A list of things to pay attention to when playing the first time without giving anything away.
Game annoyances and how to work around them
When resources are transferred between sectors, this can cause the sending warehouse to become unresponsive to needs within the sector. See Advanced Resource Transfers to learn how to limit this problem.
Your docking bays have a quantity limit on how much they can store. You can use the Fleet Management to limit each docking bay to only specific resources. You can also open the building menu of a warehouse and use the trash icon to dump the warehouse’s inventory so that the warehouse can then start accepting more resources from the full docking bay.
The mining ships and cargo ships can sometimes act amazingly dumb. See Fleet Management to learn how to hammer some intelligence into your idiots.
Incomplete tech menu annoyance: On the tech window, look at the outermost tech tier circle, left side, second question from the top. This tech may not unlock DEPENDING ON YOUR GAME ENDING. In other words, it is not a bug if you beat the game with this left as a question mark.
The mess hall has a tiny slider choice in the building menu that lets you feed starving people when food is available. This defaults to ‘no’ for every sector.
The probe launcher will build probes OR missile defense. If you want both probes and missile defense, you need at least two probe launch buildings: one building probes and one building missile defense.
If you’re ever told to build special shuttles, you can build them in your docking bays after the research is complete, even if your docking bay has all three slots full.
Resource Transfers
Simplified Resource Transfer checklist – If it isn’t working:
- check the sending warehouse to make sure it’s powered
- check the sending warehouse to make sure it has stock
- check the receiving warehouse to make sure it has room and is set up to accept the resource you’re sending
- check the settings you entered. Did you make sure to set the sending warehouse slider to be lower than the current total?
- Did you make sure to set the receiving warehouse slider to be higher than the current total?
- If previous transfers between sectors are in progress for this warehouse, your next request may be delayed.
Advanced Resource Transfers
As mentioned in the game annoyances section, transferring between sectors can and will make warehouses unresponsive to needs in their own sectors. If you’re dealing with a steady stream of resources being transferred, it is strongly recommended to use the Advanced Resource Transfer menu to limit how far your deliveries will travel.
It’s not blatantly obvious, but we’re looking at sector 3. In this game, I made my sector 3 and sector 6 as farming sectors.
Four resources are active:
- Alloy is actually not programmed correctly. The desired amount section is correct, but if I ever have to deconstruct buildings, my warehouse will become overloaded and the excess will not get shipped out. My export checkboxes are all turned off and should be turned back on.
- Food is programmed correctly. I want this sector to reserve 53 units at all times, no matter if other sectors are starving or not. I am exporting primarily to sector 2, and the excess is going to sector 4. I will never export to sector 1,5, or 6. The farms in sector 6 are in charge of sectors 1 and 5.
- Ice is programmed correctly. This is a farming sector, so I want ice to refill my water reserves. If you look at the graphic on the left, you will see that sector 5 is shipping ice to both sector 3 and sector 6.
Fleet Management
***WARNING: THIS IS NOT A RECOMMENDED BUILD FOR EARLY CHAPTERS***
***BE ADVISED THAT MY EARLIER CHAPTERS GAMEPLAY WAS MUCH MESSIER AND FOCUSED ON PULLING RESOURCES IN AS FAST AS POSSIBLE***
You may be wondering why I’m talking about this when I have that warning. Simply put: this is what I wound up with near the end of later chapters, and was afk playing for science points. It also highlights the strengths of the Fleet Management window.
The fleet management window DOES NOT automatically sort your ships based on which docking bay they’re assigned to. However, you can easily reassign them in the individual docking bay menus, and I encourage you to do so.
Looking at these windows, you should notice that all my mining ships are assigned to sector 5. My cargo ships are split between sector 1 and sector 5.
My sector 1 has 4 docking bays, and each docking bay has 2 cargo ships assigned to it.
My sector 5 also has 4 docking bays, and each docking bay has 2 cargo ships assigned to it.
I have my ships organized to each focus on only one resource. In sector 1, each ship that is focused on a main resource belongs to the same docking bay. This pattern allows for two things: first, if any of my docking bays gets plugged with an abundance of resources, it will not block different ores from arriving. Second, sometimes expeditions need resources, and this pattern will typically ensure there is at least one docking bay not plugged with which I can send resources out.
In sector 5, I also set each docking bay to focus on a single resource. But because my storage for both ice and hydrogen are very large, I allowed the ships to also collect a second resource if the primary is not available. I did wind up plugging all of sector 5 docking bays with hydrogen at one point, so be aware that this design isn’t perfect.
Workaround for fixing your idiot ships.
There is a bug involving cargo ships where a nearly empty resource deposit will have multiple cargo ships fly to it. The first cargo ship will clean out the resource and fly back to the station. The other ships will keep flying to the empty resource deposit, and then fly empty back to the station. Because the ships will target a new resource deposit after docking with your station, and because this almost never actually causes an issue with long-term gameplay, you can safely ignore this issue when it comes up. Unless you’re looking to speed run.
The manual workaround for this is to either send your ships after a different type of resource or
- wait for the deposit to empty
- open the fleet management window
- find the ship that is being stupid
- click four times on the resource checkbox that it is flying towards.
Doing this keeps the cargo ship collecting the same resource, but reboots it’s brain into going for a resource deposit that isn’t empty.
There is also a bug where mining ships will try to sit on top of each other. This triggers a shuffle effect where both ships attempt to reposition themselves. Unfortunately, this does not always fix the problem, and you wind up with mining ships constantly shuffling instead of mining.
The miners will eventually need maintenance and dock with your station. Like the cargo haulers, this resets the targeting. Because this almost never actually causes an issue with long-term gameplay, you can safely ignore this issue when it comes up. (Complain to the developers, speed runners. ‘Cuz I feel your pain.)
The manual workaround, unfortunately, is to set one of the problem ships to mine a different resource type. You can either ignore the ship as it goes on to the new resource, or you can wait until the mining ship has flown away from the original deposit and is closer to a different deposit of the same original type and then change it’s priorities back.
Construction and deconstruction
You can plan out your sectors by pausing construction on individual buildings. Click on a building and choose the pause or unpause button at the bottom of the building menu. Feel free to design your entire sector without worrying about your current resource inventory.
Your buildings recycle with zero loss. So you can construct and deconstruct them over and over without any resources lost.
The resources in a building and the resources used to build the building will have to be hauled away to complete a deconstruction. This is true for every building except:
- First workshop will deconstruct and reconstruct instantly at zero cost
- First mess hall will deconstruct and reconstruct instantly at zero cost
- Deconstructing the mess hall will cause a glitch in build menu. Just close and reopen the build menu and mess hall will show up.
- The game remembers which workshop is the first one, but does NOT remember which mess hall is the first. So if you have more than one mess hall, only the last mess hall deconstructed will instantly deconstruct.
Sector specializations
You do not need a DLS building for the specialization to take effect.
You can only see more info about specializations in the DLS menu
You can only open the DLS menu if you have the DLS building built AND POWERED UP in the sector.
For a sector to gain a specialization, you must construct buildings of the same type. Most buildings have a type, although some do not have a type, and others have two types. You can see the type of each building when you hover your mouse over the building in the build menu, or when you click on a building in the sector and open the building’s menu.
I don’t want to take away from the specialization guide also listed here in Steam, so please check it out to learn the requirements for achieving a specialization.
Hints
I hid some of the hints. None of them actively talk about events in the game, but my rule of thumb was: if the hint feels even a little bit like a spoiler, I hid it.
- Your most valuable resource is science points.
- Your science factory will produce an upgradable stream of points throughout the game.
- Not all tech is guaranteed to be useful, but some is SUPER useful
- Although it is possible to run out of any resource, the second most valuable resource is electronics.
- The Recycle Center can produce steel, polymers, and electronics. It defaults to steel, but you can change it anytime you want.
- It is not guaranteed that every building is useful
- If a building has an accident, and the sector still has an optimal workload, the accident will not cause an explosion or fire.
- Besides accidents, explosions and fires can also be caused by enemy weapons.
