Spacewrecked: Won

The enemy that was my bane for most of this session. Even above the gnomes!

Exploration started off this session quite poor. The lower map is well-bottled necked. You have to get past a bear or a Wesbet. Why isn't it just called a Wesbet bear? Who knows. I hardly react to encountering new enemies in the flesh. It's just stunning and running past. Ignoring computer chips. It's possible that ignoring the robots is screwing me over, but outside of medical care, it seems like too much micro-managing for me. What I really need, they can't give anyway, bottles.

Lower deck's map. The Inhibitation Lock is west of the bride, labs are on either side of the elevator, and there's a manufacturing room in the south door at the east end of the east hallway.

The west side of the lower deck proves to have mostly stuff I don't yet need and more labs. Helpful yes, useful now, no. I just need two things and the game keeps disappointing me. Weapons are not that useful yet, but they're rare enough that unless I make an out of game map, which would be tedious because of the doors that lock on one side thing, I won't find them again. I try out the rope once, it doesn't do anything. Something had to be unimplemented.

The main deck, this one's so filled out you could use it as a base for any level of the game. Terminal rooms of importance are east of the west elevator, and at the southeast corner of the map. Charge rooms are in the middle of the circular hallway and at the northern end of the connected hallway. The west corridor is most just bonus stuff here.

Rather than brute-forcing my way through the lower deck, I decide to use my previous level maps to find the elevator to the other dorsal deck. That works, although it seems slightly different. Was I wrong? I'll check, don't worry. It leads to a terminal room with a crab monster. And one room north of that is my destination, the manufacturing room. How cruel, but I expect no less from a final level. I make myself six 5 liter bottles and plan my attack on the rest of the ship.

On the west side, there are manufacturing rooms on both doors on the side from the elevator, a galley at the far end. On the east side, charge rooms flank the room that's left then right from the elevator. There's a coolant applicator in the south one.

Fortunately, on the other elevator, there's a lab on the lower deck right outside. Do that, then rush up to communications and I should have enough time to fix it before running out of electrostunner charge and keycard power. I do...but I don't have the repair kit from the save I started this particular run from. It takes a long time to find one. I said last time there was one near the ladder down to the lower deck...and that's not as true as I remember it. I did find one in Bio Control, which is quite unfortunate because I need to stun two enemies, the disappearing gnome and the rock monster, before getting there. And I discover that without the applicator, coolant spills, which is charming.

This guy just gives a little kick. Which makes him look very goofy.

It isn't really helping me that I constantly have to reload because weapons get fumbled or you get hurt. The repair kit can fix it, but it also has charges and of course, doing that in combat is real smart. It's completely random, and therefore, somewhat annoying. I really wonder how this game was intended to be played? You can reload in-game like this, but that's a lot of loading and saving to disk.

From here, that is pretty much that. It's just a matter of fixing up the systems enough so I have time to breath while taking out the roaming monsters. But the recharge system stops working, so I figure I need to wait for it to get back up to strength once its fixed. And then I realize that I need to fix the computer room...I.E., the bridge. Probably. Well, at least that gives me some idea of what I need to do.

A lot of the humans seem like they're refugees from other genres, she tries to stab you with a knife like a horror antagonist or something.

Eventually, I find my way to the bridge. It's on the lower level, east of the elevator. Which because of the way the map works, means you go through the first door level from the lift. Once you go through the corridor on the left there, it's the last door on the left. Which took a while to actually reach. It is mercifully quick back, and having five five liter bottles is enough to fully repair it. Yeah...the number of five liter bottles I had was five. It would have been six if one didn't have to be thrown out just after making it...because the game doesn't damage objects, it just randomly decides they should die.

I clear out the area around my "base" of operations on the main deck, basically life support, after making sure that system won't fail on me. And just slowly clear it out, occasionally picking up items like weapons or key cards. New enemies do slowly spawn in, but I clear them out fairly quickly. I wonder if the rooms they come out of generate them out of a finite number or infinitely? It's probably best not to test that.

Then it's mostly just going between floors, doing the busywork, as I gradually clear up more and more of the main and lower decks. I think there's about 20-25 minutes before a system starts failing, and it feels like it takes half of that preparing for the next fix. Not helping this is a lack of recharge stations throughout the central and eastern half of the lower deck. At least I find the inhibition lock, just a bit left of the bridge, and the replacement flux decoupler, just before the locked door leading south at the end of that corridor. The locked door leads to a manufacturing room, which if you were capable of reaching this far without energy weapons, would set you up for a bit. There's even a repair kit next to the flux decoupler.

My cleanup of the main and lower decks more or less uncovers everything, meaning that the power room is on one of the dorsal decks. My guess is that it's on the west side, east side I know enough that it seems unlikely. And let me tell you, the west side of the dorsal deck is just as brutal as the side with all the dinosaurs. Turns out that the crab enemies are difficult to hit. It's not so bad with the stunner, but killing them is far more tedious than any other enemy. That combined with one of the purple heads as well as an invisible gnome and it's just so incredibly frustrating. This of course, means that the power room is here.

One run through with the electrostunner later, and now all I have to do is fix the rest of the ship. I kill a crab, then wander back and forth a lot. A whole lot. At least 10 trips in total. Waiting for the coolant to pour in, pour out and then fix the things with all the fun stuff in-between. It takes so many trips I start to think that maybe I've done something wrong and the final mission can't be won in the state I've gotten it to. Navigation just won't get up to a good status despite Communications being fixed.

But eventually, I win. And the game just ends with the same sequencee it always ends on. The music track just plays on and on, and the game itself does nothing to get out of this screen. This is all I'm going to go through I'm afraid, I checked level 2 again and it was just the same map design again, just the rooms all replaced. There's not really any more for me to say.

At one point, I got a working robot with repair, and most importantly, combat ability. In theory, combat mode just turns on and off, and it never shot anything. Maybe it works with the programming mode, but that's a lot of work for not much reward and kind of nullifies why I would want a robot to fight my battles for me. Communicators are just for communicating with robots, if they should need to get programmed orders from wherever you send them. The crowbar is a melee weapon. That's pretty much it for the mysteries of the game, next time, the rating.

This Session: 5 hours 20 minutes

Final Time: 13 hours 00 minutes