The Long Journey Home (Quest)

The Long Journey Home, The Journey Begins, A Brief Stop On Mars, Preparations for jump, Destination: Alpha Centauri, FAR FROM HOME, Trapped!, or Our Long Journey Home Begins is the main quest of The Long Journey Home.

Description
The quest guides the player throughout the whole game. It starts on earth at the IASA headquarters.

A final crew member has to reach the ship in orbit with the Lander. Thrust up straight until the lander crosses the line where the autopilot takes over.

As a next step the player has to visit the Schiaparelli mining colony on Mars to collect exotic matter for the first jump to Alpha Centauri. Leave the orbit and thrust or boost towards Mars. The planet is marked on the minimap. Once the ship reaches the orbit of Mars adjust the speed with the thrust or boost such that the ship can activate the autopilot. Land with the lander at Schiaparelli Station IV and visit it. The location is marked in red on the planet minimap. The ship is refueled and the player receives a Big EM Tank and an Experimental IASA Shielding.

The player has to return to orbit and use the Big EM Tank in the LAB to fill the Exotic Matter Tank. It is advised to install the Experimental IASA Shielding as well, but not necessary to proceed in the game.

Now it is time to make the first jump to Alpha Centauri by pressing the boost and thrust at the same time. Be careful not to boost into neighboring planets or the sun.

A short video shows the first jump and how the ship gets damaged, depending on the chosen difficulty a component of the ship gets a defect and up to two crew members get injured. The player ends up in a field of broken ship parts and a mysterious glowing spherical construction. It is possible to leave the vicinity of the sphere, but impossible to leave the star system, because it jams the jump drive. The ship can dock at the bottom of the sphere (indicated with an arrow) and the lander pilot enters the alien structure. The sphere is empty and everything is oversized. To open a door the player has to choose a signal. Both signals "!=?-" and "/&%§" will give the pilot a Translation Matrix, which he has to install into the ship system. Now the player is able to communicate with other alien races. The door opens and the pilot receives a Keystone. Taking the Keystone shuts down the power of the sphere and the player is able to leave the system.

Leaving the sphere starts the Mining, Repairing, Refuelling quest.

If the player decides to start after the jump, the game will start here. The player's home system Sol is marked on the minimap.

The player now gets the freedom to interact with the galaxy and its inhabitants, can accept and solve quests, and upgrade the ship and the lander, while the main quest stays in the background during the following hours of the game. During his journey the player will be intercepted twice by mysterious Energy Readings (Cerulean Dawn), who will react to the Keystone with attacking the player.

Behind the second to last gate the player is confronted with ships of the Cerulean Dawn and %$^£, which will attack on sight. The last sector is always characterized by high radiation and the lack of peaceful aliens. There are no more merchants, refill, or repair possibilities, so it is advised to enter the last sector with a maximum of preparations.

The last gate is running on emergency power and can only be activated by using the Keystone... in theory. The Entrope actually sealed the gates of the surrounding sectors to keep Earth in a state of self-evolution. If the player has visited the Raxact horde they can circumvent the security lock of the Entrope on the gate and use it anyway with the help of a hacking device. If the player has no hacking device, they get access to the Gate Circuit and can let a crew member decide, whether to blow up the gate after passing it. Siobhan, Kirsten, Lebedev, Miri, and Zoe leave it open, while Malcolm, Alessandra, Ash, Benoit, and Simon want to destroy it. With the gate hacking device, the gate always remains open, even with a purely xenophobic crew.

Back in Sol the player discovers that there is actually a gate near Pluto. Seen from Earth it is right behind the sun. The crew receives a signal from Earth. Once the ship is back orbiting around Earth the player has to land and the game ends. The credits are displayed and the player can take a last look at the mission report.

"We will make it. We will survive."

Backstory
The Daedalus-7 uses a space folding drive, the Alcubierre drive. Due to its experimental design and the lack of knowledge about the target system, the D-7 relies on gravitation for its navigation, which causes them to always enter systems near the sun. To avoid a deadly crash with a sun, their navigation most likely uses an enforced shift from the gravitational center to spawn some degrees away. The only thing they didn't expect was that something other than the galaxy's center would have the highest gravity well past the solar system and would roughly be on the same axis from Sol.

The sphere has barely the size of a proper satellite, but creates a gravity well only comparable to a giant blackhole. This is needed to keep the huge amount of Ceruleans imprisoned inside of its core. Of course the huge energy density also increases the problem.

Many alien nations already know about the 'Forbidden Systems' and use according star maps to avoid aligning their jump trajectories with the spheres. Too bad nobody told humanity about them...

Trivia

 * Sol is the Latin name of the sun.