Gameplay Challenges

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Once you first finished the Star Control II game, you may like to play the game in another way. This page will describes various challenges that may make it interesting to replay the game.

The Challenges

Complete the optional quests

Some quests are optional. You may already have solved these quests when you first finished the games, but if you haven't, it's worth another play. Things you may want to do:

Time trial

Try to finish the game in as little time as possible. The best reported time so far is September 27 2155 1, without any optional quests.

Bounty Hunter

Get all RUs from combat salvage -- no mining allowed, nor buying fuel from the Melnorme or trading items for fuel from the Druuge.

Be the bad guy

The game gets significantly more difficult without your friends (particularly the Melnorme). Piss off everyone you meet, or attack at sight. To stay into character, name your "alliance" "The Empire of ...", and sell your crew to the Druuge. The game will still be completable this way, and you will see more funny lines of dialog you wouldn't see otherwise.

Don't visit the Starbase

A very difficult challenge, and it requires a lot of patience. Until you have access to the StarBase, every day in HyperSpace a Slylandro Probe will show up (even after you've acquired the self-destruct code). As you've got no way of upgrading your engines (until the Chmmr refit your ship), you can't outrun them, so be prepared to fight a lot, at least until you can get them to self-destruct. You will end up with mountains of money, but you've got nowhere to spend it. Among other problems are: you can't replenish your crew (at least not without abusing the reincarnation gift of the Pkunk), so you're dependent on your good fighting skills and gifts of other races; you have no Emergency Warp Escape Unit, so you cannot run away from a fight in progress; and no slave trading.

Tip: To get started, after leaving Sol, aim towards a good nearby biological planet, and collect enough biological data so that you can keep getting fuel from the Melnorme. With careful planning, you can take care of all of your fuel problems for the rest of the game relatively early. You can also buy some technology from Melnorme, but the only kind of technology that you can utilize are the ones concerning the Planet Landers. Getting all upgrades (11 of them) costs 1650 credits.

The only escorting ships that you can acquire are:

  • 1 Earthling cruiser at beginning of game; for a total of 17 transferrable crew.
  • 1 Spathi (Fwiffo) (if you rescue him from Pluto), for a total of −8 transferrable crew (you lose 8 landing crew members, and the ship comes with just a captain).
  • 4 Pkunk ships once per year. You can get a total of 16 ships from them by following a careful plan; for a total of 112+infinite transferrable crew. Their resurrection ability can be abused for an endless source of new crew: if the ship enters the battle with just the captain, and gets destroyed and resurrects, it gets a full complement of 8 crew.
  • 4 Zoqfot ships after rescuing them; for a total of 36 transferrable crew.
  • 1 or 2 Druuge ships (13 or 26 transferrable crew), if you sell them up to two Mycon Eggcases and refuse to take the Rosy Sphere. You can sell one case for a ship and the other for the Rosy Sphere. If you sell both cases for ships, you will then need to rely on the Kohr-Ah massacre in one way or another in order to acquire the Bomb.
  • 3 Druuge ships, if you sell them the Portal Spawner; for a total of 39 transferrable crew.
  • 6 Druuge ships, if you sell them the Shofixti Maidens; for a total of 78 transferrable crew.
  • 4 Utwig ships, if you give them the Ultron only after the Kohr-Ah death march has already began (i.e. 17 February 2159 or later); for a total of 76 transferrable crew. If you do this, the Druuge and the Mycon will be exterminated before the end of the game; your flagship just isn't fast enough to perform all the remaining tasks in 24 days (including the 14 day wait imposed by the Chmmr), or even 44 days if don't care about the Druuge but want still to save the Mycon. You'll be hard pressed to finish the game before the Vux get exterminated, too (53 days).
  • 4 Supox ships, if you give the Utwig the Ultron only after the Kohr-Ah death march has already began; for a total of 44 transferrable crew.

There are a few other races that give you ships that you don't need to build in the shipyard, but they are unavailable because:

  • 4 Umgah after rescuing them (cannot escape inevitable ensuing battle with infinite fleet).
  • 4 Yehat ships from Yehat Rebels once per month, and up to 8 Yehat and Pkunk ships right before the last battle (rebellion starts when they see a Shofixti escort, and you cannot build Shofixti ships).
  • 3 Arilou (though it is a free gift, they are sent to the starbase).

Ships of Chmmr, Orz, Shofixti, Syreen and Thraddash can only ever acquired by building them at the shipyard.

You can also buy fuel from the Druuge, 10 crew for 10 fuel, but it is hardly worth it, especially considering that it is nearly impossible to replenish crew. They also give you a maximum of 60 fuel (all tanks full), if you sell them the Burvixese Caster.

Minimalist challenge

Collect the absolute minimum number of items and ships. This relies on using the Kohr-Ah death march to exterminate a number of species, so you don't need to deal with their respective petty problems. Technically, you will only need the Talking Pet, the Utwig Bomb, and the Sun Device.

  • You do not need the Eggshell fragments or to do any sidequests, to acquire the Sun Device, if you wait until the Kohr-Ah exterminate the Mycon.
  • You do not need the Taalo Shield to acquire the Talking Pet, if you wait until the Kohr-Ah exterminate the Umgah.
  • You do not need to deal with the Ultron and Ultron parts at all, if you wait until the Kohr-Ah exterminate the Utwig.
    • After the Utwig have been annihilated, you will have 97 days of time to beat the game before the Kohr-Ah scorch the Earth (81 days if the Pkunk have migrated). Without the Portal Spawner, it will cut very close even at full thrusters.
    • If you must have an Utwig vessel, the least-effort way is to get the Clear Spindle from Pkunk homeworld, loot the Rosy Sphere for free after the Kohr-Ah exterminate the Druuge, and loot the Aqua Helix after the Kohr-Ah exterminate the Thraddash. Talk to the Supox to receive Ultron (or loot it after the Kohr-Ah exterminate them), fix it, and hand it over to the Utwig. Ask the Utwig for help at their homeworld, and they will give you four ships. This option is only available when the Death March has already begun. Helping the Utwig will still get you a Bomb without having to deal with the Druuge, because the Druuge were already exterminated, but it hardly counts as minimalist.
  • You do need to trick the Ilwrath (and hence need one of the Casters) in order to talk to Chmmr. If you wait until the Ilwrath are annihilated by Kohr-Ah, you will not have enough time to complete the game. Interestingly enough, the Ilwrath can still be sent to fight the Thraddash after the Thraddash have already been annihilated.

You will also need one Planet Lander and at least one crew member, to pick up the Bomb and the Sun Device.

If you have minimal thrusters, and do not pick up the Portal Spawner, you will need to fight the Kohr-Ah ships, which can now be found all over the galaxy as their influence spheres move around. The Probes will only have a maximum of 8% encounter rate, unless you never visit the starbase (in which case it is 100%).

In an ideal minimalist challenge, you might have no escorting ships at all, but this is not really feasible. The vanilla SIS ship is not really a match to the enemies you encounter in the end of the game. Realistically, you might still want to get Fwiffo, collect a single 13 unit Uranium deposit of radioactives from Mercury, and sell the Cargo Bay, the Earthling Cruiser, and the Ion Bolt gun, to get enough RU (6553) for a full set of thrusters and three extra turning jets, so that you can at least outrun any ship in the Hyperspace. Fully crew the SIS (as backup crew for Fwiffo) and Fwiffo's ship as well. You can afford a few units of fuel too. Alternatively, you might want to get a few extra fuel tanks instead of turning jets, so you are less often vulnerable while waiting for the Melnorme to show up. All of these (except the radioactive deposit and Fwiffo's ship) are resources that the game gives to you in the beginning; it does not count adversely towards the minimalist challenge. If you wanted to avoid the radioactive deposit, you would have to ignore the Starbase as well (see No-starbase challenge). You cannot sell the Crew Pod (worth 2150, including the crew), because you need to be able to crew Planet Landers. Harvest enough lifeforms from Delta Centauri II-A, and thus you can have the Melnorme resupply you with fuel. Alternatively you collect nothing, and hope that the Melnorme strip anything but your planet lander (hopefully one of the spare turning jets). Then just idle several years. The fastest way to idle is to head towards the quasispace portal, and enter. Time passes in quasispace as fast as in hyperspace, but you will not get encounters. If you want to idle in the solar system of Delta Centauri instead, you save 13.2―20.5 units of fuel depending on route, but you need to idle 25 hours instead of 5 hours in order to elapse the 4 years necessary to get the death march started.

Approximate total need of fuel in the challenge from begin to end: 270―300 units depending on route (assuming the Portal Spawner is not acquired). This estimate relies on using the naturally occurring Quasi-space portal from time to time. If you used the Portal Spawner, you might want to substitute Alpha Wolf for Delta Centauri, and the total amount of fuel needed becomes around 170 units.

See Also

Notes and references

1 Star Control II TAS: http://tasvideos.org/1493S.html , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDVKVwnBKWg
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