Alternatively, you could just purchase the navigation chips whenever, just for increasingly large sums. Technically this means you can skip the crafting progression and kit yourself out entirely through exploration and moneymaking. You'd still need to go through the progression if you wanted to start crafting things.
Just musing on the whole alternate tier progression thing. With the combat revamp, low-tier characters will have more of a fighting chance in high-tier worlds, and just buying the starmap upgrades becomes viable, since you trade your ability to craft things for it. The builders and explorers are happy because they don't have to fight bosses, the fighters are happy since they can go to out-of-depth places earlier, the "way it's meant to be played" crafters/adventurers just play it normally.
As I was reading through the thread, I was wondering "why hasn't anybody suggested multiple ways, rather than just combat, of getting past the progression barriers?" And then you come along and do it. Bravo, sir, bravo.
As someone who's been running around merrily exploring, mining, building and (slightly less) slaughtering in the early tiers, but keeps getting endlessly ganked by the UFO and has yet to get a molten core (yeah, I know, I'm bad at this
), if there were another way to unlock that barrier I'd be happy. I don't want to avoid challenge, I just want the challenge to be based on one of the OTHER 4 Xs of the game (because, at least in my head, it's an eXplore, eXpand/build, eXploit (ruins/villages/merchants) and eXterminate game...just with everything locked behind barriers of the last X).
N.B. Yes, I know about the avian gun merchants. I've been avoiding it so far, but should probably set myself up with that in order to get the firepower to get past the UFO, at least. I'm fully kitted out in leather and tech, so it's just a firepower/really-poor-at-dodging-penguins issue on my part.