LAUNCH DELAY
DUAL UNIVERSE is a challenging space sim in every sense of the word
My first attempt to reach space in Dual Universe ended in disaster. I’d purchased a Space Bike, which is the cheapest space-viable craft Novaquark’s ludicrously ambitious space sim offers, with the intent of doing a test flight from the planet Alioth to one of its nearby moons. But through a combination of ignorance and ineptitude, I failed to escape the planet’s gravitational pull, and ended up crashing 60 kilometres away from the nearest transportation.
In Dual Universe, distance is measured at a 1-to-1 scale, and without the resources to repair my bike, I was faced with the prospect of a two-hour trek back to civilisation. Having already battled with the game’s byzantine systems at seemingly every turn, I tempted to bin it off completely.
After sulking for a bit, I sat back down and got on with it. And while not exactly thrilling, that long journey home proved more interesting than I had anticipated. You see, Dual Universe’s planets and major moons are not environmentally uniform, and as I travelled I passed through wind-sculpted deserts, lush forests and meadowy plains. I also saw many player-built structures, ranging from starting prefab houses to elaborate industrial complexes, all with spaceships parked nearby. At one point, I spent 15 minutes travelling across the bottom of a lake, and encountered several player installations that had been built beneath the waves.
It gave me a sense of what had been going on elsewhere in the world, and by the time I finally returned to civilisation, I was inspired to keep going. And this kind of encapsulates what playing Dual Universe is like. It’s a wilfully obscure, regularly frustrating and arguably unfinished experience. But hiding beneath the tangled mess of its many systems are moments of vision.
Broadly speaking, Dual Universe is a hybrid of EVE Online, No Man’s Sky, and Factorio, with a little bit of Minecraft thrown in for good measure. It aims to be fully simulated, player driven sandbox, giving players the tools to build their own structures, design their own ships and create their own interstellar enterprises that form part of a dynamic economy.
You literally drop into this universe as a lone pioneer, given a chunk of territory to claim as your own on the game’s starting moon of Haven, before descending to your chosen plot via orbital dropship. You then set up your starter habitat (I picked a flash futurist villa with its own miniature runway) deploy your starting vehicle, a speeder, and get a crash course in how the game’s voxelbased creative tools work.
From here, you’re theoretically free to do whatever you like, and start building your legend within the Helios system. In practice, you’ll probably corkscrew yourself into the ground figuring out what you should be doing. Dual Universe’s learning curve is more of a launch trajectory, with countless interlinked systems to learn at the start of the game. Building, mining, crafting, establishing industrial pipelines, two different types of flight mechanics, the labyrinthine Talents system that dictates a huge amount of what you can and cannot do within different professions. Even something as ostensibly simple as buying and selling items at the market has its own tutorial that you will need to run through.
SKY’S THE LIMIT
It’s an intimidating prospect, and the great irony of it is that what you should be doing at this early stage is very simple – breaking rocks. Planets are scattered with randomly generated surface ores that can be mined with your universal multitool. These ores are the baseline through which more complex materials are developed, but they can also be sold en masse for a small but easilyattainable income. Once you’ve got a few hundred grand under your belt, you can purchase standalone mining units that passively mine ore, and can also be ‘calibrated’ roughly once a day to provide a fat chunk of ore.
The problem with doing this is that eBay doesn’t exist in Dual Universe. To sell anything in the game, you must take it to market like a medieval peasant. And depending on where you initially planted your flag, your starting point could be 20, 50, even 100 kilometres from the nearest market, which is a long trip in your starting speeder. Consequently, the opening hours of Dual Universe are a pretty miserable grind, as you drive to the market, drop off a big bag of rocks, go home,
The opening hours of Dual Universe are a pretty miserable grind