With mining not bringing in the credits like I needed it to be doing. It was time to switch over to running quite a few escort missions. This will also allow me to further discover new systems and try and map out where different training skills and ships are being sold.

At the very least with the money mining did bring in I was able to afford some better weapons and some other slight upgrades. In this game, I'm mostly focusing on laser damage. For the time being it is short-range laser damage.

The biggest drawback to using laser damage is the amount of power drain on your systems. I’m however trying to cut down on costs since I don’t have a lot of credits to burn on other ammo types. I also don’t want to run out and must find somewhere to restock that is even selling the types of ammo that whatever weapon system I'm using requires anyway.

I also was not quite certain at the start of accepting escort missions would make me and the person I'm escorting around some kind of target. Turns out that is not the case. These missions are simply easy with almost no risk whatsoever.

The only real damage is if I happened to go into a system that already had pirates spawning or would spawn after being in there for a short amount of time. Since the only number of times, I'm spending in the system is getting the NPC I need to escort and warp through them. There is no opportunity for pirates to take me down.

While going through systems I did make it a habit to try and select and scan down anything I can while I'm going through them. That way in the future if I'm going back through a system, I already have all the gates discovered and things like stations.

I’m also keeping an eye out for different kinds of rocks to mine in the different systems I’m passing through. While for the time being I'm done with mining. Who knows if at some point I need a break from mission grinding and want to get a better ship to go out mining in.

Many of the systems I ended up passing though had anything even slightly better than mine always had pirates. If they were not right away, they tended to show up as I was about to leave the system, I was in. It looks like I never was going to have a peaceful time mining anyhow if I went deeper down that route. Which I was expecting to be the case anyway.

While these escort missions were not that rewarding either. It was better than mining. I was also starting to rack up quite a lot of skill points. While getting two skill points at a time per mission might not sound like a lot. With how quickly I was running through these missions it would end up being quite a meaningful amount.

Often when I was taking missions out to systems I had already discovered. I’d just let the autopilot do all the work. I had quite a few other things I was putting time in elsewhere outside of the game. I just needed to make sure I was not sitting idle somewhere getting picked off by any pirates or dying from space itself.

A big difference between Astrox Imperium and Eve Online is the life support systems. In Astrox Imperium you need to maintain things like water, food, oxygen, and waste. These systems are not annoying like survival games. All you have to do is dock and they go back to being full.

You do, however, need to invest in buying upgrades for the different life support systems. As I started to venture down into more deadly and lower security systems. Those systems themselves started to have more kinds of environmental damage that would start to take their toll quickly on my life support.

In one extreme case, I ended up entering into a system where I had around 30 seconds of life support remaining. The only good news is once life support runs out you still have another 30 seconds to dock at a station. I managed to get out of that system with seconds to spare which ended up being well over twenty minutes of life support in the next system I entered into. Leaving me ample time to decide it was worth docking in that system before moving on to the next just in case that one would be quite harsh on my life support systems as well.

After a while, my biggest struggle ended up being just finding further escort missions to run. I had taken all the ones I could find, and they were not quick to reappear in systems and stations, so I took up all of those types. It seemed I usually got more missions every time I leveled up my faction

Once in a while, I'd take on a transportation mission as well. I however do not have a large cargo hold so I had to make sure any of the ones I did take on I could finish off in a single trip. I did not want to end up in a situation where I'd have to abandon the mission.

Along the way, I ended up making quite a few upgrades in skills for laser damage, reduced weapon energy used, more ship energy, shields, engraining, weapon tracking, life support, and even a few points into different classes of ships.

Another easy type of mission I started to take on was recon. You just needed a scanner to go out and scan an object. Most times I had to go out and scan an NPC. I was rather shocked by the lack of getting attacked back for doing so.

Final Thoughts

After I familiarized myself with quite a few of the different kinds of easy missions. I started to carry around a few different kinds of modules in my cargo hold. I’d have a scanner and a spare laser weapon, along with some cargo modules as well. I’d then just swap out what I needed depending on the kind of mission I was going to take.

The rewards for all these safer missions in this game were only going to hold me over for so long. I started to find the locations of some rather massive and fun-looking ships. They would cost many millions of credits to buy even before considering the cost of outfitting them with guns and defenses.

I was also starting to get a bit bored after grinding these missions out for a couple of days. Granted a lot of the time I was just having my ship auto warp to the next location. Still, even that gets a bit boring since it was quite rare, I'd find myself in any kind of combat situation.

Other Content

• Astrox Imperium | The Return

Information

Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Astrox Imperium.