The Crust – Early Game Strategy

Getting Started Guide

Construction:

• Build 4 Solar Panels and 4 Batteries.
• Construct 1 Charging Station.
• Set up 1 Drone Configuration.
• Install 1 Scanner.
• You can build 1 to 4 Smelters. (Start with Steel and Silicon).

Buy a “Rover Scout” For early game science.

• Go to “Commerce Center”
• Go to “Crust Solutions
• Buy “Rover Scout” (Make sure to send it off the map when it lands)

Resource Acquisition:

Your primary goal is to find a deposit. Ideally, look for an Iron (Fe) deposit, but any deposit will work. Once you locate a deposit, scan it using your Scanner.

Mining Pure Oxide:

Send your drones to mine the deposit. They will extract pure oxide from it. By mining pure oxide directly, you can skip the regolith processing step.

How to get the drones to mine the deposit?

When in the screen to select where to have mined out (AKA Mining Mode), if you hover over a ore deposit that you have scanned and identified, you should see a plus and minus, this will directly assign a drone to that deposit.

Straight to Smelting:

With the pure oxide in hand, you can now proceed directly to smelting. Use your Smelters to convert the pure oxide into usable resources.

Belt Fed Flight Control Center (BFFCC)

Steps to use belt feeder:

• Pause Game.
• Lock and unlock distributor directly adjacent to FCC.
• Order Contract (ideally 1 material per container).
• Unlock left distributor by storage chest of relevant material.
• Unpause and wait for container(s) of given material to fill.
• If contract of only one material, skip to step 9.
• Lock distributor by storage chest of material.
• Unlock distrib by next material.
• Lock distrib by used material.
• Enjoy your money!

Day-Night Cycle

Here’s a list of the 14 day day-night cycle for the first year. The current UI does not make this clear, but using this information, you can quickly determine how long until the next sunset-daybreak.

• 1-Jan
• 15-Jan
• 29-Jan
• 12-Feb
• 26-Feb
• 12-Mar
• 26-Mar
• 9-Apr
• 23-Apr
• 7-May
• 21-May
• 4-Jun
• 18-Jun
• 2-Jul
• 16-Jul
• 30-Jul
• 13-Aug
• 27-Aug
• 10-Sep
• 24-Sep
• 8-Oct
• 22-Oct
• 5-Nov
• 19-Nov
• 3-Dec
• 17-Dec
• 31-Dec

Did You Know?

• Camera would move faster while left [Shift] is pressed. And there is camera speed option in gameplay settings too!
• There is free camera mode activated with [Ctrl+F / Alt+F]. Have fun messing aroung!
• You can copy module settings with [Ctrl+LMB] and paste it with [Shift+LMB].
• Also don’t start a contract until you have at least 10-20 drones, unless the contract is only a small bundle of resources (under 200 items) because there is no way that your dinky 1 item inventory drones can carry that much stuff in the timeframe provided… Do not accept a contract unless you have the needed amount of resources!

Hot Keys / Controls

• Q,E – Rotate camera.
• TAB – Underground level.
• X – Global map.
• R – Turn modules during construction, as well as change the angle of rotation of conveyors.
• M (In Conveyor Mode) – Dump resources from conveyor belt and distributor.
• V – Change conveyor direction.
• I – Upgrade conveyor speed.
• L – Toggle automatic conveyor path search.
• CTRL+M – Switch music track.
• MMB – Adjust camera angle.
• CTRL+F – Free camera.

I appreciate your time and hope this little tutorial was helpful.