Overview
A guide for starting explorers about what to expect and how to outfit a ship and hire a crew to handle the galactic hinterlands
What to Expect
Exploring: What To Expect
Exploration captains travel to unexplored worlds in quadrants near and far in search of exploitable resources, hidden caches of goods, and rare xeno artifacts. With the right crew and right shipboard equipment, wealth will rain down from the sky. With the wrong setup, or a horrible spate of bad luck, you’re dead. Such is the call of the wild!
For an idea of the things you’ll find out in the hinterlands, have a look at the wiki, specifically the Card Game Mechanics/Logic section: [link]
Exploration has a risk/reward factor based on planet size and danger rating versus the planet’s richness, your overall Tactics skill pool, Exploration skill pool, and your captain’s Wisdom. The rewards are straightforward: resources, intel, and a few other things. The risks are dangers to the ship and crew, plus crew combat. The crew combat part is important:
YOU WILL BE FIGHTING XENOS!!
In fact, you want to fight xenos, because they come with the highest amount of artifacts, and, with a skilled xeno hunter onboard, yield even more artifacts after beating them. But, you must be prepared to turn live xenos into dead ones, or you’re lunch.
Character Creation: Captain
Captain:
Now’s the time to decide if your captain will be participating in crew combat. This guide assumes that you’re playing with permadeath active, so this is not a decision to be taken lightly.
The Captain can be built to be monstrously OP in crew combat. With Attributes set to A and skills set to B (or vice versa), your Captain can own a battlefield. The risk, of course, is the Captain can be killed, and then it’s game over.
Here’s a sample Captain meant to engage in Crew Combat: (I’ll put a character creation template that I’ve often used at the bottom of this guide.)
14 Strength
28 Quickness
24 Fortitude
14 Charisma
30 Wisdom (+2 Explorer)
26 Resilience (+1 Explorer)
Skills:
Evasion 5
Tactics 10
Touching on the skills, why no Exploration? Simply, you’ll be hiring Explorers, Exo-Scouts, Xeno Hunters, and Scavengers in non-combat and combat capacities. You yourself are likely to have one or more of these jobs too. Your Exploration skill pool will already be quite high. Tactics is a little harder to come by for early exploration runs, so it makes sense to stack in some here. It also factors into ranged defense, grenade defense, and critical hits, so you’re well-served having some Tactics under your belt. I base this recommendation on experience, but there’s noting at all wrong with maxing out Exploration and becoming the next Magellan.
With the stats above, such a captain will have 132 health, 158 morale, and a 16-30 initiative range. They’ll be solid for any position in the line, and can use any weapon you choose to specialize in through other jobs.
Speaking of Jobs, two things of note:
1- THERE IS NO RULE THAT SAYS AN EXPLORATION PLAYTHROUGH REQUIRES AN EXPLORER CAPTAIN!
One very successful run I had recently had an Assassin Captain with Assassin / Bodyguard / Swordsman for her jobs. We hired Explorers, Exo-Scouts, and Xeno Hunters for the crew, and worked to increase our overall Exploration and Tactics pools accordingly. The Captain herself did not need to be an Explorer to go out and Explore. We were an absolute nightmare to Xenos thanks to the Assassin inherent traits, and by building for melee combat. (Xenos are 99% melee, but more on that later). We did miss out on the Explorer traits that a true Explorer captain gets, but our ship was no less an Exploration ship for it.
2- Your Captain’s starting job will determine Traits for your starting crew. As an Explorer, you’re more likely to start with Diggermind, Adventurous, Observant, and other traits that aid in Exploration. Xeno Hunter captains also start with a chance for these traits, but won’t see them as often in the starting crew as an Explorer.
If your captain is NOT going to be going into crew combat, then putting a priority on their Exploration and Tactics skills plus their Wisdom is all that’s required. You can get your Wisdom to 30 and your Resilience to a respectable level with a D in Attributes, if you’re really hurting for priorities. Skills can be higher or lower, as you see fit, but at least a 4 in each tactics and exploration would be adviseable, just for the extra bump they provide.
I do not recommend such low attributes for your captain. Here’s why:
When you encounter Crew Danger or Ship Danger cards, the test is often based on the relevant skill plus your captain’s attributes. Resilience and Wisdom are quite common, followed by Fortitude and Quickness. Those that understand the dice mechanics know that Standard Dice from Attributes are not everything, but they can make or break a test, given a good or bad roll. Given that the only way to ensure high attributes for a Captain is at creation, I recommend an A or B for their priorities, with a B or A for their skills, respectively.
Close-Combat Crew
Close-Combat Crew:
Once again, YOU WILL BE FIGHTING XENOS!! Planning your crew accordingly is the difference between life and death. I’ll give a sample fighting crew at the end of this section, but there are many, many strategies towards crew combat, and many of them are valid for fighting xenos. You just have to know a thing or two about your enemies to plan accordingly.
1- The vast majority of xeno attacks are melee. If you look at the Crew Combat Dice Pools on the wiki, you’ll see that the only Strong dice you get for Melee Defense come from Blades Skill and any Parry from a weapon: [link]
A high Evasion helps, Stealth helps, and Quickness / Strength help, but those are all Standard Dice, and only half as effective as actual Blades skill. Since most of your crew are often built around Ranged attacks, this presents a problem. The way around it tends to be having Officers as your combat crew, stacking up combat jobs and the evasion that goes with it.
Most combat jobs come with Evasion built-in. The three jobs with the highest inherent Evasion are the baseline Soldier, Pistoleer, and Swordsman. Having any one of these as a non-officer Combatant works just fine, particularly the Swordsman. If you’re hurting for Officer berths (and early on you likely will be), look into recruiting one or two of these baseline jobs with the usual eye towards Initiative, Health, and Morale. (This isn’t a Crew Combat guide, but just to stress the point, Initiative is KING in all ways and at all times, particularly against xenos.)
2- Xenos have very high health pools. Even ‘non-combat’ xenos encountered on their ships (their gunner, e-tech, navigator equivalents) have around 150 health, and they all have armor equivalent to an A4 weapons locker as a baseline in the early game. As an explorer, you’ll be running into their soldiers, which generally have in the 200+ range of health and armor equivalents of levels 5, 6, and 7 (or even higher). Scary, yes! But, Xeno-Hunters, Exo-Scouts, and Soldiers in particular have skills and weapons which punch through even the thickest armor. Plasma damage is brutal against xenos. They’re vulnerable to it, and Exo-Scouts in particular have access to plasma damage. It’s advisable to have one of each job in your combat line, often stacking jobs up on multiple officers.
3- Xeno buffs and debuffs are the most brutal in the game.
I’ll tell you a secret: Terrox Xenos don’t hit any harder than an A4 or A5 weapon as a baseline. What makes their strikes so hideous (besides being melee, and having an easier time hitting you) is their buffs. Their buffs often give +poison and +radiation damage to their attacks. You can easily be looking at +50 bonus damage applied directly to your crewman with one swipe. Crew baseline health is 100, so a non-critical hit can inflict upwards of 90 to 120 damage. Ow. They can walk right through you, if you let them get buffed up.
Similarly, their debuffs tend to stun, reduce resistances, and lower your initiative. Most of their attacks have a debuff of some kind, so if a crewman is lucky enough to survive a couple of strikes, they’re probably half-stunned and may or may not be able to act at all.
Consequently, jobs that have talents which remove enemy buffs and clear off debuffs are vital. Fortunately, many jobs have these talents, usually by rank 5, with more powerful ones being rank 8. I won’t make an exhaustive list here, but the baseline Soldier, Swordsman, and Pistoleer all have talents to remove enemy buffs, and more exotic jobs like Combat Medic, Xeno Hunter, Commander, and Military Officer can cleanse your crew of debuffs, often multiple debuffs at a time.
One note: the Bounty Hunter has a talent called Unfaltering Ire. I mention it because it clears the front two enemy combatants of buffs and puts a debuff on them lowering accuracy and damage. I don’t consider my xeno-killing crew complete without a rank 5 bounty hunter job represented somewhere in the line for this reason alone. Debuffed / unbuffed xenos tend to want to buff themselves up, and will often waste some time rebuffing if you keep them cleansed.
So, with all this in mind, your combat crew is very well served by having at least two officers or more in the line. For my part, when I’m designing an Exploration crew, I’m looking to have something like this by the time I can afford the officer space:
4 – Bounty Hunter / Xeno Hunter / Explorer – Captain
3 – Doctor / Combat Medic / Pistoleer
2 – Soldier / Exo-Scout
1 – Swordsman / Zealot / Bodyguard
Early on, it’s more like:
4 – Bounty Hunter / Xeno Hunter / Explorer – Captain
3 – Doctor / Combat Medic / Pistoleer
2 – Soldier
1 – Swordsman
Again, this is just one set of strategies, but the rules for fighting xenos are roughly the same for both Terrox (early to late game) and the Jyeeta (mid to late game).
1 – Melee attacks
2 – High health pools
3 – Nasty buffs/debuffs
If you can deal with these three things, you can kill Terrox xenos and be solid for Jyeeta xenos.
Regular Crew
Non-Combat Exploration Crew:
The usual rules apply for crew that doesn’t participate in close combat: They operate the ship. I won’t talk about your navigators and pilots and such, but rather focus on extra hires which will make your life as an explorer easier:
1- Explorers: I mean, duh. You want a couple of regular crew Explorers with you to bump up the dice pools and provide card manipulation talents. Once you’ve got four or five of these card talents available, you’re ‘safe’ to explore even dangerous planets and ‘usually’ avoid most of the worst it can throw at you. Explorers have some of the better reward-boosting talents as well, and it never hurts to get a solid 15 to 20% extra on resources (especially artifacts!) on a find.
2- Exo-Scouts and Xeno Hunters: It doesn’t hurt to have one of each in a non-crew combat role. They both have useful talents for the Exploration game that are not designed around blowing up enemies. And, of course, they contribute Exploration dice to the skill pool.
3- Scavengers: They’re not wholly exploration-focused, but Scavengers contribute to the Exploration pool, and offer an eclectic array of talents for the Exploration game, including the Scrappy Healing card, which is one of the only ways to heal crew that may have been injured on the job without heading to a medical facility. Never hurts to have one around.
Starting Ship
Starting Ship:
An Explorer’s ship has only a few functions. Most of your work is done on the ground, after all, with the ship serving as a mobile base of operations and a retreat from the horrors of the wilderness.
Your ship can:
1- Boost resource gains.
2- Protect the crew from damage.
3- Protect itself from damage.
4- Haul your goods to market.
You don’t need a huge ship to do all of this.
Resource drills come in two varieties. The Extraction Drill or Javat Resource Processor in the medium slot, and the Javat Mechi-Reaper in the large slot. Note: THESE DO NOT STACK! You only need one, and the Mechi-Reaper is the winner, hands down. It comes with cargo space and fuel capacity, so it can even replace a spare cargo bay, should you need it. Resource drills take damage as they’re used, but you can find ship repairs out there in the wild, plus there are talents that automatically repair damaged components upon landing. You want one.
Depth-Scanners are Rychart-specific components that vastly increase intel records gathered when exploring. If your Explorer captain dabbles in spying and faction politics on the side, picking up one of these doesn’t hurt. Again, their bonuses DO NOT STACK.
Protecting the ship and crew from damage comes in a variety of forms, from the Exo-Crawler in the large slot down to Ferrochromium Plating in the small slots. In each case, the larger the slot used, the more protection from hazards and damage offered. Note again that the protection offered DOES NOT STACK! However, things like bonus armor and shielding or bonus medical ratings offered from these components do stack up, just like any other component offering these same bonuses. If the more powerful component is out of commission, then the lesser component is used. But, that said, it’s really rare to go so long on an exploration run as to put a component out of commission.
An addendum about Crew/Ship Danger cards. When they come up, your crew will make a test against the planet’s danger rating and the card’s danger rating. This is often something like Tactics + Captain’s Resilience as the Strong plus Standard dice. If you succeed in the test, no damage is taken. If you fail, you might still save, if you have an Exploration save, Stealth save, Tactics save, etc…. If you don’t have a save, only THEN do you take the hit. These hits can hurt, but unless you intend to stay on the planet for round after round after round, they’re unlikely to stack up to the point where your crew is dying left and right and the ship is a trashed-out hulk. What this boils down to is that the protection gear isn’t 100% necessary, and you may find it more useful to kit the ship out to evade space combat, or even become a boarding ship. You’ve got an incredible close-combat crew, right? Enemy crews will have a very hard time dealing with you if you can get into grappling range. But, that’s a whole different guide. Just know that you may not always need the protection gear, and the better you get at exploring, the less necessary it becomes.
Finally, your ship is there to haul your goods to market. It’ll need a LOT of cargo space, because you’ll be an amazing Explorer! Depending on how far-flung your travels are, it’ll also need fuel capacity to get there, but cargo holds come with inherent fuel capacity, so just keep an eye on your jump costs. I recommend any ship with at least two large slots available. One will be for the largest cargo hold you can find (the Javat Hauler Hold is great for this), and the other is for a Javat Mechi-Reaper. If you don’t have the slot for a Reaper (or if Javat hates you for some reason), then make room for a resource extractor in the medium slots, and still aim for the largest capacity holds you can get.
I like the Paladin as a starting ship for almost everything. It’s got three large slots to configure for what I want (usually two holds and a Reaper), plus a built-in medbay (medical rating adds directly to doctor rolls, which are often used on the planet’s surface). It’s highly configurable, and only requires a C commitment during character creation, plus room for one extra officer. At least one of your starting combat crew will probably have the stats to make them a great crew-combat officer and ready for an immediate promotion, so it’s another reason to like the Paladin.
Addendum: The weapons locker. You can get away with an A3 to start. Run a few Proving Your Charter missions from your contacts, and get that upgraded Locker ASAP. An A3 can even fight xenos in the early game, if necessary, but more realistically you’ll be running Proving Your Charter and the Arbiter missions for the first couple of years to stack up a few card game talents and get some crew combat talents to fight those inevitable xenos (Unfaltering Ire, Bounty Hunter 5. Live it! Love it!)
Contacts and Starting Faction
Contacts:
Myself, I tend to use my starting contacts to get crew that I would ordinarily have a hard time finding. In the case of an Explorer, these will be Explorers, Exo-Scouts, and Xeno Hunters (and Scavengers). You can’t get Explorers or Xeno Hunters from a starting contact without unlocking those contacts. The Explorer one can be done quite easily, since it’s simply ‘Explore 50 times on Hard or higher in less than two years’. Find yourself a low-danger, high exploration wilderness zone, and go to work. For the Xeno Hunter unlock, it’s the same, but look for high danger (and be sure you’re kitted out with the basics to fight these terrors).
If you’re brand new to the game, then the Retired Explorer or Gestalt Explorer are obvious choices. And for the second one (if you’re at a D for contacts) I’d recommend the Smuggler and learning the smuggling game. Xeno artifacts have a 2 legality. They’re very hard to sell. You have to look for an Independent world with a low Trade Law (and a lot of them don’t even go that low). Being able to smuggle your artifacts in to a world that has a demand for them is an incredible boost to profits, but you can’t pick where your starting contacts live. It can be hit-or-miss. Also, you have to navigate the Smuggling card game, which comes with its own difficulties.
There is always FarFallen Rim, which is a storyline quadrant that’s in every single randomly generated galaxy. It has an Orbital station called Temple of Refuge that has a baseline Trade Law of 2. Conveniently, xeno artifacts are in demand at orbitals. You can always sell your artifacts here, if you can get them safely to market. An event can alter this place’s Trade Law to be higher, but if you find yourself in such a situation, the planet below is a great place to stash your stuff until the event ends. As of the writing of this guide, stashes are safe and will not vanish if found by other Star Traders, pirates, or scavengers.
Finally, your starting faction can be anything you want, but I recommend Javat for the same reason it makes sense to use an Explorer captain: crew traits. Javat is the ‘digger’ clan of Explorers and Miners and Scavengers. We’ve already talked about the specialized equipment they sell, and Javat crewmembers are weighted to have the valuable traits like Diggermind and Adventurous and so on. A full Javat crew will, more often than not, have bigger hauls.
Suggested Template
So, that just leaves us with the template I’ve used time and again with tweaks here and there for particular strategies. This template is good for folks with no unlocks, but the only one that really matters is maybe swapping out one of the contacts for the Explorer to get true Explorer recruits early on.
Xenoarchaeologist
“It belongs in a museum! (for the right price…)”
Attributes: A
14 Strength
28 Quickness
24 Fortitude
14 Charisma
30 Wisdom
26 Resilience
Skills: B
5 Evasion
10 Tactics
Ship: C
Paladin Cruiser
Contacts: D
Retired Explorer
Smuggler
Experience: E
Explorer
And that’s it! Safe travels, and good hunting!