Securing a Home Base
In my last few sessions playing X4, I was rather rudely ejected from Terran space where I had a growing sense of familiarity and comfort. You see, after a successful defense of our brand-spanking-new defense platform on the fringes of neutral *cough* Terran-occupied space, I was brought into the fold of their secret service.
In this capacity, I took on a mission to investigate the Sergaris Pioneer faction. Technically… They’re Terran too. But when all jump technology was broken for a period of time in the X-universe, they were isolated in the outer reaches of the solar system. For a bit too long, by our reckoning. Started to get their own ideas about things. We caught wind of something called ‘Project Genesis’ and as the old trope goes… I was a nobody! Relatively speaking at least, they’d have no idea who I was. So the rookie gets sent in to investigate undercover.
What could possibly go wrong?
Well… The short version is, I still have no idea what Project Genesis actually is. But while working for the Segaris, I was sent to investigate a strange station emitting even stranger gravity waves.
Of all the things that could’ve gone wrong, this might be the one I least expected: Something happened… and I still don’t know if it was me or not… But the entire station jumped, unaided by a gate or other external aid, into a system deep in Commonwealth space.
There is a superhighway in a ring connecting the core systems from a great many of the Commonwealth systems. You can jump on and ride it to and through the jumpgates that connect them.
This is neat and greatly expanded my knowledge of how this universe connects together… But I was still incredibly far from home without much of a clue how I might get back.
There was a silverlining to all this though. The station that brought me here for daring touch it also decided it was mine. Well… Or maybe I decided it was mine. Either way, it’s now mine. This was less useful than it might sound though. It was without any docking facilities, for one. While I didn’t make the trip by way of an EVA in my space suit, this wasn’t exactly going to be conducive to trade.
So! I set to building one. There were attachment points on the structure where I could in fact do that, then I had to hire one of the behemoth constructor class ships and provide the station with enough funds to ensure the constructor I’d hired could in turn buy the necessary materials and ship them here.
That took a fair amount of time, so I was left to wander.
I had a home away from home, now… But I still wanted to know how I might get home-home.
As I am wont to do, however, I continually became distracted by other missions and tasks. I kept finding new factions and new people that wanted me to help them in some manner. I even found my way into the titular systems from the latest DLC — Tides of Avarice. If you’ve seen any of my recent X4 screenshots where the star looks a scooch too close for comfort, chances are it was take there.
My introduction to Avarice was trying to rescue some poor sap of a trader with engine trouble after everyone else had ‘Yeah, Nah’d’ out of helping with the short time remaining before Avarice let out one of its tidal waves of supercharged energy.
I won’t lie — this was a high intensity, panic fueled rescue. I was sure I had made a mistake, one that would prove fatal. You see — rather than heading to a nearby station able to provide shelter, in order to help I jumped out of my own ship into an EVA and desperately tried to repair his engines.
That failed.
Twice.
Sure I was about to get extra crispy, I managed to convince the trader over comms to abandon ship. The thinking was I’d scoop him up into mine and we’d fly to safety together.
The problem was… I fly a very small ship. It has a crew complement of just two, and could not fit another soul aboard.
What happened next is best only thought about in terms of how the game handles it mechanically. Because thinking about it from a practical lore perspective… *cough* …It probably wouldn’t have ended well for all involved.
What I did was ask one of my crew members to ‘Work for me somewhere else’, with the ‘somewhere else’ being on my station. Mechanically, the crew just shows up there as if by magic. More realistically… I probably kicked them out into an escape pod in order to collect the trader from their… escape pod.
…
Anyway, alls well that ends well. We all made it back, barely, to Tidebreak, the main station of the system before turning into something more resembling bacon. Yay not-Bacon! Huh… There’s something I didn’t expect to ever say.
Anywho, did I make it home? Well, maybe! Turns out, that’ll have to be a story for another day.
This was posted during Blaugust 2022, the annual blogging event hosted by Belghast. Blaugust is an event aiming to welcome new blogger blood into the fold and revitalise those who’ve been at it a little longer.
The Blaugust Discord is still available to join in year-round!
