Useful Tips for Noobs
Now that I’ve finished my first successful run, I’ve learned that whether you’ll be successful or not is in no small part already decided within your first two jumps. Any bad decision made there will come back to haunt you afterwards.
The key here is that any resources that are just sitting in your stock and aren’t being used to build or process things might as well not be there. The initial buffer in resources is something you want to use to your advantage by investing heavily at first in order to ramp up production and build key infrastructure. This is especially true for produce, energy and water. Any shuttle sitting in the hangar without a good reason is also not doing anything for you. Valid reasons are: the ship is preparing to jump, the shuttle needs repairs, the resources from the previous shuttle run haven’t been unloaded yet or the entire crew is tired after extended yellow alert.
The same also goes for your crew. They’re all healthy at the start so you can use that to your advantage. I kept yellow alert active until the first jump to build as much as possible. And if you keep the crew healthy, you can also use yellow alert sporadically in short bursts without too much negative impact on them. The pause button is your friend, I use it constantly whenever I build something or send out shuttles.
The away missions, especially the salvage ones, are crucial as I found they’re really the only viable way to get metal, plastic and composite (manufacturing just doesn’t seem worth investing in at the moment). I favor jumping to locations that have those because biomass, produce and water are things you should be able to create in large enough quantities on the ship.
It’s of course still a challenge to deal with the crew’s health and keeping the balance between production, but I had fun finally seeing things work out in the end. I do wish there was some time to actually relax and just observe the ship and crew. I don’t mind the Zutopians chasing you, but some moments of downtime would be nice.
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