Star Control: Origins is an action adventure game that has a fair bit of role playing in it.  

It does not, however, have any randomness.  This is by design and will become increasingly obvious.

Instead, you, the player, are the random number generator. 

Every single player will play the game slightly differently.  It's an open universe. You can go wherever you want, whenever you want (though you may get you and your crew killed doing so!)

However, the good news is that you are all playing within a shared universe.  That means if you do X, and Y, and then Z in that order at the same time under the same circumstances, it will happen for someone else too.  This is important because you don't have to worry about "random drops" or "random quests".  This has allowed us to create some missions (quests) that are very, very hard and, as time goes on, we will be adding even harder missions (optional) as players start to get used to the freedom, the horrible, horrible freedom of the Star Control universe.

The Mission Help forum has been set up so that players can talk to each other about where to go, what to ask, and so on.  Note that spoilers are obvious so don't peruse posts casually from this sub-forum. 

We do ask that players use brackets to make it clear to others what they are asking:

[MISSION] Where do I find the Tilarian Urlon Horn?

[MISSION] Who do I need to talk to to find the Ixes?

And so on.

Good luck and have fun!

Oh...

One other thing to be aware of...

The map you see above... Only stars that have been mapped by various civilizations to the hyperspace navicomputer are present at the beginning of the game (think Babylon 5 style hyperspace).  The stars we know of come from a finding in caves on Ceres. But you'll learn more about that soon enough.