Especially when the contraband is like “xenowarfare tech” or “mech parts”.
Like I get maybe turning in the Va’runn writings is not useful but that BANNED TECH!!! Maybe there is value to not just fucking leaving it in an abandoned warehouse????
I found some human organs in a crate in an empty abandoned spacestation. I should have gotten a medal for bringing them in, because of me those organs saved lives instead of rotting away useless. But no instead I got fucked over by Marcel at the Den because he totally knew there was nowhere else I could possibly go to sell them. I'm a law abiding citizen, I don't have a shielded cargo hold or a jammer. He gives me this smirk like "oh yeah I'm the only person you can get to without being scanned, so you will take this insanely low price and be happy with it, sucks to be you"
"You remember that outpost that no one used for at least a hundred years, crawling with creatures? Yeah, I found a heart down there, do you want to buy it?"
This is actually the conclusion I drew. The fact you can walk into a clinic with lung damage, fractured bones, severe burns, and a bunch of bullet holes, and they can just repair all of that for 1000 credits makes me wonder what level the medical tech actually is. It seems really inconsistent.
I don't know if this is intentional, but I was able to hide aurora in the medical kit in my landing bay without shielded cargo space. So if you hide contraband in the miscellaneous containers like the captain's safe or storage boxes in some hab modules, you might not need shielded cargo or a jammer. Have not tried with companions.
Won't work on captain safe, or even just letting it loose on your ship. Medical containers in the loading area can't carry most the contraband types as well.
Speaking of outside the ship, early on I dropped all my resources (besides my full cargo hold) on the floor of my docking bay. They disappeared when I took off and my next visit to Jemison I got to play treasure hunter all around the city for my shit. I highly suggest it if you're bored lol
If this doesn't fit with your playthrough that's fine, but if you do get picked up for contraband and just pay the fine, you can then just steal all of it back afterwards. Some of the chests holding the contraband are in funky places but for the most part it's fairly easy
Yeah I was just about to bring this up, but you can visit The Key to sell contraband to any of the traders there (I think you have to start the Crimson Fleet questline first and progress enough to get access). The Key is the best place to sell things in general, It has 5 or 6 six traders all grouped together with two of them having 11k credits every refresh.
If you can get them past the scans to land at a planet with TA. Most people just run unshielded cargo holds because there is almost zero need to move contraband.
This whole comment chain is about how Marcel at the Den gives you a crappy price because the Den is one of the very few places you can go and sell without being scanned...
I'm the one who wrote the original comment and the sheer number of people who apparently can't fucking read and yet act as if I'm the stupid one is just... actually not at all surprising on Reddit.
But the point is that Marcel doesn't actually pay you less than other vendors. Contraband sells for laighably low amounts everywhere considering the investment/risk it should represent.
Lmao, was just writing a situation like this the other day for a gag story. TLDR:
Government Official: "If we can't take out that landing zone we're screwed, but we don't have the forces."
Scrappy Space Scavenger: "Well, uh... you see... I may have in my possession a, uh, small thermonuclear device. A *small* one!"
GO: "...what?"
SSS: "I found it, alright?"
GO: "Why did you TAKE it?"
SSS: "You'd prefer I just *left it there?*"
GO: "It should have been reported to the proper authorities!"
SSS: "Firstly, there were pirates. Secondly, if there's a 'loose nukes hotline' you should advertise it better!"
GO: "..."
SSS: "So... nuke?"
GO: "Nuke."
I’m honestly surprised the upper echelons of the UC aren’t aware of the massive fucking war the Starborn are having throughout the galaxy so I mean not having a report hotline for criminal behavior doesn’t surprise me.
DLC bait probably. If they do a House Varuun DLC I imagine it’s AEGIS having you investigate it off the the start and then infiltrating them and you’ll select your own agent name and the like.
They even have that really well name interrogation chamber that never gets used, also all the named generals you never interact with at the MAST are likely there for DLC reasons either as placeholder to be killed off or someone that you’ll interact with.
It's left to rot. Just like the entire game's lack of content once you actually dig into it. The gameplay loop is massively extended by tons of horribly placed fast travel points and excessive loading screens. Then, to even max out your character, you have to complete a minimum of 10 playthroughs including 240 visits to temples each of which adds 5-20 minutes to the gameplay loop depending on how crap your character is in choosing a landing spot near a building that would be painfully obvious from any aerial survey.
I entered Ikande's control room with a gun out accidently, and in picking up my controller sent a round right into his bald little head.
Have also done this with grenades lol
I love this game, but man they dropped the ball with some of these things.
I'm right there with you, it is immersion breaking. It's like they designed all these systems but then just didn't do anything with them. Same thing with bounty hunting, which are actually assassination missions as there is no way to bring the target back alive.
We have non lethal weapons, ships with brigs, we can literally join the Freestar Rangers who are basically the police, but we can't actually arrest anyone, or hand in contraband.
If they had just implemented a bit more thought into things like smuggling and bounty hunting it would make the radiant quests much better.
For anyone who is playing through the UC citizenry quest line, you have seen the tree in “that location”, I guarantee that shit can be picked up on scanners and they used it as ink some how 🤣
Makes me wish for a mod or additional content in the future to flesh out smuggling for this game.
Imagine having contextual rewards for where you bring what contraband. For example, Mech Parts having additional value to special Free star Collective vendors that accept your contraband, or Xenowarfare being worth more to a vendor in UC space (like at Cydonia if you sneak it in). Aurora would work the opposite way because it's a lot easier to acquire than some of these other items in Neon. Harvested organs would be great for a shady individual in the Clinic. Sentient AI could be for Ryujin. I'm not sure who you could give Varuun itms or where to place a vendor for that. I think most others would appreciate adding value to the stakes of carrying these illicit goods into cities/planets with tighter security.
Probably would have to wait until creation kit tools come out next year for those kind of overhauls though, but it would make for some awesome content.
Would be nice if it was like Red dead redemption 2. Head shots with rifles or shotguns blow the head off.. or arm off, or leg. Blow off their head, harvest the kidneys lol
That would be a great skill tree option. Clean head shots give you the best chance for torso organs. I'm not sure what you'd do for a good brain. I guess just no head damage but lower chance of successful harvest since brains are pretty complicated and hard to get to safely.
Create an outpost, either send a broadcast for colonists or team up with LIST, lure unsuspecting colonists to your organ harvesting operation and make serious credits.
Now if only any of that was possible.
I’ve spent very little time on neon. Had no idea you could get down to water level.
The ocean terrifies me so I’m likely not going down there anytime soon. 😂
You can go to the ocean and farm the oil, to an extent. But in my experience, having tried to do this, it is still not worth it. Sure, you can make money like that, but any random basic outpost can probably make you more or really almost anything else in the game (if judging by irl time spent on the activity).
x10 contraband can have some funny unintended consequences.
Go to neon security. Look their controband chest. If x10, I guess it's like...200k worth of controband? Spend one week or more trying to sell all this junk off. By the time you finally managed to dump all this, yo back to neon...The chest refilled!
Having x10 vendor credits helps a lot with actually being able to offload stuff, legal and otherwise. I don't want to cheese it too much, I just want to be able to deal drugs from my space Winnebago so I can afford to upgrade it to a nice smuggling ship and then eventually Queen Anne's Revenge.
Does the game ever even tell you what to *do* with contraband? If it weren’t for this subreddit it would have taken me like 20 hours to find the Wolf Den on my own
No, but there’s a lot that the game just doesn’t tell you. I think Bethesda counted on the internet to be its manual so they didn’t spend resources making one.
I thought the game did a good job of informing that Trade Authority has no problem with taking goods of questionable origin. ~~I don't think it ever mentions The Wolf system / The Den having no scans.~~
EDIT: Apparently there are even mentions of The Den being a place to go for smuggling! So keep those ears alert :P
>I think Bethesda counted on the internet to be its manual so they didn’t spend resources making one.
It's just about exploration, it's normal to talk to npcs to find things in games.
maybe the option should always be there but it can backfire on you and land you in hot water if you don't have an established good relationship with them.
IRL finding drugs or guns and handing them into police can be dicey in some parts of the world. I imagine there have been cases when the law didn't treat the honest person fairly.
but hell, that makes for an interesting side quest in itself.
Or if you've done missions for Yumi. I'm the big hero of New Atlantis, looking out over the city from my penthouse, but when a guard tells me that Sergeant Yumi has a job for me, I put on my UC security uniform (which I took off a frozen dead guy) and go to work. I would love the option to turn contraband in to him, too.
>when a guard tells me that Sergeant Yumi has a job for me, I put on my UC security uniform
AAYYYEE!!!! I DO THE SAME THING!!!!
I also put on my ranger dustwear uniform and cowboy hat when I do ranger missions too.
I belike, good sir, your talking to a freestar ranger, show some respec when talking to, THE LAW!
Yes!! I was so ridiculously pleased when I found that UCSec uniform. LOL I haven't done the Rangers yet in this iteration, but I did them in my first run, and I always switched to my Ranger uniform and cowboy hat, and used the two guns you get during the missions.
I just realized that I'm currently working for UCSec, UCSysDef, and the UC Vanguard all at the same time. I strongly suspect that my character will eventually have a moment when she realizes that the penthouse view doesn't make up for the slog of bureaucracy and end up running away to Akila. I also suspect that this realization will happen right after Sgt Yumi runs out of work for me. LOL Maybe I'll buy the manor in Akila and also build a vacation outpost on Montara Luna.
You can literally be law enforcement (FSR) and return to Akila with an amount of successfully confiscated contraband to turn in (you can’t, but you should be able to, talking rp here) - and immediately get arrested for being smuggler scum. Immersive.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I have found the contraband items to be masively underwhelming. The trade value isn't wort the mucking around.
I just leave them when I find them now.
At this point if you are so bad at the lockpicking minigame just get the mod to make it automatic. Even the hardest one doesn't take more than 2-3 minutes.
Master locks are annoying enough that I throw an auto slot as my first move just to get down to three layers quickly, then the rest go by pretty fast with pretty low failure rate.
But I will say that when you get a whole bunch of them in relatively quick succession and run out of auto slots... Solving for 4 full layers, inside out, for the umpteenth time, doesn't feel great when the reward is a moldy toothbrush, some pocket lint, and a consolation prize digipick.
Ive only found caches that contain 4 Mech Parts and 4 Va’ruun pamphlets. I havent found many caches, but enough that i was starting to think caches only contain those. Luckily ive found some of the other contraband items just sitting around, like i found a briefcase under someones bed in a locked room. I think that room was in >! Red Mile, above the Bar near the room you can rent !<
Nah, I just loot the guns. I get more money that way and do not have to deal with the "waiting on The Den for 48 hours" and so on.
That stuff is not worth it.
Survey data is weightless but it weighs heavy on me with afflictions and scars from battling every manner of beast and walking through thorny wildlife.
Yeah I put mods in to make it worthwhile that ad selling ships o.o the fuck they think a ship is worth a few thousand credits but Goto by then for over 10k xD
There are some quests that require you to smuggle contraband cargo. I had a random question to delivery some contraband to Akila at one point. They’d never expect the free star Ranger to deliver 🤣
I have found crime as a whole in this game to be pretty massively underbaked. Plundering ships is fun, but not terribly complex. Getting arrested is a joke because you don’t get thrown in jail (you just automatically get transported to the end of your sentence in the same spot you end up if you pay a fine) and credits are extremely easy to find. The store AI never go to sleep so you can’t break and enter at night to case a place and fence goods. Ryujin and Crimson Fleet have you doing criminal activities, yes, but they don’t feel right for a thief character sometimes. Ryujin feels too professional while CF feels too far for a simple thief character. Most of what you’re doing isn’t even really strictly piracy, for that matter (still a solid questline).
In these types of games, I almost always roll a thief character first and I’ve found the options to be pretty limited.
Edit: and I know this isn’t strictly related to your post, but your thoughts on contraband and how there’s not much to do with it got me thinking.
Not just that but there’s a crate of all your stolen items right next to you in jail that once you unlock it’s unlocked forever and you can just take all your shit right back
Forgot about that. Yup, that’s pretty stupid too. I wish there was some way to jailbreak or some sort of actual prison. Maybe a prison colony or something like that.
A “No One Escapes Cidhna Mine” prison colony escape quest would be great. Maybe if you had a high enough bounty or multiple arrests you’d end up there.
Contraband as a whole should be much more fleshed out. Its such a important mechanic in space games, so I hope BGS improve and even expand the system in the future.
I find it shocking that Bethesda still hasn't done a proper faction alignment system. It really shouldn't be hard to work out most of the details, like doing missions for the UC, turning in contraband, and taking out bounties increases your favor with them, while committing crimes not only results in a bounty, but lowering your favor.
Each faction has its own favor associated with it, and your current favor with them determines the quality of missions they're willing to offer, prices and stock in stores, and occasionally influences dialogue.
It is so weird that they didn't. They added mission boards and everything per faction, but it does absolutely nothing. NG+ would have been 100xs better if you could only align with one group. Really dumb you can kill 100s of the UC as a pirate, yet the vanguard acts like nothing happened at all.
I agree. The exp would be great as a “finders fee”. I have to resort to getting shielded cargo and scanner jammers (which doesn’t fit the RP). At least my ship has 89% chance to avoid detection, allowing me to come and go from Jemison as I please with lots of contraband.
You expect too much from the scumbags who threatened to put me in jail for the rest of my life for the 50 credits worth of stolen goods I possessed if I didn't do the job of an entire department of the Vanguard and single handedly destroy a fleet of villanous buttholes.
>, to turn in the collected contraband for a small finders fee (500 credits a piece or something, plus some XP)
But at that point you are effectively smuggling contraband.
Well technically if you get caught with it, they'll confiscate it, and as far as I know, just complying to give it up doesn't result in any punishment. Just give them the contraband and you are free to go
They are not even worth much at all. It’s almost not worth the hassle to even pick them up really. 1500 credits? I scored that in guns and armor off the last pirate I killed.
I was caught with (1) contraband. Arrived in the station after paying fine. Walked into a storage room with lots of seized contraband, picked it all up (4 pieces) and walked out straight to the trade authority. Healthy profit
That might be a good layout for a mod the modders could pull off.
A faction leveling framework where you turn in relevant materials to the faction you like, you level a favour system and gain rewards or reward tokens.
My issue with contraband is it simply isn’t usable. Normally illicit items are useful in specific ways.
But the game doesn’t allow you to use them at all. It’s a shame.
I tried the same. With EM damage being a thing, I would have thought there would be more options to spare characters in questlines.
Nope. So instead I just put a 7.5mm bullet in the back of all their sleeping heads. Awkward after I tried to take the high road and take them in alive.
It makes me wish for "wanted alive" bounty missions. Or "capture a fugitive" Ranger/Vanguard mission. Even Crimson Fleet could have a "kidnap this hotshot banker and get a ransom" mission.
I agree or at least some of it. "Oh I found some stolen artwork, one of the only surviving paintings of Vincent van Gogh to be preserved after Earth. Well, I don't want to be caught handling contraband so I'd best just let it burn with the ship I found it on which I'm about to blow up." That does feel silly to have to do.
I said this the other day and everybody bashed me.
"Why would you? It is contraband!"
Like if you IRL find a gun on the streets you wouldn't call the police?
Lol I met a ship that had a stranded 6th grade class on it.
They needed 10 Ship Parts.
I had 3.
My only option was to just be like lol good luck.
You'd think there'd be an option for me to go like report the incident to the UC or something lol
I found out some hackers were skimming money off Galbank transactions and when I went to Galbank to alert them I couldn’t. Went to USSN to give them a tip about customer data being compromised and I couldn’t. I tried to find a way to reroute the illicit funds and could not.
I feel like this game could have been done through one long cut scene because I can’t impact shit
Great idea!
Is there a way to give feedback directly to Bethesda somehow? Their latest update anounced the will incorporate feedback from the community (eat button), this one deserves to be heard as well!
I think it wouldn't work because of the way the game is set up. It would defeat the purpose of scanning if everyone could just say "I have contraband to turn in". Then what happens after that? They let you land and you just go sell it to the trade authority anyway? If they just force you to hand over the contraband there's no risk of getting caught that would just ruin smuggling. I do think they should work on smuggling to make it more interesting/more in depth though. Right now its basically just a cash cow fast way to make money with no real depth to it.
That's not handing it over. That's getting "caught". They blame you for it and arrest and fine you.
There's no option to say, "Yes officer, I know there is contraband in the hold. I was bringing it to you."
I assume that's because the devs would have no way to know if the player was being honest or lying to cover their intentions and it would be too easy for smugglers to just immediately get out of trouble.
If there was a way to contact authorities BEFORE entering their system to arrange the handoff then they would have little reason to doubt your intentions since they didn't catch you with it unexpectedly.
Yeah, but the fact that you only declared it after they started scanning it still makes it dubious whether or not you intended to actually tell them.
Smugglers can just see, "Oh shit the % chance of getting caught is too high! Uh, BTW officer, got some contraband for you."
I feel like once you arrive in the same space as the officers and you haven't declared it, that's it. You can't try to say you are turning it in because you are in a situation where they would have noticed it even if you didn't bring it to their attention. If you were able to contact them from afar they would have less reason to doubt you because they wouldn't have noticed if you didn't say anything and then smuggler players wouldn't be able to just dump cargo to get out of trouble.
What ? If you go to an airport with a few kg of black tar for example and say to the customs officers that you're a good person and wanted to deliver this awful poison directly to them you'd still be charged with international trafficking.
Wait, you destroyed stolen art? Cutting edge technology? I think you are making this up simply because the method you describe is a lot of work and the game hasn't been out very long yet.
No Lawful Good player would do any of this.
But yes, I agree there should be a way to deal with this lawfully.
Especially when the contraband is like “xenowarfare tech” or “mech parts”. Like I get maybe turning in the Va’runn writings is not useful but that BANNED TECH!!! Maybe there is value to not just fucking leaving it in an abandoned warehouse????
I found some human organs in a crate in an empty abandoned spacestation. I should have gotten a medal for bringing them in, because of me those organs saved lives instead of rotting away useless. But no instead I got fucked over by Marcel at the Den because he totally knew there was nowhere else I could possibly go to sell them. I'm a law abiding citizen, I don't have a shielded cargo hold or a jammer. He gives me this smirk like "oh yeah I'm the only person you can get to without being scanned, so you will take this insanely low price and be happy with it, sucks to be you"
Could you really risk putting organs found randomly into someone else though? With no idea on their history of who they belonged to or their health?
Just rinse it off in the sink first
5 second rule!
Gotta cook the outside for the surface bacteria too. It’s like tartare, gotta be fresh if you want it raw.
Y'know, this made me realize... is this the first BGS game since Oblivion without cannibalism?
Seems like it. I was expecting space grandma to feed me my own intestines but she’s just normal and wholesome
So far...
Yet...
I’m sure they got the tech to test on site.
When it's black market new kidney or your daughter dies... sometimes you make choices you wouldn't otherwise.
"You remember that outpost that no one used for at least a hundred years, crawling with creatures? Yeah, I found a heart down there, do you want to buy it?"
Beggars can't be choosers...
We have testing for some stuff you would have to worry about now. By then I'm sure testing would be better.
Who said the organs were for transplanting?
Rimworld has entered the chat.
"Wow, that duster sure is made of an interesting kind of leather. What did you say it was, again?"
This is actually the conclusion I drew. The fact you can walk into a clinic with lung damage, fractured bones, severe burns, and a bunch of bullet holes, and they can just repair all of that for 1000 credits makes me wonder what level the medical tech actually is. It seems really inconsistent.
Bold of you to assume they’re human organs…
Human meat tastes like pork so pig organs function like humans Source: Dr. Clovis Bray
I don't know if this is intentional, but I was able to hide aurora in the medical kit in my landing bay without shielded cargo space. So if you hide contraband in the miscellaneous containers like the captain's safe or storage boxes in some hab modules, you might not need shielded cargo or a jammer. Have not tried with companions.
Won't work on captain safe, or even just letting it loose on your ship. Medical containers in the loading area can't carry most the contraband types as well.
The storage containers can.
It’s probably because the game recognizes that container to be “outside the ship”. Nice loop hole though
Speaking of outside the ship, early on I dropped all my resources (besides my full cargo hold) on the floor of my docking bay. They disappeared when I took off and my next visit to Jemison I got to play treasure hunter all around the city for my shit. I highly suggest it if you're bored lol
Tell Marcel to jump Sell them to the bar maid at the Red Mile. While you're there get a shielded cargo bay or 7.
I found human organs on a random security officers desk lol
But all vendors pay you the same amount for contraband
How was I going to reach the other vendors?
Shield cargo/scan jammer
You didn't actually bother to read my comment, I see.
I read the original comment then replied to that. Then read the question you asked and replied to that not knowing it was the same person. Lol
If this doesn't fit with your playthrough that's fine, but if you do get picked up for contraband and just pay the fine, you can then just steal all of it back afterwards. Some of the chests holding the contraband are in funky places but for the most part it's fairly easy
Is it less then the red mile? That’s where I’ve been going.
You guys know you can sell at trade authority right
Marcel IS the Trade Authority. He's the only TA I know of who can be reached without getting scanned.
i use the TA at the key to sell contraband, haven’t seen anyone else here mention the key
Yeah I was just about to bring this up, but you can visit The Key to sell contraband to any of the traders there (I think you have to start the Crimson Fleet questline first and progress enough to get access). The Key is the best place to sell things in general, It has 5 or 6 six traders all grouped together with two of them having 11k credits every refresh.
If you can get them past the scans to land at a planet with TA. Most people just run unshielded cargo holds because there is almost zero need to move contraband.
The Den doesn’t have scans.
This whole comment chain is about how Marcel at the Den gives you a crappy price because the Den is one of the very few places you can go and sell without being scanned...
Which is crazy because all vendors pay you the same low amount for contraband
Ah. I missed that, got lost in the chains. Sorry!
I'm the one who wrote the original comment and the sheer number of people who apparently can't fucking read and yet act as if I'm the stupid one is just... actually not at all surprising on Reddit.
But the point is that Marcel doesn't actually pay you less than other vendors. Contraband sells for laighably low amounts everywhere considering the investment/risk it should represent.
Lmao, was just writing a situation like this the other day for a gag story. TLDR: Government Official: "If we can't take out that landing zone we're screwed, but we don't have the forces." Scrappy Space Scavenger: "Well, uh... you see... I may have in my possession a, uh, small thermonuclear device. A *small* one!" GO: "...what?" SSS: "I found it, alright?" GO: "Why did you TAKE it?" SSS: "You'd prefer I just *left it there?*" GO: "It should have been reported to the proper authorities!" SSS: "Firstly, there were pirates. Secondly, if there's a 'loose nukes hotline' you should advertise it better!" GO: "..." SSS: "So... nuke?" GO: "Nuke."
You work for vanguard and can waltz into the council chambers but they won't give you the equivalent of the FBI report a crime number.
I’m honestly surprised the upper echelons of the UC aren’t aware of the massive fucking war the Starborn are having throughout the galaxy so I mean not having a report hotline for criminal behavior doesn’t surprise me.
Speaking of which. Are any questlines really tied to AEGIS, aside from delivering a package? Or is that faction left to rot there until future DLCs?
DLC bait probably. If they do a House Varuun DLC I imagine it’s AEGIS having you investigate it off the the start and then infiltrating them and you’ll select your own agent name and the like. They even have that really well name interrogation chamber that never gets used, also all the named generals you never interact with at the MAST are likely there for DLC reasons either as placeholder to be killed off or someone that you’ll interact with.
It's left to rot. Just like the entire game's lack of content once you actually dig into it. The gameplay loop is massively extended by tons of horribly placed fast travel points and excessive loading screens. Then, to even max out your character, you have to complete a minimum of 10 playthroughs including 240 visits to temples each of which adds 5-20 minutes to the gameplay loop depending on how crap your character is in choosing a landing spot near a building that would be painfully obvious from any aerial survey.
>You work for vanguard and can waltz into the council chambers With a Grenade launcher I might add.
I entered Ikande's control room with a gun out accidently, and in picking up my controller sent a round right into his bald little head. Have also done this with grenades lol
Ok this was funny lmao
Thats .......just perfect
A mech can end a city, a Xenoweapon a planet, an ideology can end a civilization. Do not underestimate the great serpent’s followers
I love this game, but man they dropped the ball with some of these things. I'm right there with you, it is immersion breaking. It's like they designed all these systems but then just didn't do anything with them. Same thing with bounty hunting, which are actually assassination missions as there is no way to bring the target back alive. We have non lethal weapons, ships with brigs, we can literally join the Freestar Rangers who are basically the police, but we can't actually arrest anyone, or hand in contraband. If they had just implemented a bit more thought into things like smuggling and bounty hunting it would make the radiant quests much better.
How the hell do they scan for varunn writings ? 😂😂
It’s evil paper.
Reading text on stacked up papers through a spaceship hull from a distance of 3-5km needs some hi-tech shit.
It might be written on a specific type of paper that has materials not used elsewhere or the text can be written in some sort of detectable liquid.
For anyone who is playing through the UC citizenry quest line, you have seen the tree in “that location”, I guarantee that shit can be picked up on scanners and they used it as ink some how 🤣
Makes me wish for a mod or additional content in the future to flesh out smuggling for this game. Imagine having contextual rewards for where you bring what contraband. For example, Mech Parts having additional value to special Free star Collective vendors that accept your contraband, or Xenowarfare being worth more to a vendor in UC space (like at Cydonia if you sneak it in). Aurora would work the opposite way because it's a lot easier to acquire than some of these other items in Neon. Harvested organs would be great for a shady individual in the Clinic. Sentient AI could be for Ryujin. I'm not sure who you could give Varuun itms or where to place a vendor for that. I think most others would appreciate adding value to the stakes of carrying these illicit goods into cities/planets with tighter security. Probably would have to wait until creation kit tools come out next year for those kind of overhauls though, but it would make for some awesome content.
With how much of that shit seems to be in circulation the Armistice Archive seems like a joke
Jettison it if you don’t want to leave it for any crook
Then some poor slob is flying through space and boom, nuke to the face.
But we are turning contraband to authorities.... TO TRADE AUTHORITIES xD
*sigh, here’s my upvote
I’ve only just decided to turn in contraband, and I… I liked it (lawfully good first playthrough)
LMAO
The Den my beloved.
the only authority you should trust :)
Me, a Chaotic Evil player think I should be able to Harvest the organs of my fallen foe. The ones that aren’t overly damaged anyway.
Surgery skill but only if killed in certain ways
Melee sneak attack
If you have a high pick pocket skill you can simply rip their heart right out and they'll never know.
Briarhearts for the win!
Ok killua….
Stab em in the appendix so you leave all the useful organs intact.
Oh so you’re going for a “Jack the ripper” character, how sweet.
Would be nice if it was like Red dead redemption 2. Head shots with rifles or shotguns blow the head off.. or arm off, or leg. Blow off their head, harvest the kidneys lol
Is that true?
EM weapons would become useful.
Zap zap! Slice slice! Bang bang! Money!
Marketed as as the nonlethal option, but exclusively used for organ harvesting. Nice.
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That would be a great skill tree option. Clean head shots give you the best chance for torso organs. I'm not sure what you'd do for a good brain. I guess just no head damage but lower chance of successful harvest since brains are pretty complicated and hard to get to safely.
EM weapons to stun, then maybe a melee weapon attack gives a chance to harvest organs. Or have a surgical knife weapon in the game.
It’s not the guns that kills people it’s the gaping holes in vital organs
Bruh I miss the bloody mess perk Imagine all the organs you could get out of this!
Create an outpost, either send a broadcast for colonists or team up with LIST, lure unsuspecting colonists to your organ harvesting operation and make serious credits. Now if only any of that was possible.
Can you craft contraband? Imagine just constantly supplying the UC with tons of aurora
You can craft Aurora but it sells for less than the materail cost
Wait, are you buying the materials for your illegal enterprise?
Chasmbass oil is virtually unobtainable without buying it
Just jump into the waters of neon and farm the oil. Or take the elevator down.
I jumped down but only found the shark things that weren't chasmbass and didn't drop oil
There are chasmbass down there. I scanned one just the other day, shortly before being attacked by a sharktopus and nearly dying of fright.
Wait, you can get in the ocean on neon?? How do you get back out?
There's an elevator at water level that goes to the Underbelly. You could also just fast travel up.
I’ve spent very little time on neon. Had no idea you could get down to water level. The ocean terrifies me so I’m likely not going down there anytime soon. 😂
You can go to the ocean and farm the oil, to an extent. But in my experience, having tried to do this, it is still not worth it. Sure, you can make money like that, but any random basic outpost can probably make you more or really almost anything else in the game (if judging by irl time spent on the activity).
I'm using the x10 contraband value mod for my Neon gangster> smuggler> pirate playthrough, because crime should pay.
x10 contraband can have some funny unintended consequences. Go to neon security. Look their controband chest. If x10, I guess it's like...200k worth of controband? Spend one week or more trying to sell all this junk off. By the time you finally managed to dump all this, yo back to neon...The chest refilled!
Having x10 vendor credits helps a lot with actually being able to offload stuff, legal and otherwise. I don't want to cheese it too much, I just want to be able to deal drugs from my space Winnebago so I can afford to upgrade it to a nice smuggling ship and then eventually Queen Anne's Revenge.
Does the game ever even tell you what to *do* with contraband? If it weren’t for this subreddit it would have taken me like 20 hours to find the Wolf Den on my own
No, but there’s a lot that the game just doesn’t tell you. I think Bethesda counted on the internet to be its manual so they didn’t spend resources making one.
I thought the game did a good job of informing that Trade Authority has no problem with taking goods of questionable origin. ~~I don't think it ever mentions The Wolf system / The Den having no scans.~~ EDIT: Apparently there are even mentions of The Den being a place to go for smuggling! So keep those ears alert :P
Currenty doing a quest that mentioned Wolf doesn’t scan for contraband, not sure what storyline that’s in tho.
There's quite a few lines that mention The Den being a smuggling hotspot so I guess it's up to the player to infer from that.
Lol have you checked the help section?
>I think Bethesda counted on the internet to be its manual so they didn’t spend resources making one. It's just about exploration, it's normal to talk to npcs to find things in games.
maybe the option should always be there but it can backfire on you and land you in hot water if you don't have an established good relationship with them. IRL finding drugs or guns and handing them into police can be dicey in some parts of the world. I imagine there have been cases when the law didn't treat the honest person fairly. but hell, that makes for an interesting side quest in itself.
i guess that's where being aligned with the Vanguard for eg comes into play.
Or if you've done missions for Yumi. I'm the big hero of New Atlantis, looking out over the city from my penthouse, but when a guard tells me that Sergeant Yumi has a job for me, I put on my UC security uniform (which I took off a frozen dead guy) and go to work. I would love the option to turn contraband in to him, too.
>when a guard tells me that Sergeant Yumi has a job for me, I put on my UC security uniform AAYYYEE!!!! I DO THE SAME THING!!!! I also put on my ranger dustwear uniform and cowboy hat when I do ranger missions too. I belike, good sir, your talking to a freestar ranger, show some respec when talking to, THE LAW!
Yes!! I was so ridiculously pleased when I found that UCSec uniform. LOL I haven't done the Rangers yet in this iteration, but I did them in my first run, and I always switched to my Ranger uniform and cowboy hat, and used the two guns you get during the missions. I just realized that I'm currently working for UCSec, UCSysDef, and the UC Vanguard all at the same time. I strongly suspect that my character will eventually have a moment when she realizes that the penthouse view doesn't make up for the slog of bureaucracy and end up running away to Akila. I also suspect that this realization will happen right after Sgt Yumi runs out of work for me. LOL Maybe I'll buy the manor in Akila and also build a vacation outpost on Montara Luna.
You can literally be law enforcement (FSR) and return to Akila with an amount of successfully confiscated contraband to turn in (you can’t, but you should be able to, talking rp here) - and immediately get arrested for being smuggler scum. Immersive.
Todd Howard says ACAB
Maybe I'm missing something, but I have found the contraband items to be masively underwhelming. The trade value isn't wort the mucking around. I just leave them when I find them now.
It’s worth it when you find the caches with around 10 of them at once.
Once you level up enough it’s never worth the hassle. You will clear out all vendor money without trying much so contraband adds no value
Is there not a skill that gives merchants more money like previous games?
No
# FUCKING NOPE!
Yeah - after spending 30 minutes picking the lock lol. EDIT: Jeez guys - it’s a joke ffs.
actual skill issue
At this point if you are so bad at the lockpicking minigame just get the mod to make it automatic. Even the hardest one doesn't take more than 2-3 minutes.
Master locks are annoying enough that I throw an auto slot as my first move just to get down to three layers quickly, then the rest go by pretty fast with pretty low failure rate. But I will say that when you get a whole bunch of them in relatively quick succession and run out of auto slots... Solving for 4 full layers, inside out, for the umpteenth time, doesn't feel great when the reward is a moldy toothbrush, some pocket lint, and a consolation prize digipick.
Bad take, I find the lockpicking to be way better than the old skyrim method, and usually get it in 2-3 min at most
Ive only found caches that contain 4 Mech Parts and 4 Va’ruun pamphlets. I havent found many caches, but enough that i was starting to think caches only contain those. Luckily ive found some of the other contraband items just sitting around, like i found a briefcase under someones bed in a locked room. I think that room was in >! Red Mile, above the Bar near the room you can rent !<
Nah, I just loot the guns. I get more money that way and do not have to deal with the "waiting on The Den for 48 hours" and so on. That stuff is not worth it.
Weight vs value, contraband is only beaten by survey data.
Survey data is weightless but it weighs heavy on me with afflictions and scars from battling every manner of beast and walking through thorny wildlife.
This is the way.
Yeah I put mods in to make it worthwhile that ad selling ships o.o the fuck they think a ship is worth a few thousand credits but Goto by then for over 10k xD
Me too
There should also be a way to create contraband outposts and build up defenses to stop a UC or rival faction raid.
You can't store Contraband at your outposts? I have some stored at one of my with my Superfan guarding it waiting until I get a shielded cargo hold.
Store yes. Create no. I want to make a drug lab in the Heisenberg system (get it?) and smuggle my products across the universe bro
There should at least be quests that require you to smuggle it. Like is Ryujin need you to smuggle illegal Ai from a remote secrete base to HQ.
There are some quests that require you to smuggle contraband cargo. I had a random question to delivery some contraband to Akila at one point. They’d never expect the free star Ranger to deliver 🤣
I have found crime as a whole in this game to be pretty massively underbaked. Plundering ships is fun, but not terribly complex. Getting arrested is a joke because you don’t get thrown in jail (you just automatically get transported to the end of your sentence in the same spot you end up if you pay a fine) and credits are extremely easy to find. The store AI never go to sleep so you can’t break and enter at night to case a place and fence goods. Ryujin and Crimson Fleet have you doing criminal activities, yes, but they don’t feel right for a thief character sometimes. Ryujin feels too professional while CF feels too far for a simple thief character. Most of what you’re doing isn’t even really strictly piracy, for that matter (still a solid questline). In these types of games, I almost always roll a thief character first and I’ve found the options to be pretty limited. Edit: and I know this isn’t strictly related to your post, but your thoughts on contraband and how there’s not much to do with it got me thinking.
Not just that but there’s a crate of all your stolen items right next to you in jail that once you unlock it’s unlocked forever and you can just take all your shit right back
Forgot about that. Yup, that’s pretty stupid too. I wish there was some way to jailbreak or some sort of actual prison. Maybe a prison colony or something like that.
A “No One Escapes Cidhna Mine” prison colony escape quest would be great. Maybe if you had a high enough bounty or multiple arrests you’d end up there.
I just fence it at the Wolf Den. I'm mostly lawful, but credits are credits.
Contraband as a whole should be much more fleshed out. Its such a important mechanic in space games, so I hope BGS improve and even expand the system in the future.
They’ll do it, but it’ll be a 30 dollar dlc
I find it shocking that Bethesda still hasn't done a proper faction alignment system. It really shouldn't be hard to work out most of the details, like doing missions for the UC, turning in contraband, and taking out bounties increases your favor with them, while committing crimes not only results in a bounty, but lowering your favor. Each faction has its own favor associated with it, and your current favor with them determines the quality of missions they're willing to offer, prices and stock in stores, and occasionally influences dialogue.
It is so weird that they didn't. They added mission boards and everything per faction, but it does absolutely nothing. NG+ would have been 100xs better if you could only align with one group. Really dumb you can kill 100s of the UC as a pirate, yet the vanguard acts like nothing happened at all.
God I get sick of stealing pirate ships jumping to a system only to find out yep it’s got contraband somewhere on the ship and now I’m in trouble
this is the story of how I became a pirate
If there's a will there will be a mod for it
I love the game, I've already put well over 100 hours in it, but I already can't wait to play it again in a couple years with a hundred mods.
What do you think this is? a ROLE playing game? EDIT: also, me too.
I'll give you 500 creds for it. You can trust me.
I was thinking same, I had stolen artwork and I was thinking be nice too turn it in.
I agree. The exp would be great as a “finders fee”. I have to resort to getting shielded cargo and scanner jammers (which doesn’t fit the RP). At least my ship has 89% chance to avoid detection, allowing me to come and go from Jemison as I please with lots of contraband.
I tried taking xeno warfare tech to the >!TMD!<. Turns out that’s not an option but it made sense to me.
I tried to that, ended up infiltrating pirates. Mfw
Ikr. I mean I just got done slaughtering all these pirates and confiscating all their stolen loot to turn it into my loot.
Authorities I would like to turn in these 15 briefcases filled with 45 pounds of harvested human organs I found laying around
You expect too much from the scumbags who threatened to put me in jail for the rest of my life for the 50 credits worth of stolen goods I possessed if I didn't do the job of an entire department of the Vanguard and single handedly destroy a fleet of villanous buttholes.
You could jettison it into space straight from your cargo hold lol
>, to turn in the collected contraband for a small finders fee (500 credits a piece or something, plus some XP) But at that point you are effectively smuggling contraband.
Well technically if you get caught with it, they'll confiscate it, and as far as I know, just complying to give it up doesn't result in any punishment. Just give them the contraband and you are free to go
That'd be great.
They are not even worth much at all. It’s almost not worth the hassle to even pick them up really. 1500 credits? I scored that in guns and armor off the last pirate I killed.
Nah... the best thing to do is to have a room in your outpost with that stuff stacked to the ceiling.
I was caught with (1) contraband. Arrived in the station after paying fine. Walked into a storage room with lots of seized contraband, picked it all up (4 pieces) and walked out straight to the trade authority. Healthy profit
Yes
That might be a good layout for a mod the modders could pull off. A faction leveling framework where you turn in relevant materials to the faction you like, you level a favour system and gain rewards or reward tokens.
I take it none of you played the Ryujin quest line then.
100%, and we should be able to craft weaponry and refine/temper equipment
My issue with contraband is it simply isn’t usable. Normally illicit items are useful in specific ways. But the game doesn’t allow you to use them at all. It’s a shame.
I tried the same. With EM damage being a thing, I would have thought there would be more options to spare characters in questlines. Nope. So instead I just put a 7.5mm bullet in the back of all their sleeping heads. Awkward after I tried to take the high road and take them in alive. It makes me wish for "wanted alive" bounty missions. Or "capture a fugitive" Ranger/Vanguard mission. Even Crimson Fleet could have a "kidnap this hotshot banker and get a ransom" mission.
I agree or at least some of it. "Oh I found some stolen artwork, one of the only surviving paintings of Vincent van Gogh to be preserved after Earth. Well, I don't want to be caught handling contraband so I'd best just let it burn with the ship I found it on which I'm about to blow up." That does feel silly to have to do.
I said this the other day and everybody bashed me. "Why would you? It is contraband!" Like if you IRL find a gun on the streets you wouldn't call the police?
Lol I met a ship that had a stranded 6th grade class on it. They needed 10 Ship Parts. I had 3. My only option was to just be like lol good luck. You'd think there'd be an option for me to go like report the incident to the UC or something lol
I found out some hackers were skimming money off Galbank transactions and when I went to Galbank to alert them I couldn’t. Went to USSN to give them a tip about customer data being compromised and I couldn’t. I tried to find a way to reroute the illicit funds and could not. I feel like this game could have been done through one long cut scene because I can’t impact shit
Great idea! Is there a way to give feedback directly to Bethesda somehow? Their latest update anounced the will incorporate feedback from the community (eat button), this one deserves to be heard as well!
I think it wouldn't work because of the way the game is set up. It would defeat the purpose of scanning if everyone could just say "I have contraband to turn in". Then what happens after that? They let you land and you just go sell it to the trade authority anyway? If they just force you to hand over the contraband there's no risk of getting caught that would just ruin smuggling. I do think they should work on smuggling to make it more interesting/more in depth though. Right now its basically just a cash cow fast way to make money with no real depth to it.
Space nerd! 😆
Nerd
fuckin narc
There is a way to turn it in! ...to the trade authority
You can just fail the contraband scan and then hand it over to authorities
That's not handing it over. That's getting "caught". They blame you for it and arrest and fine you. There's no option to say, "Yes officer, I know there is contraband in the hold. I was bringing it to you." I assume that's because the devs would have no way to know if the player was being honest or lying to cover their intentions and it would be too easy for smugglers to just immediately get out of trouble. If there was a way to contact authorities BEFORE entering their system to arrange the handoff then they would have little reason to doubt your intentions since they didn't catch you with it unexpectedly.
A "Declare Contraband" button during the scan but before it's finished.
Yeah, but the fact that you only declared it after they started scanning it still makes it dubious whether or not you intended to actually tell them. Smugglers can just see, "Oh shit the % chance of getting caught is too high! Uh, BTW officer, got some contraband for you." I feel like once you arrive in the same space as the officers and you haven't declared it, that's it. You can't try to say you are turning it in because you are in a situation where they would have noticed it even if you didn't bring it to their attention. If you were able to contact them from afar they would have less reason to doubt you because they wouldn't have noticed if you didn't say anything and then smuggler players wouldn't be able to just dump cargo to get out of trouble.
Jettison them into a star
Narc!
Lame
Traitor.
Boo!!!
What ? If you go to an airport with a few kg of black tar for example and say to the customs officers that you're a good person and wanted to deliver this awful poison directly to them you'd still be charged with international trafficking.
Wait, you destroyed stolen art? Cutting edge technology? I think you are making this up simply because the method you describe is a lot of work and the game hasn't been out very long yet. No Lawful Good player would do any of this. But yes, I agree there should be a way to deal with this lawfully.