Starfield - Fallout fallout that isn't ES6

Chanur said:

Is this worth playing yet, or is still the big empty boring buggy mess I've been hearing?

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Bandwagon said:

Void - can you link me your tl;Dr ship stealing post?

I'm not a min/max kinda guy. Just want to find an upgrade.

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Void said:

I wasn't sure if I should continue or not, but since someone actually benefited from it, here goes! Since you asked, the one in the video is an Ecliptic Falcata II. Here is the video of it:



I'm not really looking for the loot crates he mentions, but the ship itself.

So, after yet another night staying up until 1AM, here are my newest findings. I have since seen a few comments on Reddit about the nature of Bethesda random/triggered encounters, and they seem to confirm what I'm going to say. Some of you might have already known this, but I didn't and had to figure it out. And since some people might not know, and it seems to have helped you, I'll lay it out in the hopes maybe someone else benefits as well.

The moment you pick a site and click land, the game generates everything around the landing site. Stuff like the various buildings, caves, etc. and that is obvious since you can see them as you are landing. That also includes starship landing spots (which are not guaranteed, but fairly common). I'm skipping ahead a bit, but if you save when sitting in the cockpit with the Exit/Launch/Stand Up options (or really any time before leaving the ship), you can then step outside and see if you have a landing event. If you don't immediately get one you can reload back to that save in the cockpit and exit again and check a few times because there is a particular quirk that might make a landing not show up on the first try or two. But if you reload several times and never see a landing, launch back into space and try the process all over in a new spot because you likely didn't get a landing event.

Once you know you have a landing, the next thing to see is whether or not it just drops guys off and takes off again. If you get one of those, launch back into space and try again. There is yet another exception to this where you might think you have a landing that stays on the ground, but it is actually a drop off event, and I'll explain that in a bit too. Suffice it to say that if you keep reloading and it suddenly starts taking off all the time, launch and start over in a new spot.

Ok, now you have a good save where every time you leave your ship one lands. You'll quickly notice that it always lands in the same spot, which is convenient. At this point you can just keep reloading until you get a ship you want. However, it seems heavily weighted towards particular ships and I think the guy in the video got INSANELY lucky with his spawn.

Now to explain those quirks I mentioned. You will quickly grow to hate a particular ship. I can now recognize it just from the sound it makes coming in for a landing, and of course by sight. That ship is the UC Vanguard Raptor (UCVR). That isn't the same as a Raptor (no other name) which I somehow got once but I can't remember the specifics, that was a good ship except for the low cargo hold. You see, the UCVR is, as far as I can tell, ALWAYS piloted by just one captain that is trying to repair their ship. If you board the ship (no guards, no hostiles, doesn't blast off if you are seen, etc.) and talk to the captain, he won't take any help or anything, and I honestly have no idea why the fuck that event exists. If you blow his fucking head off, aside from your companions leaving you, you still can't sit in the cockpit and take the ship, so it is an entirely fucking worthless event. The only thing that it does is when you leave the ship and head back, the UCVR will take off and leave. That's it. Fuck that ship. I once got it SIX times in a row. You will come to hate its red "mouth" of a cargo bay.

The reason I mention that ship (besides it being a complete waste of time) is because it can spawn even on the "drop off some soldiers and take off immediately" events, but it just sits there until you interact with the captain, making you think you have a landing event but you actually have a drop off event. So you have to watch out for that, as you might think you are golden but then ships start taking off, meaning it is time to launch and pick a new site because you'll only ever get that motherfucking UCVR as the lander.

The other quirk is when you know you have a good landing spawn, but suddenly no landing happens. That kind of fucked with my investigations a bit until I found a perfect landing spot about 200 distance from my ship (most are 600 or so, making it a fucking pain in the ass to run and check the spawn), that also happened to be directly in front of where it sets me outside of the ship, and I could actually see the landing spot from there. Lo and behold, sometimes the ship is already sitting on the fucking ground! I have no idea why that's a variable, but it is, and I would imagine that all of those times when I had a good spawn but it was far away and nothing landed, a ship was already sitting there. That's why I tell you to reload a few times before you decide a spot has no landing spawn, you might just have a ship on the ground that you can't see. The best thing about the ship being on the ground already is that it seems it can never be the fucking UCVR.

After finding that perfect spot where I can actually see the landing site, I reloaded a fuckload of times. I considered documenting my results, but I had already done so many other ways that I wasn't sure it was worth it. I also am not sure if each spawn has different probabilities and variables and would thus make my results worthless for the next person. But assuming that they are all fairly similar, here is what I found. Oh, and I did all of this on the night side of Wellish in the Cheyenne system, because that video happened on this moon so I know it can happen there. I choose night side not because I'm positive it is a better spawn rate, but because I don't have to deal with excessive solar radiation on the sunny side. You will have to deal with freezing cold temps on the night side, but that's typically the least of the environmental hazards I've found. Obviously a good suit would lessen any effects but I don't wear my suit for the stats as much as the effects.

I would say that around 20% of the time the ship was already on the ground.

Far too many times (maybe 20% again) the ship that lands is that fucking UC Vanguard Raptor.

Occasionally you'll get a Freestar ship that you can just walk onto, it has a crew that won't aggro, and the captain is called Smuggler Captain. That's where you can lie and say you are the courier and they will hand you a random item (confirmed by saving and reloading) and some credits. Blasting the Smuggler Captain in the face does not allow you to steal the ship either, the seat is not targetable just like the UCVR. So once you start to recognize the smuggler ships you can start skipping those too, although I am pretty sure I've stolen a Freestar ship before, so might want to check until you get a good handle on which ones are smugglers. Oh, and it DOES come up later, as randomly you will be confronted in space by 3 ships that want you to either pay 10000 credits or fight them because he was the real courier and you stole his shit. Depending upon your ship it can be a bit of a pain to fight them.

Common ships besides those listed are the Ecliptic Stiletto, Va'ruun Hymn, a few others I'm sure I'm forgetting. I always steal a new ship just to check it, but I gave up on selling them because it isn't worth me losing my perfect spawn point for it, and it is a pain because eventually the ship vendor runs out of money and you have to go rest on Venus to make the month or so pass before he restocks his credits. I've stolen a ton of ships, 90%+ of which are not as good as the Wellwander ship that my parental units gave me.

It should be noted that many ships you don't have to sneak aboard, and some won't even have a crew and you literally just walk on, sit down, and blast off.

At this point I feel that almost any ship might have a chance of spawning, but if you look here there are a veritable fuckton of possible ships.

Starfield:Ships - Starfield Wiki

starfieldwiki.net

You'll need to scroll down a bit to the All Ships and Space Stations with FormID and EditorID section and click Expand, and you'll see all the data mined ship IDs. A fuckton. Many, many of those are uniques or likely ones that can't spawn as landers (like Galbank ships for example), but still, that's a huge list of ships, and if I'm just rolling the dice every time, it might take literally weeks or months to land on the one I am looking for. Particularly with the rolls being clearly weighted in some way, like the fucking UCVR, smugglers, Stilettos, etc.

I didn't write them down, but just scrolling down that list I am certain I have stolen these ships, which is just a drop in the bucket.

Crimson Fleet Ghost, Haunt
Ecliptic Bayonet, Stiletto
Freestar Narcissus is the smuggler one, although I'm fairly sure it has been other FS ships at times too.
Hulker (wasn't actually a lander, was literally just sitting there, and is there every time I reload that particular save, so never varies, has no crew, etc.)
Raptor (not UCVR)
Settler Econohaul
Spacer Jackal, Raccoon
Sunsail
UC Carry-All and another UC ship that was early on but I forget exactly what it was (it sucked though)
Va'ruun Hymn and another one, maybe Dirge?

Not on the list, but I for sure stole it (could load an old save and prove it if I had to)
Colony Ship (no guards on that ship, only outside, just walk on and steal it)

There are likely a few others, like maybe another CF and Va'ruun, but those are the ones I am positive I stole. I was afraid at first that you could only get Type A ships as spawns, but the Sunsail and Spacer Jackal are Bs, so it is apparently possible to get higher tier ones. Just really rare I guess, as I only saw each of those once. I also can't remember where I got the Sunsail, but I am positive I got the Jackal in my current farming spot (and then reloaded because it isn't a better ship than what I have), so hopefully that means some of the really good higher tier ships can spawn if you get really lucky. That Falcata I was looking for is a Type A, but maybe something even higher like a Claymore could spawn? Of course you can't see the stats on most of these until you actually steal them, so something like the Claymore might just suck.

There you go. I guess we all have a little bit of autism in us somewhere, it just requires the right trigger to bring it out!

EDIT: Oh yeah, I tried a ton of runs with it set to Very Hard difficulty too, and I didn't notice any difference. Maybe there is a slightly better chance of something higher tier/rarity, but I have no way of verifying that even if I did 1000 runs, as the chances seem really slim anyway.

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