I couldn’t wait to see the expressions on their silly little faces.
As my red-and-white interstellar sled streaked across the starry sky toward Jemison, I gazed at a parade of alien reindeer—led by a red-nosed Arceles—stretching in front of the cockpit of my modified spaceship Come on. My face is covered with thick white hair, and my fat body is draped in a red dress, because there are surprisingly few non-pirate crimson costumes in the Star Realm.
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My cargo bay is filled with gifts and I’m ready to spread some holiday cheer among the denizens of the settled system. Boy, they do need it.
Getting to this point wasn’t easy. First, I had to waste a ton of my stupid space bandit hard-earned points on two things. Plastic surgery is required to turn a grizzled melee and dungeon crawling veteran into a pudgy, mischievous old guy and create a suitably happy supertanker with enough cargo space to carry every inhabitant of every city All the loot they need is a gift they can cherish.
With that done (the latter thanks to some help from DerekM17X’s “Derretech” mod), I w as ready to start the second phase of Operation Festival Spaceship. Knowing I would need an army of elves to help me with the daunting task ahead of me, I decided to try and clone Ai Fan as much as possible, leaving the original group of subordinates to command in his new elven position – Chief. Sadly, I found that every clone I summoned failed to function like a standard follower. Instead, they behaved somewhat like cats, perched on the furniture in the cargo hold of my boat in strange positions, and refused to talk to me no matter how much attention I gave them.
So, Plan B came into effect. Those very non-noisy vanilla followers in the game will have to be pressed into service. I selected available members of the constellation to serve as Van’s lieutenants, and set out to find a suitable place to build an outpost that would serve as my North Pole in the Nebula – my lunar Lapland. After making sure I had the proper perks to build a habitable residence-cum-sweatshop on the icy surface of Bardeen VI in the distant Bardeen system, and bringing in enough resources, I got to work.
When I was done, I built a white base on the ridge of my choice, with a watchtower next to it and surrounded by machines that mined copper and water, the only two native resources on Earth. Since the world’s extreme environments preclude the use of solar and wind energy, my mining and manufacturing equipment must be powered by many helium-3 generators, each of which emits a festive buzz that floats across the planet. A cold, desolate surface. Within the main complex, I placed a long list of workstations and bedding, and had a lounge next to these areas filled with couches, coffee machines, and other amenities to help make it feel like I was definitely not slave labor Happy.
Soon we were up and running, gradually amassing a treasure trove of weapons and spacesuit modifications, food and medicine, and a healthy stockpile of raw materials. These will be our gifts to the carefree, battered populace of the universe. I made the executive decision to improve this group by raiding nearby gangs of pirates and spacemen, looting their equipment, and incorporating the valuable modifications we made to every rifle, helmet, and everything in between. I reassigned the goodies from the kids on the naughty list to the kids on the nice list, like a slightly fascistic Robin Hood.
When we had a good supply of toys, I packed as many as I could into the cargo hold of the sled and set off for my first destination, New Atlantis, bringing along my top assistant as a crew Help distribute toys. I wonder what the people in the United Colonies’ capitals thought as they watched our strange craft land in the spaceport. I just want it to be happy. As soon as we arrived, I started delivering. Since there were no chimneys to get down (hold on, you), my initial plan was to pull what I thought would be a suitable gift for each NPC from my vast inventory via the tried-and-true Bethesda gaming staple of Sneaky Reverse Pickpocket Distribute among their gifts.
Sadly, I forgot that this feature doesn’t seem to be fully integrated into Starfield, so I’ll need to resort to other means. Since none of my subjects would accept gifts through conversation, I decided to follow them back to their residence or workstation and drop the gifts there. In some cases this is easier than others, for example senior military personnel have proven difficult to satisfy. Still, I persevered, making sure to sell some gifts to shopkeepers and stack some around the city in places where people might gather.
When I finished working on New Atlantis, I returned to Badin to restock, then continued on to places like Akila City, Cydonia and Neon for my current distribution run, before stopping for a break at the Astral Lounge in the latter one time. It was here, surrounded by a large group of people swaying awkwardly to percussive electronic music, that I took a second to bask in the glory of a job well done.
I don’t know if the people in the Star Realm appreciate my gift. Their faces remained stoic, unchanged and motionless. And yet, as I sled back to the cold edge of the galaxy, I thought, It doesn’t matter. Even before I started my little quest, the game’s world was already full of crap that other people were probably having a lot of fun handing out.
Maybe it’s that joy, that warm feeling knowing you played a role in helping something good happen, that’s what really matters.
Maybe this is the true meaning of Christmas, I thought—as my wildly impractical ship exploded into a million pieces amid a barrage of laser fire from the Varun family.
