Truth be told we do play about 90% in cooperative mode. We’ll help each other plot out missions or figure out rocket builds. The real help comes in talking each other down off the ledge when something super fucked-up happens and you need to plan a rescue mission.

Mine: I had just promoted my gigawatt thruster at the lab on the comet (read that sentence again but slowly!) but I couldn’t run the thruster without a generator. Which I could not fabricate in the asteroid belt, because I didn’t have an M factory anywhere and had to decommission my working gennie when I industrialized the comet in the first place.

Soooo I broke up my stack and left the thruster and some other junk back at the lab and built a working tug out of the remaining parts. I flew that tug to my Bernal in the middle of the asteroid belt, turned it all into cargo, and then built a new rocket back at my ersatz Bernal in HEO over Earth to fucking haul a fucking working generator from fucking Earth.

Then we rolled for events. We rolled Glitch. That means you decommission the heaviest card in every stack where there are no humans present. Humans (and emancipated robots!) make a stack glitch-proof.

Hey so remember that lab I left behind? Yeahhhh, no human there. I’d brought my nanobots with me to protect the generator, forgetting the Bernal itself would protect me from glitches (being crewed by humans after all). Awful, just godawful.

It took us a solid 20 minutes to work out a rescue mission, which involved using the comet’s factory to rail-gun all our shit out into space (being a synodic comet, you can only land there 1/3 of the time BUT you can leave whenever you want), building not one but two rescue missions, and juggling outposts and rockets juuuust so to get a working ship built around that terawatt thruster.

Honestly, when you take away the fancy technical talk, the game is probably 90% puzzle solving. Figure out how to get from X to Y with these particular bits.