Tips and tricks for starting a new game

## How to choose the right ship?

### Ship selection

At the beginning, your ship selection is likely to be severely limited. The first ships are not meant to beat the game, rather to help you unlock bigger and better ships, which usually unlock when reaching to certain sectors. Those in turn should be enough to unlock the largest ships, which are generally more than enough to beat the game with. The chance of survival is higher with every newer ship.

It’s recommended to try out all the ships, but if you’re planning out specific strategy for your next run, for example being heavy with gunnery or producing resources, have a look at the ships page. There you’ll find all the default modules, containers and slots that the ship comes with + statistics.

Check out this Steam guide to see the build of default ships. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1839325708

## Starting perks

After you’ve chosen your ship, you must choose perks to help you during the run.

**Perks can be categorized into 6:**

1. Gardens and other economy modules

2. Ship hull upgrades for deflection/evasion/accuracy/HP

3. Ship weapon upgrades

4. Other ship module upgrades

5. Crew members

6. Extra nukes

Not all perks are equal, nor is their cost necessarily an indicator of the value you're getting. Keep this in mind when choosing perks.

Typical examples are spending 2 fate points to unlock 1 exotic resource, while you can just buy a module plus extra resources with the same number of fate points, scrap the module, and end up with your exotic plus a few hundred resources for the same price. At the early stages, you will likely have a fair amount of fate points to spend, but not a lot to spend it on, so perhaps just taking everything that looks good can work.

**Check the ships page to see every ship’s default build, combine the information with choosing perks.**

### Tips for choosing starting perks

* Have a small crew? → Choose extra people/bots. (Bots have different skills,  don’t consume any organics, but need a drone repair module to be fixed up.)
* Ship hull bonuses are always handy (+accuracy/evasion/HP/deflection)
* Extra weapons, weapon upgrades and nukes come in handy.
* Have lots of microgrowerys/greenhouses/science labs? → Take specific gardening drones/scientists.
* Perks that are marked PERMANENT will apply to all your ships, on every playthrough after you pick them up. High cost on your initial purchase but worth getting.
* It is recommended to have a drone repair and medbay capability for all ships as a backup feature. Late game crew are incredibly valuable due to their skill levels, and losing them should be avoided.

## Crew

Crew members come with different skills/roles, as seen on the picture above. The higher the skill, the more successful one is at their role. For example, if one’s gardening skill is 7, they produce 7 organics/100 ru or member with higher repair skill is faster at repairing than somebody with lower repair skill.

Once new sector is reached, every crew member gets one extra skillpoint - where that point is going, can be decided manually or added by the AI (every crew gets a skillpoint according to where they are currently assigned to).

Use presets to save time and resources - one is for travelling, other for battle situations. During travel mode, resource consumption should be as low as possible (or production as high as possible), during battle mode, crew should be positioned to weapons, shield and point-defences.

Use the crew roles panel (seen on the picture) to conveniently send members to their spots. If everybody has got their tasks, make sure to *save* the sets to *load* them easily when necessary.

### Travel mode

For travelling mode have one person controlling the sensor, everybody else can be sent to gardens/labs to produce organics or data. Figure out which team members consume the most organics and send them to either gardens (where they’ll produce food based on their gardening skill) or to cryo modules (where their food consumption is zero).

### Battle mode

For battle mode send crew with gunnery skills to control the weapons and point-defences, don’t forget the shields. Unoccupied crew and bots can be used for taking care of the fires, repairs and on-ship combat.

## Crew skills assignment

In this section, we'll take a look at some of the main areas you can assign your crew to. Clearly, you want them to train skills that will bring the most benefit to you. In general, if you can support it, you'll want to have your bridge, shields, and all of your guns and point defence systems manned. But beyond that, what should your priorities be?

### Dedicated bridge crew

You should leave at least one permanent crew member on the bridge, making sure that both their travel and combat preset is the bridge room. This is because when the last bridge crew leaves the room, weapons and shields that are unmanned will have their effects reset. In other words, you will start the battle with your shields uncharged, and if your crew are still running around, your weapons not charging. Since this crew member will be permanently in the bridge, it makes sense to train their bridge skill to max. Also, importantly, only use reasonably low organics using crew members for this role (-4 or -5, etc). It makes no sense to have a -17 person standing in bridge eating all the food. Having those as secondary bridgemen is fine, of course, they can join once they are out of cryo.

Bear in mind that the more people you have at bridge, the bigger the evasion, which makes the enemy shots miss your ship.

### Dedicated sensor crew

By dedicated, I mean a crew member whose primary skill is sensors, and will spend most or all their time operating the sensors. Since sensors don't do anything during combat, this person would still have a separate role during combat. If you have the crew to spare, having someone train up sensors is an excellent idea, because the bonus scales to double radius (IIRC), meaning that you're actually seeing 4x more area on the map. The first, obvious way this helps is for you is to highlight additional event locations you might otherwise miss. The second is just as important, by scanning far-away locations, you can often optimise the order in which you want to visit them in any given system. Lastly, they tend to alert you to enemy fleet locations before they surprise you, removing a minor irritation and potentially dangerous situation.

### Dedicated gardeners

Since gardens also serve as immediate cryo-bays for their crew, it is a strong option. Use crew with high gardening skill or gardening drones to produce organics during travel. If you are able to reliably offload organics at stations, this is a great way to make some money on the side. If you have decent storage capacity, and are diligent in offloading organics, you should rarely have wastage. If you are simply selling the organics to buy other resources you're short on, you're going to be doing so at a 50% loss (sell at 1, buy other resources at 2). To compensate, it’s recommended to use a very efficient engine. You're essentially trading fuel for organics when you travel - something you have to do in any case - so you might as well optimise the ratio at which the conversion happens.

### Dedicated researchers

Unlike food modules, research modules don't zero your crew's organics usage. They are also generally quite limited in space, fitting the largest crew of 3. They produce 1 credit per 100 ru travelled per skill point, although there is an ‘advanced’ science lab with even more limited crew space (max 1 crew), which yields 2 credit per 100 ru. The first question is what the break even point is for having a crew member do research, versus grow food, versus be in cryo.

* Research vs cryo modules: profitable as long as [research skill] > [organics consumption]. As an example, a crew member with 7 research and -4 organics use is generally profitable, unless you find yourself having to constantly buy organics at 2x the price, in which case it is a slight loss.
* Research vs food production: profitable as long as [research] - [organics consumption] > [food skill]. Example: a crew member with 8 research, -4 food consumption and 2 food growth skill is producing 8 credits per 100 ru at the cost of 4 food, instead of generating a nett of 2 food.
* Research vs standing around: obviously, anything is better than consuming food without doing anything productive.

A few final notes about research/credits. The main advantage of research is that it directly generates the game's currency, which can immediately be spent. It never needs to be converted to fuel, and you can always convert it to other resources at stations at a 50% loss. It is also the primary currency that you use to buy modules, repairs, and crew members. As such, it is a more convenient form of currency than organics. However, unlike farms, you are inherently losing organics while producing research, so it's generally done at a small disadvantage. At the end of the day, experiment with what trade-offs work with your ship, available slot space, modules, crew, and general situation.