StarMade: The Miner's Tycoon

I'll start by introducing myself. My name is Zachary Kensmith. I'm 23, and I have Autism. Asperger's to be exact. I have few friends, and people bully me because I'm smarter than them. I am, at times, very condescending. I procrastinate. What else is there to tell? Well...

Yesterday I started playing this free game called "StarMade", which seemed cool to me(seeing as I was obsessed with space), until I found out something I really shouldn't have.

Event 1 - 12:32 P.M.
I got into the game and started the tutorial, and completed it after half an hour. There was very little music. It was very quiet, and I started with 5000 credits.

I immediately began building upon the ship I had made in the tutorial, and used what hull parts I had bought to make a small mining ship with 2 rooms; a cockpit and a storage room. The hallway connecting the two also fed off into the exit. The cockpit had all the ship's vital systems and machinery, and was consisted of a small 3x3 room. It contained the core, which was protected by the cockpit I purchased. The storage room consisted of a small 3x4 room. It had 4 power cells, 2 energy storage tanks, 8 engines, and 8 storage containers. I just flew around for 2 hours using my 2x4 tier 3 lockable rocket launcher and my 2 1x4 Antimatter lasers to mine up large portions of asteroids to find tier 1-3 minerals.

I eventually got bored and shut down the game. I thought to myself, "Well of course there's not much to do, the game's in early Alpha."

Event 2 - 4:12 P.M.
I got extremely bored when I found out that none of my subscriptions on Youtube had any content, so I decided to give StarMade another whack. I logged back in after getting the code-filled bootup screen, and came back to my ship looking oddly different.

I couldn't put my finger on it at the time, but I thought it was just my eyes decieving me, since I was so tired. I decided to go mining and see if I could get a space station set up on one of the asteroids, so I'd have somewhere to spawn if I died. I found out that I had bought the spawn shop out of white and grey hull pieced already and sighed. I had to either make it ugly with pieces of the asteroids or random blocks in the shop. I just decided not to, since vanity is a big thing to me.

I ended up spending around 1 hour more around the spawn area before looking for a planet to land on. I found a wierd green terrestrial planet full of craters and chasms. It wasn't orbiting anything, and I shrugged it off thinking, "Well it's only in Alpha, so maybe they're working on fixing this."

Event 3 - 5:37 P.M.
I landed on the planet, hoping to find some more resources, and began to blast away at the planet, finding nothing. I then noticed something odd with the planet. It seemed to be cyllindrical, like a hockey puck. I desregarded this, as the game was only in Alpha.

I did some more exploring, and discovered this wierd indestructible block that rapidly changed colors and showed random textures and images. I quarantined it and left, thinking that I would do some more research and find our what it is.

Event 4 - 6:42 P.M.
I looked it up, finding nothing about it. "Wierd," I thought. I decided to make a Hi-Alert light, so that I could keep track of it. I also set the planet as a target so that I could continue mining asteroids, seeing as I only had 147 credits left.

I eventually got back to the spawn and continued mining for a few hours, and accidently selected a rock as my target. "Shit!" I exclaimed, as I realized that the Hi-Alert light was out of view. I then decided to forget about it, and continue to work on getting money.

Event 5 - 9:13 P.M.
I finally realized what the difference in my ship was. It is constructed of reinforced grey hull pieces. This was good and bad for me, as it improved the health and damage resistance of my ship, but I did not place these. At this point I got scared that something was affecting my computer, like a virus or malware.

After several minutes of thinking it over, I reasoned with myself that one of my little brothers got into my computer while I left it logged on, or was in the bathroom. I quickly changed my reasoning as it would have taken at least half an hour to replace the entire ship, and my brothers would have only been capable enough to do it in an hour if they even knew the controls! I don't take an hour to use the toilet!

I panicked at this point, so I quickly shut down the game.

Event 6 - 3:10 A.M.
I decided to brave it again. I decided not to record it unless something else creepy happened worth recording, since just mining would be boring as fuck.

I just mined a few asteroids for a few hours, and nothing strange happened. That was, until my game crashed.

Event 7 - 5:31 A.M.
My entire family was still asleep when I restarted the game. I got the usual loading screens and all upon booting up the game.

I returned to find my entire ship to be replaced with red rock(which is dark-grey, despite the name), which was found on asteroids. I luckily found all my items to be safely scattered in the storage containers.

After around 40 minutes, give or take, I had finally restored my ship to it's original condition. I had shut down the game after that, out of fear of anything freaky happening.

Event 8 - 9:22 A.M.
I decided to boot the game back up, with my oldest younger brother by my side, through fear of getting scared to death. I continued mining and showed him the game. At one point I came upon an unusually small asteroid, just as I was explaining how the rockets worked. I began mining it out when I saw something that froze me in my seat.

My younger brother couldn't understand what was wrong, but I clearly did. The same glitchy block that I quarantined a few hours before was sitting there, spreading from the center of the asteroid like a virus...

I quickly hit the Print Screen key to snap some proof. Then I panickingly floated over to my ship, which I had landed on the asteroid, and raced to the cockpit. The blocks spread to the ship before I could get to the spaceship core to get into fly mode, and they caught up to me. The game crashed when the 'virus' touched my character.

Event 9 - 2:31 P.M.
I couldn't get the game working! I just tried and tried for hours on end, but to no avail. All of my younger brothers had all left with my mom to go shopping, and I was alone with my dad, 2 of my older brothers, and my 2 dogs and bunnies.

I ended up giving up and reinstalling the game completely, after deleting the old gamedata.

After a few hours, the game booted up like normal and I redid the tutorial again. The only difference to the first time I played StarMade was that the game was running very slowly, as if there were too many scripts running at once, causing the game to be slow to respond. I quit after making sure that everything else was normal, and proceeded to go and watch more Youtube videos to take my mind off of that damned game.

Event 10 - 7:42 P.M.
I got bored again and decided to try the game again. Oddly enough, the game was running at normal speed now, so I just continued mining and reconstructing my ship to try and remake my fortune again.

There were no glitchy blocks, and no oddities this time, and I thought it was just because I didn't go to the green planet again.

I shut down the game and decided to take a nap.

Event 11 - 9:12 P.M.
I rebooted the game to find that my ship was gone this time, and I landed it on the spawn shop, near the spawnpads. I thought it glitched out, so I disregarded it. I didn't get very far with it anyways.

I decided to try something else with the new ship I had. I was going to go and kill pirates to take apart their ships and fix up mine.

Event 12 - 11:23 P.M.
I found 1 pirate and attacked him. I got through his window and shot at his core until his started overheating. That was my cue to take apart as much of his ship as I could.

I successfuly disassembled the entire ship before his core overheated and exploded.

Event 13 - 1:42 A.M.
I had an adrenaline rush by the time I found another pirate ship. I was exhilerated, to say the least.

I began approaching his ship until I saw something that stopped me in my tracks. His ship was composed of the glitchy blocks. I fired at the blocks, knowing that it was useless since they were invincible. I then retreated back to the spawn.

Event 14 - 2:56 A.M.
"Aw Hell!" I exclaimed, as I approached the spawn area. I had come back with the pirate still pursuing me only to find that the entire spawn was made of glitchy blocks.

On impulse, I activated the gravity module on my ship and jumped out. Just in time too. The pirate had rammed my ship, infecting it with whatever glitchy virus it had. The gravity module I activated gave me a head start on my long descent away from the spawn.

Event 15 - 4:23 A.M.
I was falling to no avail, as the pirate ship caught up to me and touched me, causing the game to crash again. I reinstalled it yet again, and rebooted it to find that it was all normal again. This time, thinking with my head, I skipped the tutorial and proceeded to try to close the game again. I got to the menu, only to find that the "Exit Game" key was greyed out. The menu automatically closed and what seemed like a million errors popped up, which read: "YOU WILL NOT LEAVE"

At this point I was trying to open task manager to close it. I stopped when I saw in the chat: "What are you doing?! Don't leave me here, you asshole!" After that I tried to close it with task manager even faster. My computer started to lag and task manager froze and became unresponsive. In the chat, whoever sent the previous message had said, "See? I own you now. You are mine!"

I started to freak out, as I had literally no control of my computer at this point. The mouse started spazzing out, the character started moving at rapid speeds everywhere, and the screen began to spaz out as well!

I said, "Fuck this!", and pulled out the battery, resetting the computer entirely. The computer wouldn't boot up after that, indicating that it couldn't access the hard drive. I ended up buying a new hard drive, with more disk space, and I never went NEAR the StarMade launcher again. Strangely enough, the StarMade launcher was on my new hard drive too. I couldn't ever delete it or move it, and it always remained just sitting there, in the middle of my desktop, beckoning me to launch it again.