I finished my Galactic Starcruiser cruise, and I have some regrets, they’re mine and nobody else’s. Some YouTube folks have listed their mistakes and regrets, but those are theirs.

Take Me To The Improv

Go Hard, you miss every shot you don’t take. So I’ve been a Renn Faire cast member, done stage combat, stage acting, and years of Live Action Role Play, but not only did I not go hard, I did not lean into the character angle much. It’s a muscle you develop it over time, and mine had atrophied for years. I do plenty of Role Playing in weekly games with my home groups, but not in character costume LARP. There were folks that went hard, and I envy them that.

I also have kind of resting scowly face, Raithe asked me if I was having a good time, I told him I was, and I meant it. Get me talking about something I’m excited about, and you’ll see it come out, but when I’m just soaking it in, I might crack a little smile or something. I’m just not outgoing that way naturally.

If you get out of it what you put into it, not going hard on the character interactions is a regret I have.

This Is A Recording

I brought a DSLR, GoPro and cell phone with a nifty camera on it to the Starcruiser.

I was so worried about the DSLR I bought extra batteries and another charger with me and the DSLR case was never opened except by security on the way in. I brought the same camera top the UK and Galaxy’s Edge West and didn’t need all three batteries I had, much less five.

I bought another 256gb Micro SD card and a 512gb as well, I didn’t even fill the 256gb that was already in the GoPro.

The GoPro I took some walking tours of places in the ship, and I recorded my Bridge Training. One of the walking tours was a little skewed because my open vest was not meant to be a steady-cam rig. I feel like a shoulder rig would have straightened up the video and made it easier for me to record more with babysitting the camera. Other folks did this and hopefully, we can all dissect the best of the Starcruiser.

My cell phone is a Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra with a better camera, I bought a USB C to SD card adapter that would allow me to offload some recordings from time to time to Micro SD cards if necessary. One of my fellow passengers reminded me, the best camera is the one you have with you. The Samsung was a workhorse this week.

Time Management

I’ve been to Cons where the game goes on all weekend, and at the end of them all the players young and old are generally wiped out by the end of day 3. It goes a little something like this, you check in to your hotel, drop your stuff change clothes if necessary, go to the convention part of the hotel get your badge if it wasn’t mailed to you for some reason. You may or may not have signed up for the games you want to play ahead of time, maybe you check in with the game organizers and maybe you wear a nametag different from your official con badge.

You go hard, you don’t want to miss a thing, you don’t eat unless everyone else agrees because you might miss something, you don’t keep yourself properly hydrated, and even as the masses of people start dwindling away in the evening, you stay up late with the night owls at the Denny’s or something because even though the game content has slowed down you don’t want to miss out on anything involving retellings of the day’s events, or getting to know your new friends, in this case, you close down the Sublight lounge two nights in a row. (tiny regret: the sublight lounge could have been a little bigger)

So as these things apply to Starcruiser, there are other Disney activities where the Magic Bands are sent to you ahead of time, and people can integrate them into their costumes if they want to. I would have liked to have done that and customized my name in my datapad ahead of time since I was sharing a cabin and didn’t get in line at the same time as the reservation holder. I didn’t find out until I got to the room that the Magic Band and my Fitbit didn’t want to coexist on the same wrist so a costume fitting would have been better.

Anyways people are checking in for 4 hours before the muster and while the first people in are looking around and exploring while others are still getting checked in, you can be clearing some of the early datapad missions during this time and getting ahead of the people still checking in. leading up to the muster and a bunch of 4:30pm training activities there’s still a trickle of datapad activity. It seemed to my cabinmate and I that the activity fell off a cliff at 5:30 for the first dinner seating which was noticeable to us because we had the 8pm dinner seating. After the late dinner, there was a little more activity and then radio silence.

So you have a bunch of people trickling in over a 4-hour window, and they might do a little, but it’s not going to be very much because in some cases the families with kids might have an earlier bedtime. More on that later. You check in as early as 1pm, stuff really stops at 9, I don’t recall a lot of kids at the Cruise Director’s toast. But let’s say you’re not running missions during dinner, for an hour and a half, 4-9 is 5 hours of meat and potatoes possibly minus 90 minutes of dinner. You get some more done in the open period from 1-4 which isn’t guaranteed. So let’s just say there’s room for improvement on the onboarding and day 1 activities side. I don’t really feel like I met folks in bridge training, maybe more at dinner.

FOMO and closing down the Sublight Lounge

So it’s 10pm, you’re here in costume, and maybe you can explore the ship some more if you didn’t get an earlier check-in and do some of the datapad missions. But for a lot of folks, everyone else has gone to bed, and we’re up all night at the bar finding out who our new friends are back on our home planets. Last call comes, you meander out to the atrium and linger some more like the old Denny’s parking lot and people slowly drift away to their rooms. Sleep is probably the first casualty of any con-like experience.

Day 2 a level set

On the morning of day 2, everyone has had time to look at everything offered to them so far, and there are events for the Batuu excursion in your datapad to remind you of what you need to do while on planet. Some of my fellow travelers had as many as 4 top-level missions on the planet, others I’m told, such as a First Order path player had only one objective on the planet.

Mine quests without any spoilers were;

Go to a location, do some hacking to make contact, there’s three hacking terminals in the location,you hack all three. There’s a complication, you need something for the character to use, so go to a location, do a lot of crate scanning to find the McGuffin. call the NPC, come back to the original location and scan another crate. the character says they’ll do the thing and the objective will be sent directly to your original quest giver. This quest pays off with another memorable activity on the ship.

Here is a McGuffin, go to a location and ask for a character, then you go to another location, exciting things happen, and somehow the McGuffin gets delivered despite the excitement. You get more trust and familiarity with the quest giver, but there’s not a lot of payoff and there’s no finale activity you get from this one that I could tell. However, the big payoff could be the exciting stuff that happens in the middle. There’s no quest line glue to this activity for a First Order character while in reality, they should be screaming at Croy at the top of their lungs what they learned while completing the activity.

Go to a location, give the passphrase, you’re given a token, scan it into the datapad, contact the mission NPC, there’s a complication, the character resists helping you, but will do the thing you need if you do something for them first. You travel to another location and push the button, you call them back, the character says they’ll do the thing, there’s a complication they need a McGuffin, go to a location and find the McGuffin. You call the NPC back, you never hand off the McGuffin, but the character says they’ll do the thing and the McGuffin will be sent directly to your original quest giver. There’s a lot of steps, but it leads to a memorable payoff activity on the ship and you meet some more people on your path.

Go to a location, go see the contact, give the passphrase, do the mission, exciting stuff happens, come back to the ship, getting the McGuffin to the Halcyon will be part of a follow-up mission on the ship, a memorable activity, and there’s a follow-up mission to that which is another fun group activity. There’s no quest line glue to this activity for a First Order character either.

A lot of people go to Batuu early, run their missions and go back to the ship, you might have had activities, need a shower and change of clothes after being under the Batuu’s three suns. Stuff really starts cooking at 4pm again on the ship. If you’ve ever been to Eastuu or Westuu before, do your missions, use your lightning lanes, eat your voucher meal, ship everything you need to back home from one of the three gift shops, grab a bottle of water from guest services and wait for the first shuttle back after you’re done. The common/received wisdom is you’re paying for a Starcruiser experience be on the starcruiser.

The shipping from Batuu is Disney’s flat rate by cost of the merchandise shipping, and I’m told it’s capped. The luxury shipping service on the ship is based on size or weight and starts at more than the in-park gift shop cap.

Coaxium powers starships, not cell phones

At the later dinner on day two one of our table companions was down to 13% on their phone, I loaned them my compact 5,000mah power pack and a multi-adapter cable to get through dinner. I had plugged my phone into the high-speed charger I had in the cabin after we got back from the excursion and my phone was fine. Then lightning storms kept a number of us stuck in Orlando’s airport for hours I ended up breaking out a power strip, and a high-speed charger for the other passengers at my gate because not enough of the power at every seat benches were actually plugged in. So I overpacked on gadgets, batteries, chargers and cables, no regrets on that one.

Yesterday all my data seems so far away

The morning you depart, or shortly thereafter, your datapad, all your missions, and comms disappear. There are ways to revive it, access is linked to your reservation so you need to reset the date on your phone to revive access. It would be easier just to state you can only access events, comms, and profile and they will be static after your cruise.

More notes as I have them.

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Paul

Evilrobotgames at Gmail.com