This week, we’ve been streaming Star Wars™: Journey to Batuu gameplay on our Twitch channel. My Sim, Clementine, has been working up the ranks of The Resistance, while moza has been taking her Sim, Callie, through the First Order.
After her first trip to Batuu, I realised it’d be helpful for Clementine to work on her rocket science skills!
What’s in the pack? CAS and Build/Buy Items
We started off by looking through CAS. There’s plenty to see there, both items that are very obviously Star Wars themed and those that could be blended together with regular CAS items. If you want to see all the new items, you can unlock them for the current Sim using the cheat cas.unlockbytag GP09 – just be aware that once unlocked you can’t re-lock them, so if you do want to later unlock them through gameplay I’d recommend checking the clothes out on a different Sim first so the new clothes remain locked for your Sim.
At the end of our first stream this week, we also took a look through Build/Buy Mode. There’s actually lots of items there that would work for a steampunk style build, and the lights have an almost Art Deco feel, so if you like to build in those styles but don’t like Star Wars, you might want to consider keeping an eye out for this pack on sale.
To Batuu!
Next, we headed to Batuu. It’s a vacation destination like Granite Falls, but you don’t need to pay to visit, and you can visit for as long as you like – just an afternoon, or for weeks at a time.
The world has 3 areas. The Black Spire Outpost is where you’ll find Oga’s Cantina, a couple of eateries and shops, and a little dwelling where you can change your clothes, freshen up, sleep, and even woohoo. You’ll also find The Millennium Falcon there. The First Order District is the place to go if you want to join The First Order, obviously. It’s also where you can buy yourself a droid, and there’s a TIE Echelon fighter which you can fly in if you join the First Order. If you’d rather join the Resistance you’ll want to head to the Resistance camp. There’s a cave to explore here, plenty of tents to sleep in, and an X-Wing which, again, you can fly if you join The Resistance.
When we first arrived in Batuu, Clementine was given a little introductory mission which helped us to learn our way around the area. Once we’d completed that, we headed to the Resistance Camp and found our first Resistance mission:
The first mission essentially involved some basic spying in the First Order district. We had to speak to Stormtroopers, survey a supply crate, and “analyze” the TIE fighter found in the district. Speaking to Stormtroopers and analyzing the TIE fighter were pretty simple tasks, but when we tried to survey the supply crate we were spotted by Lt Agnon and questioned. This is about when we realised that there was a bit of a stealth element to some of these new missions! Turns out you can’t just blatantly survey a supply crate directly in front of First Order officers and expect to be ignored.
But once we found a more discreetly placed supply crate we easily scanned it, and we’d completed our first mission. This raised our reputation with the Resistance, and decreased it by the same amount with the First Order.
With our first mission under our belt, we spent some time seeing to our basic needs. We freshened up back at the outpost, and spent some time dancing to DJ-R3X. I’ll admit as much as DJ-R3X made me smile at first, with subsequent missions forcing me to the Cantina, I began to find him a little obnoxious and had to turn the “object music” down a bit.
Feeling refreshed, we returned to the Resistance camp to pick up another mission. Our next mission involved “slicing” some control panels in the First Order District. Once again, stealth was key here. Each time before we attempted to mess with the panel, we’d have to check around for guards. Initially, we were quite unsuccessful with this task, and we did get arrested a few times before we got the hang of it.
We also had to hack the Comm Tower for this mission – with a little help from chat we located it in the middle of a courtyard, looking like some kind of sculpture. Eventually, triumphant, we returned to the resistance camp again, turned our mission in and collected a new one. The next mission was excitingly named: “Forest Flight”. For this mission, we had to hack some supply crates and loot from scrap piles to find X-Wing parts. Again, we found ourselves getting in trouble with the First Order as we hacked crates in the Outpost.
And how do you repair an X-Wing? If Clementine had any rocket science skill she might have had a clue, instead she rather unconvincingly applied heat to the spacecraft, then took to the skies! Once she was in the air, a series of chance card / choose your adventure style pop-ups appeared. But on the first of these it became obvious that we would have benefited from having some rocket science skill before flying a spacecraft.
We picked up one final mission, similar to one we’d done earlier where we had to slice control panels. This time we did so with much greater success and fewer arrests!
Skilling Up
Over the next couple of days before playing Clementine on stream again, I spent some time building skills – charisma, fitness, programming and rocket science. These are the skills I’d recommend building before you head to Batuu if you want your Sim to have a serious “career” in the resistance or the First Order. That means if you’re an astronaut, an athlete, on the officer branch of the military career, or on the entrepreneur branch of the tech guru career, you should already have some of the skills you need to succeed in Batuu.
We returned to the Resistance Camp when we arrived back in Batuu. Here, we saw Rey for the first time and were amused and bemused by her voice. Part of me is delighted that they gave her a custom voice to make her unique, but also… part of me just finds that it grates a little. Maybe it’ll grow on me and I’ll find it less grating with time! (I hope so…)
These initially involved collecting items from crates and speaking to people, but then we picked up a more complex mission which once again involved hacking control panels. So, we finally bought ourselves a droid, who we named BB-PLZ. This cost us 1000 galactic credits and 3 scrap, but proved to be invaluable. Not only could he hack some of these panels for us, removing our risk of being arrested, but he could also distract the officers while we hacked.
With our rank in the Resistance reasonably increased, we decided to try some Scoundrel missions. Initially these were straightforward, starting out with a simple game of Sabacc and then some more splicing. One mission involved a flight on the Millennium Falcon, so our new rocket science skills were put to good use!
Another mission involved gathering data and compiling an information report. With this information report in hand we could choose who to hand it in to – the Resistance, the First Order, or the Scoundrels. Upon turning it in to the Resistance, we were able to complete the mission, gaining reputation with both the Resistance and the Scoundrels.
That pushed us up to rank 3 in the Resistance, where a new chain of missions becomes available – these follow a little subplot of their own. We worked through these, some of the actions being more slicing control panels and hacking crates, and others involving interactions with other Sims – such as giving them drinks until they revealed their security passcode!
A couple more Resistance missions pushed us up agonisingly close to Rank 4, but we didn’t quite get there on this outing.
In our final stream in Batuu, we worked through more scoundrel story missions which involved several outings in the Millennium Falcon! After much important experimentation, we found the coolest angle to watch the takeoff from – and it honestly never gets old watching it.
Finally we levelled up our Resistance and Scoundrel levels all the way. With these ranks, we were allowed to fly the spacecraft associated with each faction whenever we wanted. We also earned a replica of each ship, so we now have a cool model X-Wing and Millennium Falcon for home!
I’ve really enjoyed playing with this pack. I know this isn’t a pack that everyone was delighted about but I really seriously was, and I was honestly a little confused by the reactions I was seeing within the community. If you don’t like Star Wars, you probably won’t like this pack. If you do, I think there’s a lot here to love. Having our own little BB droid following us around is not getting old any time soon, and flying the Millennium Falcon definitely won’t.
If you enjoyed our Batuu streams, you might enjoy our regular Sims streams – check out our schedule on Twitch!
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