Yes, I noticed them. Animated ball bearings. I might adopt one.
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Well, if it is any consolation, you have to die once. I managed to get back on track fairly quickly. You do keep the slots you open up.
Query: does anyone know? To progress the overall bar, we just take Polo the items he asks for right? At first, I thought maybe we had to die…a lot…but it seems to be the 3 items. I assume, reaching the milestone points on the bar will open the optional mission at the end of each stage…? This expedition is a bit confusing. I am taking a break for a while. 
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I “finished” the expedition, sorta. It was easier than I though. I got taking down the sentinels out of the way first, died once, then grabbed the eggs from a low gravity planet on-route. From there the rest was mostly a cakewalk because you get shield, hazard and weapon upgrades just for completing milestones. Its all downhill from there mostly.
A little confused myself but here is some insight.
You cant truly “finish” the expedition and claim the final reward of the leviathan frigate right now. You can finish all but the “optional” milestones. Unfortunately, to claim the frigate you have to have finished the optional milestones too. From the looks of it, its a community progress bar so the leviathan frigate wont be legitamately unlocked untill what I think is a set time by HG. I gave Polo tons of what he asked for and the progress bar went up 1%.
Unless im mistaken, it looks like we arent getting the frigate till HG says so. Why? No clue. Maybe it leads up to something?
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Permadeath is not for me.
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In case anyone is worried about the permadeath aspect, its not true permadeath. 
Your expedition/story progress remains, your expanded inventory slots remain and I believe there are some essential items that carry over but i didnt die more than once so I didnt see how many things carry over.
Also, several of the expedition milestone rewards give you several random upgrades to suit/ship/multitool, and you get so many that you have to sell or throw them away, many are duplicates and some of them are the entire modification(example: scatter blaster) Its honestly pretty easy to come back after a death.
Additionally, you dont need to gather many resources for crafting anything complex either so losing them isnt a big setback.
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Uhm… I cannot confirm this… Maybe I’m bugged as hell… ?
How is it for you when you die, does it restart immediately, or do you find yourself in the main menu again?
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I died after finding my ship, but before I repaired it. I got sent to the main menu and reloaded the save. I was at a different spot and my ship was too.
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As mentioned, I died to a bug about halfways through iteration 1, and all milestones (except for the iterate / repeat, obviously, because otherwise you could never finish the bloody thing) were reset. Is anybody experiencing something differently?
Or… hmmm… I guess it’s possible that completed iterations don’t get reset? That would make some sense…
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I have died three times now. Each time, I was returned to the main menu, and had to start the game again.
Whilst I did keep any Expedition milestones I had achieved, I still had to claim them again. All inventory / suit / ship / multitool improvements are lost, and have to be re-installed. In cases where that depends on resources (like chromatic metal, or cobalt), the resources have to be re-acquired. Many of the rewards you get are random - so when you come back after death, you don’t get the same resources the next time.
Storage space is is reduced to 1/10 of that in the normal game. Prices for selling goods are much lower than in the normal game. Prices for purchasing recipes and blueprints (those purchased with nanites and salvged technology) are 10x higher than the normal game - so a bluprint that would cost you 250 nanites is now 2,500 nanites.
Yields from natural resources (carbon from trees, ferrite from rocks, copper from ore deposits) are much reduced (half or less) than the normal game. Launch fuel will only give 1 or 2 launches per charge.
Oh, and one bite from a predator will kill you.
All in all, it’s a PITA.
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Huh… That was definitely not the case for me on my first death, but I guess I’d have to look more closely at the last state from yesterday. It was late, and it’s possible that I misinterpreted what I was seeing.
Yeah, that’s pretty much the normal game for me… I had a bit of trouble readjusting to survival fall damage because I’m a bit softened from past expeditions, but all of those are things I work around pretty naturally. Yes, a large predator is something to watch out for when you have no shields yet, but they’re distracted very easily with creature pellets which you now even get more of, so they’re really not much of a danger.
About the prices… honestly, I hadn’t even noticed 
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and I have to decide if I want to complete this expedition twice. Once on Steam and once on Steam Deck…of course, I have to complete it on Steam first. 
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Is it not syncing saves between Steam and Steam Deck? Or do you have (Dynamic) Cloud Sync disabled?
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It does save to the cloud and I can play my Deck file on my PC (actually, I assume the extra file that shows is my Deck file but it is time stamped from a week ago. It seems to lag behind so I am afraid to play it for fear of messing something up) but it does not seem to be sharing items from QS and previous Expeditions. I was a bit bummed about that. Seems like it should.
What did happen is my Steam PC file now says I did not complete the 3, 4,or 5th Expedition. I still have my items but it does not show completed in the menu at the QS store… 
(update: this has now been fixed)
It’s amazing what a little hindsight can do. I breezed through the first leg of the Expedition on Deck with little trouble and I am set up better than my PC file. As soon as I spawned, I ran toward my ship with lots of players standing around, noted that it was at an ancient ruin with an undug treasure awaiting, ran right past everyone and took a flying leap of death off the precipice. In a few seconds, I was back with my TM ready to go. Dug up a treasure worth 500,000 U, fixed my ship, flew to the space station and bought everything else I needed.
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Well I think I’ve finished.
Put a good number of hours into it, (with a couple of deadly fails right at the begining trying to get to my ship), but all smooth after that.
Ending has me a bit confused:
Am I correct in understanding that the PARTNERS IN TIME mission is linked with the ‘5 Optional Milestones’ & is also waiting for the community progress bar to fill.
I gather we are suposed to keep fetching stuff for Polo are we?
I’m a bit lost TBH
EDIT see follow up post below
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Yea my first death happened because a predator bit me and took down my shields and most of my health in one shot. i ran away and fall damage is what killed me. But after i came back and claimed an expedition reward, I had 4 shield upgrades each at 33% improvement. Didnt die again after that.
I think what helped me finish this one quick was that I claimed my golden vector ship, and I quickly had too many upgrades from rewards so i sold a few at the space station and that yielded a few thousand nanites and I was able to install two s class hyperdrive upgrades to it. 2-3 warps to reach each anchor point.
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I belive your right. Im at that point too. Seems to be a community progress bar.
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Iirc, Partners in Time has its progress incremented whenever you submit items to Polo. So you’ll need to submit things 5 times in total to Polo on your own (not linked to the community mission) in order to get that milestone.
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Yep. Thanks.
I just realised that.
It said 4/5. (I hadnt noticed that before).
Game was still running while I processed Tainted Metal so I just zipped off to see Polo with some ‘leftovers’.
Gave Polo some more dust & up came the milestone banner.
Now its just the optional milestones.
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I’m kinda stuck right now actually, I’ve done all the milestones apart from the optional ones, and the Storm Crystal one. For some reason I get an inventory full error when trying to pick things up, or claiming expedition rewards 
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