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Beyond exploration?


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So you've landed on every planets and moons and returned safely. You've visited every biome, extracted all the science you can, seen every easter eggs, etc. And you want to do more, but you don't want to muck around with designing weird spacecrafts for the sake of it.

Gameplay wise, I know it takes a very long time to collect every science in every celestial body. Heck, I'm still far from doing it myself. But collecting science eventually feels like filling a checklist, a checklist that ends. And I get this strange feeling, a fear that if I've collected every science there is to collect, I'll be left with nothing to do. I can just make outrageous stuff out of spaceship parts, but I've already done that in my spare time.

KSP is a game of exploration, but why stop there? What is there to do when you've explored everything? What do humans do when they finish exploring?

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Explore it again! But differently. :)

I had that same worry myself, back when I started KSP. And that was before anything outside of Kerbin/Mun/Minmus had biomes, so if you go to a planet and land once, you've done pretty much everything there is to do there. So what happens after I've landed and gathered science from everywhere that's possible to gather?

That was over a year ago and I still haven't looked back. Am not even close to being "done" with KSP.

I'm sure other players can chime in, but my own KSP experience looks like this: I play a career game up to some milestone, and then it's "done". And then I start a new career with a different set of parameters, and it's a whole new experience. The key is to keep it varied so that each career is something new.

Some ideas for mixing it up:

- New places to explore. The Outer Planets Mod is fantastic, really professionally done, easily the quality equal (both in game-design and art-design) of the stock planets. It adds equivalents of Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto to the outer reaches of the solar system, along with moons. Is interesting without being gimmicky. There's a moon that has a moon. The Saturn-equivalent has a Titan-equivalent: a world with very low gravity but deep thick atmosphere. Exploring all that could easily take up as much time as exploring the inner system. Standing on an inner moon of the Saturn equivalent and looking up at it looming over you, with the rings arching across the sky, is just awe-inspiring. (Squad really oughta just hire this guy and put his stuff in the stock game, like they did with Porkjet's spaceplanes.)

- Done with Outer Planets? Try New Horizons, another really well-done planets mod. This one re-jiggers the solar system completely-- nothing is where it was-- and adds a lot of new moons and planets, interestingly arranged. Kerbin becomes a moon of a gas giant, just as an example.

- Add a mod with a game-changing technology in it. Here are some that I have used and really enjoyed:

Atomic Age (by Porkjet, the spaceplane guy), with some really interesting variations of nuclear engines, with their own engineering challenges.

Karbonite and Karbonite+, by RoverDude. It involves a new resource to mine, with lots of cool parts to work with it. Karbonite+ adds another resource that's super hard to mine (is found only in small quantities in very hard-to-get-to places), but powers super-powerful futuristic fusion engines.

Extraplanetary Launchpads: Mine metal ore and use it to build spacecraft on other planets. Set up a Mun (or Minmus) base and run your space program from there!

UKS/MKS: Also by RoverDude. Not for the faint of heart, it's a massive and hugely complex mod for doing space colonies. Turns KSP into more of a resource-management game: if the goal is to set up a fully self-sustaining space colony, you need to build out all kinds of specialized crew modules, mine multiple different types of resources and refine them into the correct supplies, and so forth.

TAC Life Support: Your kerbals now need food, water, and oxygen to survive, and will die if they run out. You have to make sure your crewed ships have enough to keep them going. Rescue missions take on a whole new meaning.

RemoteTech: Controlling remote probes now requires active LOS (directly or via relays) back to KSC, and also there's lightspeed lag in controlling them. Antennas have finite range, require power continuously while operating, and are vulnerable to getting ripped off in atmosphere. The really long-range antennas are big, massive, and power-hungry. This makes unmanned craft more challenging. It also gives you a reason to build networks of communications satellites.

...And the list goes on. There are many, many more good mods out there-- the ones above are just the ones that I personally have done careers on. Don't try to do them all at once, just pick one (or perhaps two-- for example, the life-support mod dovetails nicely with RemoteTech) and run a career through with it.

And of course, every once in a while Squad comes out with a new KSP patch with new goodies, and then the fun starts all over again. :)

And all of that is just changing the technical rules of the game. You can also set self-imposed rules on yourself to keep it interesting. For example, I did an Extraplanetary Launchpads game where I set myself a rule that after establishing my initial, minimal base on Minmus, there would be no further launches from Kerbin except for new crew members. Or make a rule of "no orbital debris". Or "no debris, period; anything ejected must be recovered." Or "explore the whole solar system in the shortest possible calendar time." And on and on, limited only by your imagination.

Anyway, just a few ideas... those are some of the ones that have kept me hopelessly addicted to this game for a year and a half now, through many career games.

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