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Star Traders: Frontiers – Completing all Exploration and Crew Combat Achievements

Regardless of what you do, you’ll be at the mercy of the dice. But with a few careful steps, the rest can be fairly easy.

Other Star Traders: Frontiers Guides:

Captain Creation

This is the build.

  • Skills – 10 Doctor, 10 Evasion, 3 Pistols.
  • Attributes – 30 Wisdom, 30 Quickness, 20 Resilience

(It might not be unreasonable to swap these. Losing pistol and evasion skill for fortitude and resilience can help with some non-combat challenges, and the loss is unlikely to hurt much)

  • Ship – Galtak Freighter (or Frontier Liner if you don’t have it unlocked)
  • Contacts – Retired Explorer, Weapons Dealer (second one doesn’t much matter)
  • Experience – Explorer (Doesn’t actually matter much; could take Bounty Hunter or Zealot for combat ability instead)

Only Expert Xeno Hunter and Warrior can be completed on Normal. Adventurer, Master Adventurer, Expert Prospector, Master Explorer, Warmaster and Xeno Slayer require Hard difficulty, which means permadeath.

Manually assign talents. It’s a big deal.

Clan Javat is the recommended starting faction. Their home system, Hyperion Abyss, is where you’re going to want to start exploring for reasons that will be explained later, and they have a decent assortment of planet types that doesn’t include population zones (which are bad for trading)

Preparations

The first thing to do is assign talents. Don’t spend your captain’s talent yet. For most crew, pick up the auto-success talents, they’ll save you an enormous amount of trouble. For pilots, pick up a couple quick-land talents. For E-Techs, pick up a Signature Jammer, and maybe a Storm Shielding. For Navigators, pick up a Fast Getaway. It’s possible you won’t need it, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

Swordsman gets Sharp Counter, Soldier gets Suppressing Fire.

Then land on the arbiter’s planet and pick up her quest. Then fire a pistoleer, soldier and at least one gunner – you don’t need them. Hire a mechanic or two when you can and drop off the arbiter.

Something I didn’t notice for quite a while is that availability and demand for good depends on the planet type, and is listed in the trade window. Check the zone type of your destination and buy trade goods to match. You should do this at every opportunity. You can check the planets of other systems before traveling to them by selecting them on the galactic map the pressing the system atlas button.

Once you’ve dropped off the arbiter, buy up your trade license from the prince and run missions from your contacts, particularly the retired explorer. Your aim is to buy a new officer cabin, upgrade your weapons locker to A4 or A5 and recruit a fistful of exo-scouts (preferably of high level). You have time to work toward A5 for a little more security, but it really isn’t necessary and takes a fair bit more time.

Your first captain level-up is Combat Medic; grab Cleansing Purge. Next level is Doctor; grab Field Surgery. Once you’re ready to hire exo-scouts, fire your engineer. Promote a soldier and a swordsman. Keep only your first soldier level; the rest should be exo-scout until at least level 6. Swordsman can be multiclassed into assassin for a few more skill levels.

Alternatively, you could hold onto your second soldier, fire your doctor and promote the second soldier into exo-scout too. Give him a shotgun. Alternatively alternatively, you could trade the doctor for a second swordsman; they’re pretty good.

It took me half a year to complete these preparations.

Getting Busy

From here it’s pretty straightforward. In Hyperion Abyss, the lonely planet of Ghett Peak at Wi-Cix is Exploration 10, Richness 10, Danger 10 and Medium size. Ideally it would be large for more Terrox Xenos encounters, but that’s fine. In the same system, the neutral world of Hadlington has Trade Law 2, meaning you can sell Terrox Xeno Artifacts there.

In combat, you have a suppressor soldier in rank 4, your medic captain in rank 3, a swordsman or shotgun soldier in rank 2 and swordsman in rank 1. All except maybe rank 2 are officers.

Make sure all of your characters (except maybe a rank 2 soldier/exo-scout; he’s gonna get brutalized more often than anything else) are in light armor. Sniper rifles and HMGs are not recommended.

Your captain’s initiative and healing capability are about as high as they will go; he will heal through anything.

Explore, explore, explore until the achievements are done or something so disastrously terrible happens that you need to restart (unlikely). If you can’t explore on that planet anymore, shop around for another high-danger planet. In the same system, Ryleeza Moor at Vingate-Rukas is also very good. Once both are depleted, maybe head for Prances Trench in Garrick Void.

Stop by an inhabited world every few months to pay your crew.

In this way it should be quite easy to complete all these achievements, but it’s all rolling dice. If you get bad luck, try again.

For the record, I got preparations completed in 22 weeks and 5 successful xeno encounters in 110 weeks, by which time my captain was level 10. With a little luck (which I didn’t have), it’s very possible to get the Xeno Hunter achievement in under 2 years. This was keeping my doctor, a generic exo-scout in the second position, A4 locker and only hiring two exo-scouts. The more of them, the better, especially as they level up and give you more rerolls.

Written by Cronatos

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