I’ve been having a good old time ferrying things back and forward between Sol and the Ross systems, and bought myself a Cobra Mk 1 with a much roomier hold and some more beverage cup holders. I’ve mostly been dealing in computers and robots, with an occasional venture into illegal goods.
The Ross 128 prison system is a good place to load up on goods that are banned in most places (animal skins are the ones I’m most ethically comfortable carrying), then you have to make it back to another star system and find someone dodgy enough to accept them (the space station Gorbachev around Earth seems to be a fairly reliable place to find them). Sometimes the police will fine you for carrying illegal goods when you land, but bizarrely, they then allow you to keep them for selling anyway! Although they can get you again if you try to sell to one of the police plants on the bulletin board. In any case, they only get annoyed if you fail to pay your fines before taking off again.
Much was made of the size of the game at the time, and it’s definitely impressive to have made this procedurally-generated galaxy – the size of it is absurd, but… there doesn’t seem to be a lot of reason to explore very far? You have to keep your fuel topped up, so moving between unpopulated systems is risky – and once you get about a hundred light years away from the start point, all the stars show no registered settlements. Is there something beyond my freelance delivery service that I should be aiming for?
