Liquidators expedition redux ended up starting on December 25th. I’m kind of glad this one ended up being a bit shorter than the other expeditions I've wanted to get around to running. I ended up finishing it a bit later than I would have liked due to the holidays.

The good news is this one was also quite different from the others. It was mostly focused on combat. An aspect of the game that I needed to become better familiar with anyway. So, I ended up learning some new tricks and testing out some stuff I've rarely if ever used before.

Since it was focused on combat. That combat did not need to take place on far away planets that required having the higher tier warp drives. It was kind of nice not needing to acquire the blueprints for them and build them.

While I did end up having the resources needed to craft them in the anomaly that I sent from my main save game. I more or less left everything in there. Only pulled out some warp fuel which I ended up running out and needing to craft up a bunch at the end regardless of what I brought along with me.

As I have done with the last one. I took some time to look over all the milestones required to finish the expedition. I started to notice something a bit odd. The drop zones or as they have called them in the past rendezvous points were mostly at the front of the milestones.

The developers tend to try and put the milestones in “order.” Although you can do them in any order. In past expeditions, the rendezvous point would usually be one of the last ones for a phase. However, since there were usually only a couple of plants you needed to warp past to get to the next one. They put them up front.

It was also rather nice not having to jump eight or more systems to get to the next point. Even better once you landed in a drop zone it gave you a location of usually the second milestone in each phase with an infestation that needed to be destroyed. Right then and there an easy 1/3 of each of the milestones for each phase is done quickly.

My biggest fear of things not getting done ended up being on the optional milestone that required everyone to partake in. Despite this expedition requiring a lot of killing. I do not like the chance of it finishing before the expedition is over.

I noticed that only my first fifty kills would count toward the global optional milestone phase. At the time of writing this with around a week left the community was stuck on phase 3.

It also seems I had killed enough to not worry about logging in to get extra kills. The issue is I have no idea how many total kills of creatures that would count towards the milestone I have. Since it only shows me at 150+ and not my real total. It knows I have more kills it’s just not showing it.

With all of that out of the way. It was time to bang out the first phase rather quickly. This one followed more in line with the other expeditions. Since I've gotten used to starting over, making it to my ship, collecting the resources needed to repair the ship, and getting myself to another system.

I must have done all those milestones in record time for myself. I also knew better than to go out of my way looking for a dozen horrors to take out. I’ve dealt with these things in the past. I know just finding a single pack of them I'd kill that many if not more. It also did not take long for that many to find me anyway.

Next up was phase two. Just reaching the drop zone I'd quickly finish off three milestones. I swear it was only a couple of jumps out from the start. I was shocked at how quickly I got there. While there I got ambushed by a dozen horrors making my third milestone quickly done.

The second milestone in each phase was just going to the location that was given to me after hitting up the main computer at first sight. A giant brood mother would spawn at that second location and I'd take out it.

At first, the brood mother was a bit of a challenge. As I got milestones finished off and quite a few weapon upgrades. By the fifth one and many others, I ran into it while doing other stuff. I took them out in under a minute.

I also realized quickly that if I damage some of the spawns it puts out first. Suddenly the backside shell opens up. Leaving quite a high-value location for me to just dump as much damage as I can into.

Along the way, I stopped at every space station I came across. The goal was to pick up an inventory slot from each of the stations. I however did not waste my time running up from where the ships park in the stations.

I got to give it to them. Some of the space stations during the expeditions are just epic-looking. I’ve also not played the base game in a while other than to move supplies to and from expeditions. I however don’t recall running into a random space station looking that amazing in the past.

After my first ten systems, I used the portal system and just teleported to each station. Then took a much shorter walk up the stairs and to where the suit inventory upgrade unit is. While I'm sure this did not save me a lot of time. I felt it was more effective with the limited amount of time I had to run this expedition. So, I was rather amused doing it this way.

There were many milestones I just got randomly without having to think about acquiring them like independent action. I recalled reading the one that wanted me to clear around three waypoints. I was not quite sure what that meant until I was clearing out a random spot and realized it was my third location of killing horrors.

I knew a few random things I'd need would just be at random buildings. I wanted to collect some random words, and nanites, and maybe find a location finder or two. I also knew I had a few combat milestones I had a feeling I'd have a few of them get marked as complete by hitting up some random sites anyway.

There were also quite a few easy milestones. Like shoot soon so many times, take out some low-level sentinels, get so many kills, and kill a hostile creature over a certain rating.

I’ll admit I got a bit lucky with the killing of a high-level hostile creature over a certain rating. It was called the Apex predator milestone. I have a feeling that one would have been painful trying to randomly find. Most naturally spawning creatures I'd encounter were not hostile to start with and therefore would not even be close to the requirements for that milestone.

Perhaps one of the more interesting ones was Metamorphosis. It required me to scan for a vile grub. Then gathering that grub and crushing it. This then caused a brood mother to come engaging at me trying to bite my head off. It looks like any time I want to fight one of these I'm not that far away from finding another grub and forcing another one to come out of hiding to die to my gunfire.

At one point I was killing some sentinels for a milestone. Then the weather turned bad. I ended up fighting the rest of them flying around on my jetpack.

Final Thoughts

Before I knew it I had the first two phases finished off. I was heading towards the drop zone of the third one. I also almost had enough milestones done in the remaining ones to more or less have another phase finished off as well.

There would be however some trickly milestones remaining. I mostly got the easy ones out of the way without even trying to do them. Next up I needed to focus a bit more and even try and work out how I was going to get some of the later milestones finished.

Information

Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about No Man’s Sky.