Bought it!
Thing is, my son and I share a Steam account, and I promised to let him play first, so I’ll probably only get around to playing it myself in a couple of months. Parenthood is sacrifice.
(Don\t worry about me - I have the Cyberpunk 2077 DLC in three weeks, which will keep me busy for a while).
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The base building went surprisingly well! I had enough materials to build a lot of basic stuff: airlock, habs, turret, power sources, etc.
The material storage system is still a bit mystifying to me. I found a storage system that looks like a large rolling platform, which I guess you position anywhere inside the perimeter of your base, which has a range from which it can transfer ship storage to your base or vice-versa. This seems to solve the problem of storage and transfer. But it’s limited in capacity.
And to make the outpost actually useful, I need to build the capability to assign crew (build a crew station), add a landing pad to allow my ship to be closer and transfer cargo off-world, and I need resource extraction. I’m missing a lot of aluminum and some other special parts, so I am going on a shopping mission.
Something odd happened. I visited the ship and was transferring resources to my personal inventory, when I accidentally hit “transfer all.” Unexpectedly, my inventory was filled with a large set of bric-a-brac like pots, slippers, decorations, tools–things that the game labels “misc” that have visual appeal but often have no use. Maybe this is deliberate, a package of stuff you get when you start a base? I certainly wandered around the crew quarters, dropping stuff here and there, giving the place a lived-in look. At first, though, I was horrified that I had stripped the ship of all its various items (this was not the case).
The ship inventory system seems a bit buggy now. I put medical supplies in the lower bay containers, then the next time I visit them, they’re all gone. Where are they? Don’t know yet.
I suspect part of the base building is for the role playing immersion. I haven’t built one yet, but I’m thinking about trying it so I can mine aluminium. I took a contract to deliver 5000 units of aluminium to Mars, and at the rate I’m collecting it by running around doing side missions and collecting resources by hand, it will take me weeks, maybe months, to fulfil that contract.
I suspect if I set up a mining camp, this will go much faster.
I think you covered it.
To haul that much material, you’ll want a new ship to carry cargo. So buying and operating a new ship will be part of the experience.
I’ve already bought an Econohauler, which has pretty good cargo capacity, and can hang in a fight as well. Until I’m rich, I think this might be a good option for raiding&trading missions.
I got an absolute monster of a ship as a mission reward but it’s a Class C and I think it’s gonna be a long long time before I can pilot one of those. 
I found my first major glitch. Among the tools there are ‘Vice Grips’ . However the image is clearly something in the Channel Lock/Pliers-Wrench category. Totally immersion breaking. 
It does seem to be in the Irwin color scheme at least. 
How required is building buildings in this game? I skipped it all in Fallout 4 and when they required me to do one, i used the console to cheat it.
As best I can tell it’s fully optional. You collect resources to build outposts to automate the collection and production of resources to build better outposts.
Sad robot anecdote:
Vasco had some kind of placement bug where he kept clipping to stand awkwardly on top of my ship’s cockpit while in space. Not only messed with the vibe but got in the way of cool screenshots, so I kicked him off the ship.
Now every time I go to The Lodge, he’s standing in the foyer and waiting for me to show up so he can ask to be let back on the ship.
Sorry, bud, we’ll try again after the Day 1 patch.
Today it became available on Game Pass. On my Xbox it says to upgrade to Series S/X to play Starfield. I said, you gotta be shitting me, this should be available for cloud gaming.
Then I went to the actual game itself in the Game Pass area, and there is a Play button. Ran that, it launched, I can play it.
Sneaky bastards at Microsoft trying to trick me. I didn’t actually get a chance to play yet, I have some errands to do first, but I confirmed that it works.
I’m about two hours in. I’m enjoying it and it seems to be running pretty well on my 2080 Ti with almost everything set to high.
I admit I am finding the inventory a bit of a slog to use. Switching weapons is a pain (I’ve probably missed an easy way). Combat seems fun (what little I have done). Although, the tutorial said to use lasers on shields and kinetic on ship hulls but my laser on the first ship seems near useless. Bullets seem to work better for me. Again, I am probably missing something.
Also, I keep picking up all sorts of crap because I not sure what may be useful later…or is it just junk?
Are you adding weapons to your Favorites menu?
I didn’t even know that existed. I’ll have a look. Thanks!
There is a mod to improve the UI. Still early for mod development, but it exists.
This one amazes me…
Apparently there are some people who are furious that Starfield asks for your pronouns in the character creation screen. One YouTuber/Twitter person, HeelsvsBabyface, went on a tirade about it. Of course, now there are two polarized groups on this.
I honestly don’t get the fuss. How is does being asked in a game what pronouns you prefer make some infuriated (watch the video…infuriated is the correct word)? Just pick one and go…takes 2-seconds. This is a symptom of a lot that is wrong in this world (but that is for another thread).
From that article:
“Do you want to get immersed in our world? Yeah, well guess what – fcking pronouns,” he is seen angrily screaming into his camera. “You take everything we love, all our immersions, all our fantasies, all our escapism and you just can’t help shovel your dogshit fcking crap ideology into everything,” the furious gamer added.
I mean, at least (and I use that with a very low bar) there’s some vague validity to saying your pseudo-medieval world is too modern when importing current viewpoints. I don’t agree with it but I contrast it to the idea that it’ll be in the far-flung spacefaring future where we encountering sentient alien races of all sorts of flavors and… we’ll still just be staying with an outdated gender binary? That’s more realistic and immersive?
Dibella save us all.
Right… this is the future. You can go to Enhance and change your sex, appearance, voice, and pronouns all for 500 credits or about three times what a vending machine soda costs.
The item descriptions tell you whether an item is a crafting material. Don’t bother with other stuff unless you want it for decoration somewhere.