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[Gabeux]

Hello there! Would you like to bathe in deadly radiation for no special reason fame, glory and !!SCIENCE!!?
Do you enjoy games such as Duskers - or does the combination of words "sci-fi, exploration, mysterious aliens and science" makes you all tingly?
Then come with me and start calling Scavenger SV-4 an indie gem today.

This game came out of nowhere for me. But in this roguelike, you're a spacer that for some reason (the backstory is different each playthrough) is orbiting an extremely radioactive planet, on a spaceship equipped with a highly modular exploration rover.
Although you don't fly the ship, you can operate some of its features, go on EVA (no reason for it, most of the time), do your hourly treatment of radiation in the autodoc, and so on. You can also space yourself. You've been warned.

The core of the game lies on sending your rover into expeditions on the planet, finding derelicts and ruins, acquiring artifacts, recalling your drone, researching the alien artifacts and, most of the time, fitting them back into your drone for greater firepower, utility or survivability.

Due to being roguelike and sometimes a little slow, I don't think this will be everyone's cup of tea. But for a game made by one man in five years, I find it great and damn fun.
The little details and features just makes me happy - from animations such as the rover taking cargo from inside of it with its own little arms, to the really great ability to assign the rover's modules to any screen in the UI (see my screenshot - you can click&drag modules on the left and drop on any of the displays, and each module will have its own information display).

Not to say about the 'resource management' of spare parts. Your rover's Microphone blew up? You can't hear anything in the surface - either use a Radio Receiver and try to make something up from the static/radio frequencies, rely solely on visual from the crappy video camera, or try to find an alien microphone to research.
Your good reactor blew up? Now find a way to deal with all the heat of the crappy one.

The game also has a full PDF manual, 90s style, which includes an interesting "Useless Tips" section.

It reminds me of Duskers - albeit here you have just one drone and you only explore the single planet..that will probably give you enough trouble anyway.
By the end of the expedition, you will be given a score and epilogue. My first run, I ended up becoming a pawn shop owner when coming back. Second run I died on my way back home with absurd radiation, and became some historic explorer.

Let me know what you think.

Here's the first video I watched on it.
Here's a link to the Steam store.
Here's a screenshot.

[n9103]

Not a fan of the overly-realistic doors/console interface that requires using the mouse to point to a button, rather than just pressing a button for common functions, like say, opening a door...
They've been popping up more and more since the first time I saw it in DOOM 3 (that I can recall at the moment anyway. I have a feeling it's much much older). Useful on highly detailed consoles (most stuff in Space Engineers for instance), but the interface you're interacting with is almost always too simple to justify and it's just tedious instead. Meh.

Otherwise, looks pretty interesting. Waitlisted.

[forsaken1111]

ptw

[Gabeux]

The more I play it, the more it makes me happy. The only negative at the moment is the fact that there's only one planet, with the same set of structures/etc to find. Although everything is procedurally generated, and each game can play very differently from another sometimes, it just leaves me wanting for more. That's usually a sign of a good game, though.

I enjoy the fact that there's little neat things to find and discover. For instance, installing, powering up and assigning a screen for 'useless' artifacts might wield [mildly] interesting or !!FUN!! results.
In a certain run, I got all my spare cameras, microphones and radio recievers blown up..rendering my rover blind and deaf. I made do with two tech items to at least give me SOME way to drive around, and ended up finding some more cameras and mics...only to get them destroyed again, forcing me to give that run up.

Spoiler: A screenshot of said run. Minor spoilers: installed tech (click to show/hide)

[forsaken1111]

I just picked this up and yeah, it was a good call. I love this type of game.

[forsaken1111]

Doublepost just to say, fuck that little nine-armed son of a bastard. That is all. Anyone else who has encountered it knows what I am talking about.

Edit: Anyone know at what point you need to leave to not get the score penalty for health? I left at around 2000 microsieverts and got 'worrying health' penalty. Later I went much higher than that and didn't survive the return. I wonder just how random it is, and what the safe range is.

[Gabeux]

Not sure if I know what you're talking about, but let's just say that I got to understand why there are door controls and "horror" in the game's description.
I'm yet to ""beat"" the game (if there's such thing), because when getting closer to certain..structures..things can get messy. I do enjoy the randomness, though, because threats play by the same rules as you (modular and location-based damage), friendly fire is a thing, and the threats might be very active with advanced tech, very active with zero tech, barely active with ultimate tech, not active, damaged, and so on - every run felt different to me. I also only discovered that certain flora can bite only via Youtube, because in all my hours in the game I didn't bump into it.

Although I got frustrated at times - had a run that I invested about 4 hours in it, after all - the game feels fair and everything seems to play by the same rules...which is a trait I love.

I don't think the radiation limits are random. From my experience:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

1000 your character is on passable health and is usually implied that treatment takes care of any symptoms or bad issues
2000 is on average-bad in which treatment doesn't fix it all but you are still ok
3000 you may have your brain removed from your body and kept alive plugged in machines and whatnot - or you might keep alive in a really bad shape. Not sure.
4000+ I'm pretty sure you're already dead.

[forsaken1111]

Not sure if I know what you're talking about, but let's just say that I got to understand why there are door controls and "horror" in the game's description.
I'm yet to ""beat"" the game (if there's such thing), because when getting closer to certain..structures..things can get messy. I do enjoy the randomness, though, because threats play by the same rules as you (modular and location-based damage), friendly fire is a thing, and the threats might be very active with advanced tech, very active with zero tech, barely active with ultimate tech, not active, damaged, and so on - every run felt different to me. I also only discovered that certain flora can bite only via Youtube, because in all my hours in the game I didn't bump into it.

Although I got frustrated at times - had a run that I invested about 4 hours in it, after all - the game feels fair and everything seems to play by the same rules...which is a trait I love.

I don't think the radiation limits are random. From my experience:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

1000 your character is on passable health and is usually implied that treatment takes care of any symptoms or bad issues
2000 is on average-bad in which treatment doesn't fix it all but you are still ok
3000 you may have your brain removed from your body and kept alive plugged in machines and whatnot - or you might keep alive in a really bad shape. Not sure.
4000+ I'm pretty sure you're already dead.

Yeah we're talking about the same encounter I believe. That thing sucked.

Re: Structures, I found some big ones but wasn't able to get inside them. I also found that some things that look like trees (normal harmless tress) are NOT HARMLESS

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Yeah i found out it roughly maps to real world rad sickness but leaving at 1000 seems so... limiting. Like I only had about 8 artifacts at that point.

[Gabeux]

Exactly. I didn't find those trees, and they make damn creepy sounds on the Radio Receiver.
Also, want an epically creepy experience? Go hunting in a forest (which I only found in one of the 7+ runs) with a radio receiver on..god damn.

What I think might be random but have zero evidence of it, is how fast your ship can research things. It's on the manual that the more you research categories, sub-categories and specific items, the faster you research stuff off the same type. i.e. Researching "Optical" category will make Optical research slighly faster, researching "Laser" sub-category will make that a bit faster, researching the a certain type of laser will make same lasers much faster to research.
However, as I got more experienced in the game, I had a playthrough in which I had about 10 artifacts on Cargo waiting for research, with 4 being researched in the lab and the rover ready to go grab more. I'm not sure if I simply had bad luck of getting super-random unique and complex items, but even researching one type of item at a time (I had a bunch of Electronics that I researched in sequence) would take FOREVER...to the point that I lost my rover and let the game run by itself, only researching..which gave me 600+ more rads and forced my poor guy to give up his body and keep his brain in a jar.

I will only spoil you what I know if you get tired of trying things out. Because it feels really good when you crack it. One of them is really silly, though. I even tried playing recorded audio from 'Data Containers' and stuff like that..and all I had to do was to bring a weapon...
Oh, and those folks really liked cryptography and electronics (like IFF beacons, but not exactly that..)
The answer probably lies in research along those lines, but it is damn hard (to find the right things, solving is okay) and I wasn't successful either - got killed before I could try my solution. 

Spoiler: Minor spoiler: comment on structures (click to show/hide)

What is a bit obvious is there is a huge structure, the biggest there is. And there might be only one. I haven't got there yet, because every time I get close, something terrible happens...I even had all my cameras, microphones and radars destroyed while sitting right in front of it..imagine how I felt.

Also, you can flashbang yourself. I did it 3AM and that blinded both me and my character for a few seconds. And I'm pretty sure you can explode/disable your ship from the inside. Once I gather determinationn to try that out, I'll probably record it.

[forsaken1111]

Well I can confirm that you can certainly destroy your ship from the outside.

I can confirm the research thing too. The lab 'learns' over time. I have gotten some data crystals which give you a big dump of experience with one topic, and I have had some items be automatically at phase 3 research because I have already researched half a dozen of them.

I'll figure out the mystery buildings eventually. I have not seen a forest yet. I did once find a computer that could steer me towards something but I died before arriving so no idea what it would have been.

I would really like more fiddly things to play with on the ship. I got excited when I saw the computers during reboot had some other options but they don't seem to work (pressing DEL is supposed to bring up setup). I was hoping I could mess around with ship systems more.

[Gabeux]

True that. It feels like a lot more great stuff could be added on to it. I'm hoping the dev keep on dev-in' this game or others.

Well I can confirm that you can certainly destroy your ship from the outside.

I did once find a computer that could steer me towards something but I died before arriving so no idea what it would have been.

LOL, I shall try that. For Science. I did also find the autopilot thing, but that run also ended horribly. The worst thing is this game is finding some really neat thing and losing the game when you're just about to test it. 

I saw a headline and screenshot of a game called Deep Sixed that should be along SV-4's lines, but as I'm travelling I haven't checked it out yet!

[forsaken1111]

I grabbed Deep Sixed too. I won't clutter this up too much with talk about it but it really does what it says. You are the captain of the shittiest ship ever made. You have to sometimes knock vent fans loose because your oxygen recirculator is busted, or figure out where the radiation leak is, or... so many things. It has a big ingame manual on how to fix all of the ship's systems and it is extensive.

[ZeroGravitas]

loving it so far

what kind of scores are people getting? only finished a couple of runs and getting around 36k.

and what all affects radiation? should i be wearing my space suit at all times?

[forsaken1111]

and what all affects radiation? should i be wearing my space suit at all times?

Dev confirmed that wearing spacesuit has no effect on radiation, but he plans to put in a small reduction just because people have requested it. I doubt it will be worthwhile. As far as he has said, the only thing that affects the radiation clock right now is using the medbay

[Gabeux]

loving it so far

what kind of scores are people getting? only finished a couple of runs and getting around 36k.

and what all affects radiation? should i be wearing my space suit at all times?

My current top score is 54k, in my fastest most awkward run in which I managed to grab a lot of good, expensive tech (mostly artifacts) really quickly, somehow researched stuff damn fast with no apparent reason, barely got any radiation and lost the perfectly good run because I had no spare sensors.
I've never really aimed for scores. Never died on-site, but either got my drone destroyed or all cameras/microphones/radios/manipulator arms/radars destroyed, which renders it useless. So top scores were achieved because I was forced to return. Unless there's a pot of gold under the rainbow (I want to believe), grabbing a lot of stuff quickly while going to medbay and managing Cargo every launch/recall is a good way for high scores.
Managing that launch/recall time can be the difference between life and death IMO

Just noticed a new patch is up, with fixes for things I did bump into. And also: New button in Helm: "Reset landing zone".
This is pretty great. Although we can't pick a landing site (for balance reasons, I think) I lost two or three runs to dying before even touching the ground (never at the start of a game, but later on).
There was a particular run in which the threats had probably the best targeting computer along with a hurtful gauss-cannon, and they would snipe me from absurd distances. Recalling and landing near them was certain death.