3 Years "Away" from KSP: Any Suggestions?

[Diche Bach]

Amazingly, it seems to have been at least 2, maybe 3 years since I've played this game! I realize it has changed dramatically (campaign mode? interstellar travel?) so I'm just curious: what do guys suggest?

I must've bought the Steam version of the game at some point cause I have it in my Steam library and I'm just now updating it.

Are there pay-for expansion-packs or DLC I should consider?

There must be a lot of great mods. Although I think I'll try vanilla for a while first, what are considered the "go to mods" for KSP these days?

[Alshain]

Wait a little longer.

 

Ok seriously, that depends, but there are some really nasty bugs in the current version due to the recent switch to Unity 5.  Mainly they are centered around landing gear and legs.  We expect 1.2 to fix them (because they are switching to Unity 5.4 EDIT: We think, that also depends on if 5.4 is release by Unity END EDIT).  However, if you don't build rovers or planes you may not notice these problems and 1.1.3 will be ok for you but otherwise, waiting a little longer is a serious suggestion.

 

There are no paid expansions or DLC at this time.  There is a really good official mod Squad made called Asteroid Day though, it's free.

 

For "go to" mods, they haven't really changed much.  Kerbal Engineer and/or MechJeb are favorites along with Kerbal Alarm Clock and RCS Build Aid are mine.  These do not alter gameplay much, just quality of life (except auto-pilot in MechJeb).  Arguably the data in MJ and Engineer could be considered gameplay changing, but to me all it does is save me from the manual calculations which I could do if I really felt like it.

Of course there are tons of great mods I use, but those ones are the ones I would never play without regardless of what I wanted to do in any particular game.

If you are looking for just graphical improvements, you have Environmental Visual Enhancements (with various 3rd party configs available), CoolRockets, CollisionFX, PlanetShine, RealPlume, EngineLighting, Destruction Effects, TextureReplacer, and Distant Object Enhancement. These of course won't touch gameplay

Other good ones include BetterBurnTime, Diazo's Landing Height, PortraitStats, Waypoint Manager, and Trajectories, some of these will alter gameplay a little.

Edited July 11, 2016 by Alshain

[kBob]

Have fun.  That's what I did after ~two years.  Start out with the basics forget mods and just learn the new aerodynamics and reentry heat.  Then you can decided what mods you want like KER or KAC once you start going beyond the Mun.  I suggest career rather than sandbox as it helps keep you focused on the basics of relearning the game and getting used to the new way of doing gravity burns and needing to consider whether your rockets are "pointy" enough.  Check out some of the tutorials that use the newer stuff I found this and this helped get me back up to speed.

If you decide to use career and try the easy mode to help get you get going I'd suggest moving the reentry heat slider to the 100% position as it will help force you to learn to deal with reentry heat right from the start so once you've got that you can move on to the harder levels without having to deal with that too.

Edited July 11, 2016 by kBob

[Ultimate Steve]

Okay, engaging list mode: Assuming you were away 3 years, that puts us somewhere around 0.20.

• Command seats
• Lots of new parts
• Flag planting
• Career & science modes (do science, complete contracts, earn money and science to unlock new parts, rockets cost money, upgrade buildings, etc.)
• Biomes (basically only useful in career mode)
• Subassemblies
• Tweakables (Adjust stuff in the VAB/SPH)
• A hybrid Jet and Rocket engine (the RAPIER)
• Asteroids
• size 3 parts
• Completely new and retextured spaceplane parts
• You can blow up buildings now
• New explosion effects
• Transfer crew without EVA
• Kerbals can be Engineer/Scientist/Pilot and have experience points in Career mode
• Female Kerbals
• Fairings
• Mining (YESSSSSS!)
• Re-entry heat and heat shields and radiators (this is a big one)
• Parts can sort of sink now
  
  And the big one: The game is now 64 bit!
• No new planets, though.
• And the forum has been updated.
• And they replaced the old mod site.
• And there is like fifty other mod sites now.

 

Edited July 11, 2016 by Ultimate Steve

[Diche Bach]

Thank you gentlefolks!

[Dman979]

I second @Alshain's suggestion to stay away for a bit longer. I haven't played in a few months, because I'm waiting for all the major bugs to get ironed out. I do recommend that you become active in the forums. It will give you an idea of where the game has gone, and inspire your own creations.

[Corw]

Keep waiting.

[Diche Bach]

Cool. Having read all your responses closely now, sounds pretty exciting! I reckon I've forgotten most of what I had learned about space flight, so just relearning how to get a sputnik beeper into orbit will probably keep me busy for quite sometime.

I want to say I was playing the game as recently as 0.9, but most of what Ultimate Steve refers to sounds totally new. They were just talking about career mode "eventually" being in the game when I got distracted by other stuff.

So let me ask this:  Has no one yet built an interstellar mod? Even just mod model Proxima Centauri? Modeling something like an Orion-pulse interstellar vehicle or a colony ship would be freakin' cool. Of course, even a whole GALAXY would be even more cool, but I'd settle for just one additional solar system that was positioned at an approximately accurate distance

[Tyko]

Arguably, this is a game under constant development and "waiting for all the bugs to be squashed" could be a long wait. I'm a new player that just started with 1.1.2 and while I've encountered a few annoying bugs, the overall experience has made it more than worth it to put up with them.

[Alshain]

6 minutes ago, tjt said:

Arguably, this is a game under constant development and "waiting for all the bugs to be squashed" could be a long wait. I'm a new player that just started with 1.1.2 and while I've encountered a few annoying bugs, the overall experience has made it more than worth it to put up with them.

This is true, however I've been playing since 0.20 and 1.1.x has been the worst version since.  That is taking into account serious bugs with no mods, but not lack of features which you expect from an Early Access title.  There have been some serious bugs in the past (those we call the "Kraken" among the worst) , but usually not all at the same time like we have had in 1.1.  The sheer number of high profile in-your-face failures the moment 1.1 was dropped beats every version I've seen.  On the one hand I understand changing a game engine is a massive ordeal, on the other hand they knew a lot of these problems before release and chose to do so anyway.  That's neither here nor there at this point, 1.1 is out and it's massively buggy... still.  Hopefully, 1.2 will bring it back into line with the quality we had in 1.0.5 (which wasn't perfect but still better).

Edited July 11, 2016 by Alshain

[Tyko]

1 minute ago, Alshain said:

This is true, however I've been playing since 0.20 and 1.1.x has been the worst version since. 

I get it...all I'm saying is that as a new (or long absent) player, the items you see as egregious may not be very apparent and that, in balance, the game is still too hell'a fun to delay buying for a few bugs

[Mister Kerman]

Honestly I'd say if you focus on rockets and ask any questions you have, you'll be fine and not run into too many annoying bugs. The editor in the SPH and VAB is a lot more user friendly now too. KSP rules. Bear with the bugs; It's what we do.

[Alshain]

2 minutes ago, tjt said:

I get it...all I'm saying is that as a new (or long absent) player, the items you see as egregious may not be very apparent and that, in balance, the game is still too hell'a fun to delay buying for a few bugs

I disagree, taking that attitude is why Squad doesn't bother to fix the bugs before release.  If they know people will buy it anyway regardless of how little it works then what compels them to do anything about it?  But that's just me.  The OP said he already owns the game anyway.

[Diche Bach]

Well I'm hoping that stuff still blows up with great profusity?!

[Alshain]

2 minutes ago, Diche Bach said:

Well I'm hoping that stuff still blows up with great profusity?!

That's one place it has gotten better.  Explosions are a lot more entertaining graphically than they used to be, and the buildings are no longer immune.

BTW: Career mode was nearly finished in 0.90, so it must have been a lot earlier, I would say around 0.20ish

Edited July 11, 2016 by Alshain

[Corona688]

For a revolutionary idea, maybe they're not mustache-twirling villains who've taken the money and ran.  Maybe it's a lot easier to complain about bugs than fix them.  And maybe it's not something that absolutely needs to infect every single topic.

[Tyko]

4 minutes ago, Alshain said:

I disagree, taking that attitude is why Squad doesn't bother to fix the bugs before release.

Fair point

[Diche Bach]

1 minute ago, Corona688 said:

For a revolutionary idea, maybe they're not mustache-twirling villains who've taken the money and ran.  Maybe it's a lot easier to complain about bugs than fix them.  And maybe it's not something that absolutely needs to infect every single topic.

I already got my "money's worth" out of this game years ago! Everything from here on is just "gravy!"

Hopefully they are still having enough fun with it, and still generating enough revenue from it, that they will be keen to keep expanding and perfecting it for many years.

Have to say, I'm puzzled though that they have yet to make any "pay-for" DLCs. The base game was dirt cheap if memory serves, and I'd happily contribute $5 or $10 here or there for substantial content/functionality packages . . . course I also am one of those mental defectives that does things like spend $120 for games like "War in the Pacific Admiral's Edition," spend a month learning the basics of the game, get bored with it, set it down and NEVER go back to it for years at a time!

Meh, different business models I guess. It's all good! I'd put this game almost in the same category as Minecraft: insanely cheap, and while not as customizable, very much more than your average indie game.

[LordFerret]

1 hour ago, Ultimate Steve said:

Biomes (basically only useful in career mode)

Make that Career and Science modes.

[Diche Bach]

So browsing through my old posts . . . looks like Fall of 2013 was when I was last playing the game, and I made a few posts in 2014, but that was mostly just because of the great conversations and brilliant minds that frequent this site.

So last time I played likely was Fall of 2013.

[Corona688]

I'm in a somewhat similar situation actually, though I've only been gone two years.  B

8 minutes ago, Diche Bach said:

I already got my "money's worth" out of this game years ago! Everything from here on is just "gravy!"

Hopefully they are still having enough fun with it, and still generating enough revenue from it, that they will be keen to keep expanding and perfecting it for many years.

The dev team has seen big changes lately.  Particularly, HarvestR has left.  They've got the talent to keep going, but he was kind of the game's soul.  Also, Dan, who did their videos.  And now KSP's prepping for launch into the console market.

Right now I have no idea what this means, and will wait and see, but suspect the game isn't about to see any giant changes.  Then again, they could surprise me and do things HarvestR never thought of.

[CoriW]

Just now, Diche Bach said:

So browsing through my old posts . . . looks like Fall of 2013 was when I was last playing the game, and I made a few posts in 2014, but that was mostly just because of the great conversations and brilliant minds that frequent this site.

So last time I played likely was Fall of 2013.

Right so 0.21.1 was in July 2013, and 0.22 was in October 2013, so somewhere in there.

[septemberWaves]

Go-to mods? Kopernicus (with Sigma Binary), and a whole lot of planet packs. Some of my favourites are Outer Planets (analogues of Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto-Charon) and Xen's Planet Collection (additions to Eve, Duna, and Eeloo as well as two interesting new planets), but there's a vast number of others out there - including several great ones for other solar systems including Other Worlds, Larinax, and Interstellar Adventure Revived (I'd recommend something like Interstellar Extended or Alcubierre Warp Drive to get there though). I don't know what the game was like several years ago as I've only had it since just before 1.0 was released, but I can say with confidence that the more places there are to explore, the easier it is to keep an interest in the game as there's constantly new places to go and new things to test out on different worlds.

Also pretty much a requirement if you're going to be sending multiple simultaneous missions is Kerbal Alarm Clock which, in case you don't know, allows you to set alarms for various events (maneuvers, transfer windows, etc). And since aerodynamics and probably several other systems have probably seen some huge changes, I must recommend MechJeb because watching how its various autopilots do things is a valuable asset for learning (or reminding oneself of) how to do things in the game. MechJeb's maneuver planner is also incredibly helpful for figuring out how much delta-v is needed to go to the aforementioned modded planets.

And finally, if you're anything like me and prioritise aesthetics, I would suggest Kerbal Joint Reinforcement because it allows the avoidance of unsightly strut webs in most situations. There's also innumerable great parts mods that can help to make some wonderful-looking vessels as well as adding a lot of utility (check out Nertea's mods for example).

[Brownhair2]

2 hours ago, Alshain said:

There are no paid expansions or DLC at this time.  There is a really good official mod Squad made called Asteroid Day though, it's free.

Forgive me if somebody already mentioned this, but didn't they make it stock in 1.1.3?

[something]

Yeah, have had some annoying bugs in 1.1 some of which have been removed in 1.1.3. However, reading what happens to some users out there, I'd say you should not be surprised if your game starts crashing at some point...as for the announced 1.2 version - I am still having my doubts if it makes things better - witnessing yet another change of the game engine I suspect even moar bugs to appear, while some will be swatted. So we should end up round about our current level of bugs.

With that being said - I don't know if it is the right suggestion to wait. I'd say -try it but be warned - your spaceplane might just dissassemble on the spot and send itself into a transfer orbit to Hell (erm, it's users call the concept of Hell "Eve" if I remember correctly) or if pressing the EVA button puts your Kerbal in orbit of the Mun etc