Missions explore aspects of the story behind Tau Station.
All known missions
Note: Sort order: level, release date, mission name.
There is also the option to accept some Discreet Work or perform Side Jobs.
Description
You’re exploring the shipyard of København Station when you bump into Kane, the distraught owner of Citizen Shipbuilders. He’s recently challenged his rival, Chamberlain, to a contest to prove who can build the fastest ship, but now the day of the race has come and he knows he’s going to lose. He doesn’t really care how you do it, but he needs you to get the race called off and will pay you a reward to make it happen.
As you navigate Tau Station, your character will be offered missions. There’s nothing really unusual there; missions are pretty common in MMOs. A non-player character (NPC) has a problem and hires you to solve it. You do the work, get your pay and experience points, and move on. But we see every mission, even the short ones, as a chance for the player to interact with the game world and make meaningful choices through their character.
A mission is a story, and Tau Station is a game built around stories.
Some are fairly short and straightforward like the one described above, “Competitive Edge.” It’s just a side mission, a brief interaction with an NPC that gives you a little insight into their life and the background of the space station you’re on. Other story plots are longer and more involved, spreading out over several missions and stations. They may give you clues about what caused the Catastrophe, or delve into the differences between the game’s Consortium and Gaule governments. The missions in the game will take many forms, and with a setting as rich as Tau Station’s there’s no shortage of story ideas and themes to explore. What they all have in common, even the side missions, is that they involve player choice.
We think that stories in games are the most fun when you have agency as a player and can affect the course of the action. We also think those kinds of stories are the most fun to write, so it works out well for everyone. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the occasional “fetch” mission, such as when an NPC hires you to go to the next station over, pick up an item, and bring it back for them. Tau Station will offer some missions along those lines. But in most of the missions we write we’re striving to give you a more interesting, interactive, experience than that.
In some missions your goal is clear: the NPC needs you to do something fairly specific. But how you accomplish your task will be up to you, based on how you want to play your character. “Competitive Edge” asks you to decide how to go about getting the race canceled. If you like to be reasonable or have a high Social stat, you might appeal to Chamberlain’s better nature by reminding her of all the people who will lose their jobs if Kane’s shipyard goes under. Or maybe you’re feeling a bit more forceful and will use your Strength to convince her to call off the race through intimidation or combat. To keep things interesting, sometimes we throw in hidden options for your character that you’ll only find if you go looking. After all, Chamberlain can’t win the race if she doesn’t have a working ship …
At other times your choice will be less about how to do something and more about what you should do. You’ll be asked to make tough decisions, and the path that you take may lead to very different outcomes for you and the NPCs involved. Perhaps the NPC that you thought was the victim turns out to be the aggressor and you must decide whether or not to keep helping them, even at the expense of others. Or you could be hired for what looks like a totally legitimate job and discover that you’ve gotten mixed up in some criminal activity. Should you take the risk and finish the job? Turn the criminals over to station security? It will be your call. But be prepared to deal with the results – your actions in the missions can affect how much you get paid, your reputation with political factions, what information you learn, even who around you lives and dies.
And sometimes, as in life, you’re going to be presented with multiple options but with no clearly comfortable way forward or happy ending in sight. In a post-Catastrophe galaxy where most people are just trying to survive, it isn’t always possible to be the good guy and there may be no moral choice you can make. At these moments it really comes down to how you perceive your character and the game world around you. Your character will come to life through the choices and decisions you make.
What all this means for the game is that no two players are going to have the same exact experience. The actions you take and the choices you make in the missions can lead to very different outcomes, and those outcomes can affect your character elsewhere in the game and in other missions that you take in the future. You might find yourself in the game’s chat room discussing a mission with a friend and discover that you each got a different piece of information or reward out of it. Their ending to “Competitive Edge” might have been completely different than yours, and that’s part of what makes Tau Station so much fun.
Mission Chapters
Book 1: Recovery
Systems: Sol, Alpha Centauri
An awakening of sorts, stumbling through darkness within more darkness. We hunt among the ashes for clues that might explain the Catastrophe. What happened? Will it happen again? Did we…deserve it? We hunt for clues about who we are…
Book 2: Sequencing
Systems: Barnard's Star, Sirius, L 726-8, Ross 154, Ross 248, Epsilon Eridani, Lacaille 9352, Ross 128, L 789-6, Procyon, Tau Ceti, YZ Ceti, Luyten's Star, L 143-23
Book 3: Run
Book 4: Fault Tolerance
Book 5: Daemons
Book 6: Convergence
Kickstarter
I like a good story well told. That is the reason I am sometimes forced to tell them myself.
Mark TwainOne of the core pillars of Tau Station are its missions. They are the main medium by which you can experience the many stories of our galaxy, how we introduce you to its denizens and engage you with their struggles, their passions, fears, their loves and laughs. Our missions weave throughout the systems and their stations, tying in themes and genres while guiding you through each narrative.
“A good story well told,” is very much how we approach the crafting of our missions. We want them each to feel like a unique short story that takes you on a journey, be it of emotion, humor, adventure, or the like. We craft them with the user experience very much at the forefront of our design, wanting to engage you in the most satisfying way possible. Aspects such as subtext, agency, and conflict are some of the lenses through which we view and review our missions many times over before we make them live.
There are a number of mission types that each focus on a part of Tau Station that we want to help you delve into. What we refer to in game as Missions tell a variety of tales and tend to explore the thematic focus of the station they originate on. They are the people’s stories, introducing you to characters and seeking to engage you in a number of ways. Some example include:
An ancient and apparently unmanned vessel has arrived at Sol Jump Gate. Various factions demand ownership when the ship suddenly comes to life and demands you, and only you, enter to defuse the self-destruct protocol it has just initiated!
Bloody Evaluation—Orwell Stronghold
A series of murders framed as grotesque art pieces will take the player and their sleuthing partner Qui9 around Spirit of Tianjin. Question suspicious patrons, check recordings and gather clues—but know the murderer may also be keeping an eye on you.
Moments of Truth—Hopkins’ Legacy
A once-revered Tanegashima fleet admiral languishes in a brig cell on a treason charge. She counts off the days until her capital sentence, troubled by one lingering question about her past. Can you help find the answer before her time runs out?
Our Mission Dispatch (and two and three) posts can further tease you with a little extra detail on many more if you find your curiosity piqued!
Weaving through the aforementioned Missions and the stations they take place on is a newer development we are adding very soon. Core Stories grab the mystery at the heart of Tau Station and guide you through the shadows to try and unravel its dangerous plot line. Core Stories will have a unique functionality that focuses on this epic scale quest that will take you through the galaxy and where your choices can branch off into a multitude of possibilities!
Story is quite obviously front and center in a lot that makes up Tau Station. If Tau Station was some sort of time-traveling, intergalactic alien, narrative would absolutely be one of his and her hearts. Each beat tells a tale that we have carefully woven with utmost respect and care so that it reads like a lovingly crafted short story that you direct.
Notes
- Missions will be terminated if they run longer than 15 days:
The mission '<mission>' has been terminated: mission ran longer than 15 days.
Tau Station Notebook
Tau Station Notebook is an on-going project to conceptualise the storyline behind Tau Station. The results are progressively being included in this Tau Station Wiki, under the Additional information from the storyline section. An experimental conceptual approach, as the next image, is updated here as missions are processed.
