This is a basic guide for new players who are a little lost or paralysed about how to progress in the game. It covers a basic approach to planning your route through a system and should help you get a foothold on the loop of the game. The guide should give you the tools to approach your run and keep your exiles alive and well. This is not a walkthrough and will not guide you on beating the game.
Setting Objectives
A Journey in The Banished Vault is made out of a series of stars through which you will travel. Whilst the overall goal of the game is to complete your journey by making four entries within a Scriptorum (thus building four separate scriptorums on four separate Hallowed Planets in four separate systems), there is no requirement to build one in order to leave a system. One decision you need to make when entering a new system is whether you will attempt to build a scriptorum in this system or not. This guide assumes we are not going to do that.
This guide is instead focused on getting across the bare minimum you need to achieve in a given system:
- Building a stasis producer (3×3 building requiring 1 Iron, 2 Titanium, 1 Alloy)
- Producing 8 units of Stasis (requires 8 units each of Titanium, Carbon dioxide, and Water)
- Returning all four exiles and the 8 units of Stasis back to the vault ship at or before 30 turns have passed, in order to hibernate.
Assuming we can complete the above, the remainder of our 30 turns can be focused on achieving other goals. These will probably all be progressed in parallel, but they are worth considering:
- Stockpiling fuel to enable travel across the system
- Stockpiling basic resources such as iron or water to give you a headstart in the next system
- Producing and stockpiling elixir to maintain the faith of your exiles
- Producing and stockpiling alloy to enable the construction of stasis producers
- Gathering artefacts to produce knowledge for upgrades between systems
This guide will provide a little guidance about each of these individually. With practice, you’ll be able to see opportunities to achieve all these objectives and more in your journey through the stars.
Producing Stasis
This is the only non-negotiable objective for a given system. We must always produce stasis for our exiles. It’s helpful to first break this down into the material requirements to achieve this. 8 Stasis can be produced in a Stasis Producer. Each unit of stasis, as well as the producer itself, requires resources. Laying down the building and producing 1 unit of stasis also takes 1 action from an exile.
For the sake of simplicity, let’s assume all the materials are in our vault ship. Whilst this won’t be your experience if this is your first system, it is worth understanding that you can gather everything you need to produce stasis and make the next system more straightforward is possible. Flexibility around what we’re achieving in one system versus the next forms part of your long term strategy.
In total, then, we are looking to have:
- 10 Titanium
- 1 Iron
- 8 Water
- 8 Carbon Dioxide
- 1 Alloy
This will take a total of 6 cargo slots. Our ship(s) will also require fuel. If our target location is a planet with a thrust requirement, we may also need an additional engine. This is the case with the Avocet ship, which has 8 cargo slots. Annoyingly, unless we limit ourselves to 1 stack of fuel, we’ll be short of space (don’t leave yourself short of fuel). There are other ways of saving space, however.
For example, we may want to choose a location that also has some of the resources we need close at hand. If we opted to build on a planet that had a titanium deposit, we could potentially leave some or all of our titanium at home, pack a little more iron, and build a mine on site. Or, we could take two ships and share the cargo between them, noting that will add to our fuel consumption.
Finally, we need one or more exiles to do all the work.
A note about actions, turns and travel
I don’t want to go into too much detail about the action economy, but I’m going to do a small digression here to discuss how we might factor the action economy into deciding where to build our stasis producer. Building the stasis producer is one action, producing the stasis is 8 actions, totalling 9 actions.
If we wanted to mine the titanium on site, that would be a further 1 action to build the mine, then 10 actions to produce all the titanium we need, totalling 20 actions.
The system is separated into different branches that represent the various orbits of the star. The objects closer to the vault, and thus further from the star, tend to have lower action restore values. The objects closer to the star tend to have higher action restore values. In the screenshot below, the red circles indicate the action restore values on both branches. The blue circle indicates a “turn stop”. These may occur between branches and there can be more than one turn stop between branches. They incur a cost in turns irrespective of how many actions you might have.
We have 2 plans. The 9 action plan for producing stasis alone, and the 20 action plan for producing titanium and stasis, thus saving us cargo space.
If we choose the outer planet with 2 action restore points, our 2 exiles would have no additional travel stops and could complete each plan as such
- 2 exiles * 2 actions = 4 actions per turn
- 9 actions = 2.25 (3 turns)
- 20 actions = 5 turns
If we were to travel to the branch with an action restore value of 4, then we need to add in the additional turn stop into our calculation.
- 2 exiles * 4 actionss = 8 actions per turn
- 1 turn stop each way = 2 turns
- 9 Actions = 1.125 (2 turns)
- 20 actions = 2.5 (3 turns)
I’ve rounded all the values up because assuming you leave the system and hit a turn stop, the remaining actions in the turn don’t matter for the purposes of the task at hand. However having extra actions often give you the opportunity to do things like search for artifacts or mine extra resources to take back to the vault. The key insight from the above is this: The more actions you are doing on planet, the better value you get from a higher action restore. There’s no value burning 3 turns each way to grab a small handful of resources if you can get them elsewhere. Conversely you will struggle to get an abundance of iron or water if you simply pick the closest deposit to the vault.
Co-ordinating Activities
So far we’ve discussed sending a single ship with 2 exiles loaded with everything they need to produce stasis. Even if we had all those materials at hand, we can’t do that in every system. We will need to build harvesters and stockpile materials. Plus, we have 2 other exiles who aren’t going to just cool their heels for 10 turns while the others do all the work.
Let’s assume we’ve found a location where we can mine iron and titanium. Both those will be useful, not just because we need so much titanium for stasis production, but iron and titanium are 2 of the 3 ingredients for making alloys. Since 1 alloy is required for a stasis producer, 2 are required for a scriptorum, and several are required for engines or ships, it’s really good to have a decent supply on hand because you don’t want to have to produce alloy in every single system. When an opportunity like this is available, it’s a good idea to take it.
If we were planning on sending our other 2 exiles to a 2 action restore planet where they could produce all this, we have 3 buildings (iron mine (3I), titanium mine (1I), alloy producer (2I, 2T)). We may just take enough iron to guarantee we can build the iron mine and rely on mining everything else. It’s likely there will be some resources on the planet already, but let’s not rely on that.
This means to be ready for alloy production we would need to take the following actions after arriving on site:
- Build iron mine
- Mine iron
- Build titanium mine
- Mine iron x2
- Mine titanium x2
7 total actions. Then if we wanted to produce alloy, we need 1 each of iron, titanium and silica. We’re missing Silica, but if we were aiming for 9 total alloy, we could spend another 18 actions mining the iron and titanium necessary. So, once again let me calculate that in turns.
- 2 exiles, with 2 action restore each = 4 actions per turn
- 7 + 18 total actions = 25 actions
- 25 actions / 4 actions per turn = 6.25 turns
If you’ll recall from the previous section, our other exiles busy making stasis will be done in around 5 turns. If there happened to be a silica mine in their 4 action restore branch, well that’d work out great. After spending all their water and carbon dioxide and titanium making stasis, they have free cargo slots to stop by, fill up on silica (9 actions worth of mining + 1 to build the mine would add 2 turns to their journey), and then we are not only ready to head home with stasis, we also have a stack of alloys.
Final Thoughts on Stellar Math
I want to be clear that I’ve contrived this specific scenario with a bunch of ideal circumstances, calculated it to specifics, and written as though it should be easy to secure enough stasis for your next jump and get some sweet resources to boot in less than a third of the time provided for a system. And I wand to be clear that in practice, it doesn’t work out quite like that.
For the most part, packing more resources than the math tells you you strictly need is a good idea. This is especially true of iron (used for most buildings, like that extra silica mine we decided to get our stasis exiles to make) and fuel (because now they’re adding two additional stops to their journey). You’ll overproduce resources and leave them on planets. You’ll miscalculate your cargo slots and have to make multiple trips to get everything. You’ll leave an exile on the planet because you forgot to move them out of the laborer slot before their buddy took off. None of these have to be run-ending goofs.
The fact that stasis can be produced fairly painlessly when the conditions are right and that you can do so much in the current system to prepare you for the next is what cushions you against these mistakes. You don’t need to be perfect. The mistakes are part of the journey.
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