The official Freelancer guide was written by Doug Radcliffe and published in 2003 by Sybex. There are 10 sections to it which cover all the things you would expect which I’ll quickly run through.

It starts with a guide to all the planets and systems in the universe. This gives a background to each planet and system in much the same manner as all those new system descriptions that Loaf has been spamming my inbox with these last couple of weeks. The Star Citizen ones are more entertaining and detailed by comparison. The most useful information here is which ships can be bought where and what level of difficulty the random missions will be in that part of the universe. These go all the way up to level 43, which considering I finished the game on level 20 must mean it’s possible to spend a lot of time Freelancing once the story is up. Another point of interest is a short list of hidden items which can be found through rumours in bars but I never came across one in the time I was playing.

This is followed by a guide to all the numerous factions in the game. They don’t have a lot of history but it’s still good to have some knowledge on who they all are. Clearly one of the aims of the story was to introduce as many of these as possible, but there more than could ever have been covered.

We get onto the statistics heavy part after this with commodity trading info + ship and weapon specs all with bios. Finally it’s tactics all the way to the end starting with general hints and tips. This is obvious stuff on the whole but there are some useful tips. The next two chapters deal with the story missions. These cover the story itself but it’s more of a set of instructions and tips. There should be enough info here to get anyone through the game.

The section on random missions is extremely brief reflecting the simple nature of the missions themselves. These go all the way up to level 43 which pays an obscene amount of money for a single mission. I can only imagine how tough those must be and it has raised my curiosity as to how one of these missions would play.

This is an OK guide but it’s not all that entertaining in it’s own right and one of the less interesting I’ve looked at. It would no doubt help if I was more of a Freelancer fan but it’s now scanned and sat on the downloads page for anyone who wants to read it for themselves.

I’ll give a quick mention for Star Citizen while I’m posting which just hit $5.5 million as I type. I’ve been watching a little of the 24 hour live stream and was up in time to see Loaf fall asleep which is going to take some living down. Not long to hold out now at least. I’ve heard how tough running a Kickstarter campaign is from other developers and Star Citizen has been going on far longer than most. Apart from the issues with crashing webservers it’s been an incredibly well run campaign and I can’t believe how fast the total has been going up this last day. The Project Eternity fundraising record is a distant memory at this point and I expect this is going to take some beating.