Jackalgirl

7) Make It Stop, Please Make It Stop After I bought a pet at the ARC facility and the game installed the pet feeder in the workshop, there is now a non-stop loop of AC commercials, as well as a strange crackling/gurgling sound in that space. It sort of sounds like sprat sounds (but maybe it's the sound FX associated with some other creature, maybe a crabble). I first thought it was associated with the pets, but activating/deactivating all pets, and each pet one at a time (sprat, Zane's Drone, Protectorate Drone), does not affect it, and the pet sounds are quieter and localized to the pet. The radio/creature noises seem to be localized in a place that's loudest if the PC is standing on the animal blanket, facing the pet feeder. I quit the game, restarted the XBox, and restarted the game, and that got rid of the crackling/gurgling creature sounds (thank goodness); however, the advertising loop is still going and is pretty loud. It's now loudest when standing roughly in front of the pet feeder, facing towards the corner that's next to what I'm assuming is the requires-lockpick-of-11 armory. Update (13 November 25): various noise problems fixed by recent XBox S update. I'm presuming that I need lockpick of 11 to reach what is probably a radio in the locked cabinet, which I will then take out and crush into little pieces a la Office Space with the crew. It'll be a party. ; )

I figured out an issue on the XBox where I got my premium stuff, but not the sprat. Turns out that the pet feeder in Incognito doesn't load until you purchase a pet. So, I'm wondering whether, for PS5 users, if purchasing a pet will load the pet feeder, which will not only bring in your sprat and Zane's Drone, but might also drop in your premium items too. I've asked a friend to give this a try, but if anyone is willing to try it out: you can buy a pet in the ARC facility if you've obtained the ARC credentials (and have full access to the base); the Quartermech sells it. Not sure if Fairfield has a pet for sale somewhere; I'm going to take a look. Update: No pet for sale in Fairfield (that I've been able to find yet). But you can recruit a pet at the Crabble Farm, which is on Paradise Island down the road that leads in the opposite direction from Fairfield from the landing pad, past the Desalinization Plant. You'll have to fight your way through a bunch of Crabbles, but once you're at the farm, as long as you have a fairly high Medicine or a Trauma Pack, you can heal little Lucy the Crabble, then examine her again, and she'll want to follow you home (at which point you can send her straight to the ship). Update 2: Thanks to asta666 for trying it out. Unfortunately, it didn't work, but that's another data point for the devs, so hopefully it'll help them figure it out and get a patch out asap for PS5. : )

Continued Locker Woes Locker #3 (CW from the work bench) now shows an empty inventory after long-press of Y. However, on hover-over, it shows the inventory just fine (items are not lost, just can't be managed through the locker-swap UI). Update: NOT A BUG. When you look at a locker's inventory, it'll only show you what's in it that's part of the current item category (e.g., weapons, armor, food, junk). When I use the long-press of Y on locker #3, it looks empty because the UI defaults to showing me weapons, and this is my junk locker. So the empty inventory is just telling me "there are no weapons in here" and, of course, there aren't. It also means that your locker's storage capacity is 20 items of each category (or 20 stacks, if the items are stackable), for a total of 6 x 20 = 120 items per locker. I took the hologram emitter from Fairfield, but can't find it now. Some part of my mind says "you stored it in the same locker as the advanced encryption key" in which case, it seems to be gone as well. I am hoping it will turn up again if I get to a point in the game where it's useful.

On the XBox: 1) "Sir, I'm Going to Have to Ask You to Keep your Boots off the Table" or "Whatever are They Putting in the Drinks These Days" or "I'll Have What He's Having" The patron at the table farthest from the door (but before the seating divider) in the Fairfield Saloon is positioned in mid-air in a seated position at start. Later on, he'd moved and was no longer seated. I suspect that any time this particular NPC sits, we'll see that issue, but will report back if I see otherwise (it might just be a problem that only appears upon init). 2) Locker Woes I stored an advanced encryption key in a locker in the workroom in Incognito and when I returned after saves/a restart, it was gone. It was the fourth locker from the work bench, counting in a clockwise direction. It didn't prevent me from completing any quest, but it's annoying, since they're relatively hard to find. As far as I can tell, this hasn't impacted any of the other lockers (in particular, the first three, which I use to store materials, armor & weapons, and junk, respectively). 3) Okay, I Guess I'm Storing Them All, Then If I have more than one of a thing, and I store those things in the lockers in the workroom in Incognito, pressing "A" results in the dialogue that I'm sure say something like, "how many do you want to store" (and slider) appears and disappears in a flash and all the things are automatically stored. This is okay, because generally I really do want to store all the things. I'm pretty sure this isn't a controller issue as nothing like this has happened before (storage in Avowed, for example, worked fine) 4) Fairfield: Kinda-Fast Travel or You Can Have Anything You Want -- As Long As It's Not Fast Travel to Fairfield or Your Ship The map reticule is hard to control. Sometimes it takes me a considerable amount of time to get it to settle on the Fairfield Landing Pad; it just wants to snap to anything, and everything, else in that area. Likewise Fairfield: the reticule wants to settle on points of interest in Fairfield -- anything but the Fast Travel marker. It's especially difficult if there's a quest active that is just slightly on, but not actually on, the Fast Travel marker (i.e., VAL's upgrade quest). Note: using Left Stick works great to cycle between options in the ARC facility, but it didn't work when VAL's quest was active on top of the landing pad Fast Travel marker (I tried). 5) You Want What, Now? Bringing up the inventory/data interface works inconsistently: sometimes, pressing the View Button does nothing. I can restore function by double-tapping the button (which flashes the UI on and off), after which a single press of the View Button will bring it up (for a while; haven't timed it yet). Again, it could be an issue with my controller, but I didn't have this issue with Avowed and it's also persisting across battery swaps (it's a wireless controller). 6) Where Beast? I seem to have gotten the majority of my pre-order items (I have the Moonman stuff and all of Zane's stuff); however, I was given to understand that there was supposed to be a pet Sprat. This beast has not appeared yet, unless I'm just looking in the wrong place or this is actually a mini-quest I haven't run into. Update: I suspect the bug (in which the sprat and Zane's drone aren't available) is due to the fact that the Incognito's pet feeder doesn't load until you purchase a pet. The ideal situation is that if a user has a premium package/pet, the pet feeder should load at main-game start. Maybe the ultimate solution is to just load the pet feeder for everyone at main game start so that people know that pets are a thing they can bring onboard. Anyway, the temporary solution for people facing this issue is to go buy a pet. There is one for sale in the ARC facility if you have gotten credentials and are allowed access (the Quartermech sells it). Update 2: There is another pet you can adopt if you successfully heal her, and that's Lucy the Crabble at the Paradise Island Crabble Farm (opposite direction as Fairfield from the landing pad, past the Desalination Plant). Update 3: I was hoping that getting a pet and adding the pet feeder would not only bring in the missing pets, but all the missing items for the PS5 users who aren't able to access their bonus pack stuff, but alas, it did not. If you all need me to be more specific with what flavor of XBox I have, let me know. : )

Would Obsidian/Microsoft consider releasing a purchase-able asset kit (and personal-use license) of assets for those of us who are building in such sites as Resonite (VR social/building sites)? I would love to remake my cloud home in Resonite to look like the penthouse in the Grand Colonial, and could probably build something like it on my own, but it would be very nice to be able to just import, say, materials, so that I can give the space that Halcyon look & feel. : )

Thanks to you both for the response -- that makes sense, and I figured that there would be a legal worry about copyright infringement if someone viewed an unsolicited pitch and then ideas from that pitch leaked into something they did down the line (or there was some kind of "convergent evolution").

Thanks for your reply, ShadySands -- it's not recommended by whom? Have Obsidian reps specifically posted this? (I wouldn't be surprised if so.)

Howdy, Is there an established process for pitching a game idea to Obsidian? I see at least one pitch in this Forum, but I imagine that for legal reasons, there probably has to be something formal and possibly less public. Or does one just go hog-wild here? TIA -- -- JG

What a very interesting observation, thank you -- you've given me a lot to think about. (This is not snarky--I mean it.) I think that if I had to hold up some outliers, I'd note that Sophia Akande is an antagonist (if you're anti-Board, that is), and Phineas Welles is a protagonist (again, if you're anti-Board). There are some other examples of quests where you have male protagonists and female antagonists, or at least jerks (I'm thinking of "Cupid of the Laboratory" and the Early Retirement Program quests -- though they are very much side quests and not tied into the main arc or subarcs like getting in good with SubLight). However, none of this IMO invalidates your point, which is (correct me if I'm wrong!) that generally speaking, major male characters (in particular, the antagonists) are portrayed in a more tropey fashion in the game. I will point out, though, that from my own personal experience*, I at no point got any sense that "the colony's broken because of men and the solution is to kick out the men and put women in charge**". I always had the personal impression that the people in charge of the colony (including Sophia Akande) were a bunch of people who placed no value on the inherent value of people (non-elite people are resources, to be used and discarded when no longer useful to those in power) and who valued utilitarian ethics, and it never crossed my mind that they were that way because of their (apparent) gender***. Again, other people might draw different conclusions according to their own experience -- it's just an observation on my part related to my own experience. * Your mileage may vary ** In the Board Ending, you essentially put Sophia in charge (as I understand it -- please anyone correct me if I'm wrong, as I haven't played the Board Ending yet, myself). My understanding from the Good Ending is that your character is more or less in charge (unless you choose the Ice Cream ending), leaving a group of people probably including Phineas, Junlei, Zora, and maybe some others (I don't believe it's explicitly laid out, but I might be forgetting) as your "small counsel". If your player-Captain is not female (and you haven't chosen the Ice Cream ending), then that means the colony is now being lead or at least directed by a not-female person. *** And I might not have noticed it due to implicit bias, to be sure. Thank you for the post! -=-=-=-=- Edited to add: I didn't want you or anyone else to think I was minimizing or glossing over your other salient point, which is that by portraying this kind of behavior as being largely carried out by men, it could reinforce/normalize negative stereotypes about men, which can be incredibly damaging to actual men. I agree. I was just trying to get to my points.

I've noticed this also. Sometimes she says something, but now it seems that all of her "welcome aboard" barks that announced some kind of other companion interaction (such as Max/Felix/Ellie arguing) aren't happening.

Well, I ran all over the Vale and explored as much as I could and did not find anything. That doesn't mean he's not there, of course. However, it doesn't surprise me, because if you were to find his body, it would kind of be a spoiler for later.

That's a great question! I haven't found it, but I haven't gone looking for it, either. I realize I have some places I haven't been to in the Vale on my latest run-through; I'll go back and wander around and if I find it, I'll come back here and post about it. : )

Oh yes, that is some really really realness right there! LOL

Tumblr: < long speculative discussion of pets in The Outer Worlds, pet-based commerce & culture, pets that NPCs and personal characters might have, and in particular pet sprats, sprat breeding and showing > Brain: You know, there once was a magazine called "Rat Fancy"... Me: NO. I AM NOT MOCKING UP A COVER OF A -- < several hours later > Me: GODSDAMMIT

Oooo, this is a good, good catch. I'm immediately taken straight to Game of Thrones where Cersei gets in league with the Sparrows and it does not turn out particularly well for her. Although I imagine that the relationship between OSI and the (other) corporations is more stable and collaborative. I think that Spacer’s Choice would like to think that OSI is its loyal (and domesticated) defender, and I’m sure OSI likes that Spacer’s Choice (and the other corporations) would think that, but I’m absolutely sure that OSI has its own agenda, too. In my own headcannon thinking, OSI has a sizable intelligence arm that it occasionally brings to bear to the benefit of individual corporations (or of HHC as a whole), but I think it absolutely has its own agenda as well. (Back to Game of Thrones: vibes of Varys.) Thank you for pointing this out!

(1) Agree for needing to eat & sleep in other modes. It would be a nice add to the DLC if a) it isn't already and b) isn't too late to add into the game.

Maybe not a hamster (though I admit that would be cool), but it would be great to have a Ship's Sprat. : )

If you press on the Options button, you should get a menu; select "load". Those are your saves. The game autosaves at several points, so you should see several of those, and you may have to scroll down to get to any saves you have made. But you have to make the saves to see them -- Options > Save > New save (or you can overwrite an old one).

I see I'm of the same mind as everyone else here -- I saw a lot of stuff in the noclip documentary that I'd love to actually see in the game, and I'm intrigued by the stuff that was cut out -- the 6-month project, the expanded Terra 2 map. For some reason, I really have Hephaestus on my mind, though. I'd love to see what they do with that. I keep thinking of Kim Stanley Robinson's "Mars" series and wonder if they'll have something like Terminator -- the city that rides on rails so that it's always on the night-side of the planet (as the sun heats up the rails behind it, they expand, and "squeeze" the city along the cooler night-side rails). Also, we've seen canines, primates, insects, reptiles, and something like birds, as animal foes. Where are the cats at? I would love to see some cats. I did some speculating on my own...

I've noticed that on the PS4 at least, the character name field is limited to 16 characters. Could you expand it to 32? My character's name is longer and I'd love to use it, for all of the four or five opportunities to see it in-game, and it might be fun to play a game with "Arthur Septimus Higglesworth III" (Occupation: tossball mascot). Thanks for considering it!

If you belong to the Venn-diagram intersection of "TOW fan" and "Military", what little snippets of unique-to-your-world dialogue would you love to see happening in the background in future installments of TOW? You know, those things that people in your branch always seem to say? I'm thinking something like: or or, of course, any Chief Petty Officer starting a verbal counseling of any kind with the wielding of said knifehand and "Shipmate -- " I'd love to hear from other military folks as to the kinds of verbal or visual memes that you experience in your day-to-day that you'd love to show up in the game! [ Edited to add: I should mention that this is US Navy. Absolutely would love to hear from other branches and other countries' militaries. ]

Just wanting to note that I found the Community Guidelines for IP use for Pillars of Eternity (here: https://eternity.obsidian.net/eternity/legal/ip-use); however, there's nothing specific to The Outer Worlds and I'm not sure where Obsidian stands wrt licensing (especially with the Microsoft acquisition).

So very well-earned!

...and now I have to know: ARE THERE TEDDY BEARS IN THE OUTER WORLDS?

I was trying to get a lock on the story timeline and finally read through the parts of the various wikis that talk about the background history of the worlds of The Outer Worlds. All of them mention TOW's first point of departure from our own history as taking place in 1901, when President William McKinley wasn't assassinated, and Theodore Roosevelt didn't become president of the United States. (Yes, I'm slow to the party.) This kinda majorly blew my mind. I've read Edmund Morris' Theodore Rex series, although it's been a while, and I need to read it again. But it's super intriguing that this one person's absence could be what leads to the throughly hyper-corporate culture of TOW (the gist is that without "Theodore the Sudden's" monopoly-busting activities, the growth and development of super-powerful corporations would have been unchecked, leading to the society we see at play in TOW). That got me thinking of a lot of things. One of the other things that Theodore Roosevelt was passionately interested in is a topic that's near and dear to my own heart: the US Navy. He's the one who instituted the sailing of the Great White Fleet in 1908, and I've always felt that this was one of the starting points (for good and for ill, in retrospect) of the United States' growth as a global superpower. Roosevelt, thoroughly onboard with Alfred Thayer Mahan (contemporary author of The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783), realized that dominance at sea was critical to a nation's prosperity, security, and power. There's no indication that Alfred Thayer Mahan was also absent in the history of TOW, but without a no-holds-barred leader like Roosevelt to act upon Mahan's ideas, what would the US Navy of TOW have looked like? Clearly there's some form of some kind of Navy/Marine Corps relationship (not necessarily the US Navy, mind you), because we run into the descendants of a Marine Detachment in Groundbreaker. But without Roosevelt, how would the growth of the United States as a global power be impacted? Would some other country have stepped in to bridge the gap? What would World Wars I and II looked like (I imagine that they still would have happened, especially WWI)? Would there have been the Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway, without the earlier effort to build up the size & effectiveness of the US Navy? I sort of imagine that governments would have had their own proprietary military forces for a while, but eventually the corporations would have become so powerful that governments would have had to contract out to the corporations for military services (sort of as if the British Crown had hired the military arm of the East India Company instead of maintaining its own Navy) before ultimately becoming subsumed themselves by corporations (a unified corporate takeover of governmental functions*?). It also reminded me strongly of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. If you haven't read it, I can't recommend it strongly enough. But I think I can safely say without spoiling it too much that it's set in a speculative world in which strong encryption has lead to the growth of cryptocurrency (a theme explored in another of his books, Cryptonomicon, also excellent), which in turn has led to governmental collapse and a world which is largely run by...you guess it, corporations. I need to go reread my Morris, and I can't help but wonder if the folks at Obsidian are Stephenson fans. I was absolutely delighted to find out this detail, though, and I have to think that they've thought about all of this, and I wonder if any more details about the much-earlier history of TOW's Earth will be part of the DLC (or maybe TOW 2)? I sure hope so. I am just on fire to learn more, and for me it really underscores why Obsidian is just so dang awesome. : ) * Do historians in the world of TOW talk about the "Instruments of Corporate Power" as opposed to the "Instruments of National Power"?