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Comment by uejfiweun | Hacker News Reader

I think I was hoping for more of a "space sim" from this game. One where I could fly into gas giants and get crushed, fly near the sun and fry to death, use a black hole for a gravity assist, that sort of thing. It didn't turn out that way at all, instead it's just a regular old quest driven Bethesda game with a generic sci-fi veneer.

If anyone has any cooler "space sim" type games to recommend, especially ones where you can play around with the crazy shit in space like magnetars, pulsars, black holes, etc... I would love to hear about it.

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Kerbal Space Program 1 with a few mods is the best space sim of that sort ever. Someday KSP 2 might match it, but that’ll be a feat. KSP 1 is just within the solar system and KSP2 promises to do interstellar at some point, but to be honest that point feels about as far as the closest black hole.

KSP is unique in its “space” simulation, afaik near every other game made just treats space as a three dimensional flight sim without gravity and black backgrounds.

Thanks. Any particular mods to recommend? I've tried playing without mods many years ago but I remember it being extremely tough - I imagine mods would improve the user-friendliness significantly.

The most important lesson is that getting to space is easy. The hard part is staying there.

After 100 or so hours you'll manage to dock in orbit. This is about as good as it gets. MechJeb trivialises this (IOW means makes the game playable if you don't want to play space randezvous simulation) but I strongly recommend doing it by hand if only just once.

I agree up to as good as it gets. Building a in orbit assembled explorer to fly to Jupiter, land probes on all the moons, and fly in the Jovian atmosphere in a plane, then land your explorer on a moon to form a permanent base is about as good as it gets.

But yeah my suggestion is to play career mode where MechJeb is in a science node. That way you play and awful lot of the game without it. Docking without assistance is definitely tricky, which makes it all so amazing that people actually did this in real space ships and their real life on the line without any automation.

ummmm.... most of the mods just make it harder or more complicated :-/

Well, I don’t know about that - MechJeb makes it considerably easier to do almost anything.

MechJeb is the most important mod. It makes the game reasonable to play. Otherwise it’s just too difficult. I still recommend playing it in career mode and starting with original space flight rockets where you didn’t have a lot of automation. You get a good feel for the mechanics and it’s really not hard to get something into space. Then as you unlock the science nodes you get access to more advanced features including MechJeb, which is a part on your ship. It offers a lot of features like various autopilots, planning calculators, etc. The other mods add a lot of parts that are fun and become critical in extending game play. Something I found interesting in the game was how absurdly hard it is to actually hit the sun. The earth is moving so fast around the sun the amount of delta v (change in velocity) required to actually fall into the sun is really hard to build into a probe. So much for shooting our nukes into the sun.

MechJeb - makes the game much easier. Provides a lot of data and autopilot guidance features.

https://www.curseforge.com/kerbal/ksp-mods/mechjeb

Near future * - a lot of engines and parts that aren’t far future tech but are current or near current engine tech

https://www.curseforge.com/kerbal/ksp-mods/near-future-propu...

https://www.curseforge.com/kerbal/ksp-mods/near-future-solar

https://www.curseforge.com/kerbal/ksp-mods/near-future-elect...

https://www.curseforge.com/kerbal/ksp-mods/near-future-space...

https://www.curseforge.com/kerbal/ksp-mods/near-future-explo...

https://www.curseforge.com/kerbal/ksp-mods/near-future-launc...

https://www.curseforge.com/kerbal/ksp-mods/near-future-const...

Interstellar - provides a lot of game play and features including in situ production

https://www.curseforge.com/kerbal/ksp-mods/ksp-interstellar-...

Planetary base system - makes settling planets more fun

https://www.curseforge.com/kerbal/ksp-mods/kerbal-planetary-...

Transfer planner - helpful in visualizing when to move between celestial bodies

https://www.curseforge.com/kerbal/ksp-mods/transfer-window-p...

Thank you so much! Will definitely check these out.

Elite dangerous probably, which I played a lot but its very grindy and lacking content, the space sim part is very well done though.

You can visit black holes and pulsars which can supercharge your ship for very long jumps. Many try to make it to Sgr A* at the center of the galaxy to see the massive black hole, quite a long journey even with 30 ly jumps. The milky way is modeled true to size and you can explore all of it, but its pretty empty.

Elite Dangerous is a beautiful game with excellent voice acting. I eventually stopped playing it due to the ships getting prohibitively more expensive to replace when some pirates would out-maneuver my bigger and more expensive ships. As time went on it became more of a money grind. Too bad really, because I enjoyed the effort they put into the graphics and voice acting.

Yup, I think this is the closest thing out there to what to OP is looking for. It is pretty open and empty, though.

Interesting, thank you. What types of simulated aspects are there in the game? Temperature, pressure, magnetism, gravity, etc? I was under the impression it was more of a space dogfighting type game but based on your comment it seems I may have been very wrong about this.

None of those.

The closest it gets to physical simulation is newtonian gravity (not that that really matters much when you're flying ships with practically reactionless thrust, just means some planets are slightly trickier to land on with thruster modules which haven't been upgraded) and ship movement when you turn the assist off that emulates a plane style flight model (although this also doesn't mean much in terms of realism because there's a speed cap, so you can't just keep thrusting and accelerating.

You can only interact with planets with no atmosphere or a thin one. But IIRC stars of all types and black holes can destroy your ship if you get too close). Some of the models for irl nebulae are cool, although unrealistically presented in the sense that they're blatantly visible. While the milky way is modeled to a realistic scale, the vast majority of it is empty and might as well not even exist.

> and might as well not even exist

As someone who flew around the galaxy literally, those systems exist, just too long to get there (and hard to get back in the inhabited part).

I'm not saying that they don't exist, but that they add so little (due to mostly just being nothing but another variation of the same handful of planet types with norhing to do there), that they might as well not exist.

It’s also absolutely amazing in VR. Totally changed the game for me, I find it unplayable without.

Outer Wilds is the absolute best one.

Outer Wilds tops my personal list of "videogames you should play before you die."

I'd recommend it to anyone regardless of experience with videogames, even people that have never played a videogame. The beginning area reminds me of old school videogame tutorials, it's basically just a safe "sandbox" where you can experiment with all the mechanics and figure everything out.

If, incredibly, you haven't heard of this game yet, do yourself a favor, don't look anything up, take us on faith and just buy it and play it. It's even better if you go in blind.

> "I'd recommend it to anyone regardless of experience with videogames, even people that have never played a videogame."

While I absolutely agree with you that everyone should experience the game because it's amazing, it isn't the easiest game for non-gamers to get into. First person controls take a bit to get used to and folks who have gamed even casually for a while probably take that for granted. There are some "platforming" sections which require pretty good coordination that will likely frustrate most non-gamers to the point where they cannot complete the game. I would love to recommend this game to EVERYONE because it's so good, but you need at least decent FPS control skills for it to be approachable.

Any counter-recommendations?

Another recommendation for Outer Wilds, and echoing the parent: go in the game blind, get lost in the universe and take your time with the puzzles even if you are stuck. I wish I can wipe my mind and play it again!

Agreed. Unfortunately, I've already played it (and the DLC), and it's not really the type of game that's easy to replay since I already know all the secrets. Can't wait for Mobius Digital's next game.

Every time somebody says Outer Wilds, I think Outer Worlds, and that game could not have less exploration.

Yeah I think we all were. The fact that my stamina rate isn’t at all affected by whether I’m on Venus or the moon is incredible.

It definitely is, though? My character runs out of stamina making the short run from base airlock to my ship at Red Mile, on a 2g planetoid. Compare that to a low g moon where I can run for ages.

I guess I would have imagined a much different mechanic. If my weight limit for carrying without fatiguing is 150 on Venus, it should be like 900 on the moon.

Though I get your point, from a quality of life perspective it seems like it would be annoying as hell to be under constantly changing carry weight limits.

Inertia is still an issue regardless of local gravity.

Yeah. The fact that you can't even fly your ship around a planet is astounding to me. The ship is basically nothing more than a glorified elevator.

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