact hunting and ends up becoming starborn and then eventually decides to become the hunter is demonstrably false. In every universe Father Aquilus is already a starborn, you learn this if you team up with the hunter and you undertake the quest he sends you on to kill his doppleganger in your universe. He flat out tells you he's a starborn and when you kill him he doesn't have a corpse, just a flash and you collect quantum juice.
founding a new religion is nothing new, a version of the hunter has done this many times throughout history, including founding house Varuun and the enlightened. The hunter is the pilgrim, he hid the path to finding the unity throughout the 3 religions versions of himself founded, which is why the Father Aquilus in your universe sends you on the pilgrimage a version of him undertook many many years ago to find the path to the unity.
The hunter's original identity is Victor Aiza, the NASA scientist who first interacted with/did research on the first original Artifact discovered on Mars 300 years earlier, in the 2050s. With the help of the artifact he invented the Gravity Drive, which inadvertently destroyed the Earth's magnetosphere and with it the atmosphere and made the Earth uninhabitable. After the advent of the grav drive and the impending doom of the earth, mankind was forced to rapidly evac from earth and thus began colonizing the stars, and he used the technology/research he did to track down all the other artifacts with similar signatures. He is the first person to collect the artifacts, form the armillary, enter the Unity, and to become Starborn.
We know this from 2 sources. First on the NASA mission you find all the recordings, and you learn that in your universe, Victor Aiza was given all all the technology/grav drive equations/manufacturing data/etc from a version of himself "from the future" who told him all about the drives, New Atlantis colony, mankind colonizing the stars, etc. He also told his past self about the fate of the Earth, that the grav drive testing would end up destroying the Earth. The Victor in your universe you are doing this mission in, decided to go ahead and make the Grav drive knowing that it would doom the earth. But he confessed to his girlfriend how he knew and what it would cost, and she guilted him, and this version of Victor ends up killing himself instead of leaving the planet. That is why the artifact is still locked in this facility on earth in your universe, Victor killed himself instead of taking it and forming the armillary.
Also, when you side with the hunter, you are teamed up going through anomalies on the final mission, and you see visions of your past (the mine, the fight with the collector dude) and you ask him what he sees when he goes through the anomalies, The Hunter tells you that he is older than you think he is, and that he sees visions of his past back on Earth. Since the only artifact that was in humanity's grasp while people still lived on Earth was the one locked away in a top secret super max research facility under NASA and Victor is the only person we know had access to it, performed research on it, experimented with it, etc then the hunter can only be Victor.
This explains why the hunter is so, well, fucking old. He was a research scientist in, probably his 30s or 40s back on Earth. After the advent of the grav drive, and the tech he had to search for them, it probably took him another 30 years to find them all as there wasn't convenient colonies plopped down everywhere for him to stop by and rest up.
So yes, the hunter is the first starborn and he has been groundhog's daying his reality for 300+ years. Versions of him have grown tired and settled down, founded religions to conquer the universe (varuun) or simply to make peace with it (universal sanctum) or just chill the fuck out (enlightened). He is responsible for the creation of the grav drive and colonization of the stars, but also the destruction of the earth. Some versions of himself couldn't live with that (suicide), and some could (became starborn).
he's done this so many times that, as time has gone on and with the formation of Constellation, the most efficient route to collecting the artifacts is to let Constellation collect most of them then just merc them and steal them off their corpses before they figure out what the artifacts really are. This typically leads to your death and results in your lover/friend in constellation becoming starborn, taking up the mantle of the Emissary and fighting against the hunter over and over and over again.
Void ? I know they're having been a lot of spoilery discussions lately, and anytime I see something like that I just jump to the next page. Have an idea of what's going on but not how it's going to play out.
Sylas
if you don't care about using console command, you can shore up those NG+ powers any time you want with those. I did that after finishing them all the first time and not wanting to do it again for 9 more runs. I feel like that isn't even cheating, it is just saving you a fuckload of pointless time, since there is virtually no risk in completing them.
