Tips for New Players
- Do not use botany early in a game. It require huge investments of space, life support, working time and water – this is for later stages, when you have a lot of crew. They can live on algae indefinitely. You can buy food service time from time to keep them better. It is cheap and money is not a problem even on brutal.
- Asteroids are really annoying and bad balanced currently. Point defense are very weak and require an operator. Fighters can destroy asteroids, but usually are too late for that, plus require a free pilots. Use shield. Best defense against most treats in a game. Should be your very first tech to research.
- Shields consume a lot of energy – try to get better generator. I would recommend to get X1 as a second tech after shields, than switch to “Medical beds”, than return research to generators. With new pills you don’t even need a hyper-sleep chambers anymore. At least not early in a game.
Derelicts are your “bred and butter”. It gives everything that required for extending, and selling soft blocks are a solid money maker. Use money to buy ice and energium.
This is a resource (micro) management game. Water and power are the two most important resources in the very beginning, I’d say.
You need water to make oxygen and power to run the oxygen generator. Heat to stay warm and power for the heaters. It’s a lot to get used to. When I got my first solar array, it seemed to turn things around for me. The array doesn’t put out much juice, but it doesn’t use anything other than what it costs to build it. You need a few of them.
I too started out on “Medium” and experienced the same struggle. You’re learning. It takes time.
I customized the medium settings to give more starting resources, the basic botany tech, and increased the amount of energium and ice in the galaxy. I found the right balance for me where it was a little challenging … but not a death spiral.
Fast forward a couple hundred hours and I learned a lot and found myself swimming (and sometimes drowning) in resources. I’ve long since backed off the adjustments I made and am actually making it harder now (fewer derelicts, fewer resources, etc.).
I would suggest the same. Give yourself some crutches or, as previously suggested, knock it down to Builder and give it a go. There’s a lot to learn and over time you will become much more efficient.
One of the things that was killing me was moving facilities around. If you haven’t discovered it yet, you lose any partial resources … only whole numbers are kept. So if you move your power core with 1.9 energium in it (or an oxygen generator with 1.9 water) you just wasted .9 units. Another good example is the recycler … if you move that while it has a bunch of partial units in it they are all lost.
You can tone down the asteroid threat … or … give yourself a starting crew member with level 5 Operations skill (or both) and see the difference it makes.
You have to be careful about building too much too soon. Too many early industries will just burn through the energium on the starting power core.
What starting scenario are you using?
I wouldn’t recommend the “abandoned mining station” until you are pretty proficient with the game. You can’t even begin to do any research until you’ve build a good portion of a ship.
The “basic platform” is okay … and it does have hints/tips for what to do. But it’s also pretty easy to build too much too soon or make critical errors like having the sleeping quarters too close to the shuttle bay, oxygen generator, or CO2 scrubber!
I prefer “a small hope” … it comes with a caveat that there’s no starting tips/guide, but you get a fully functional ship with a research bench making it possible to start research the second the game starts. Everything is arranged properly for comfort so you don’t need to worry about anything but gathering resources and then expand/redesign the ship as you can.