Fargo5's Guide
1. Set Power Core logistic to setting 1 to prevent power outages. Loss of power will likely lead to crew death.
2. Energy cells are the ammo for ship turrets. These are made in the Cell Fuser. Aim to have lots of them in storage!
3. Change crew settings such that only the best crew will man the shield and weapons stations. Set the rest to "X" under shield and weapons to ensure only your best crew members man these stations when you must force them to be manned.
4. When entering a new system, other than a sector for mining/salvage, check pirate locations for trade ships in the same system. Man shields and weapons stations and jump to any pirate sector with a trade ship. When you arrive, the pirates will begin assaulting the trade ship which will allow you to gang up with the merchant and kill off the pirate ship with help.
5. After killing a trade ship or most likely the pirate ship, you can wait 1 full day (24 hours) for the enemy crew to die since they'll be stuck in space suits and unable to sleep. Looting after enemy crew death is a great way to get loot, though you'll need to be quick as other ships in sector will seek to retrieve the loot first.
6. Solar panels should be maximized to decrease dependence on power rods. Make as many as you can afford.
7. Look out for boarders during ship-to-ship combat. The enemy tends to try to sneak aboard your ship during battle.
8. Build a dedicated bridge room with weapon, shield, ops, and other stations, preferably in a small room with a door with its vents set to off and its own life support. Enclose the crew in a similar room. This increases the chances of crew survival and prolongs combat effectiveness in case of temperature fluctuations and oxygen loss from a breach.
9. Set up dedicated machines for making water and energy rods with logistics priority set to 1 on both to ensure that the crew prioritizes them when lots of other machines are online
10. Weapons work well as follows: shotguns are ideal for alien combat, assault rifles work well against pirates as they tend to carry shotguns.
11. Have two recyclers if possible to make infrablocks for pistol manufacture. Pistols are great trade goods. Farming derelicts provides plenty of infra scrap.
12. Your mothership has 16 ship system points. The point cost of systems is 2 per for all modules, which includes shield generators, turrets, hull stabilizers, and scanners. Scanners are an ideal item to add in late game..
13. Maintain jump readiness as much as possible. ALWAYS have an eye on incoming ships, and try to be ready to jump less than 2-3 hours before it deploys. If a pirate ship with 4 turrets attacks, you'll probably die in 20 seconds.
14. Fleets are key in combat. Merely having 2 ships arrayed against the enemy can be enough to control a sector.
15. Fleet management can be eased by setting a new ship's storage facilities to move set item into storage if they contain less than a specific amount. Key items include energy cells, water, food, and power rods in a quanity of about 10 on ships functioning essentially as gunboats. The mothership will then automatically send shuttles with these items to other ships. All you need is a balanced workload so your crew dosent get overwhelmed by the logistics.
16. When you have five or more crew, set them to work in night and day shifts. Create a derilict team and a shipboard team when you can. When affordable, add on a second shuttle to cut trade and salvaging time in half.
17. When the crew is swamped with tasks and you want to prioritize a repair, click the repair icon to turn the task off and then on and a crew member will prioritize the task. Same goes for recharging your engine with power rods after a jump.
18. The mothership is likely to contain an industrial machine park. Ensure the room housing the manufactory has no air in it to prevent a catostrophic fire. This is accomplished easily with spacesuit doors (and exterior vents if using a mod).
19. Kitchens and crew quarters require a gas scrubber in close viscinity to manage kitchen fires and death from CO2 suffocation.
20. Grow Beds MOST be in a closed room with lots of light and a CO2 machine or you'll lose half your production.
21. Pause during fire alerts and draft crew near the fire to ensure they don't doing get cornered by it and die.
22. Every time you make a new room or redecorate, check temp and air flow in the next hour. A medical room with too much CO2 will kill its occupants faster than their wounds.
23. Good power management requires batteries and separating circuits for sections of the ship, perhaps with their own generators attached. This will slow energy rod use, especially compared to the rod use rate for a ship that daisy chains everything to a single generator. A circuit for the food production rooms and life support and others for production are a good start. Try to have enough batteries to run everything on them alone if possible so as to have a fail-safe.
24. Dismantling most items returns all materials except water placed into grow beds (and possibly hull blocks for engines and airlocks).
25. Before exploring your first derelict, make an item fabricator and 2-3 new shotguns. You can dismantle both afterward to regain the initial resource investment since things are tight initially. Then arm your crew with the shotguns by drafting them, walking them over to the weapon on the floor/in storage, and use the appropriate icon in inventory. Crew members will only fight if drafted. During fights it is helpful to pause to issue orders as they will repeat their last action until stopped. If they see an alien or a pirate and are armed, they will auto-shoot whatever is in their line of sight.
26. Wounded crew that won't go to a medical bed can be commanded to while drafted by clicking on the bed in the same manner as clicking on a shuttle you want them to enter. Restrict medical treatment tasks to crew members with high skill to prevent death at the hands of unskilled members. Medical supplies and IV fluid are used on a daily basis to close wounds and replace food at a rate of 1 of the former and 2 of the latter per day, though a nearby storage stockpile is recommended in case these numbers are off.
27. If a crew member is starving or low on energy, set them to only sleep and leisure time in the schedule manager. Crew members with low health should be set to only rest.
28. When trading, ensure your exchange amounts transfer goods such that your trading partner has 10 or more of a good you want to trade, as NPCs will not trade any good of quantity less than 10. If a trade is delayed, it may be because your crew or that of your trading partner is asleep or logistically swamped, which can be fixed on your end by pausing all machines and reducing other logistics overhead. The risk of a pirate raid during a trade is plenty of motivation to streamline production and logistics.
29. Each engine can jump 1600 mass. Double clicking your ship will display mass in the UI. If your ship is 1781 mass, you will need two engines and a minimum of 1 hull stabilizer and a navigation console.
30. Delicts without airlocks can be entered by clicking dock and selecting a hull breach on the ship. This will spawn a grey grid adjacent the hull breach in the derelict for the shuttle to park next to. Your crew will use this instead of an airlock.
31. Priorities for living in space - create a grow bed in a closed room with a heater, a CO2 producer, and wall lights on all sides. Then prioritize a recycler and then either a water purifier or energy refinery to make those two makes water from ice blocks and convert hyperium into hyper fuel/power rods. If you're short on materials you can dismantle machines to get a 100% refund of materials invested. Never get under 15 units of water, power, or fuel - feel free to set production appropriately.
32. Try to use the option produce if lower than (50 is good for water and electric, medic is good for 5 etc). Try to avoid continuous if possible.
33. It is vita to put 5-6 crew members on a nightshift as soon as possible. Once things are running smoothly, the 4 bravest crew members can become the dedicated away team and prioritize them for derelict work.
