I was looking for a specific planet type.
But that originally wasn't on my mind. Instead, my plan was just to explore new systems and get nanites from naming stuff and finding every species on the planet. I needed the protection modules, which costed nanites unfortunately. The 'Rare' or even at times 'Common' underground species were not common at all, being the bane of my existence as I sometimes spent days looking for them, but at other times? Only half a day.
I'd also gathered a new ship, which was a B class and had plenty of slots. I traded out one of my ships for it, and still had to pay extra units to get it. I partially got it because I thought it was red and matched my colour scheme, but no. It was a dark orange, much to my annoyance. I'm not colourblind but the lighting in the space station made it hard to see.
Either way, I stupidly used my new ship - which had far less equipment and defensive systems - to go exploring. I gathered myself 3 hyperdrive fuel cells, put them into my hyperdrive and was off.
In the new system, I found an Ash-Shrouded Planet. Better yet, my first frigate and to follow it? This was a Vy'keen system and the ash-shrouded planet had corrupted sentinels. I had grown rather fond of the Vy'keen and their warrior-like ways, especially how they were so loyal to Hirk.
So what did I do? I landed on it and started exploring. It had these weird purple crystalline growths that were disturbing. Not that I liked purple anyways, particularly not almost neon. Some of them even had sentinel remains inside of them, the robotic entities destroyed to the point of being inoperable permanently.
There were these extra large crystalline growths too. They came up on my analysis scanner, and there were also a whole host of gravitino balls.
'Gravitino balls... holy crud. I think I just found the jackpot!' I thought to myself.
Even just ten gravitino balls can sell for, at times, half a million credits, and these were in abundance here. No wonder that the (corrupted) sentinels status was big, bold and in red saying 'Answer To None'.
They spawned like normal sentinels and acted the same, scanning stuff and investigating if I were to break anything in their line of sight. They also responded a similar way to gathering gravitino balls as normal sentinels; attack with brute force.
So I tried to kill them a little, only to have to retreat underground when I nearly died. But that didn't work at one point when I reached wave three of the assault.
'Suppression Level: Urgent' and 'Swarm Multiplying in X' was what came up on my systems as usual, but I was nearly dead. So I had rushed underground.
Only for the alternative to normal quad sentinels to attack me THROUGH the ground. My shields went down and I had to dig as far away as I could.
And that saved me. At least, for now.
Having spent about a week before collecting gravitino balls, when I finally killed a quad it dropped a blue combat supply pod. I opened it up before it could roll away.
But then it would take me another day to notice I had something odd in my inventory. Whatever it was, I could use it; that's exactly what I did.
And then it put a marker on my screen for something called a 'Harmonic Echo'.
I had only just started rooting out the corruption; I had a long way to go.
ns 15.158.61.23da2