I have no courage to play career...

[Nivee~]

Is it OK if I play KSP in sandbox everytime, and not play career at all? 

Does the community accept mission reports and stories that are done in sandbox?

[Mikki]

Welcome to the KSP forums!

I can tell from observation through the past years that only a small fraction of the posts contain actual careerplay content, i started two careers of which the second went successfull in terms of completing the science tree and not going into bankruptcy on normal difficulty.
Posting Sandbox/ Science experience is absolutly common and was never an issue of any kind 

KSP career is quite timeconsuming but teaches alot about econimcs in various aspects, but challenging and most funny when things work out as intended.

[Dafni]

43 minutes ago, Nivee~ said:

Is it OK if I play KSP in sandbox everytime, and not play career at all? 

Does the community accept mission reports and stories that are done in sandbox?

Of course this is perfectly fine!

Go ahead and play however you want.

As for community acceptance, really anything is welcome here. Mod the game until it crashes, play with hack gravity or infinite fuel enabled, process your screenshots, build only boats or cars or whatever, ANYTHING goes. Reports and stories always find resonance here.

The only thing that is maybe frowned upon here would be doing something with the cheat menu enabled but telling otherwise in the post, like lying about it. And yeah, asking modders for updates, dont do this. Other than that, anyting goes. Its KSP, welcome to the club.

Having fun and learning the game and things about spaceflight is really the only goal here.

 

Welcome again

 

Edit: for the record, myself, and many other players here, only ever play sandbox. Most people might do a science mode play through or a career one when they start out, but many end up playing sandbox exclusively later down the road.

Edited May 30, 2018 by Dafni

[Nivee~]

8 minutes ago, Mikki said:

Welcome to the KSP forums!

 

6 minutes ago, Dafni said:

Welcome again

Thanks!

6 minutes ago, Dafni said:

Go ahead and play however you want

And will do!

[lugge]

1 hour ago, Nivee~ said:

Is it OK if I play KSP in sandbox everytime, and not play career at all? 

Does the community accept mission reports and stories that are done in sandbox? 

Nope, you wont be accepted until you start a hard career.
(Just kidding).

Most of the forum discussions are about orbital mechanics, ship design, mission profiles, math...
For these topics, there is no difference if one plays career or sandbox.

However, I started KSP with career (I liked the progression. You can get familiar with each new part. Sandbox was to overwhelming for me back then) and have only been playing career since then.
I would advise to every beginner to start with career.
In my opinion, career, even a hard one, feels only different at the start.
You have to decide where to spend your funds/science points.
But after 2 visits to Mun and Minmus (each one with 5 or 6 active contracts), you will not have any issues with funds and science.
I'm no in midgame of a hard career and I play with lifesupport, but after my first manned Duna mission I basically can fund whatever I want. There even is no need for reuseable booster stages because each mission pays a lot more than the vehicle costs (if you have 1 or 2 contracts everytime you launch).

Edited May 30, 2018 by lugge

[steuben]

3 hours ago, Nivee~ said:

Does the community accept mission reports and stories that are done in sandbox?

The acceptance of stories and mission reports is based on two things.
- Technical; spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc. half of the stuff your English drones/droned on about in school.
- Literary; plot, characterisation, dialogue, symbolism, etc. the other half of the stuff your English drones/droned on about in school. Note English teacher, and not what that hipster jazz-poseur in that independent coffee shop  drones on about.

If you want to talk about taking a leap into that pool, we've got a pretty good writer's group here: 

 

[Geonovast]

Welcome!  I to find career a bit irritating.  I've been playing for nearly a year, and I'd say at minimum, 95% of my hours were in sandbox.  I've just very recently managed to muttle through long enough in a career save to get to where I'm starting to think about maybe enjoying it.

So far nobody's told me to leave.

[Kesa]

Career mode is very easy on any default difficulty setting (at least the difficulty does not come from the career aspect), as long as you allow flight reverting. As Lugge pointed out, it is a great way to be slowly introduced in the various part of the game. It can feel grindy however.

Here are some advice if you ever decide to make a career run :

• You start without patched conics or manoeuver nodes. It leads to interesting challenges, but if you're not up for them, it can quickely turns into "grind until I unlock them", in which case, you should rather inrcease your starting funds (unless you like grinding), or decrease fund penality to reduce the grinding associated to facility upgrade as a whole. Difficulty settings can be adjusted in an ongoing game, including reward and penality if I am not mistaken.
• (unless you like grinding) Don't accept contracts just because they are proposed to you, or offer a big reward. Even on hard difficulty, game is generous enough so that you can do what you want to do and only choose the contracts that align with your plans (though contracts may give you interesting missions ideas).
• Most importantly, you can transform your career save into a sandbox save. I've not done it myself, but saves are easily readable and editable text files. It means you can switch to sandbox whenever you no longer enjoy career without losing progression (eg station assembled over several hours). You can duplicate saves as well.

 

As for as community content, as other said every thing is welcome.

The closest thing there exists to restrictions is if you want to participate to challenges. Restrictions are here for obvious reasons and different for each challenge, but in most cases, they are about building, navigating and piloting skills, and thus have no game mode restrictions (and are better participated in sandbox).

In short, sandbox mode is pretty much the default mode used by the community, because it allows to do anythin (appart from being restricted).

[Nivee~]

I have not played much KSP, only a couple of times, last December(Was too hard,got frustrated!!! ).. So I am almost a beginner, but aware of facts of the game.. Thanks for clearing out my doubts! ... I need to watch some tutorials..

And I will jump into the mod craziness too! (Oh my God, its full of mods!! )

[Geonovast]

Science is also a nice balance between career and sandbox.  You still have to unlock the tech tree, but you have unlimited funds and there's no contracts to worry about.

[CrashyMcCrashFace]

As somebody that mostly plays career mode, I've noticed that's it played as much as I thought it was. Asking questions about career doesn't result in as many answers or people will say, "I don't play career mode much but here's the answer..."

Answer to the question you didn't ask, career mode is not that hard. I'm basically playing with complete disregard to cost at this point. Just pick increasingly difficult contracts and you will get lots of Kerbal Bucks. I probably do half contracts and half whatever I want.

[General Apocalypse]

Without the career contracts the game feels a bit empty , also funds about if you set them to 200%. I used to do that in my first play troughs and it wasn't robbing me of the experience.

[NewtSoup]

Hi there and welcome  I've played almost entirely in career mode in the year I've been playing ( on and off ).  It's actually a great way to learn how to play as you always get an up front payment to cover the cost of the craft you'll need to build and you get a reward for completing an objective.  I grew tired of it though and switched to just science mode.

There is no wrong way to play the game.  I really hope you have fun, whatever you do and there's loads of people here who will  help you out if you get stuck.

[Xd the great]

THIS IS KSP. DO WHAT YOU WANT. ITS WHAT THE GAME IS MADE FOR.

[Fraston]

I, personally don’t really like career.

[Snark]

On 5/29/2018 at 11:05 PM, Nivee~ said:

Is it OK if I play KSP in sandbox everytime, and not play career at all?

It's your game, so of course it's okay to play however you want. 

That said:  Some newbies at the game may actually find career an easier way of getting into KSP than sandbox.  It may be worth trying a career game just to see how you like it-- you might be surprised!

"But wait," I hear you cry.  "In sandbox everything's unlocked, and that makes everything easier than career, right?"

Well, yes and no.

Yes, it's easier, in that you have a lot more "freedom" (since everything's unlocked).  However... KSP has a pretty steep learning curve.  There's a lot of complexity in this game.  When something goes wrong, there are a lot of different ways it could go wrong-- and fixing the problem requires understanding the situation well enough to be able to identify which one of the many, many possibly-wrong things is actually wrong.  That can get very confusing and scary, for a newbie.

In other words:  "more freedom" makes things easier in some ways... but more difficult in others.

One of the things that career does is that it forces you to build only very simple rockets with very few parts in the early stages of the game.  Since they're very simple, there's less to go wrong with them.  And since their capabilities are limited, it forces you to figure out the underlying basic principles-- in a "safe" environment where everything's still fairly simple-- before you move on to the more-complicated stuff.  Whereas if you just get "tossed into the deep end of the pool" with sandbox mode, you might not be forced to learn that stuff (it's too easy to just "throw moar boosters" at the problem), which means that when you finally do run into a problem... it's likely to be a more complicated one.

Different people have different play styles, and run into different problems.  So it may be that career mode isn't for you, after all, and if that's the case-- fine!  Whatever works for you. 

Just sayin' that career mode isn't necessarily as scary as you think, and (depending on your play style and approach to learning) might actually be an easier introduction to the game for you than sandbox.  So it may be worth your while to try out a career game, just to see whether it suits you.  Who knows, maybe you'll like it. 

[Kryxal]

For that matter, science mode is probably going to be "easier" than either sandbox or career to start.  You're not limited in funds, but you are limited in the parts you can select, which keeps things simple without any danger of running out of anything.

[Plusck]

A definite +1 to the voices saying career is easier.

I actually started with KSP because I didn't want to buy the game.
Not that I had any problem with paying for it, but because I just knew that I'd be hooked if I did.

So I played the free demo, for a long, long time. And I played each new demo that came out. And eventually, I decided to say goodbye to my spare time and bought the game

 

So naturally, I was used to a very limited set of parts, and making the most of them. And that made everything after that so much simpler.

So yes, playing career really forces you to understand the benefits of each part. Therefore each additional part is a benefit, not a confusion.

It's just easier to apply your mind to problems if you have a strict framework to work in.
Give too much freedom to your designs, and you'll find it harder to think about a solution. The bigger the possibilities, the less thought you'll actually give to the solution, and the poorer your constructions will be.

 

So yeah, imho, play career.

Edited June 1, 2018 by Plusck

[Superfluous J]

4 hours ago, Kryxal said:

For that matter, science mode is probably going to be "easier" than either sandbox or career to start.  You're not limited in funds, but you are limited in the parts you can select, which keeps things simple without any danger of running out of anything.

This. Career is the hardest mode (inb4 "career mode isn't hard) available as it has the most limits. Science is the hardest to learn in because it has no structure. Science mode has structure but no limits.

[Lego_Prodigy]

Bro its literally a sandbox game, its ok mate

 

 

[Nivee~]

11 hours ago, Snark said:

In other words:  "more freedom" makes things easier in some ways... but more difficult in others.

Hmm... that's applicable both to the game and the real life!

But I chose the middle ground, and started playing science mode~ And since I am writing a story based on the After Kerbin planet pack, I installed it for my science mode game, instead of Stock.. Am I making a huge mistake? I dunno, but it will be fun to find out!  

 

5 hours ago, Lego_Prodigy said:

Bro

 Bro Sis...

On 5/31/2018 at 1:14 AM, NewtSoup said:

science mode

I did the same

Edited June 2, 2018 by Nivee~

[NewtSoup]

9 hours ago, Nivee~ said:

Hmm... that's applicable both to the game and the real life!

But I chose the middle ground, and started playing science mode~ And since I am writing a story based on the After Kerbin planet pack, I installed it for my science mode game, instead of Stock.. Am I making a huge mistake? I dunno, but it will be fun to find out!  

 

 Bro Sis...

I did the same

Superb Choice!,  You have made no mistake.  Science mode keeps the part count low and simple to start with without the pressure of doing contracts to earn money.  I look forward to seeing what you get up to.

[klesh]

Community acceptance is overrated.  You do you and if they cant handle the majesty, so be it.  

[Nivee~]

@NewtSoup I am binge reading through all the mission reports, several of them are masterpieces and I have a lot to live up to..

[NewtSoup]

You'll be fine