Interstellar Rift – Tips and Tricks

An organized list of helpful tips and tricks meant to aid people new to the game.

General

All credit goes to IgneaVentus!

• Never use “wild” rifts if you don’t have your own rift generator. You can get stuck.
• Always keep track of your fuel. There is emergency option (“Services” tab on GRIP) but it’s expensive.
• If you have batteries on ship, at the start it will start to drain fuel rapidly. Give it time to fill them up and refuel, then your ship will work as it should.
• On PvP server always keep looking around you. Not counting cloaking device, you will see enemy faster than enemy could shoot you.
• On PvP server try to drop rare resources like gold, silver and the like to your vault at first chance you get. This way you drop chances someone will attack you.
• Try to keep your ship in storage. Thanks to that, it will not burn fuel or oxygen and will be safe from attacks (Both from skrill and players)
• Drop from the warp at one second remaining or earlier until you get a good feel of the warping. Otherwise you could end inside some ship or station, getting fined and/or losing faction standing.
• With auto warpdown disabled never point straight at a planet, lag could make you unable to slow down and result in ship loss. (Thanks Johnno)
• Getting silicon is easier than you think. Just rift to T1 system and buy it from any mining / scrapping / ore trading station or traveling trade emporium.
• Tier system can be easily bypassed by buying used rift cartridges. Each one has 3 uses and is quite cheap. (15k for 3 jumps to T3?)
• If your ship starts counting down for destruction, you lost. So grab whatever you have and run to escape pod. If you don’t have escape pod, you lost everything on ship and in your inventory.
• If ship is disabled, it is not dead. You can fix it with armor generators, repair drones or very expensive services on GRIP. Interior though is fixable only by you (repair device) or services.
• Speaking of repair drones, until you have twice the amount of iron needed to build your ship, they won’t be of use.
• Early on, it may be great idea to specialize ships (or, if you don’t build them, get specialized ships). Miner, processing, cargo hauler, fighter etc. It helps you to conserve resources if you scrap ships you don’t use now.
• When putting things into Vaultron or cargo container remember to put inside only full stacks, because both don’t stack for you.

Fighting

• If you find yourself in unwanted fight, warp. (J key)
• Sometimes you can’t warp because you are under attack. In skrill case you can try putting your speed to the max and violently changing direction of flight to avoid most, if not all, skrill attacks.
• Good way to keep on Skrill tail is to press ‘P’ after targeting them. This will make your ship go the same speed as target.
• Mounted cannons (not the gimbal ones) are most probably most powerfull (and for sure most efficient) weapons in the game. If you can pilot good enough to use them, that is.
• … if not, use gimbal cannons, they are second.
• Another Skrill tactic is to just go full throttle back (Skrill go up to 250m / s, so don’t overdo it) and just shoot the bastards beelining for you.
• If you want to make a bigger fighting ship, it may be good idea to create several weapon groups specialized in certain aspects, for example lasers against shields, cannons against armor/hull and missiles for far targets.
• Biggest and tankiest isn’t always the best option, if you look for a fight always try to prepare accordingly. For example, light fighter is more than enough for grunts and hunters, but to fight players you may want something a little more tanky.

Boarding & Hacking

• Remember to always have some firewall repair chipsets. More or less, one such chipset can block one hacking chipset.
• Repair chipsets, different to hacking ones, don’t drain untill you are under attack so you can leave them online.
• There are three types of chipsets, standard (drains the same amount all the time), pulse (drains in pulses) and precentage (drains % of CURRENT firewall strength)
• Remember that boarding party is at disadvantage. If they made mistake in leaving their ship alone, run with them on board.
• If you have engineering console nearby, you can cut off power to rooms with and near teleporter during enemy boarding. This way you will slow them down.
• Also, with engineering console you can cut off life support in any room you are not in currently.
• Remember that GRIP can show you stats of any ship you’re on. Use this to keep track of access firewall on ships you board.
• Don’t randomly hack people. They will get big fat notification and more often than not, treat this as an attack.
• When boarding, you can use molecular assembler on your own ship as backup option for return.
• When boarding derelicts, you may want to grab some oxygen with you. If you repair their life support, you will have a lot less to worry about.

Shipbuilding

• If it’s your first encounter with editor, take your time to more-or-less learn where is what. Look into every category, get a feel of moving around.
• Building your own ships can be daunting at first, so try playing game with faction ships first. Look how everything works, what is needed for ship to function etc.
• Either place batteries last, or during building put them in temporary power group. This would allow you to see real ship power usage. If you want to go a tad further, do the same to extractors, refineries and everything that needs to be activated to drain power.
• Until your ship is having tons of power generation, you may want to put escape pod off the main grid and assign it Power Transfer Box. This way, it won’t paralyze your ship during charging, as it needs lots of power.
• Don’t use power groups until you know what are you doing (ex. Escape pod). They are great tool, but useless for smaller ships because of built-in proritization.
• Batteries are very useful tool. Not only they can gather power for later use, they can extend power output of your ship. For example, ship with two generators and two batteries will have power output of 600 (2x 300 output of batteries) instead of 300 (2x 150 output of small gen)
• Always put at least one solar panel on your ship. This way you won’t have to fight with doors when first time boarding, and will be able to teleport away even if your ship gens are dead. Or run transponder.
• Even if you don’t plan on fighting, keep every system accessible. If you can’t reach something with repair gun, it is useless. Random lucky shot from a skrill can render that part broken, and only throu services you would be able to fix it.
• When building a hauler, remember to put way more engines than needed. When your ship mass grow, it gets slower. If your engines are way more powerfull than needed, you won’t feel this.
• Try to avoid putting too many doors between cockpit/bridge and escape pod. They will more often than not badly damaged during attack and thus inhibit ability to use escape pod quickly.
• Especially on smaller ships, you may try and avoid putting doors at all. Thanks to that, user will be able to move more efficiently around, but at the same time ship will be more prone to enemy boarding.
• Keep in mind purpose of your ship. There’s no much reason in mining vessel having more firepower than battleship, but trading vessel with huge amount of shields to allow it time to run would make sense, right?
• Keep in mind you can stack some of the ship components. This allows you to create nice looking things. Or cheat, if you preffer it that way.
• Always check up on your weapon groups to avoid exceeding your CPU power.
• Always check your ships before using them on normal server. To do so, create server with creative mode on and take a small flight around, test every machine, do your standard routine.

Trading & Mining

• For basic resources it may be wise to build a station-like mining sattelite near one of the asteroid field spawning starter stations. You can mass produce iron, copper, steel and water this way.
• If you really think about being space hauler, get yourself a ship with data core (the server-like one) and buy trade data cartridge. It will, when enabled, collect data about prices in visited systems making your life so much easier.
• If you have rafinery or really big cargo space, you can buy cheap scrap and remake it into ingots wchich are sometimes even five times more expensive.
• If you want really quick money, get on any station with excavators and refineries, check their shop and if there’s any demand for Deuterium, fill it.
• You can sell basic resources in bulk if you know where to look. GT Traveling Trade Emporium buys bulks of metals, whereas HydroPex Fuel Trader buys bulk of Hydrogen.
• Learn to use ACTR. It’s especially useful in mining and processing, but can also help you move your cargo to teleporter in bulk.
• You can set whatever amount of final product you want in rafineries or assemblers. They will stop working once they lack resources or meet that quota. This, with ACTRs, allows for primitive automation.
• Learn to use scanners. They will help you with looking for threats and help you hunt with rare resources.
• Try to refine your goods before selling them, this way you will most likely boost their price greatly.
• Don’t bother trying to get gas clouds to what you want them be, rather collect gasses and let them out in proportions you want.
• When mining gasses you want a ship with as many collectors as you can use, because gasses continuously dissipate on their own with time.