~TerraTech Apropos of Nothing~
TerraTech is quite a fun open-world game by Payload Studios, wherein you may assemble your own vehicles from all manner of modular pieces, have races, watch them fall over, and try to survive and sell natural resources on alien planets. I've made a small picture diary of my most recent attempt at playing TerraTech, because I do that from time to time.
Chapter 1
The TerraTech campaign starts with you as a miner affiliated with the Galactic Survey Organisation, or GSO for short. You promptly crash-land on a procedurally generated planet with nothing but a mobile cab to your name, and have to assemble yourself a small vehicle, or tech, during the tutorial.
The simple beginning tech. Would you believe that it's about four metres long?
Having a reasonable grey thing to my name, I set about finding a trading station, a building central to the TerraTech experience. It's there that an off-world miner can sell their harvest, buy new parts and take on new missions, and without doing any of that stuff, the game would probably be less enjoyable.
On the way to the trading station, I met plenty of the other prospectors new to the planet, all of whom immediately started destroying my tech to strip it for parts. By bravely holding the space bar to make my own guns and drill do their thing, I destroyed the enemy techs and stripped them for parts. At once, I beheld the cruel, dog-eat-dog, growth-at-any-cost, stop-thinking-and-make-the-number-go-up spirit of TerraTech.
Trading stations are a common sight, nearly as common as tiny, poorly-armed enemies brimming with confidence. The GSO scatters these cylindrical grey buildings on unclaimed planets throughout the galaxy, where miners can sell resources for "block bucks" or use said bucks to buy new blocks. I can't help but wonder how much money and material must have gone into making the trading stations, to say nothing of shipping millions of them into space and dropping them everywhere.
Trading stations use a simple delivery method. Chunks of wood, minerals and other substances are processed by the trading station, then fired through the cannon in the roof into space, where they're presumably picked up from orbit. Blocks you buy simply pop out through a slot in the side of the building.
It's easy to amass quite a pile of blocks, and I definitely did, growing my tech over time into the twelve-wheeled tank you can see up there. To keep my other excess blocks safe, I built a thin tower and stuck a pile of wheels and guns to it. The "tower of gubbins", it is by far the safest method to use until you're given access to bulk storage.
My improvised tech was meant to resemble a tried-and-tested GSO design, the First Wave II, which only uses basic parts and can cope with most situations. Download the snapshot here if you want to use it in your own game:
The First Wave II. It should really be the second wave, seeing as it's version II, but never mind.
After lunch at the trading station, I took a paid gig assisting a craftsman named Crafty Mike. He's one of TerraTech's cast of colourful characters, where it isn't quite clear whether they're piloting strangely-shaped techs, or if they actually look like that.
Mike eventually gave me a few crafting blocks to take home. Since I didn't have a roof rack, I stuck them to the side of my tech and drove them back to the tower of gubbins. The journey went quite smoothly, although I did have to turn right ever so slightly all the way back.
I spent the night at the trading station, where I chatted up some of the other prospectors and ignored Crafty Mike's wanted poster. For dinner, I had locally-sourced fish and chips, then I slept in a bunk bed under a GeoCorp saleswoman whose name I can't remember.
In the morning, the saleswoman pointed me towards where I could get a GeoCorp license, entitling me to buy or plunder all sorts of yellow mining equipment. I followed her directions to another strange-looking chap named Big Pete.
Pete was a mining and tree-felling specialist who hated to do any actual work, so he talked me into fetching him some wood and plumbite ore. I fetched him some wood and titanite ore, because sod him altogether.
My tech laden with Supplies, also featuring Turret Joe. I'll address Turret Joe in a minute.
After I'd fetched Pete his weekly quota in natural resources, some of which could never be replenished, he gave me a rank 1 GeoCorp license. This meant I could buy the interstellar mining company's blocks, and also that wild GeoCorp techs would start showing up, laden with drills and plasma cutters, looking to mine my own long-suffering tech for parts.
This quickly became a problem. Not because I couldn't handle them; the First Wave II had plenty of guns, and could outrun a slow, heavy mining vehicle most of the time. The actual problem was what to do with all the parts.
Using a spare cap to make solid piles of GeoCorp scrap and slowly, painstakingly pushing them back to what I optomistically called my base was a bit boring after the first couple of times. No, what I needed was proper long-term storage, and the only real option for that was an SCU device.
This brings us back to Turret Joe. The autonomous turret had been deployed some time ago to protect a trading station, and I happened to show up at one point when he was under attack. After I'd shot the enemies besieging poor Joe, he granted me access to the SCU system.
SCUs are probably the best, most unrealistic devices in TerraTech. They can pull blocks into an infinite storage space for tech parts, from which you can take blocks out whenever you want. This was the dawn of a new age for me. No more making towers of parts or agonising over which ones were worth keeping.