Tips and Tricks
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AI miners only shoot viable asteroids. Asteroids of a given type always look the same. You can learn which asteroids are mineable in a system if you find an AI ship shooting at asteroids, zoom in with ‘+’ and look close.
It’s definitely some of the best cash early for a newbie. Almost everything you get out of asteroids is worth more than cargo you might buy and sell. You can see the value of these minerals by opening your map, clicking the ‘Outfitters’ tab, and scrolling to the bottom (once you’ve picked them up).
Getting a piece of equipment with asteroid scanning lets you target asteroids, so you can tell your fleet to mine asteroids for you and pick the stuff up.
“Inventory” is horribly confusing. There’s your cargo space of stuff you pick up, but you can also leave “outfits” (equipment) on planets. That stuff gets labeled as “in storage”. Pressing ‘U’ to uninstall puts a thing in storage (while ‘S’ sells); if you press ‘1’ (no idea why it’s that key) can option shows up to move outfits from storage back into cargo… for something you might be equipping it on another ship you left somewhere else.
When dumping cargo, ‘Z’ is the default key to toggle your fleet grabbing stuff. For some ungodly reason giving a fleet other orders (attack a ship for example) seems to sometimes turn this off. It seems to be when there are other hostile ships around, but sometimes they remain not collecting flotsam.
Remember to hire crew so you actually have a chance of capturing and selling ships. You can only have extra crew on your flagship, and only your flagship can capture. Bunk rooms are nice here, especially early. Most ships you want to just take parts you want and sell ASAP, since squishy ships inevitably get destroyed fast.
Oh, this is a BIG one: there is NO danger to you in buying, selling, uninstalling, equipping, customizing each ship, so long as you remain there on the planet. Soon as you leave the planet, the next day starts and that shop will be reset. But if you spend $5,000,000 on that fusion reactor and realize you could make do with that fission reactor you looted and sold for $375,000, you can just select the first one, press ‘S’ to get the $5mil back, then ‘B’ on the fission reactor you sold and just undue it.
All those items have their value from 25%-100% of full value. You buy something, you can sell it back the next day at 100% (I think it might degrade by 1% every 2 or 3 days?) — that includes whole ships. There’s no “your car just lost 20% of its value by driving it out of the dealership” issues.
And this might be hard to explain…
The tl;dr is “don’t worry which of a given item you buy or sell, the game will always buy or sell the one that benefits you most”.
But the game keeps good track of the values of these items you have, and when you sell them you’ll always sell whichever one has the highest sell value (maybe that $5 million fusion reactor at 97%) and buy any item you’d sold to the shop that is cheapest for you to buy (something you just looted at 25% value and sold, that’s the one you’ll buy back).
Again, the simple idea is “don’t worry about buying or selling, the game treats you well”.
Just a personal ship customization preference it took me a long while to have an epiphany about (after crunching lots of numbers and thinking other options were pretty good): engine space (I think everyone would agree) is surely the biggest limiter to work around in customizing ships. This means that those super inefficient in heat / energy engines certain aliens have are still going to be the best, because it’s regular outfit space you’re using to compensate for their downsides. Other ones might seem better, at first….
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