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[Pnx]

So Ironseed is a DOS game that was released three years after I was born in 1994, which I believe was the height of the "crazy age" of scifi.

I don't know that much about it beyond that it seems to be some kind of cross between Star Control and Alien Legacy, and that it's rather esoteric, and hard to figure out.

I'm playing this more or less blind, as of writing this, I've only skimmed the manual, installed it, and fiddled about a little to check things were working (they seem to be). Don't be surprised if I don't finish the game.

Anyway, let's get started.

Spoiler: Update 1 (click to show/hide)

We start with an intro cutscene, which starts with the developers logo fading in from a static filled background, this made my eyes hurt.



So as stated in the manual it all starts off on mars, humanity drove earth into the ground, much to the surprise of no one, and now in the 38th century, everyone lives happily on mars... Except of course mars is run by an insane theocracy (because why not?).


So the priesthood is engaged in a big time Stalin-style purge, they're getting rid of all revolutionary minded people, and so a group of revolutionaries start up the "iron seed" project, which involves a plan that goes something like this:
Step 1: Program a computer virus that will wreck up all the technocratic priesthood's ship. Thereby destroying the government of mars. Give said virus a thousand day counter, just for giggles.
Step 2: Steal a ship, download a crew of six members into the grey goo matrix, blast off into space, go into sleep mode until the virus activates, then come back.
Step 3:
Step 4: Revolution!


However it turns out that despite being able to program a planet wrecking virus, they can't program an alarm clock correctly, so instead of sleeping for a thousand days, they sleep for a thousand years, and thus find themselves waking up way too late to catch their revolution party doh!


Oh yeah, and some aliens are in the middle of trying to kill them, don't ask me why. Something about them being scavengers I think.






The ship crash lands on some planet.


And that's all of the intro. So it's basically something like Lost In Space, but with more grey goo.




So this is the main menu, for reference all those little white and grey pixels slowly tick by to the left in unison.

Let's do this thing.


So clicking new game gets you to the ship select screen, on which some kind of light rock techno synth-punk music plays (or whatever the kids are calling it these days).

Basically clicking the up and down arrows will cycle you through all the different ships one by one, this is pretty annoying since all it is is three categories of ship style with three choices in each.
These categories don't seem to be named, so I'll just come up with my own.

The first category we'll call "size", you small, strategic, and heavy. sizes,

Then there's "style", which has shuttle, assault, and storm.

then there's "role", which has transport, frigate, and cruiser.

All of these seem to represent some kind of trade off, and not necessarily in the ways you'd expect. I haven't really looked into the different possibilites too much since I don't even really understand the significance of the statistics yet, so I just went with the one it automatically starts you off on, which is the heavy shuttle transport.

Incidentally I can click the little red light next to ship select, which toggles it between green and red, I have no clue what this does, maybe it changes the alarm clock between "years" and "days".



So this is the crew select screen and ermm... yeah that font is pretty hard to read isn't it? I've been told there's a way to switch it, which I'll look into as soon as I start the game in ernest.

So yeah, the first crew member we pick is the psychometrist, which as near as I can tell is a combination of doctor/comms officer in this game. There's four choices in all including three well accredited psychiatric professionals, and apparently a gifted psychic, go figure!







I went with Serine Delin at the bottom because I thought she sort of resembled Vector, and this seemed like as good a reason as any to go for her.

The next crew member we pick is the Engineer. I'll explain my thoughts on these as I go along.


This guy seems kind of crazy, so I elected to pass him over since I hear crazy crew members are a big issue in this game. I'm also pretty sure they're using his arrest mugshot as a profile picture, which is never a good sign.


this one's apparently some sort of kid genius, who risked it all for love... cute. NEXT!


The baroness here is apparently a gifted engineer, but also a total snob.


... Ermmm, I think I'll pass on this one.


Apparently this girl is the result of abiogenesis through lab accident. And is not even technically human, but hey, who isn't in this day and age of goop-driven transhumanism? I decide to go with her, mostly because nothing drew me to the rest of the candidates very much.


So the next position to fill is the science officer. Let's take a look at our candidates.


This one is a xenobioligist, with what appears to be a completely ordinary and not even slightly manic character...


I notice it never actually mentions in his profile what his qualifications actually are.


I actually like the sound of having a philosopher onboard our ship.


I really don't think I want a "perfect" person on board, I prefer my people deeply flawed but in acceptable ways, thank you very much.


And this guy is apparently some brain damaged dude that started this whole revolution. He doesn't seem very qualified to me.

I think I'll go with the philosopher then.

The next position is security, for which there is five candidates. Let's take a look.


So apparently a very gifted but emotionally unstable person who couldn't come to terms with her synthetic parentage. Because apparently being born in a tank is pretty common in this day and age.


I actually like the sound of this one. Not much to say though.


Perhaps a career criminal would be a poor choice.


So a pretty similar background to the other athlete then.


Ah, another snob, pass.

I go for the second choice

The next crew member to pick is Navigation.

I think at this point you guys have an idea of how this all goes, I'll post all the rest of the profiles together in a seperate spoiler and just show you the ones I picked.





I pick these two to make up the rest of our intrepid crew. As soon as I pick the last one the game asks me to pick a slot to save in.



I'll continue this in the next spoiler.

Spoiler: update continued (click to show/hide)

As soon as I pick the slot out and click ok, I'm treated to this screen explaining the situation.



For those of you unable/unwilling to decode the hard to read text, here's the gist of it. A mysterious distress signal has woken the crew up, they've just found out that the ship's clock has failed. We don't know how long we've been adrift for, and we can't seem to map any of the stars to those visible on mars, so we don't know where we are either. We're lost... in space.

When waking up the captain (which is us by the way), experiences a hallucination that says something about the iron space between thoughts. Which psychometry assures us was just a meaningless malfunction.

There's a mysterious wreck on the planet below we're advised to send probes down to probe it.


So before things start up I get this screen with a rapidly counting down counter, I assume this is some sort of glossed up loading screen.


And then I get this screen of us over the planet surface.

This is where things finally get fun, because now I have to figure out the controls!

So the square thing with the buttons on it is the "command cube" it, like many other varieties of cube has six sides, with one for each station, there's a whole bunch of buttons on each station, and they're not always very clear about what they actually do. The functions of the buttons are listed in the manual, but the manual isn't 100% clear on how you operate this thing so bear with me here.

The first thing I did was click the brain stem which takes me to the psych evaluation screen.


So in case you haven't caught the message yet, in this game humanity has successfully achieved it's dream of turning itself into goop. Said goop is currently being depicted on the left side of the screen. The goop will change colour according to their moods.

So the crew have these three statistics, skill, performance, and sanity. All of which are pretty necessary. Skill seems to indicate how well a crew member does their job, while I think performance infleunces how fast they can do it?

Sanity is the health of a crew member though, if it runs out the crew member goes nuts. Which is really bad. We also have the ability to save and reload crew members using the "encode" function.

I know we control the balance of the crew members stats through increasing or decreasing the chemicals in their system, but I'm sort of afraid to touch this right now, so let's check out some other options.

I click the one that sort of looks like a cluster of people, which gives me the crew stats screen.


Which looks like this, here you can see the crew's experience points and level... that seems to be this screen's only function. So I go take a look at something else.

The screwdriver seems to be the research button, which I leave alone for now. Instead I click the small brain projecting brain waves, which is the crew communication button.


Here we can talk to one of our crew members, and hopefully be enlightened. Let's try talking to the lab accident!

EDIT: This image actually appears to be missing, and I really don't feel like going back and replicating it, all it is is she says, something like "What do you want my Laird?"

She seems like an ordinary, ration, not quite human being so far. This game is one of those ones with keyword based dialogue, where you type in keyword and get results. LAIRD is written in yellow, so I assume it's a keyword, so let's ask her about that.


Oh geeze... They don't seriously call people LAIRD's around here do they? Let's ask more about that.


I think she's threatening me a little bit.

Asking about LORD gets the same thing as LAIRD... Apparently in the future the English language went back to no longer being standardized.

Anyway, since ADVICE and WRECK were both highlighted in the log we saw at the beginning let's try asking about them.


Her advice is to investigate the wreck, and talk to the scientist for more details. Let's do that then (asking about WRECK gets the same answer).


Yeah, she basically just explains how to send down a probe.

There's other keywords revealed when asked about such as SCIENCE, FUNCTION, ALIEN, ANOMALY. All of which are pretty uninteresting. I futz about talking to some other crew members but there's nothing new or interesting, so I decide it's time to send down some probes!

It's at this point that I also found the options in the medical section and changed the font to "CLEAN" which seems to be much more legible.

Anyway, this is what the planetary scan screen looks like.


Essentially there are several types of scans, I do the anomaly scan first, the process of scanning looks something like this:


The probes move about the planning scanning different spots, and as they do so the counters on the bottom left tick up.

There's five different kinds of scans to do, Lithosphere for land, Hydrosphere for the liquid surface, atmosphere for the air, biosphere for the life.

After scanning for a while I exit this screen and am greeted by another log.



And I think that is where I will leave this, because it's getting kind of late and I'm getting kind of tired.

Spoiler:  Crew choices (click to show/hide)

Psychometry








Engineering











Science












Navigation












Medical

I hope that wasn't too boring for anyone who read that.

[Mictlantecuhtli]

This will be handy if you figure out that goddamn keyword dialogue system. Expect to lose your crew and start all over, by the way.

[Anvilfolk]

He's figured out more of the dialogue system than I ever did :\

[Pnx]

It doesn't seem that complex, it's basically identical to every other keyword dialogue system I've encountered, but I haven't spoken with any aliens yet.

And yeah, I'm expecting to lose everyone, this looks like one of those games you fail a lot at. I will post another update in a bit.

[Pnx]

Alright time for the next update. This is a pretty short one.

Spoiler: Update 2 (click to show/hide)

So last time we picked out our crew of blob people, and got lost in space under confusing and contradictory circumstances. I mean the intro said we were attacked by scavengers, but when we started there seemed to be no sign of them, we just woke up orbiting a piece of wreckage.

I'm put in mind of the crazy anime trailer at the beginning of Infinite Space, it was cool and sort of vaguely followed the plot of the beginning of the story, but really things went nothing like that.

There's also some confusion in the manual regarding the circumstances of how they left. So they created this virus then blasted off into space, but in one part of the manual it seems to indicate they intended to return, but overslept thanks to their clock malfunctioning, but in another part it seems to say that they were going to go put human life on other planets, but there was a malfunction that led to them never waking up along the way. It's all pretty weird.

But let's get back into things for a bit.


So the first thing I do on loading the game is decide to talk with the crew members some more, when suddenly:


I err, didn't even know it was broken, but back to business. Let's ask not-vector for advice!


Ok, sounds like a plan, though I think I should probably explore this system first, let's ask some more questions.


Tool?


Ok... What's this iron business?


This is starting to sound a little bit crazy, let's ask about seeds, I like gardening, do you like gardening? Perhaps she has some good tips on picking good seeds.


Or err, maybe not.


Huh, but exposition is good, let's hear what this LEGEND stuff is.


Ermm, yikes.


...


It's alright man, there's no creepy priests around.


Ermm what?


Let's just go do something else now. I ask a bunch more questions and gain some more back story, there was quite a bit of this, and it's going to be quicker to read my version which I'll tell you about here.

Ok, so apparently on future mars the whole uploading your brain into goop technology is as common place as cell phones today. Not everyone does it much, but almost everyone at least keeps a backup copy of themselves in storage for use in case something bad happens. It's also apparently very easy to manufacture new bodies to inhabit, it appears however that despite this, they've never found a way to cure myopia judging by how many people still wear glasses.

The people of mars apparently deal with any existential dread through their belief in an intangible soul that remains intact through any transfers/copies/restores you might make, which sounds like it might be tricky given all the memory loss, tampering, and the possibility of having multiple copies of yourself running around.

So anyway, in addition to this mars had started to produce synthetic intelligence's for the purposes of performing menial tasks. They're treated exactly like slaves, with absolutely no rights, and are expected to toil away endlessly without any kind of thanks or payment. This wasn't so bad when they were basically on level with cleverbot, but as time went by they were made more and more intelligent for the purposes of doing more and more complex tasks. Which started to become a problem when they started asking questions like "who am I", "what is the point of it all?", and "why do I have to sift through industrial waste all day while the 'real' humans sip martian champagne?"

So some people started arguing that these synths should have rights, and the upper priesthood argued back that they weren't entitled to any because they don't have "souls". Some revolutionary types disputed this, which lead to the "Purgation Trials", where many potential dissidents were jailed or executed, thus the ironseed project which was... some kind of vague plan to escape and/or overthrow the priesthood.

I have to say this was a more interesting backstory than I thought the game would have.

I would continue after this but unfortunately I don't have the time right now, so I'll leave things here and pick them up later.

[deoloth]

Not sure if you know, but you can change the font settings.

Medical > Options

Font > Iron Clean

Makes the text so much more readable.

[USEC_OFFICER]

Damn it Not-Vector, you're supposed to be the straightforward and logical one!

Anyways, posting to watch. Are you going to try talking to everyone until you harvest some fuel and start exploring?

[CognitiveDissonance]

PTW. Holy crap, the backstory here is amazing. I MUST SEE MORE! I may even have to get a copy of this.

[Pnx]

Not sure if you know, but you can change the font settings.

Medical > Options

Font > Iron Clean

Makes the text so much more readable.

I did this in the first update, this is the more legible version. Which is still slightly illegible.

Damn it Not-Vector, you're supposed to be the straightforward and logical one!

Anyways, posting to watch. Are you going to try talking to everyone until you harvest some fuel and start exploring?

Honestly I just intended to have a quick chat with the crew before going on to do just this, I didn't really expect them to have so damn much to say.

PTW. Holy crap, the backstory here is amazing. I MUST SEE MORE! I may even have to get a copy of this.

I know right? I'm really loving this woes of trans humanism shtick.

I'll probably do another update once I've woken up some.

[USEC_OFFICER]

Having fiddled the game for a bit, I have to ask: Have you set your engineering teams to repair the rest of the damage to the ship? Also, it looks like you have to install the only weapon you have manually. Just wondering so in case you blunder into combat with half a ship and no weapons for it.

[Pnx]

Ok, so let's do this.

Spoiler: Update 3 (click to show/hide)

So we should probably gather materials from the planet we're orbiting before we do anything else, so I go back to the planetary scan screen and start working on finishing the scan of the planet.


After we finish a complete scan of the planet, we should get more information about what the planet can be used for in terms of mining materials. While this is going on I go ahead and retrieve the anomalies we'd already detected on the planet.


This is the planet's readout, it tells us what we can expect to be able to gather from it with minebots, I believe this is what the manual describes as a "dead rock" planet. It seems to be a good source of industrial chemicals and aminoacids. From here I went and fiddled about in various menus.


This is the system we're currently in, as I understand this game has a randomly generated galaxy, so I believe this is different every time you start a new game.


this is our current ship status, we appear to be somewhat damaged, and as you can see we're not exactly flushed for fuel right now, so I think getting ourselves some fuel will be a first priority.


This is the sector map, in which we see the stars we know of. The thing on the left seems to be a rotating 3D display of the stars. There's only one other star on here right now, but I'm sure we'll find more of them later.
I'm not sure if it's possible to tell how much fuel we'll burn going to one of the stars without actually going there, it seems like it should be, but I can't figure it out.


This is the crafting screen where we put stuff together. Currently our selection is rather limited, but I understand it will grow with research, which is something we'll do at some point. Here we see that making a fuel nodule will cost us a radioactive, a strange particle, and a heavy element.


Radioactives take two heavy elements and an industrial chemical to make. Strange particles take two heavy elements and a transition metal. So it seems fuel nodules will require a lot of heavy elements, though I think it might be possible to mine radioactives and strange particles, rather than having to make them. I don't know, but I'm sure we'll find out.


So this is what our cargo hold looks like right now, the dirk is a basic weapon, and really the only one we've got right now (I should probably install it), the two probots are the scouts we use to recon planets, getting two more would help us scan plans faster. There's also a minebot and a manufactory onboard, minebots you drop on planets and they will gather raw materials, manufactories convert these raw materials into components for you. Both of these can operate without you having to actually be on the planet.

We've also got some unknown components and materials I picked up, I think we need to research these to figure out what they actually are.


I decide since this seems as good a place as any, that I decide to drop off our minebot. We can always pick it up later if we need to.


While I'm here I decide to go to the configure menu and select one of our weapon slots, this here's the stats of the "dirk" that we've got onboard. I'm guessing since we started with it that this is one of the weakest weapons in the game, but I figure that having one weak weapon is better than having no weapons at all.


So I install it.




This is the damage control screen, as you can see in addition to installing the weapon, we're also repairing our currently damaged power supply.

I decide it's time to start researching.


From what I understand, research has a bit of a tendency to drive people insane... no joke, it's a very stressful job apparently, so I'm going to have to keep an eye on psychometry.


If worst comes to worst I have a fresh encode.... which isn't worth much considering we haven't gained much experience yet.


The manual does not explain how to handle this screen at all. I know the red green and blue bars to the right of the picture represent skill, performance, and sanity respectively, and it seems I can rebalance these as suits me. I'm not entirely sure what the brown bar represents, but I think it might be stress. None of the other members of the crew are currently showing any brown bars, I suspect this might have something to do with the science officer having done a bunch of work scanning the planet. But this is sort of guesswork here.


Anyway, so I've figured out that I can rebalance the mental stats of the person in question, what I think I want to do is boost emotion/sanity to stop people going insane when they get stressed, then when they're in a good state of mind, I boost the other stats to make them do their jobs better. This is sort of my idea of things for now at least. I think this wound up being a good guess because what I do next is ask my psychometrist about stress and research.


Huh.


So yeah, research is really stressful, stress eats away at sanity. I'm pretty sure I need to keep people's emotion levels high to counteract their research stress. I might also want to stop the science officer from researching for a while.

From here I futz around a bit while I wait for some stuff to happen, the engineer installs our dirk and repairs the power supply, then moves on to fixing weapons control. I err... may have wound up accidentally decomposing our unknown components/materials. They really should have some kind of warning switch for those. Anyway once I do that, I decide it's probably time to explore the other planet in this system.


Welcome to Obam Primus (we were previously at Obam Secondus)! This planet appears to have some kind of life growing on it, how unhygenic!


I start a planetary scan, though before I do that I make sure to switch my science officer off of research. Around this time engineering finishes repairs to weapon control.


Hey, this looks promising, we found a bunch of materials! I go ahead and retrieve all these while we finish the scans.


So it appears this planet only posses very simple multicellular life forms, I believe this is somewhat equivelant to earth hundreds of millions of years ago. Nonetheless in millions of years it may well come to posses intelligent life.


I decided to check on the science officer, and whoa! Ok, note to self, assuming that brown bar really is stress, then scanning planets is REALLY stressful. I think our science officer should take a break now.

Some of our other crew members have started to develop brown bars, but theirs are still pretty low.


So I notice we can pick up strange particles and radioactives here, which was two parts of a fuel nodule, this seems like a good place to mine for that purpose, though of course our minebot is still at Secondus.

We still have a manufactory, but I'm not so sure it'd really be very desirable for getting fuel from this planet. My engineer explained to me that minebots mine up raw materials, whereas manufactories develop components from various materials available, generally working at a faster rate. Since we can't actually build minebots or manufactories yet, I decide to just drop the manufactory here for now and then I to use the time burst to move forward in time. After figuring out how to get more than one repair crew working on repairing the ship.

I was just slowing down time again after the engineer had increased his knowledge base when this happened.

ALIENS!

I have no clue who they are, or if they're friendly or hostile, but let's find out.

I bring up the short range scanner.


Uh-oh, whoever they are, they're getting closer.

I try hailing them.


And they actually respond.

The manual said something about how you have to work with them to establish a common basis of communication, fortunately these ones just seem to speak plain English or something as our hail goes straight through.

It seems these guys were expecting us, and they don't seem immediately inclined to shoot us.


Huh...


Err...


I...


But...


Ok, I'm a writing a note in my captain's log here, don't get these guys started on the whole "pathways" thing, they will never shut up about it.


It's at this point that I discover the info tab on the right, apparently these guys are known as Titarians.

I try asking them about a whole bunch of other stuff, but they don't want to trade, and don't seem to have much to say about any of the things I asked them about, so I exit the conversation.


Alliance huh? Maybe I should ask them about that, I'll hail them again just to be sure.


Ermm, are they dropping plot hints at us? Anyway turns out they don't have much to else to say right now, at least nothing that I can ask about.

And I think this is where I'll leave things for now.

Having fiddled the game for a bit, I have to ask: Have you set your engineering teams to repair the rest of the damage to the ship? Also, it looks like you have to install the only weapon you have manually. Just wondering so in case you blunder into combat with half a ship and no weapons for it.

I did just these things you mentioned.

[Cerol Lenslens]

Oh, this looks interesting! PTW.

By the way, a few of your screenshots in the first update are screwed up. The last two crew members in Engineering, including the one you picked, show not-Delta instead. Also, the first conversation screen with the Engineer (where she brings up the 'Laird' topic) appears to have been replaced with the blank 'select crew member' screen before it.

[Pnx]

Oh, this looks interesting! PTW.

By the way, a few of your screenshots in the first update are screwed up. The last two crew members in Engineering, including the one you picked, show not-Delta instead. Also, the first conversation screen with the Engineer (where she brings up the 'Laird' topic) appears to have been replaced with the blank 'select crew member' screen before it.

Ah, thanks for the tipoff, when you're dealing with so many images this stuff happens sometimes. I fixed the first mistake, but for the second I apparently never uploaded an image of the first part of that conversation.

[USEC_OFFICER]

From my little experience I can tell you that science dude, lab accident and medguy are the weakest members on your team. Everyone else seems to be able to reseach non-stop without any harmful effects to their sanity. Science dude is also really vulnerable sanity-wise. If When you restart you need to replace him with someone more stable.

[EuchreJack]

Nice LP, I'm getting into this game myself.

I actually really like Vestin the unknown engineer.  He's actually quite good!

Also, I strongly suggest dropping the manufactory on the planet where you are at.  The minebot shows you what base mineral it can collect, whereas the manufactory shows you what refined materials it will produce.  And Fuel Modules are made with the two refined materials you have on that planet, plus the base mineral Heavy Metals, which manufactories will never give you (they would refine Heavy Metal into something else instead).  You really lucked out, take advantage of it!

Your minebots/manufactories will produce every time you show up to the planet.  So by just bouncing back and forth between the two planets, you'll generate a ton of materials without using any fuel (it isn't used for in-system travel).  Plus, your crew will level up, unlocking more stuff (like how to make your starting weapon).