Crypto Space Commander (CSC) is a space MMO game on ETH that has recently finished being in early access. Players can run missions, go mining, manufacture ships and modules, trade, and even pvp in a vast amount of different systems.
ETH And Different Kinds of Currency
There are quite a few different currencies and values to keep in mind while playing this game The biggest thing for the movement for many gamers out there when it comes to ETH is the gas fees. While they are still fluctuating quite a bit they have at least come down from some of the more insane highs we have been seeing over recent months. There are a couple of ways the game tries to get around this.
CSC is a game on Steam so buying things from the developer’s microtransaction shop such as creates you can either go ETH or fiat money. When gas prices are insane it might not make much sense to pay $10 in gas fees for $2 items when you can just pay with fiat.
This is also one of those games where items you acquire are not automatically NFTs on ETH. Rather you have to pay a minting fee on select items such as ships, modules, or containers of goods such as processed ores. Once you do they can be sold on Opensea. CSC has around 17 ETH in trading volume weekly on Opensea.
You also have the premium in-game currency you can buy from the game developer or sell items to other players for it called Galactic Federation Credits (GFC). At the lower end, it was $10 to buy 500 GFC out of the shop. A lot of the early adopter players in this game have massive amounts of GFC and they prefer to trade with it on the in-game player market.
There is also the more common currency that you can get from running missions or even sell items called GRP. As a player starting this tends to be the currency you will be dealing with the most. For a while, as a new player, it will feel like it’s impossible to earn the millions let alone hundreds of millions of GRP needed to buy ships from other players. After a while, you increasing the amount you can earn and understand the rarity some of the end game ships have.
While ETH dose has a place holder in-game and you can connect your wallet to the game. I’ve yet to see items just sell for it in-game let alone be listed for ETH without having to mint the item and go to a third-party site like OpenSeas.
While this all might seem a bit complicated there is still one final value to keep in mind and you will see it a lot when mining or blowing up other ships in PvE or PvP and that is GALe. It is an approximant value in USD of something. Before you go crazy thinking you destroyed $1k’s in ships or mined $100’s in ore it has been wildly off when I played to such a degree I ignore that value. With recent game updates, they have tried to make it a more accurate value. The last time I played it felt like it needed more work.
Mining
One activity a player can do in-game is to go out mining. It has a low barrier to entry to get into. It however is not very worthwhile at the lower end of things unless there is a massive need by a crafter as that part of the economy is a bit lackluster.
With the basic ship the game gives you to start with you can mine in the starting system Sol without too much worry. Other than some NPC pirates flying into the belt there is a good chance you can destroy them without much too much trouble or simply and escape. It’s a rather peaceful activity.
These belts are also easy to find as they are market with resource beacons on the map. The first system has such a large quantity of belts to mine in it’s rare to see another player or find one that has been depleted.
The asteroids themselves when you are mining do not disappear when they become depleted. As such, I always found it worthwhile to have at least a basic GFI Standard Ore Scanner or better. These are given out in a few of the starting missions. Not to mention the market is flooded with them so they are quite cheap to pick up.
Just trying to find a buyer for the raw ores themselves is usually quite hard since so many of the lower-tier ones are worth less than 1 GRP. Most miners just go ahead and refine their ore which is done at the workshops in a station.
When I did refine I used the public ones since I didn’t have the money and resources to set up my private workshop to do the refining at. I always found it best to check the prices and refine amounts along with the costs before doing so. There can be instances where it’s just not worth refining the ore at all.
The real money in mining is not going to be found in the basic ores or even close to the starting system. To get some of the best paying and in-demand ones require taking a lot of risk and time. These harder to find ores are going be out in the fringes of space that are not connected to the normal gate system and are free reign pvp.
I was never that interested in mining so I may never know the true riches of mining in those far away reigns of space. Not to mention I just don’t have a ship that I felt would have been worthy of trying to mine in. It would have taken me forever to mine my way into being able to afford such a ship. The best option if I wanted to do that would have been buying one on Opensea if the gas prices are not too high.
Mission Running
The part of the game I enjoyed the most was just running missions. There were two different types of missions I tended to run. The first one being killed missions. The second type was transportation of goods if I had a big enough cargo capacity on my ship.
When it comes to killing missions you need to learn over time what your ship is capable of taking on. While the mission system does have numbers trying to indicate the difficulty I found missions wildly ranged in how hard they were even if you had an easy time with a “similar” rated mission number before.
I mostly focused on a long-range setup and being able to outrun and out range the types of ships that would be in the mission. This allowed me to take on much harder missions that I would have otherwise had zero chance of ever doing in the current ship I have.
Equipping a ship in CSC was also a bit of a different experience than I was used to. While you do have a limited number of hardpoints for how many guns you can have on a ship. Ships were more limited by how many slots they had and how large those slots where. Otherwise, if you wanted to have dozens of shield modules for instance, and had enough slots and the power to support it the game allows it. Creating a lot more freedom in how you fitted a ship.
The ship I ended up working my way up to a Corvette SE was by no means even anything big with its 18 slots either. I even earned it from the main storyline of the game being updated providing a better ship to fly in.
As far as the bigger stuff goes I would often see players running around in Tactical Cubes that they won from a Star Trek event that had 96 module slots. Even that pales in comparison to the Sigma Battlecruiser Dreadnought with a whopping 320 slots. There is only one of them in the entire universe. Some of these ships are so rare they can fetch a lot of money.
As far as making money goes running missions. Unless you get really lucky and NPC you blowup drops a blueprint which can be worth a fair amount to the right buyer that was not what I focused on for making money. While starting off the GRP rewards felt like they were something however 1k GRP here or there is nothing when the ships you want costs millions and you risk getting blown up every time you go out on a mission.
Instead, I focused mainly on the value of the modules and other types of items being offered for rewards. Some of them even at the lower level of missions could be worth 10k’s to 100k’ of GRP if someone buys them from you off the market.
The biggest drawback to running kill missions tended to be with the turn in locations. While sometimes you would luck out and the turn in would be the same station or solar system. The better paying once usually was quite a distance away requiring over an hour of travel. It was also easy to end up with a bunch of missions all with a different solar system to turn in. So you do need to plan out and be mindful of what missions you are picking up.
As far as transportation missions I usually just cheek stations for easy to turn in and run ones. If you got really lucky you would find one that had an insane amount of cargo that needed to be transported and it would be to the exact station you were already in. Nothing like getting a high paying transportation job for clicking a couple of buttons and taking no risk.
If I wanted to I could have gotten a ship that was more focused on cargo space. Along with getting a bunch of cargo extensions to increase it even further. The biggest downside however is these ships tend to be very slow and then you could be traveling for hours to do a single turn in. Not to mention they can take a while to enter into slip-stream for warming making you a target in dangerous systems.
Running missions was where I spent the bulk of my time playing CSC. I often just liked flying out and filling up my mission log with as many as I could. Then once I completed them setting autopilot to where most of them had a turn in and come back later when I arrived to do the flying around in that system to the different stations for rewards.
Manufacturing
Crafting in CSC looks insane! I did not have a big enough bankroll to want to play around with it too much. If you are someone that is more into making spreadsheets and working out costs and profit margins this part of the game could be for you.
At the core of crafting you need to have a blueprint to be able to craft the item. It’s however not just that simple as getting a single blueprint most of the time and having a high crafting success rate. As the manufacturing system is based around a mastery point system that determines the success rate of making the item.
This gets even further harder to do depending on the tier of the item. For a tier 1 item for instance you need 100 mastery points to have a 100% success rate. When blueprints you get are only giving you 1 to 5 points each it starts to get pricy. Even more so when the higher tiers items have much higher mastery levels where you may need 1k’s of mastery points.
This is also why there are so few higher tier items in the game at this time. The only way to even get blueprints is either off from an NPC drop which is rare or deconstructing an item for a chance at a blueprint drop. Making it quite an expensive put possibility rewarding endeavor if you happen to be the only person in the game being able to craft a higher tier item.
For a while, I wanted to craft my ship since I looted a Cruiser blueprint that had 5 mastery points on it from an NPC drop. Which lead me down the path of realizing that is quite a task to take on unless you have a lot of resources which I lack. It didn’t take long to realize I should have just sold it as trying to craft a ship is quite involved and beyond what I can do for now.
I was rather shocked at how in-depth manufacturing was in CSC. This is not just a side thing you can do. I can see entire guilds of players just focusing on manufacturing. It also feels like more needs to be added as not everything can be crafted in-game as of yet. Making it rather hard to acquire everything you need to make certain items.
Final Thoughts
This game has a lot more depth to it than you will find in a lot of blockchain games out there. It is a kind of game that will require a lot of time. I did not join any guilds which I have a feeling would have made things a lot easier on myself. I kind of wanted to experience this game as a lone wolf and see how it went.
I do hope over time the player market and economy as a whole vastly improves. While I did not touch on it much it’s a bit of a mess. Where it can be quite hard to even acquire an item worth much and a lot of things even after being listed for over a month did not sell. I can only suspect the ETH gas fees hit this game a bit hard with not as big of a player base it needs. It seems at one point items were selling for large sums of money when you see the very outdated “average” price shown on items.
Other Game Content
Information
Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar. Screenshots are from the game CSC.
