Conscious Meat's page

The final step is that a few spells, most notably Heal and Harm, have extra text explaining that depending on the situation their effect counts as either damage or healing within the same casting (depending on the creature affected).

And to be clear, it's not merely explanation; it's additional rules specific to those spells.

Positive/vitality healing does not intrinsically damage those with the negative/void healing feature, for instance. "Heal" does that only because it explicitly has such an effect. Likewise, "Harm" can only heal undead because that specific spell has that rider.

Void warp, for instance, does void damage. It does *not* heal anything, even targets that have void healing (*). Nor will the Urdefhan's void damage heal anything. Likewise, Ghost Charges do vitality damage and only harm undead and those with void healing; they never heal anything, because they have no rules text stating that they would.

(*) Well, unless the target had a theoretical ability which converted incoming void damage to healing, but I'm not sure if any such creatures even exist. It's *not* built into the Void Healing feature.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/586765/pathfinder-bestiary-3-pdf

Recent arrival -- it's listed as added on October 17, 2026.

The base price is shown as $0.00, which seems unlikely to be intentional. Neither of the other two Bestiaries are free, after all.

The error seems limited to this PDF, fwiw.

I’d like the opposite. A region of space designed to be a sandbox for GMs to create their own campaign area with a promise Paizo won’t bring out an official version. They’ve done it to me before where I get my campaign all ready to go and they produce an official guide done by talented writers and artists that kind of makes my word document look a little naff.

It'd be the equivalent of Traveller's Foreven Sector.

Seems less important for SF2e, though, given how Drift travel works. You could have a Drift beacon (accessible from practically anywhere within a "reasonable" time, which may not be what you want if you what the location to be broadly obscure), or perhaps only accessible by a Drift lane where one end is there and the other end is in an arbitrarily-chosen, obscure location that ships would previously have had little reason to ever stumble upon (and thus might remain undetected for long enough that the players genuinely get to be early explorers of it).

TBT if a whole party succeeds at their Stealth and remains Unnoticed, why is there even a switch to encounter mode to begin with ?

There's an argument to be made that order of operations matters a lot. That 'unnoticed' can change to 'hidden' or 'observed' very suddenly for any particular actor, and at that time it's critical to know exactly where everybody was and what they have already done and were doing.

Kingmaker's Player Guide (PF2e version), page 9:

The Aldori dueling sword price is incorrectly listed as 20 gp; should be 2 gp. This error obviously makes the "Sword Scion" background a bit less appealing, since it's hard to justify buying a 20 gp Aldori dueling sword with your 15 gp starting budget.

Regarding items, by the time a party has hit sixth level they should have a total of roughly two permanent magic items of 6th level, four each of levels 2nd-5th, and two permanent 1st-level items. You'd also expect that they've seen at least a couple of sixth-level consumables, too.

Weapons should be +1 Striking by this point (4th level runes), and +1 armor potency is also expected (5th level runes).

Regarding tactics, the game certainly expects players to be a bit thoughtful regarding how they use their actions with MAP seriously discouraging third attacks (or even second attacks, if the enemy has a quite high AC and the attacker hasn't been buffed somehow). Figuring out ways to trade actions (e.g. trading a Shove for a Stride) can be useful if there's a single tough opponent that doesn't have good action compression techniques. Demoralize, Disarm, Recall Knowledge, Trip, Aid, Raise a Shield etc. can all be useful.

I will say that the Barbazu that the AP uses in multiple places are a bit of an outlier because "Infernal Wounds" is potentially rather brutal against parties that rely heavily on magical healing rather than, say, alchemical elixirs or the Medicine skill. If *those* are giving trouble, consider substituting their remaster-era ~peer (Vordines).

...if it's the situation I think it is, these yak (dri) do in fact have a speed of 60, and the DC to grab and move them is on par with the difficulty of shoving a Storm Giant. :D

There's also trees in the area that need chopping. They've got an AC of 39, hardness 10, and 150 hp. o_O

So, yeah, it's extremely silly and might as well have come from the sort of video game where entire regions are high-level or where the world inexplicably levels up with the player character.

Between the dragon and the undead music band nonsense, I don't think the yaks would stick around to *be* calmed.

They'd do what most animals do when threatened, which is *flee* at full speed until they can't detect any threats or they're exhausted. The other party members already turned this into a chase scene, a stampede. Things that are normally exploration activities, like animal-taming, aren't really practical at this point.

*shrug* Why not hire crew, if you're looking to run a larger ship? For that matter, virtual intelligences seem to be a thing (and even artificial intelligence, or at least a malevolent one does. :D).

I tend to agree with the GM that the presence of an enormous, terrifying dragon would matter far more than your attempts to calm it through merely mundane means.

This one's rather dated, but there's a glaringly obvious error in the "Blood Lords" Players Guide on page 12.

Specifically, there's art that is not only out of place, but completely wrong and which spoils the name (and role, due to appellation) of a significant NPC.

The *label* is a misspelled version of an NPC's name that not only does not appear anywhere else in the Player's Guide (spelled correctly or not), but that the party should not be aware of for quite a while in the first book.

Second, the art is not of that PC at all, but of a completely unrelated creature (a Necrophidius).

Just... delete the art. That's it.

...and on that note, an action doesn't even necessarily involve an enemy in order to have the "Attack" tag and interact with MAP.

Attempting to breach a door using a crowbar via the "Force Open" action, for instance, interacts with MAP because that action has the "Attack" tag.

So yes, check tags carefully.

I'm guessing that characters at least won't be saddled with 30 years remaining on an enormous mortgage plus maintenance and operating costs. ;)

The one issue I have with a range-band approach is that it can make it much less intuitive to handle situations where there are significant actors in three disparate locations -- e.g. player ship attempting to intercept a pirate vessel that itself is trying to close in on a merchant ship, with the merchant not being already co-located with the player ship. As soon as there are three or more vessels with oblique trajectories and locations, something like the traditional 2D hex/square grid becomes interesting.

That older blog post only discusses the updated schedule of publishing errata, not for their incorporation into updated PDFs.

Case in point: if I download the latest available PDF of the PF2e Monster Core, from the Store Library feature, it doesn't reflect changes specified in the Fall 2024 Errata, after the errata update schedule changed. Check the Cassisian's "Change Shape" entry, for example; there is no action symbol for the melee entry in the Dog bullet point. Metadata from the PDF points to it being last modified in October '23 -- pre-errata.

Our team will post Errata on our FAQ twice a year, in the Spring and Fall. All those who purchased a PDF will then receive a free new PDF of those changes implemented into the text.

Is that a recent policy change? My recollection was that PDFs were updated when there was a new print run being done of that specific book, but perhaps I'm mistaken about that.

Hrm.

Well, you could decide that Belcorra still feels that keeping the lenses in proximity to each other is too dangerous c/o attracting too much attention from Nhimbaloth; and as long as she's still bound to the Empty Vault and the lowest floors of the Vault she might not want to have any installed in the Gauntlight itself.

She's also a formidable necromancer.

So, perhaps she turns the deceased characters into undead horrors of some sort, provides them with additional backup that she can muster, and makes them the new guardians of the lenses with orders to disperse and fortify until it's time for her to reclaim them?

(Edit for addendum: If Yldaris is still there, and Belcorra has any reason at all to think that its inhabitants were non-hostile to these now-dead interlopers, I would expect some punishment for their disloyalty.)

*shrug* I tend to think that it'd be a good idea provide pregenerated characters for their first scenario, so they can focus on learning the general mechanics.

Paizo provides download links for both remastered and pre-remaster pregens on https://paizo.com/pathfinder. There's a bunch of characters with versions at levels 1, 3 and 5; and six with level 7 versions as well. This might be a way of showing *possible* progression examples (while emphasizing that the 'iconic' characters are not necessarily brutally optimized for some specific target).

Send them an intro and remind them that similarly named things can have very different meanings and implementations. Run them through the Beginner's Box if they're the sort that would accept the... not great story, in exchange for a focus on introducing mechanics. If they need more story, than perhaps pick Rusthenge instead, and be patient and explain options and considerations in different situations.

Demiplane has a decent primer (free, but access requires a free Demiplane account) if they want something a bit more readable than the rules on AoN.

There's probably all sorts of videos on YT if they'd prefer that sort of thing.

On a related note, there doesn't seem to be a subforum for discussing that AP, either.

One thing that I did notice is that there's a lot of linking now. If you see a page number mentioned, it's probably a link. The main obvious *miss* regarding links is that the section headers on the right side of odd-numbered pages still aren't links.

If I compare to the Player Core 2 PDF, not even the page numbers in the table of contents are links, never mind page numbers mentioned in text.

It's the second printing, which according to the copyright page at the end of it happened in 2026.

(Yeah, they're updated in the Store Library now).

And... yup, analysis tells me that most of the images are now at 300 dpi, while I think most older PDFs were at 150 dpi. So, folks should expect a rather heftier download this time (~187 MB for the single-file version).

...on a related note, I see that the updated version is considerably heftier. Higher DPI art, I suppose?

Headscratching a bit at the sensor range being less than the range increment of the light laser cannon, but *shrug*. It'll probably be allowed to share sensor information with nearby allied vessels (or maybe whole area); it's a two-seat fighter escorting a larger ship.

15 zones in a space combat flip-mat, multiple ships can be in the same zone.

I do have to wonder a bit how starships alter things, economy-wise.

Do the ships effectively auto-level based on characters? If they instead require investment to upgrade, do we need to increase expected treasure by level to reflect the associated expense?

There's a difference between a ship breaking up and being outright disintegrated. Even with a ship breaking up, it -- and individual sections that remain -- may be quite large; and there may be magical or technological steps taken to limit the scope of such hazards as depressurization, and to facilitate survival until rescue or other escape.

"May" of course rather than "will be". Whoever designed the *Nova Rush* seemingly gave no thought to such things as containing fires or pressure loss from breaches, for instance.

But I got really, really tired of spending 2 hours on a fight (especially in a SFS scenario) with winning or losing having no significant effect. This was exacerbated by the SF1 system, of course, where ship combat was just an exercise in rolling dice. But even if the combat was interesting the lack of actual stakes is a problem for me.

The GGW AP already has multiple ship encounters which specify that if the players actually lose or are about to lose, allies show up and rescue them -- defeating or driving away enemies, rescuing the party if they were taken prisoner, and helping to fully repair their ship. There's even an ship encounter where, if the party loses, the GM is expected to have the enemies be gracious enough to repair the party ship and let them go anyway. The only real consequences end up being losing out on XP and, presumably, a loss of pride.

So... yeah, if GGW is anything to go by, appropriate negative consequences might be severely lacking.

That said, this *is* a science fantasy game. Compared to a science fiction game with grittier tones... magic could make it significantly easier to survive for a while (helping to deal with depressurized, unpowered sections -- i.e. needing to deal with vacuum and the loss of environmental protections) and also to establish communications with potential rescuers.

Being able to modify a starship at least somewhat would also make sense; such as if a party captures a fairly ramshackle, kludged-together ship from pirates and want to invest resources into making sure that things actually work reliably and take advantage of whatever access to technology etc. that they have.

So, for a little while, DTRPG has been prominently running a banner that proclaims "Explore Paizo's Full Catalog - Now Available", with the Pathfinder and Starfinder logos.

Okay, there's certainly a *lot* of it, but... what puzzles me is that it doesn't seem to actually be quite everything; and even some items that are available, are not available individually.

If we go to the Paizo section ( https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/publisher/5549/paizo?src=DTRPGPHNXPaizoBann er ) and search for...

* "Guns & Gears", "Guns" or "Gears": Neither original nor remastered versions of "Pathfinder Guns & Gears" shows up.

* "Pathfinder Campaign Setting": Quite a few show up, but it's not all; notably, "Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Distant Worlds" appears to be missing ( but "Distant Realms" and "Distant Shores" are there...).

* "Starfinder Galaxy Guide": the PDF is only available in a bundle, either with other SF2e PDFs or with Roll 20/Demiplane as well.

A blog post or other announcement explaining what's going on -- teething issues, maybe DTRPG's search engine being wonky, the DTRPG banner being premature because this still being set up, some content intentionally not there for whatever reason -- would be helpful.

Range bands are not unreasonable especially for 1-on-1. There's a case for getting a bit more precise and breaking out some kind of grid in more complex scenarios, such as if a raider is attempting to close in on and disable a trading ship while avoiding an escort vessel.

Re: detail; *shrug* Traveller's been around for a long time. The base systems in the core rulebook for MGT2e (only; i.e. no High Guard) for Spaceship Operation and Spaceship Combat take a total of 27 pages -- not too crazy, and probably more detailed than SF2e will be targeting.

I would think that thoughtful players would be extremely reluctant to suddenly and impulsively reintroduce a planet given the implications for everything from galactic politics to navigation. Just adding a new gravitational well might throw off the calculations of starships navigating the area, for instance, even if none of them happen to be in the exact volume of space that would suddenly be filled with solid matter; never mind thornier political questions that are far above their pay grade.

I don't think that having a Corpsefolk in Chapter 1 will break anything in terms of AP-specific mechanics or narrative (i.e. conferring unexpected advantages or disadvantages, etc).

The fact that there are level 1 Corpsefolk ancestry feats implies that starting as one is also mechanically permissible, so it's not that.

It's probably just that they're meant to be uncommon and largely Eoxian, and that the authors intended characters to be basically unfamiliar with Eox before they arrive.

All the rules expect that the GM use a degree of logic when interpreting them, since they cannot possibly cover all interactions and details without absolutely prohibitive page counts.

For another example, I don't think there's a general rule that reactions with triggers can only fire when the trigger is actually perceivable. If one pretends that it is not actually required, then this leads to silliness like a rogue with *Reactive Pursuit* being able to unerringly follow an enemy that is not only extremely stealthy but also hidden from all precise senses via Disappearance, because the trigger doesn't explicitly *say* that you have to have been able to notice the foe or its movement.

Yeah, would be nice if that's doable w/o compatibility issues wrt. commonly-used readers.

FWIW, GS-based optimization *without* downsampling dropped SF2e Player Core to ~150 MB. That's still absolutely massive, but less crazily, and suggests that the single-chapter files wouldn't necessarily be ludicrous.

Guns and Gears, Treasure Vault and Dark Archive (all remastered) still all exceeded 200 MB with a no-downsampling optimization. Downsampling G&G with the 150dpi (e-book) preset resulted in it dropping from ~230 MB to ~24 MB. That seems to be... manageable performance-wise for a Kindle Paperwhite, assuming that one is willing to pinch and zoom a lot in order to be able to read the text given that it's in a two-column format.

Necroing this to note that

* this is ongoing and perhaps getting crazier (SF2e Player Core is ~370 MB; even the chapter-by-chapter files have files exceeding 50+ MB ).

* because of this I did a bit of poking and found an open-source tool that can use Ghostscript to recompress PDFs with configurable DPI for the art ( https://nikkhokkho.sourceforge.io/?page=FileOptimizer )

Downsampling to 72 DPI using that reduced SF2e Player Core to... ~12 MB. The art is obviously significantly reduced in quality, but the text is fine.

Yeah, in practice it'd be unlikely to matter. Most scenarios which would involve needing environmental protection for an extended time (being stranded in a wilderness or a station experiencing mechanical breakdowns) would probably be written in such a way that everybody would be equally troubled, outside of non-breathers like corpsefolk.

I was mostly curious as to whether there was a lore reason. There are a lot of science fiction settings where such things are ascribed to a mysterious, seemingly-now-absent highly advanced civilization ("Ancients", "Precursors", "Old Ones" etc). I just hadn't noticed anything addressing it in SF2e's Player Core, GM Core or Galaxy Guide, and wasn't aware whether canonically there -were- such mysterious civilizations in the SF2e default setting.

I take it that all the major ancestries (well, ones that need to breathe and that can't rewrite their own DNA to adapt) are intended to have rather compatible preferences when it comes to breathable atmospheres, even those that originated far from Golarion.

This is obviously highly convenient for groups of mixed ancestries and makes locations like Absalom Station more plausible, fine. I don't particularly want to be *always* tracking and enforcing the use of environmental protections.

...

My question is whether there's an in-universe accepted explanation for this happy coincidence, since this is one quirk of the setting that might easily prompt the obvious question from players. Was this the result of, say, cooperation from various deities? Is it believed that this particular favored atmosphere is just far more conducive to the evolution of sapient life? Some other explanation?

I'll just note that this issue does exist for PF2e as well, but primarily from the GM's perspective. There are creatures that rely entirely on a Fly speed and do not even have a ground speed such as the Will-o-Wisp, Air Wisp and Veiled Current.

It's a known deficiency in how Fantasy Grounds handles specific magic items; specifically, that does not yet have a system that allows one item to inherit the traits of a parent item. I think that's on the list of things to eventually address, but with no known ETA.

As such, one needs to

(1) manually add inherited properties, and
(2) manually remember that its set of property runes cannot be changed.

I'd say that if art theft is such a costly lawyerly issue would aonprd adding a big ugly watermark help. That way players and GMs still get a visual at a glance which helps a lot and is a big appeal to me, but its more yucky to yoink and more obvious its just for aonprd.

Mass watermarking is technically feasible; but AoN would still need a special license to be able to publish such, I think.

Jhaeren Embercrest wrote:

The post itself fails to lay out a convincing rationale. How does this differ from Demiplane making the same content available for free?

The post exactly explains the rationale. Did you read Jim's post. He says why. And, you know that Demiplane costs money, right? It's a different relationship with a different license. Demiplane is not 'free.'

Actually, you can use Demiplane in an AoN-like manner without paying them a dime.

For instance, you can access https://app.demiplane.com/nexus/starfinder2e/creatures/corpse-fleet-junior- officer without an account, let alone paying for it.

It has the stat block for the Corpse Fleet Junior Officer from Guilt of the Grave World. OK, the stat block is ORC-licensed, although the term "Corpse Fleet" refers to a specific organization within the setting and I'm not positive that that would be ORC'd. The page also includes the artwork for that creature, and the artwork is certainly not ORC. AoN will still be able to show the stat block, but -not- the art.

Now, can you read -everything- on Demiplane without paying? Certainly not. If you wanted to read the lore from the GM Core, or if you wanted to read things other than stat blocks from Guilt of the Grave World, you'd have to pay -- those aren't ORC-licensed, after all. But soon, Demiplane will be allowed to show content, for free, that AoN will not be -- unless ofc. Demiplane is also facing such a change in licensing that has just not yet been announced.

First off, let me just say, if sites using AoN’s hosted images is a problem, they can just change the HTTP_REFERER header and deny requests that do not originate from their domain. Then that stops others from embedding or hot linking. Then no takedowns needed. Unless they are saying and hosting the images… then what’s to stop them from using the Wiki images or, more problematical, Nexus’ images?

I wouldn't be surprised if it were more relevant to scraping and reuse outside of HTTP; for instance, taking creature art and importing it into a VTT to use alongside ORC-licensed records without paying for an official module that has licensed artwork. Maybe people download art and print their own pawns for less, *shrug*.

TTRPG content is not the most obvious target for a sophisticated attacker, but there might be -some- effort thrown at it -- there are certainly people who wrote scraping code for DDB regardless of TOS, and others who zealously defend the usage of such -- and it's also possible that Demiplane has thrown more resources at the problem to make it more difficult.

I am not aware of any rule indicating that you get any such compensation.

Likewise, not a fan of this decision. They'll still be able to host rules text, at least, but this seems... unfortunate.

There's nothing saying that he can't stop in a 5x5 area. It's just difficult terrain with all that entails, including the additional movement cost and not being able to Step *into* it (as explicitly prohibited by Step itself).

And yes, squeezing would only apply if it's tighter than 5' in either direction.

All it says is you interact to reload, so it'd just reload your weapon, if anything, the only difference is that a magazined weapon does not need to reload. Though the way I see it, you can just swap a magazine for another magazine, even if it's half full, and just swap between two magazines. Don't think anything in the rules says you have to deplete a magazine before you swap a new one

Indeed. Per page 254, and also https://2e.aonsrd.com/rules/238-reload --

While all weapons need some amount of time to get into position, many ranged weapons also need to be loaded and reloaded. This entry indicates how many Interact actions it takes to reload a weapon's magazine. This can be 0 if drawing specialized ammunition and firing the weapon are part of the same action. If an item takes 2 or more actions to reload, the GM determines whether they must be performed together as an activity, or if you can spend some of those actions during one turn and the rest during your next turn.

Reading that, and also the linked rules re: magazines, there is no requirement that the weapon be empty (or that the magazine, battery etc. be even slightly depleted). You could certainly reload to switch to a magazine that used ammunition crafted from a precious material or was magical, for instance.

What could use clarification here is whether the same action includes the cost of stowing the previous, potentially partly-expended magazine / etc. in a dump pouch or equivalent. I would assume that it does, rather than having the magazine be considered dropped on the ground for speed purposes, but it's something that might be asked.

Haven't yet, but there's a decent chance that I'll pick up some non-technological monstrosity from Alien Core to add some variety (to AV). Going to resist the temptation to turn Belcorra into a Malevolent AI. :D Maybe a Caypin, Garaggakal, Blood Brother, that sort of thing.

If a player wanted to pick up an SF2e spell or feat that wasn't technological at all, and didn't introduce flight earlier than PF2e expects, I'd be willing to take a look to see whether it'd fit, anyway.

None of them have shown any interest in picking up even a PF2e-native archetype, so I doubt I'll ever be asked whether they could multiclass into Witchwarper or Solarian.

By "scene", I mean specific encounter or situation, not an entire adventure.

Things are not perfectly consistent between scenes. For instance, between the first ship combat in GGW and the last ship combat in GGW, the player's ship has more than doubled in HP and the same is true for its firepower. An additional role (captain) has even been added.

Conversely, its maximum shield capacity is completely unchanged. *shrug*

As far as I can tell, the only references of any serious modification to the ship between those GGW scenes refer obliquely to "additional security features" and the addition of navigation data for a specific, obscure route in order to bypass certain defenses. Those additional security features do not appear to be explained or even referenced anywhere other than that brief mention; perhaps it means a slight increase in the ship's Will saves for countering hacking etc, but that save actually increased the least of all three saves between scenes.

The ship is "rigged for remote piloting" over halfway through the book, but that is done while the ship is in -space-, so this sounds more like tweaking software configurations in a way that they could have performed since the beginning (the one who shows how to do this is, in fact, on the ship for the entire AP), not the result of an actual upgrade. This is the only place in the book where the phrase "remote pilot" appears, to be used in this one specific time and place. "Remotely pilot" also appears exactly once, in reference to a specific shuttle unrelated to the party ship.

Why would it not work to leave the capabilities of Nova Rush ambiguous and undefined in general, and allow each adventure (official publication or homebrew campaign) to decide the details of the ship for that specific adventure?

GGW doesn't actually list those capabilities, either. It primarily relies on listing specific actions in specific cinematic scenes, and only those relevant for those scenes; with an additional brief mention of a previously-unmentioned capability (remote piloting) near the finale. That's pretty much the only time the AP even suggests any ability to interact with the ship when you're not in it, other than a few mentions of "you CANNOT communicate with the ship in this entire area because <regions>".

It's not treated as a tool to put to use, but as a highly constrained intermittently-available plot device that entirely ceases to matter outside those scenes.

Given that it's not some incomprehensible alien technology and that both the ending of BfNR and the beginning of GGW assume that characters would have free rein to examine and operate the/a ship, I'd rather be able to be explicit about its capabilities so that players have appropriate expectations; can have questions answered; and can make plans to use it rather than being told exactly when, where and how they'll use it.

It's like... well, it'd be very very odd if I told players that they'd found a seemingly non-magical backpack stuffed with -things- but they would only be allowed to know each -thing- is once they reach specific scenes where it was intended to be used, no?

Are we going to get a detailed stat sheet for its capabilities at some point?

Given that it's the iconic ship... it's a little bothersome to me that if I for instance ran "Battle for Nova Rush", there's no guidance whatsoever about such things as

- how much Bulk might the ship be able to store in cargo
- is it streamlined for atmospheric entry
- how effective is the medbay (e.g. item bonus?)
- are their facilities for crafting (none explicitly specified in BfNR)
- is there a UPB-based fabricator on board?
- using surplus power to recharge batteries

"Guilt of the Grave World" includes an expectation that it can be remotely piloted, so that adds more questions -- how effectively, from how far?

In terms of communications, how secure and capable are ship/ship and ship/ground communicators? OK, shore to ship comms are possible; are these easily triangulated, intercepted, decrypted, jammed, spoofed?

Would it be expected that it'd be able to monitor ground-based comms (detection of traffic, at least, assuming encryption in common use), deploy surveillance drones to maintain observation of an area on a planet?

If I ran it to introduce my PF2e group to it, they wouldn't necessarily expect a lot of details regarding its potential uses as a C3, SIGINT and imaging platform (although it's *absolutely* not out of the question that they'd ask along those lines), but they'd certainly be wondering about such things as the medbay, crafting, battery recharging and cargo capacity; and maybe whether they can easily get into shenanigans or avoid consequences by fiddling with any IFF transponder.