Starting my 3rd playthrough, I felt like it was time to do something completely different. Everyone has their own head cannon, but I was struggling to envision a life path that had me joining Constellation, doing assorted heroic and adventurous things, and then becoming a corporate spy. For that reason, I’ve yet to do the Ryujin faction quests. At least for me, the opposite path, from street rat, to spy, to adventurer, made a lot more sense. So anyway.

In order to make that happen, I decided I wanted to try a non-Constellation start. I’ll get there, eventually, but not immediately. I thought others might want to consider this path so I’ll share how it went for me.

I started the playthrough like normal, all the way up to the initial dialog with Sarah. She’ll invite you to join Constellation, but you have a “not ready for that” dialog option. She’ll understand and offer you a place to stay while you mull it over. At this point, I just left. I had returned their ship, handed them their weird alien doodad, and gotten paid. I did not see the need to join their fancy clubhouse. For RP purposes, from this point forward, I did not return to The Lodge or use the Frontier. Those choices have some costs associated with them. For starters, I no longer had an infinite storage box for my resources, so I sold pretty much all of those. I also didn’t have a place to sleep, so I used a sleeping bag I found in The Well, on the upper level across from Jake’s. Most importantly, I had no way off the planet.

Job one, then, way to buy my own ride because, for me, The Frontier did not exist. A base model Rambler, the VW Bus of starships, costs around 57k credits. If that sounds like a lot for a starting character, it is, but it’s not unsurmountable. To get the money for that, you want to have hoarded as much as you could possibly carry from the first pirate attack and the Kreet excursion. I wish I had hoarded more.

Next you are going to want to do every single New Atlantis side quest you can. Some of them are off-planet, and some (like the UC guard contraband one) are locked behind inaccessible quests. This will get you tantalizingly close, but you’ll still be maybe 12k away.

Take two levels of Commerce to knock 10% off the price of the Rambler and now you’re within spittin’ distance. From here, you can try a little larceny, but there isn’t much to steal lying around New Atlantis. I made it up by jumping the walls and exploring the surrounding area. Sadly, while there are things to see and do, I didn’t find any pirate compounds or Spacer groups to take out and loot. And, while the planet is settled, the fauna are still deadly to a low-level character. Worse, they use up irreplaceable bullets to kill them. In one rather unexpected encounter, I ran into a freakin’ terrormorph fighting it out with some Va’ruun Heretics. I thought I’d wipe them all and loot their corpses, but it ended up costing almost all of my ammo to finish off the terrormorph, and the heretics had nowhere near enough to make up for the loss. Lesson learned: avoid the wildlife. The juice ain’t worth the squeeze.

I was also accosted by a squad of Ecliptic looking for me due to my “Hunted” trait. They had a lot of good loot on them, and that really helped. Sadly, for whatever reason, I couldn’t steal their ship, which would have been a nice shortcut.

I finished off the last few credits just collecting resources outside the walls and getting that second level of Commerce. I was able to buy my Rambler in just under 5 hours of game time. I was 8th level and lifted off the planet with about 2500 credits and 200 rounds of assorted ammunition. If I had anything to do over again, I would have hoarded more on Kreet and I would have completely avoided the terrormorph (as most people would).

So now, I’m free to explore the galaxy on my own terms. I’ll have to keep my inventory low until I build an outpost or go back to Constellation. My selection of companions is also drastically gimped, but manageable. I’m looking forward to this. I think it’s going to be an interesting run.