Most players rush the bars.
You land on a station, the bar is right there, and the instinct is to check the mission board and leave. Maybe talk to the one NPC the game explicitly marks. Then back to the ship. There's a trade route to run, a mission to complete, somewhere to be.
Here's the thing: the bars are where the world lives.
Every station in Sirius has one. Every bar has a bartender with rumours — short lines of dialogue that exist nowhere else in the game. Those rumours aren't flavour text. They're navigation aids, lore delivery, and sometimes the only way you'll know a particular jump hole or hidden base exists. The bartender on a planet in the Omega systems might mention a cache of rare equipment tucked in a debris field two systems over. The bartender on a Kusari naval station will tell you things about the political tensions that the briefing missions never get around to explaining.
The bar NPCs outside the bartender have their own lines too. Traders complain about pirate activity on specific routes. Police officers let things slip about faction politics. A few of them, if you click through their dialogue, drop pieces of the Hispania lore — the story of the lost fifth sleeper ship — in fragments that the main campaign never assembles for you. If you want to understand why the Outcasts are the way they are, the bartenders will tell you. Eventually.
This is not accidental. The design put the world-building in the bars because the bars are the one place you go between every action. You land, you refuel, you repair. And if you sit still for a moment, the universe talks.
There's a practical angle too. Rumours flag jump holes and hidden stations. Some of the best equipment in the game is in locations you'll never find without being told — and the telling happens in bars. New players who skip the dialogue are making the game smaller than it is.
Talk to everyone. Buy a drink. The universe is in the details.