Starfarer is still fresh out of the gate – but there are already several playable and very promising looking modding efforts under way.
I hope you give these a try, they’re a lot of fun already. Installing a mod is easy – here is a quick guide.
Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters One of several mods by forum member Trylobot. Thread & download link here.
The combat has a vastly different feel to vanilla Starfarer, with some striking similarities to Star Control in how it plays out. It’s till in the early stages, but there are already three ships – the Earthling Cruiser, the Ur-Quan Dreadnought, and the Orz Nemesis.
I’m absolutely loving how this mod is coming together. Being a huge SC2 fan I’m a bit biased, though – so here are a few screenshots so you can see for yourself:
Junk Pirates A mod by mendonca, thread and download link here. Features an entirely new faction with 6 new ships and fighters, showcased in a series of 4 missions.
My personal favorite is the Dugong-class destroyer, pictured below. It’s got an amazing amount of firepower concentrated in a broadside, and is fast enough to run circles around anything it can’t flat-out outgun.
Well, I finally beat the combat UI into reasonable shape, and was able to record a full playthrough of one of the earlier (and definitely easier) missions. The fleets are comparatively small, and so is the map, making for faster-paced action.
The mission briefing, to set the mood:
The independent prospector ISS Hamatsu is coming back from a tech mining expedition on a decivilized world. The haul is good, and the Hamatsu’s captain has retained a mercenary ship to provide protection en route to market at the Hegemony worlds.
It turns out the captain’s worries were justified. Coming out of hyperspace for a routine refueling stop in the Corvus system, the ships are attacked by a suspected Cult of Lud task force. The Ludii blame technology for humanty’s ills, and will do anything to prevent the Hamatsu and its high-tech cargo from reaching Hegemony space.
After a brief conference, the captains of the Hamatsu and the mercenary ISS Black Star conclude that a counterattack offers the best chance of success – retreat is not a viable option as the Hamatsu is running low on fuel.
The ISS Black Star is under your command.
This is the first look at a continuous slice of Starfarer gameplay. Enjoy!
I was going to talk about fighters in part 2 of this series, but thought better of it. Oh, you’ll still find out more about fighters – it just won’t be from me talking, but through the magic of video. And Fraps. Which is totally killing my desktop, I might add, forcing Starfarer to run at less than the silky-smooth 60 fps. Using Windows Movie Maker isn’t helping much, either – I had to scrounge up some plugins to export the project in HD – by default, you can’t even do that. Ahem.
This video has me setting up some combat scenarios in a sandbox. It lets me spawn ships and fighter wings at the touch of a button, and then they fight it out. In the actual game, you’re controlling a ship – but in this sandbox, we’re just watching the AI fight it out.
As our crack Eastern European video production crew was not involved in the making of this video, please pardon any rough edges.
A wing of fighters moving into attack formation is quite possibly the most evocative visual in sci-fi. Examples proving this thesis abound – two of the Star Wars movies end with battles that have fighters playing a central role. Or, consider Battlestar Galactica – on the surface, it’s about what it means to be human, and isn’t a great example – but if you dig deeper, it becomes obvious that it’s really all about how cool the human-cylon dogfights are. Star Trek, on the other hand, does not use fighters often, but just imagine how much cooler it would be if it did! Well, we’re not going to make that mistake with Starfarer – rest assured that fighters will be featured prominently. Some lore on the subject:
In the years after the great war, fighters became commonly used throughout the sector. With the decline in industrial capacity, producing a capable military ship was a significant undertaking. Fighters, on the other hand, could be produced cheaply using a coded blueprint at an automated factory.
Now, some basics. Fighter wings are first-class citizens – they’re members of your fleet, like all your other ships. Early in development, fighters were launched from carriers (being weapons, in a sense), but it became clear this limited fighters to being used only in battles that directly involved carriers, and that just wouldn’t do. We’d miss out on all this:
