Getting Started in Pilot Quest (UFO 50 Game #44)

As previously reported, UFO 50 is a collection of 50 solid games made by Spelunky creator Derek Yu and a number of collaborators over eight years. It costs $25 and is very much worth it. It invents a fictional game console maker and studio called UFO Soft, and also an elaborate backstory around the games’ construction. It contains a Little Computer People-like garden animation that expands as you play, and even a cheat terminal that no doubt hides many secrets to be found. Half the games even have local multiplayer.

Many of the games in UFO 50 are deep enough that they could have been released on their own. One of them is Game #44, Pilot Quest, which is a nice little mixture of action-adventure exploration and idle game mechanics.

It stars Pilot, a character who appears in several other games in UFO 50. Pilot’s first game in the company’s fictional sequence is Planet Zoldath, where he must survive a weird and randomly-generated world. Pilot helms the Campanella, a cute little red spaceship that has a problem with crashing, and that also appears in several games. Pilot’s sister, Isabelle, is another recurring presence in UFO 50. Pilot’s the head of his own little invented franchise, UFO Soft’s version of Mario.

There aren’t many easy games in UFO 50, and Pilot Quest is challenging, but because it’s partly an idle game, you can make progress even when you’re not playing. If you have trouble with the Wild Area, you can close the game for a while and come back when your garden and alien friends have generated more resources for you. (Sometimes. I’ve found that sometimes the feature’s a bit buggy. But if you leave UFO 50 running you seem to earn resources at the right speed, even if you’re playing a different game in the collection.)

But how does all that work out? Well, I’ve prepared a bit of a guide here, to help get you started playing this, one of UFO 50’s deeper games….

Getting Underway

After a cutscene that shows the Campanella getting struck by an asteroid, you’ll be left on the surface of the plane in an area we’ll call Camp. Talk to the characters to learn a bit more about what’s happening, but the most important thing here is the big spinning diamond. That’s called the Moon Crystal. It’s an inexhaustible supply of Moon Drops, the first of the game’s several resources. Moon Drops aren’t very valuable in general, but they can get you on your way to collecting the most important resource, Moon Ingots.

Every strike of the Moon Crystal with your basic combat Yo-Yo will generate one Moon Drop. (Did Pilot get his yo-yo from Mikey from The Goonies II, Mike from Startropics, or Ness from Earthbound?) Moon Drops don’t automatically go to your inventory: you must step close enough to collect them, so if you don’t move around once in a while you’ll miss out on some of them.

1,000 (yes, with three zeroes!) can be converted into one Moon Ingot. But once in a while the Moon Crystal will drop a Moon Ingot at random. This is pretty nice when it happens at the start of the game! More likely though you’ll have to grind Drops for a bit. If you talk to the tree in the upper-left of the camp area, you can pay an increasing number of Moon Drops to grow plants that will automatically generate Drops for you. At first though their rate is very slow. It’s best to buy the first two upgrades when you can, but save the third for after you’ve got your first Moon Ingot. You can’t have a whole lot of most resources, including Moon Drops, until you’ve expanded your storage a bit, which needs Ingots.

But the first upgrade you can buy, the Hunter’s Shack, only costs one Ingot. It’s an important upgrade, because it gives you a free Meat, and after a bit of time generates more Meat that you can buy for 500 Drops. In Camp, really the only things you can do with Drops is buy Drop-making plants, convert them into Ingots, and buy Meat with them, so there’s not a lot of reason to focus on Drops unless you’re desperate for Meat.

With Meat, you’ll be able to explore the Wild Area, which is the main focus of your efforts. In order to win, you’ll need three Ship Parts that are hidden in dungeons in the Wild Area. But you won’t be able to get them for a while, because each hunk of Meat only gives you 120 seconds to explore it! You can use more Meat at once for more time, and in fact you’re forced to use all the Meat you have whenever you enter the Wild Area, but at the start you only have one Meat, and can only carry up to five anyway.

The Wild Area is a much better place to collect many resources than Camp. In Camp, you have to save up 1,000 Drops to get an Ingot or rely on a rare event; in the Wild Area, they’re common drops from enemies! You’ll want to explore the Wild Area as much as you can, meaning you’ll want lots of Meat, and fortunately Meat also appears fairly often there.

Like most of the games in UFO 50, there is no supplied manual, and little in the way of instructions, so the rules of the Wild Area aren’t clearly communicated. Here they are:

• To keep anything you find in the Wild Area, you must exit it before time runs out. If you don’t, then all your effort is wasted. It’s always better to leave with something than nothing.
• The timer is your health. When you take damage from enemies, shots or hazards, it comes out of your time. Most enemies drain the clock of 30 seconds when they hit you. Ouch!
• Hit enemies with your Yo-Yo to damage them. Most enemies take from three to ten hits to kill.
• Enemies drop random resources when killed. There are also jars and skulls you can find that give you resources when broken. Treasure chests drop a whole lot!
• This isn’t so important on your first playthrough, but will become evident if you try to load a video walkthrough: while the map is the generally the same each game, some routes are randomly blocked, forcing you to explore by different means each game. The contents of the caves you find in the Wild Area are also shuffled on each playthrough.

This game randomization only happens at the start of play: each exploration of the Wild Area doesn’t reshuffle the maze, so if you find a useful nearby cave on one expedition, you can rely upon it until you win the game; if you choose to start over then (Pilot Quest has a New Game+ mode), then you’ll have to learn new routes, and rediscover what’s in the caves.

The map isn’t the only way Pilot Quest wields randomness against you. The tricky thing about the Wild Area is that most of the enemies have of a lot of randomness in their movement and attacks. Your Yo-Yo only has a short range, so you have to get close to the monsters to hit them, and it’s easy for one to suddenly decide to bump into you or shoot. You can mitigate this somewhat by trying to attack them kind of on a diagonal, but there’s really no way to completely avoid damage. You should always be aware of how much time you’ll need to get back to Camp.

This will risk becoming a full walkthrough if I don’t stop myself here, so I’ll leave you with a few tips:

• Whenever possible, you want to use Meat found in the Wild Area to fund your next trip into its depths. Meat drops randomly, but treasure chests and strong enemies generate it fairly frequently.
• Once you have more Ingots, you can build housing for friendly aliens, who will help out if you build them workbenches. All of this costs Ingots, but they can generate more Ingots for you over time.
• When exploring the Wild Zone, there is a tendency to try to push your timer as far as you can. Resist this urge, especially if it involves fighting monsters. Every monster type has enough randomness in its movement and attacks that it could ding you at nearly any time, and the less time you have left, the more a 30 second penalty will hurt. Remember: run out of time, and you lose everything you collected, and all the Zoldnarks you had whether you collected them that trip or not.
• Pilot’s Quest really isn’t that hard once you’ve built up your Camp a bit. Eventually you can carry up to 25 chunks of Meat, enough for 50 minutes of exploration, more than enough time to clear out the whole map in one run if you don’t take much damage.
• It’s possible to gain more time while in the Wild.
• The dungeons have more than just your ship parts. There are secret passages you can walk through to find lots of resources.
• By completing a subquest in the Wild Area (check the caves), you can get a gun! It takes Moon Drops to fire it, but it makes enemies a lot easier to deal with.
• There’s a miniboss in the area north of the entrance that can tear you up if you’re unprepared, but there’s a trick to beating it.
• The dungeon layouts also change with each play, but not much.
• Somewhere in the Wild Area (different each game) is a Gear that’s essential to bring back to Camp, in order to start generating Science.
• There’s a spider miniboss that you should defeat once you start building up substantial amounts of Meat, that unlocks a new resource when you beat it.
• A new and dangerous monster appears in the Wild Area when you get two ship pieces. You don’t have to pursue it to win the game, and since it’ll probably involve exploring the whole place several times in one Wild Area run and fighting it several times you’ll want a full tank of Meat to even try. Beating it is involved in the extra “Cherry” goal for Pilot Quest.

To win the game, you’ll need to collect all three Ship Parts, and to build the Ship Fuel. Fuel costs 1,000 Ingots and 1,000 Science. That is literally all you need to win, but it can help accelerate your progress to build other items too.

Once you win the game, in short order Pilot will crash again, starting you over from scratch. However, on subsequent playthroughs, there will be a trio of statues by the tree in the upper-left of Camp. You can buy one upgrade there per trip through the game, that can make playing through again easier, or faster, in different ways. Try them out, if you want to risk another trip through the wilds of Planet Zoldath.

If you want to watch someone’s first-time, unspoiled playthrough of Pilot Quest (which itself eventually spoils the whole game), here’s Val1407’s 12 hour playthrough, full of drama and suffering: