Stationeers – Building Your First Base

Welcome to Stationeers! After completing the tutorial, a lot of you will be asking: “What now?”.
This guide is for you.

Baby Steps

All credit goes to Sunspots!

The first step is generally to build a small platform to place your machines. You have some materials that you could use to build a pressurized station with airlocks etc. but my tip is to wait with that for now.

To build your first platform, you need to place some frames. The starting crates should contain Iron Frames and Iron Sheets, get those ready.

First, you need to place down a base frame, you do that by right-clicking with the frame in your hand to enter build mode, then you simply left-click to place it in an appropriate position. Place a few down to give you some space to build on, around 6-10 frames should be enough to get started.

The next step is to build your frames into the next build-state. You do that by taking out your torch in one hand and those handy Iron Sheets in the other hand.

Turn on the torch (R to open and toggle menus for the held item, use F to activate a selection) and use it on the unbuilt frames.

At first, you will complete the segments of the frame, this second build state is enough to start working on and around your frame. If you want to make the frame airtight/isolated, you should upgrade it to the third build state by using the torch again.

Getting the Essentials

Now when you have a small platform, you can place your machines. You will need the arc furnace to smelt ores, the autolathe to make the first new items from your newly smelted ores, and you probably want the solar panel, as well as the solid fuel generator in order to get power.

(The solar panel requires a glass sheet to finish off before it works)

In order to stabilize your power supply, you can use a Power Controller. Hook up your power generation with the input port of the Power Controller and the rest of your base to the output.

You can open the Power Controllers’ panel with a crowbar to turn it on and add a battery.
When you add a battery to the Power Controller, it will act as a buffer, effectively saving some of the energy that otherwise would be wasted when generating large amounts of energy, and then your base can use that power later when your power generation goes down (coal runs out, sun goes down, etc).

The next step is to go mine some ores.
You have a mining belt in your pack, take it out into your hand and swap it out with your tool belt. Now when you use the drill or pick (just use the drill, really, the pick is for when you run out of power, but it doesn’t really happen), the ores you mine will be put directly into your mining belt.