Building Your First Ship

This page will help you get off the ground in Starship EVO, going over the basics of building your first ship, as well as saving it and navigating blueprints. You can find further details on each part of this guide on each element's dedicated page.

When you first enter the game, you'll be presented with a short tutorial. You should complete this to get you better acquainted with moving around in the game and the various tools you have available.

### Scaling

In Starship EVO, you have complete control over the size of the blocks you place down. To the right of the build bar on your HUD, there is an indicator for the scale you're currently building in, marked in meters. Press **[T]** to scroll through the available scales. For simplicity, stick to one scale throughout this guide, either 1/2m or 1m.

Once you get more comfortable with building, you can also explore the advanced Build Menu with **[F1]** for more control over these settings.

## Your First Ship

Here's what you need to set up your first ship
* Ship Computer
* Sym Tool
* Yoke
* Reactor
* Thruster
* Seat

### Setup Steps:

1. First off, find somewhere nice and open to build and open up the Codex by pressing **[TAB]**. Click the Blocks tab on the left shaped like a Cube, and drag the Starter Block down to your hotbar.
2. Close the Codex and hold the Starter Block in your hand by using the **[SCROLL WHEEL]** or pressing the corresponding **[1-9]** on your toolbar. The Starter Block will show as a hologram in front of you. A **blue** Starter Block means you will start a new dynamic grid for a vehicle; a **green** starter block means you will begin a new static grid if you're building on the Ringworld. Place down a **blue** Starter Block. This block causes the grid to ignore gravity, which is handy for building on the Ringworld where the natural gravity would otherwise cause our ship to be pulled down when working on it.
3. To speed things up, you can place a Mirror Plane. Open the Codex, click on the Tools tab, and drag the Symmetry Tool down to your Hotbar. You can rotate the Symmetry Tool by pressing **[R][1]**, and once you have placed one down, toggle it on/off with the **[M]** key.
4. Build a small, flat platform and put a Seat in the middle for your player to sit on. It should look something like the image on the *right*.
5. Now for some Thrusters. Grab a Thruster from the Codex (not a Lightcruise Thruster) and place one down facing towards the back of your ship. The number of Thrusters pointing backward versus the ship's total mass will determine how fast your Starship travels in that cardinal direction.
6. Next, place a thruster pointing sideways onto your ship. Thrusters pointing up, down, left or right contribute to maneuvering thrust, or how fast your ship can turn. You do not need thrusters pointing in each direction to allow your ship to turn; one is fine.
7. For power, place down a Reactor on your ship. You can place them down anywhere, but you may need to place down multiple reactors to satisfy the power demand of the Thrusters. You can see the total power used versus generated for your ship in the bottom right corner of the HUD, next to the lightning icon. 100% means the vessel uses 100% of the power it generates and is the absolute top limit for a functional ship. Always aim for this value to be lower than 100%, or your ship will not have enough power to fly.
8. Now we can set up the Yoke and Spaceship Computer. Place down the Yoke in front of the seat so your character can reach it while sitting down. Next, place the Spaceship Computer anywhere you like. Take the Link Tool and draw a link by holding down and releasing the **[MOUSE BUTTON]** between the Yoke and the Spaceship Computer.

And there we have it! You've just build your first ship, complete with flight capabilities. Sit down in the chair and **[INTERACT]** with the Yoke to fly it with **[WASD]**.

## Landing Gear

Now that your ship can fly let's make sure it can land safely.

For this, we'll use a simple set of landing gear moved by Hinges linked to the **[G]** (landing gear) hotkey. Place 4 Hinges, each at one corner of your ship. Place a block on each Hinge to act as a foot. Next, place down an Event Gate and a Switch on the ship anywhere you like.

Take the Link Tool and draw a link from your Yoke to the Event Gate, then another from the Event Gate to the Switch. The Event Gate will read your key presses when you control the Yoke and produce a logic pulse, while the Switch will toggle the Hinges up and down. You can now link the Switch to each Hinge.

To configure the Event Gate, **[INTERACT]** with it and select the **Is Landing Gear Pressed** event in the "Event Registered" drop-down menu. Make sure the "Signal Type" is also set to **Toggle**.

    At this stage, you can remove the Starter Block from your ship. Or keep it on to keep working on your ship! So far, it was handy to make our ship float in gravity to work on it easily, but you can now remove it if you want your ship to behave as it should under gravity.

When you fly your ship, you can hit **[G]** on your keyboard to deploy and retract your landing gear. Consider using the Sequencer for more accurate control over mechanisms for more complex landing gear systems.

## Weapons

Like how we used the Event Gate to link landing gear to a hotkey, we can do the same with weapons.

Place a Weapon down on your ship, as well as another Event Gate. Configure the Event Gate to Is Primary Fire Pressed from the "Event Registered" drop-down menu. As before, use the Link Tool to link the Yoke to the Event Gate and then the Event Gate to the weapon.

Now you can fire your weapon when flying by using the Primary Fire **[LEFT MOUSE].**

There are many ways to customize your weapon, which you can read about *here*. You could also try mounting your gun on a Turret.

## Saving your ship - Blueprints

When you're working on your projects, it's a good idea to save them as a blueprint so you can spawn them elsewhere or share them in the Workshop.

In the Codex, click on the Entity tab at the top. The icon will show the grid you are currently working on. You can rename your creation in the Name text field and then hit Export to save your blueprint from this menu. It's good practice to save your build as a blueprint early in the build process and hit Export every time you want to keep your progress. Save often.

    To spawn in one of your saved blueprints, or one you've subscribed to on the Steam Workshop, place down a Starter Block. Interact with it to show the Spawn Menu, from which you can search for and view your blueprints. Simply click on one to spawn it at your current position.

## Heat

You may have noticed the % stat with the fire icon in the bottom right corner of your HUD change throughout the building process. Similar to the power %, this is the percentage of heat generated versus the total heat dissipation of your ship. Systems like Reactors, Thrusters, and Shield Generators and weapons will all produce waste heat. The ship dissipates heat via the amount of hull blocks on the ship, as well as its surface area - you can check all these statistics in the Entity tab on the Codex, or in the Spaceship Computer.

If the heat percentage on your ship is larger than 100%, you won't be able to fly your ship as it will run too hot. If you reach 100% Heat Capacity during flight your ship will be **disabled** until it cools down again.

Should you be running higher than 100% while building, try removing excess systems, or add structural elements like wings to increase your ships heat dissipation through surface area.

## Media

**Ship Guide**

Circle Generator- A tool to help build large circles in Starship EVO

1. ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 *Default Keybinding*