...The very same Suricrasia which Suricrasia Online comes from. (So, thanks to @blackle for inspiring this). This was a fun adventure into Noctis, an old DOS game featuring billions of planets and everything I had ever wanted No Man's Sky to be.
The shipboard guide has a good number of places of interest for Suricrasia, but the first two random coordinates I visit on my own are just boundless desert. Then I decide on a whim to see what the planet's poles might look like, so I head to 275:001. And there I find, in a rocky desert pitted with ice lakes, a great monolith with steep sides, with a huge domed structure inset on top of it, perhaps having sunken in over time. And nearby, a second one of those mysterious tripod things a guide entry led me to earlier. I was absolutely amazed to pick a random point and find such a spot like this. I think it was worth the journey.
I added some notes on these structures to my copy of the guide, but it seems the shared one hasn't been updated at all since 2017. Oh well...
Installation hints (because running this on a modern computer was kind of hard!)
- I made a DOS VM in VirtualBox for this. Using VirtualBox might be overkill, but it's what I had already so that's what I used!
- Installing FreeDOS using the floopy disk image managed to give me access to `zip` but not `unzip`? Using just the CD worked though.
- Sending files from your device to the VM is kind of hard, so I downloaded Noctis to the VM directly, which was surprisingly easy because somehow FreeDOS worked out it was inside virtualbox and gave itself internet access automatically. The hard part was typing in the download link. Probably a good idea to download Noctis to your actual computer too so you can read the manual.
mkdir Noctis curl -k http://80.style/packs/zip/hsp/noctis_iv-noctis_iv_download_JmsLdos_onlyK -o noctis.zip unzip noctis.zip -d Noctis\
- Running GO!.exe doesn't work from inside FreeDOS, but noctis.exe in modules\ does.
- [Special 2023-07-07 additional hint] Take regular backups of the files in DATA (you can open a VirtualBox disk image in 7-Zip, or use snapshots, or something). Actually pretty hard to delete it by accident but better to be safe. This will also save you from freaking out if you, hypothetically, think that you've accidentally deleted everything but really haven't. From there you're on your own - attempting to work out how the ship works was half the fun.
