Getting Started

There is currently no in-game tutorial, there might be in the future, but for now consider this a sort of tutorial on how to get started and you can then probably work out what to do from there.

## Where to start?

Way before you are building colonist buildings and setting up automation and logistics is the first phase of the game where it's all about your own survival. The game begins just after you've crashed onto an alien world, the remains of your ship is burning around you. You'll see lots of cubes on the ground. These are resources. In this universe all solids, liquids and gases are wrapped into a 4D container and the cube you see is a 3D shadow of that 4D container. #made-up-science

You can pick up these resources by simply looking at them and pressing or holding the Q key. If you then press E, you can see the contents of your inventory. In there, you'll see a 'drop' button which as you may have guessed, drops the cube back into the world. Some resources can be placed, rather than dropped, you'll see a 'place' button when you can do that. other buttons next to each items include 'Drink' and 'Eat'. That is what the first phase of the game is all about, finding or making things for you to eat and drink, otherwise you tend to feel a bit ill and might die.

## Interacting with things

Another important key is F, this will focus or interact with various things in the game and solves your first problem, what can I drink? Look around the crash site, do you see something that looks like some weird "space cow", if it makes mooing sounds, then it's probably a space cow. Look at the Cow and check out the very top of the screen, it'll tell you if it's a female cow or male cow, DO NOT try to milk a male cow. Look at the female cow and press F to interact with her, one option right there is to milk the cow. She'll drop a couple of milk cubes for you, pick them up with the Q key, then look in your inventory with the E key and there you go, you've got something to drink.

Eating works the same, luckily, you have a few baked potatoes to snack on, but they won't last long.

## Currencies

One thing you may have noticed in your inventory (E key) at the bottom is "Trinity Account". This is your space bank account, money is in the form of three coloured coins, Red, green and blue.

Green coins are used in exchange for land & food-based resources, Red coins are used when buying/selling machinery, mining and that sort of thing, Blue coins are used for complex and advanced items.

So let's acquire some green coins, that way you can buy more food, as it might be a while before you can grow your own. Press the R key, luckily you bought your space drill with you, it's gonna be very handy, walk up to a tree and use your drill (left-mouse button), hold it down for a few seconds and the tree will collapse, you'll get lumber and a few saplings for your time, you can plant the samplings if you want to maintain the forest by using the 'place' button in your inventory.

## Aliens

You may have seen alien ships flying over, they live on the ships, but other aliens have chosen to live on the planet surface, one of the first things you'll need to do is earn green coins to buy food, so go find an alien town. To make things a bit easier for you, stay close to rivers, lakes and woodlands, that's where aliens like to make their homes, you might have to walk 10, 15 or more sectors to find one, don't fret, you'll soon have a jetpack and helicopter to get around!

Once you find an alien town, use the F key to interact with the various buildings, they buy and sell various things, look for a lumberjack building, not every town has one, so you may have to carry on walking for a bit longer. Once found, you can sell your chopped lumber to them and get some green coins, that was easy wasn't it?

Now see if you can find a grocery store, use the green coins to buy some food. Another easy one is if you find some ore (which can be mined up with your handy drill), you can sell the ore to one of the shops and get some red coins. You won't get very much for ore, it's price increases when you process it into molten ore and then ingots.

Every resource is worth a fair price, so if you want more coins when selling items, you'll need to put some work in, smelting the ore into molten ore will get you a better price, casting it into ingots will get you an even better price. Usually the more work has been put into making and item, the more expensive it is.

You don't need to set up your base right next door to this town, a far easier way to sell your wares is to place down your "4D solid storage" on the ground and place things you want to sell in there, then on the top-right, there's a clicky button to make this storage as things you want to sell. When a alien ship flies over, they'll scan this and see if there's anything they want and buy it off you, coins will go straight into your account. Easy.

Doing this with many different items will bring in enough coins to buy food and drink for as long as you need, but sooner or later, you'll want to find a nice spot where you can set up a base and really start manufacturing a bewildering amount of materials, food, machinery. Certain things you cannot make as they use 4D holographically-mapped technology or "alien tech", that's where the coins come in handy.

## Explore the world and setup a base

As you may have noticed, the world is flat, just like the Earth 😉 but it's large, hundreds of square kilometres and the aliens don't mind where you set up bases. A good initial base might be close to ores, you can setup a mining operation right next-door. You'll need two 4D modules and a few other regular 3D machines, again, go buy yourself a "Smelter module" and a "Metal Casting module" from the nice aliens in one of the towns.

You put ore into the smelter to make molten metal, then using "holoconveyors" and a logistic instruction, send the molten metal into the "metal casting module" which will cast it into an ingot. OK, I'll back up a bit there as I used a lot of long words.

Let's say you've mined up some iron ore and it's in your inventory, if you look at the smelter module and press E, you'll get a split screen of your inventory and the smelter's inventory, press the "<>" button next to your fresh iron ore and it will transfer into the smelter, but nothings happening right? close out of that and now look at the smelter and press F (to interact with it). There's a drop-down list of things that this module can make, go find molten Iron and select that. Below it will say what it needs and how long it's going to take, switch the module on using the slide-y 'Enable' switch and oh....nothing is still happening. All modules will require electricity, later in the game, colony buildings will need electricity. You have several options, so let's start with the most basic setup for your tiny outdoor iron factory. Once you get good at this, you'll be able to build your factories indoors out of the rain.

## Electricity

For your first electric setup, let's keep it as basic as possible. Time to go shopping! here's a shopping list:

* "Power Generator (wood/coal)"
* "Power sub-station"
* "wooden bucket"

You'll need about 300 red coins and 2 green coins for that lot, but they will serve you well for a long time, so consider them a money-making investment.

Find a lake or river, look at the water...isn't it pretty...anyway, while looking at the water, open your inventory and click on the "use" button next to the wooden bucket, you'll see "dirty water" appearing in your inventory, do it a few more times, as you'll need quite a bit. Later on you can buy a 'Liquid pump" which will cut out all this hard work!

Go chop a few trees down, maybe re-plant the saplings? and put the lumber and water into the Power generator, the default setting is to burn wood and use water, the other option is to use coal instead of wood, which burns longer. It won't actually burn anything yet, only when there is some demand for electric.

The generator makes HIGH voltage electricity, but your modules and buildings require MEDIUM voltage electricity, this is where the "Power sub-station" comes in, place it down somewhere near the generator. The sub-station not only transforms high-voltage to medium-voltage, but is a means to distribute power to multiple modules or buildings, there is no limit, however, your generator can only make so much electric, so that is the limit of modules.

You'll notice your smelter is still not running and will say "no power". The final step:

Look at the power pole sticking up from the generator and press "C" (for connect), you'll hear an electric buzzing sound, that is good! Now look at the sub-station's power pole and press C again. Bzzzz! the connection has been made. Now you can do the same to connect your sub-station to both of your modules and then they will spring to life... you did switch it on right?

## Logistics

Your smelter will start turning the iron ore into molten iron, but the casting module will just sit there doing nothing. Now you could pick up the molten iron, don't worry, it's inside a 4D cube, so won't burn your hands! and then drop it into the casting machine, but there's a much easier way: Logistics!

Look at your smelter and press E, at the bottom-right, click on the "Logistics" button. This is where you tell the module or inventory where you want to send things it has, start on the left side and look for "Molten Iron (liquid)" under M, select that and click on "Send this".

You'll then get a list of other modules and inventories with range, select your new "metal casting module" from the list. The instruction will then appear on the list, you can change the number (default is 1) to a higher number. This is how many of that item do want to be in the metal casting module, it will send until it has that many, as it uses them up, it'll send some more to try to keep it at that number.

**NOTE: It's not a good idea to set the number too high, as there is limited space and if you fill it up too much the module will shutdown as there isn't enough space to put other things, I'd recommend you set it to 10 or so.**

When it can send items, you'll see a "holo-conveyor" appear that transports the items over and will disappear when it's done. Using Logistics and holo-conveyors you can transport any item, solid, liquid or gas over a fairly long distance...about 3 sectors. If you need to transport items longer distance, you'll need to invest in Cargo shuttles and landing pads, quite expensive, but worth it!

Logistics works with modules, liquid and solid storages (like your "4D solid storage") and later on, buildings have holo-conveyor towers on the roof for transfer between buildings, Food from a greenhouse to a habitat for instance.

Another good idea is to name your inventories using the input box next to the "Logistics" button, give things a meaningful name like "Iron ingot storage" or "My food cupboard", It'll pay off when you have hundreds of inventories and they're not all called "4D solid storage".

## Conclusion

Well, that's the basics of the whole game. This is just to get you started on your way to building a thriving colony of 100s or 1000s of colonists, each one will need food, drink and Oxygen. Sure you can buy it, but with the logistics system, you can automate the whole process from growing potatoes, baking them, sending them to a habitat and even collecting the erm..sewage from the habitat and turning that into something useful.

One other word of caution: Food rots and turns into "Biomass" after so many days, so you can't just buy "10,000" loafs of bread and then think you're set for years. That strategy will get you about 9,900 biomass and some very hungry colonists! So buy or grow what you need for the short-term. There's no mathematical formula for this, some days they eat a lot, other days, not so much. At least if there is waste (Biomass), you can make many things from it, compost for your farming operations, cellulose to make paper and plastic.

You may have noticed that you have C.R.A.P. in your inventory (**C**atalogue of **R**esources **A**nd **P**roduction). This is like a in-world WIKI, it details every resource in the game, what it does, how to make it, what to do with it, just select a resource from the list and read everything about that one, there are hyperlinks too, to other resources. I suggest setting C.R.A.P down somewhere handy, as you'll probably be looking things up quite a lot!

This tutorial has covered just the beginning of your adventure to build a colony on an alien world, there is quite a bit more to this, but I don't want to spoil your game, I will probably do smaller tutorials that focus on one thing, especially if it's quite a complicated thing.