Overview
Beginner’s knowledge after playing the tutorial on the starter planet.
Short tips
Before reading my tips, please read the great manual / tips from Skip
Most of my tips are legacy now, after Empyrion has got a new Tutorial in the main menu which shows much more things than the old tutorial ‘Robinson protocoll’, thanks to the developers:
With the key ‘v’ you can use external view.
In a ship, after pressing ALT you can use your mousewheel to have a wider distance-view to your ship.
With ALT + using the mouse you can view around your ship. It’s helpful to watch out for enemies around your ship.
In space vehicle press key ‘i’ for keeping speed without using key ‘w’ for accelerating. <– This is missing in the new tutorial 🙂
Build things after pressing F5 for your drone. It has full access to your inventory. You can delete blocks with your drone! You have to use your Multitool inside the quickaccess menu. Press right mousebutton and choose ‘retrieve’. You can do this while your using the drone.
You can use your drone inside enemy bases to look around corners and to watch out for enemies without risking your life.
Meals
In the beginning the hunger and finding something to eat was horrible. Build a base and plant your own food. See the tutorial of Skip (link above).
After that you don’t have to gardening anything (like water the pots) except of taking the finished plants after growing. My garden now has a size of about 10×10. I get about 200 plant protein everytime and other things to create cheeseburgers which give me 200 food.
Maybe a bug, but helpful: If you construct food in your body constructor, then let it stay inside the out area, because the perish timer won’t start. It’s like free a fridge without costing energy.
Bases
Important: Build two bases close to each other. If one base has everything inside (constructors, plants, weapons) the energy is fast at zero:
So, first base has only weapons! Second base is only for plants and the fridge. And maybe a third base for some constructors.
Use sun collectors and no (fuel-) generators, but put a fuel block in the base. The capacitor (battery for solar-panels) will use fuel only when the sun isn’t shining or the battery is empty. So use more than only one capacitor, because your battery size is increasing with each.
Every base can handle fifteen solar-panels. Important: The solar-panels producing more energy if their faces are looking to the sun! So look over a day where the sun comes out and where it is going down. So you can put your solar panels to all three directions.
Or you can flatten your panels: Click right mousebutton while building the solar-panel. There is a menu where you can choose how the panel should look like.
You can build your buildings with your drone (F5). It has access to your inventory.
Safe your battery: While you are not using something like the constructor, shut down every machine. You can use menu groups, you can switch on and off with one click, while the battery can load up to 100%.
Here you can see the battery loadout: ###picture later###
and here you can see how much energy comes in ### and gets out because of your machines.
### See the pictures of the ship, how I use groups there ###
Some machines you can’t switch of like the medical device or the armor locker, so they always cost energy.
At the end I delete (retrieve) these blocks with my Multitool, put the block in the cargo space and build it again if I need it.
Building
While inserting a new block to your base or ship, you can rotate the blocks with these keys:
insert, del(ete), Pos1, End, PageUp, PageDown.
With del you switch through three axis and with PageUp+Down you rotate the block.
After you set the block, you can rotate the block using your MultipleTool Laser (after building it).
Sometimes it won’t work, then use your MultipleTool click right mousebutton and choose ‘retrieve’ (the upper thing).
Take the block and set it new. While setting a new block you can always rotate a block.
You can delete blocks even with your drone cam. Then use the multitool:
Important to know: While setting a new block: use right mouse button to get a building menu, where you can choose how the block should look like, here the solar panel:
Ships (vessels)
To center your ship, press ‘o’. Especially on high gravity planets this can be helpful.
After accelerating in space use ‘i’ key to stay on speed without losing energy. Then you don’t have to hold the ‘w’ key to accelerate the whole time.
Look at those two pictures. On your screen in the right bottom corner you can see your ship with two arrows around it. Clicking key ‘i’ brings them or removes them:
Your ship is turning really slow? Then add one (or more) RCS block into your ship.
You need a CV (capital vessel) only for making warp jumps! After the jump turn off everything to keep fuel. Use a refrigerator only in your small ship, because you always use it. Never turn off the small ship, only turn off the thrusters, constructor and things like that. Deconstruct the armor locker every time you used it, because it takes fuel the whole time.
After putting the base of a ship onto the floor, later you can put the core to another position: Just delete the core with your Multitool and put another core to wherever you want.
With better thrusters you won’t be faster! The better thrusters have only more acceleration.
So, for small ships you only need small thrusters – except on high gravity planets. Once I landed on such a planet and wasn’t able to start again, because the gravity was so strong.
My solution: I have two series of thrusters on my small ship: for normal planets smaller thrusters, and for emergency bigger thrusters.
I put both thruster groups in a menu ‘group’, so I can switch the bigger ones of.
In the two pictures you see the power consumption on the left side. ‘Power left’ means the minutes how long you have fuel in your vessel. But don’t shut down everything while you are using a fridge, because it needs energy.
Other star systems and planets
To get to other star systems you need a warp drive, a pentaxid tank and pentaxid for fuel. You can mine pentaxid in space, for example on the starters moon (blue crystals you can pick up without mining), and later you can mine masses of it inside asteroids.
But you need armour to protect yourself against radioation.
To use warp drive accelerate your ship above 50 m/s and press ‘k’ on your keyboard.
With the SV (small vessel) warpdrive you can make only short jumps, and with the CV (capital vessel) you can make long distance jumps, but 30 AU max in one jump.
Afer visiting a planet you can see the minerals in a tab here:
Earn reputation for other factions
You only need the reputation for trading, I think.
You can’t trade on a trading station while your status is only neutral, you need a friendly status.
To push your reputation you can do quests for the factions. For example: Go into the Polaris tab.
An easy one is to watch out for ores:
It switches to friendly even if you have a very small reputation!
User Spext0râ„¢ added this helpful comment about reputation:
Confirmation with the Reputation depending on how you are playing it; It’s best to have certain factions as Friendly and Honored as soon as possible since they wont be bothered when you mine or take neutral plants or cut down some trees. This is especially helpful if you wish to not be bothered by them via rep loss. Just remember not to kill Neutral [Cyan Blue Tag] creatures that are marked as prey even for food. Best pick a fight with the local predators with a shotgun if you have one.
(Enemy) bases, temples, destroyed ships
- Use your drone to look behind corners, so an enemy surprise won’t surprise you.
- Every base and temple has it’s own core. If you destroy it, you can put your own core into the base.
- After putting your own core into a base, temple or ship you have direct access to all of their cargos! Use ‘key p’ and go through all cargos.
- With your multitool you can harvest destroyed ships and buildings. So you get directly plates, constructors and turrets and you don’t have to build them on your own.
- In temples some ways are hidden behind walls and you can destroy them. They have a different color to the rest of the room.