The following text was first published on the Starbound forums, between september 4th and october 3rd 2016. It's an attempt at inventing a few characters and a storyline ingame, illustrated by screenshots and partly fueled by ingame events, especially by NPC reactions. I'm not really trusting Chucklefish for long term availability of the forums and I'd like to keep this experiment, so here it is. The story is unfinished, but who knows, maybe someday I'll continue :)
I've rearranged the layout a little bit and extracted the message parts that are not part of the story to paste the information they contained right here :
On the technical side :
- I played on a vanilla server (nicely self-hosted on a clean Debian stable), no admin commands were used for gameplay, everything was done "by hand".
- The sign on the lunar base says "please teleport somewhere else if there are meteorites". I assumed durasteel was strong enough to resist stone rains, and in the end it's not ! :D But I had built a lot already when I noticed the problem and I didn't want to redo everything elsewhere, hence the warning.
- As you can guess, English is not my native language, I'll gladly correct any mistake/typo.
The initial story :
My first character for 1.0 was Rehaneh, the winged floran you can see on the lunar base screenshots here and there. As I pointed in another post on the forum, I wanted the settlers to keep their outfits instead of looking all like protectorate candidates when I had done quests for them. I picked one of the NPCs on the base to make tests, Charmoak. I hired her and dismissed her, hoping she would come back to her usual routine in her dress. Instead of that, the colony deed fell on the floor, and Charmoak disappeared. Poor glitch, I had made her go away! That's why I decided to write the story of her adventures, and play as Charmoak for a while :)
About part 3 :
Thank you so much to tehcavy on this post for indicating that the naturalist tenant sells seeds. Otherwise it would have taken a lot more time to turn the planet into fields.
I was probably not the first one to transform a planet in a whole cultivated area. It was really fun to do, and I didn't expect it to be so efficient in terms of pixels o_O Cocoa and rice definitely made all my characters very rich for the rest of their lives :D
Part 1
Talkative. My name is Charmoak, and I come from a small planet in the middle of nowhere. I became self-aware quite early in my life, and soon I couldn't bear anymore all those machine-like beings that claimed to be my family. That's why I ran away in the first space cargo I could find.
That's me, Charmoak. Yes, sometimes I glow.
After wandering for a while, mainly working as a janitor on the very space cargo that helped me escape from my home planet, I saved enough pixels to rent a small flat in a moon based station. Life on the station was really cool, and I enjoyed every moment of it. Everyone there is so friendly and welcoming, I really couldn't find a better place to stay.
That's my beloved station! I lived where I've drawn the red circle. Home sweet home!
Let me describe the inhabitants of the station a little bit. There's Tina the first merchant of the place, who lives near the market and always has some cool jokes to tell. Lubov is the guy everyone relies on to provide all sorts of repair service, he's really nice and always willing to help. After Earth crumbled, Alexis the human girl literally crashed her interstellar van on the station, and finally decided to stay in a small apartment close to the remains of her pocket spaceship. She's still a little traumatised by the accident, and constantly wears a yellow safety helmet. Close to her flat, a first class chef, Anat, decided to settle in. He was looking for a quiet place to imagine new recipes, and he very often invites the neighbours to taste his new experiments. Yum ! At the west end of the base live two weird guys. They don't talk much, and I suspect one of them to host a symbiote or something like that. Well the universe is vast and varied ! On the opposite side there's Bronzefoot, an exiled self-aware glitch noble, who was defeated in a terrible sword duel and has to leave his castle. Poor him, sometimes it's so obvious that he misses the comfort of some heavy stone manor. In front of his doorstep lives Akemi. She's one of the few Hylotls of the lunar base, and the very first inhabitant of the station. She's seen it all grow, and has the memory of everything that's happened there. She's not very talkative, but you can sometimes observe in her three eyes that she's remembering something no one else knows about.
My job was to take care of the main square's plants, and everything was fine until Rehaneh, the owner of the station, came to me one day and asked me if I wanted to join her crew. At first I wasn't very enthusiastic about leaving my friends behind, but in the end I accepted. How stupid I was! Never ever work for a floran, however greenfinger-ish she may look! She was truly horrible with the member crew, letting them rot in her spaceship in ridiculous outfits while she was exploring alone and getting all the fun for herself! Of course, when I saw those working conditions I loudly complained... And guess what? She fired me! I was abandoned on the first lush planet she could find, launching me on orbit in a half-broken ship, along with a forever angry pig, and she continued her trip without me.
There began a very hard time for me. I had to do everything by myself, from eating to building a small shelter, and get enough material to repair the ship myself. Thankfully, the aboard computer could help me and tell me what operations to do. I wouldn't have been able to fix it otherwise, I'm no technician you see.
As you can see, my shelter was really rudimentary
Surprisingly, I wasn't alone on this small planet. Right after I landed, I first discovered small tombstones under a bunch of trees, which frightened me a lot. How could I hope to survive if all I could find was a cemetery ? Yet I started to think that someone at least was alive enough to assemble the graves, so I checked around. I finally found a lonely and sad human in a tent, surrounded by crates. His name was Randy, and he was the last survivor of his archaeological expedition. With the disappearance of Earth, no more supplies reached the group, and there were no more medicine when the flu stroke on winter. He was beyond happy to see me (and so was I!), but I think he's been alone for a little too long, as he sometimes talks to the crates as if they were people... I had to tell him what happened to Earth, and that also brought him into a shock. Human psychology's not a glitch thing, I guess. Anyway, we built a wooden house together, and added basic comfort to it. Then I went down the mine the archaeologists had dug, and found enough ore to leave the place. Randy preferred to stay in the end, and I can't blame him. I promised to bring some modern stuff to him as soon as I could, and I painfully reached some civilized outpost that sells oculemonade.
What was I going to do next ?
Next (part 2 / 4)