1. use the scanner on it... it's nothing you can repair, but it sheds some light on why the ship is special.
Meta commentary on game making: SJ-X is one of those games that successfully managed to use game systems, instead of story paths, to make something that seems a LOT bigger, more engaging, and more complex than it actually is...
That there is no freedom is nothing new, since everything is pre-established by someone. For freedom to be real, it will take years until the AI is capable of making the game in real time, not to mention the resources that would be needed.
If you make a game with elements of randomness, and plenty of systems, you will definitely have "freedom" of the player to create a new story every playthrough, without involving any AI... but you will not see neat "storylines" emerging out of this unless you have handcrafted these in on top of the base game. There is a lot you can do in games like Skyrim or Stellaris without interacting with a single questline. Making sure that actually works properly is of course a lot of testing and debugging, something that is smart for a small dev team to not get bogged into.
The problem is that even if it gives you the false sensation that it is random, it is not really since the parameters have been set by the developers, so it is not random, it is just a golden cage like Skyrim for example, you have no freedom whatsoever, just a false impression since you cannot change any of the stories, only follow one of the paths that are given to you, for example in the Skyrim civil war there are only two sides, wouldn't it be interesting to take control of all of Skyrim and become emperor, but no, you can only choose the layers of the storm or the empire, not to mention that the story is not even well finished since the camps remain active after finishing but that is another topic XD
There are still 3 days of waiting left, but it will be interesting to see what you have prepared for us, you always surprise us with good content and fun art.
Precursor or the system map from the first task?
You use it just like you would when you are using the wrench to fix issues around the ship.
On the face of it that argument is a bit specious, IMO: it's like saying you have no freedom as an individual because the parameters of your life have been set by the laws of physics. And sure, there are philosophers who
Note that I specifically excluded from my example the quests-on-rails that many of those games add on top of their world systems. In Skyrim, you can totally live the life of a normal Iron Age person, doing a job, hunting and making tools for a living, with many different outcomes and playstyles, without touching a single quest. There is even a "no hero" mod that makes this the whole experience... The argument is even more flagrant in Stellaris or Endless Space, where the base game comes with nary a quest (or event chains, as they call them), and you only get those from DLCs.
