Charmoak's adventures

Discussion in 'Screenshots' started by Mjollna, Sep 4, 2016.

  1. Mjollna

    Mjollna Phantasmal Quasar

    Hello everyone !

    I'm going to let my character Charmoak talk for a little while, and then I'll speak again :)

    ---[Charmoak is talking]

    Talkative. My name is Charmoak, and I come from a small planet in the middle of nowhere. I became self-aware quite early in my life, and soon I couldn't bear anymore all those machine-like beings that claimed to be my family. That's why I ran away in the first space cargo I could find.

    starbound_charmoak.png
    That's me, Charmoak. Yes, I glow sometimes.

    After wandering for a while, mainly working as a janitor on the very space cargo that helped me escape from my home planet, I saved enough pixels to rent a small flat in a moon based station. Life on the station was really cool, and I enjoyed every moment of it. Everyone there is so friendly and welcoming, I couldn't really find better place to stay.

    starbound_003_verysmall.png
    That's my beloved station! I lived where I've drawn the red circle. Home sweet home!

    (details for the station : starbound_003_small.png )

    Let me describe the inhabitants of the station a little bit. There's Tina the first merchant of the place, who lives near the market and always has some cool jokes to tell. Lubov is the guy everyone relies on to provide all sorts of repair service, he's really nice and always willing to help. After Earth crumbled, Alexis the human girl literally crashed her interstellar van on the station, and finally decided to stay in a small apartment close to the remains of her pocket spaceship. She's still a little traumatised by the accident, and constantly wears a yellow safety helmet. Close to her flat, a first class chef, Anat, decided to settle in. He was looking for a quiet place to imagine new recipes, and he very often invites the neighbours to taste his new experiments. Yum ! At the west end of the base live two weird guys. They don't talk much, and I suspect one of them to host a symbiote or something like that. Well the universe is vast and varied ! On the opposite side there's Bronzefoot, an exiled self-aware glitch noble, who was defeated in a terrible sword duel and has to leave his castle. Poor him, sometimes it's so obvious that he misses the comfort of some heavy stone manor. In front of his doorstep lives Akemi. She's one of the few Hylotls of the lunar base, and the very first inhabitant of the station. She's seen it all grow, and has the memory of everything that's happened there. She's not very talkative, but you can sometimes observe in her three eyes that she's remembering something no one else knows about.

    My job was to take care of the main square's plants, and everything was fine until Rehaneh, the owner of the station, came to me one day and asked me if I wanted to join her crew. At first I wasn't very enthusiastic about leaving my friends behind, but in the end I accepted. How stupid I was! Never ever work for a floran, however greenfinger-ish she may look! She was truly horrible with the member crew, letting them rot in her spaceship in ridiculous outfits while she was exploring alone and getting all the fun for herself! Of course, when I saw those working conditions I loudly complained... And guess what? She fired me! I was abandoned on the first lush planet she could find, launching me on orbit in a half-broken ship, along with a forever angry pig, and she continued her trip without me.

    There began a very hard time for me. I had to do everything by myself, from eating to building a small shelter, and get enough material to repair the ship myself. Thankfully, the aboard computer could help me and tell me what operations to do. I wouldn't have been able to fix it otherwise, I'm no technician you see.

    starbound_005.png
    As you can see, my shelter was really rudimentary

    Surprisingly, I wasn't alone on this small planet. Right after I landed, I first discovered small tombstones under a bunch of trees, which frightened me a lot. How could I hope to survive if all I could find was a cemetery ? Yet I started to think that someone at least was alive enough to assemble the graves, so I checked around. I finally found a lonely and sad human in a tent, surrounded by crates. His name was Randy, and he was the last survivor of his archaeological expedition. With the disappearance of Earth, no more supplies reached the group, and there were no more medicine when the flu stroke on winter. He was beyond happy to see me (and so was I!), but I think he's been alone for a little too long, as he sometimes talks to the crates as if they were people... I had to tell him what happened to Earth, and that also brought him into a shock. Human psychology's not a glitch thing, I guess. Anyway, we built a wooden house together, and added basic comfort to it. Then I went down the mine the archaeologists had dug, and found enough ore to leave the place. Randy preferred to stay in the end, and I can't blame him. I promised to bring some modern stuff to him as soon as I could, and I painfully reached some civilized outpost that sells oculemonade.

    What was I going to do next ?

    ---[Charmoak is not talking anymore]

    Next episode when I have the courage to write it (and when I'll have built a little more, too) ! :p

    On the technical side :
    - I play on a vanilla server (nicely self-hosted on a clean Debian stable), no admin commands used for gameplay, everything done "by hand".
    - The sign on the lunar base says "please teleport somewhere else if there are meteorites". I assumed durasteel was strong enough to resist stone rains, and in the end it's not ! :D But I had built a lot already when I noticed the problem and I didn't want to redo everything elsewhere, hence the warning.
    - As you can guess, English is not my native language, I'll gladly correct any mistake/typo.

    The initial story :
    My first character for 1.0 was Rehaneh, the winged floran you can see on the lunar base screenshots here and there. As I pointed in another post on the forum, I wanted the settlers to keep their outfits instead of looking all like protectorate candidates when I had done quests for them. I picked one of the NPCs on the base to make tests, Charmoak. I hired her and dismissed her, hoping she would come back to her usual routine in her dress. Instead of that, the colony deed fell on the floor, and Charmoak disappeared. Poor glitch, I had made her go away! That's why I decided to write the story of her adventures, and play as Charmoak for a while :)

    (Edit 2016-09-22 : changed the size of images to add them in the body of the post)
     
    Last edited: Sep 22, 2016
  2. Mjollna

    Mjollna Phantasmal Quasar

    (This is Charmoak speaking :) )

    Busy. When I left Randy, I felt so sad, I thought my metal heart would start to rust. I was still poor, but the core fragments I had found in the mine allowed me to buy some useful stuff to bring back to him. As I had promised, I started to build a nice house for him, that would remind him of his lost Earth. I even found a plush in a Hylotl sunken city to decorate the living room, and asphalt certified "made by humans". Proud.
    It took me so long to be able to remove the crates without Randy bursting into tears ! But in the end it worked, and I could put them in the mine entrance. However, Randy still preferred to sleep in my woody shelter. Honestly, that made me quite upset, so I decided to remove all the furniture, and turn the place in a utility storage. After all, it was going to be his home planet, not mine.

    randy02.png
    As you can see on the picture, Randy still likes to spend time in the storage room

    I also added a first class pair of antennas, so that his radio could find human broadcasts across the galaxy, and in the end, I added a brand new teleporter for him to be able to travel. I don't think he's used it at all, actually, but at least I can bring him some food this way.

    Unfortunately, that wasn't enough to cheer him up... and I was so broke again. Sad. That's why I moved on to the second part of the plan...
     
  3. Mjollna

    Mjollna Phantasmal Quasar

    Concerned. It's Charmoak again. I've been staying with Randy a lot, since I've built a comfy home for him. I haven't told him yet, but I've posted an ad on the outpost wall entitled "Free land ready to build", so that he gains a nice neighbour. There hasn't been any answer as for now, so maybe my ad is lacking colors to catch the eye...

    Anyway, there's something I have to tell. While we were having dinner Randy and I the other day, I absentmindedly played with the coffee bag while chatting. As the label went half sticky on my hands, I suddenly noticed that the brand name of the coffee was "Reh' Industries". I immediately said, "Hey that sounds like the beginning of Rehaneh's name" (in case you've forgotten, Rehaneh is the floran that owns the lunar base where I lived, and who abandoned me on Randy's planet in the first place). I was totally astonished when Randy replied, "Yeah of course, it's that floran that terraforms vulnerable planets to plant stuff everywhere and sell it". I couldn't believe it! But in a way that made sense, it's so expensive to build a moon base, that you'd have to be very rich to conduct that.
    "Is there a picture of the brand owner somewhere? I have to check if it's the same person", I asked Randy.
    "Of course, let's look that up upstairs on my computer".
    We made a quick search, and there she was everywhere on the results, Rehaneh. It turned up she was the head of a huge agricultural firm, that sold tons of goods accross the universe. Her specialty was to detect harmless lush planets, buy everything there, change the living conditions so that she pushed native inhabitants to leave, and then cultivate every single inch on the surface. How evil!
    We even managed to get a picture of one of the planets (you'll notice the armed people to guard the fields, how terrible!).

    reh_industries.png

    As you can see in the detailed picture, the whole 3000 sectors are cultivated. Poor planet!
    (Thumbnail you can barely see with the full planet surface -->) agriculture2.png

    I exclaimed, "We have to do something! I don't know what, but there surely is something we can do against those exploited planets. Think of the people kicked out, of the destroyed nature!".
    Randy raised an eyebrow, doubtful. "You really think you can compete against that?".
    "I don't know, but well, I'd like to try".
    "Are you sure it's not personal revenge?", he said.
    "Maybe, but I don't really care".

    ---

    Not Charmoak speaking here :) Thank you so much to tehcavy on this post ( http://community.playstarbound.com/...me-or-feathercrown-seeds.124268/#post-3021843 ) for indicating that the naturalist tenant sells seeds. Otherwise I would still have half of the planet to turn into fields.
    I'm probably not the first one to transform a planet in a whole cultivated area. It was really fun to do, and I didn't expect it to be so efficient in terms of pixels o_O Cocoa and rice definitely made all my characters very rich for the rest of their lives :D
    I don't know if I try to develop something underground... Maybe it would make a creepy place for Charmoak to explore. We'll see :)
     
    OneLessLonelyGlitch likes this.
  4. Mjollna

    Mjollna Phantasmal Quasar

    Curious. Last time I (Charmoak) talked I was so upset by discovering that Rehaneh has so much power. The following weeks I started daydreaming I was saving planets from her claws, although I knew it wouldn't be as simple as thinking about it. In the meantime, Randy seemed at last to feel happier about his life. What a change! I was very pleased that he finally managed to overcome the sad memories of his lost companions.

    And then one day he suddenly asked me, "There's that history and geology museum I'd like to visit on Dabih Nest III c, would you like to come with me?". That request sounded much like, "please I crave to go, but I'll never do that alone, I beg you please come". Intrigued. "What is so cool about that place?", I replied. Randy blushed a little, and took a deep breath. "Well, I'm penpals with that Hylotl girl, Haruka, and her family owns the museum. You know I love archaeology, and she does too, and she would be ok to make for us a personal tour of the museum with her. Wouldn't that be awesome?". He looked stressed and enthusiastic at the same time. I nodded, "ok, I'm in, some history knowledge can't hurt anyway".

    A few days later we took his home teleporter and entered "Dabih Nest III c" as the destination. When we arrived, we were greeted by Gorou, a long haired Hylotl waiting for visitors at the entrance desk. "The museum ticket is free, so that everyone can learn about the history of the universe", he explained. Randy's nervosity was everywhere around us, and I tried my best to distract him while waiting for Haruka. We took some leaflets and sat on the bench near the door with a glass of water.

    museum.png
    The museum. So much history in such a clean space.

    Haruka showed up a little late at the teleporter. She looked like a spoiled aristocratic child, with a sparkle of kindness in her eyes, wrapped in a seriously eccentric outfit. The universe is indeed vast and varied!

    haruka.png
    This is Haruka. Kindness, in style.

    She looked at both of us waving and smiling from outside. Randy jumped from the seat and put his hands in his pockets, a little bit too tense. I waved back, and we walked towards each other to introduce ourselves. Haruka was a very nice person, though she had no idea about the difficulties of life. We wandered peacefully in the two levels of the museum, one for fossils, with its suspended catwalk made to admire the biggest specimens from a nice top view, and the other about geology, containing rare and beautiful fragments of ores. Then Haruka invited us in the restaurant on the other side of the building for lunch. We had a very interesting conversation, but I'll detail that later...

    See you next time!
     
  5. Iaeyan Elyuex

    Iaeyan Elyuex Cosmic Narwhal

    Could have fooled me. I saw zero grammar and punctuation errors in there.

    Rehaneh sounds very unethical. I only massively terraform barren planets.

    Maybe I should make a character blog.
     

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