Game Modes

## Career Mode

Career Mode is the main game mode of Cosmoteer, and largely involves exploring the galaxy and completing resources in order to build the most powerful ship, and reach the highest tier of Fame. Career mode can be played either alone in singleplayer or with up to three other people in multiplayer.

#### Difficulties

Cosmoteer offers two ways to increase or decrease the difficulty of Career mode, in order to better tailor the experience to suit the player. The first way to modify a Career Mode's difficulty is by changing the **Combat Difficulty**, which affects how much damage you deal to enemies, and how much damage enemies deal to you.

**Combat Difficulty Tiers**
* Normal damage dealt to enemies
 **Ensign** | Easy
* 40% more damage dealt to enemies
 **Captain** | Standard
* Normal damage dealt to enemies
 **Admiral** | Hard
* 20% less damage dealt to enemies
 **Grand Admiral** | Very Hard
* 30% less damage dealt to enemies

The other way to modify Career Mode's difficulty is through the **Economic Difficulty** setting. This affects how fast the player moves through the game, by modifying the resource drop rates, money rewards, fame rewards and resource selling price.

Both Combat difficulty and Economic Difficulty can be modified at any time throughout the playthrough of a Career Mode game. Simply open the **Settings** panel in the middle of the game, navigate to **Current Game > Difficulty**, and make the desired change.

### Gameplay

When playing Career Mode, the basic objective is to complete missions in order to gain fame and resources. Stationsplay an integral role in the gameplay of Career Mode, and when hailed, they allow you to accept missions, trade resources, hire crew and purchase Blueprints. They are regularly visited by Trade Ships, which restock the station with resources and can be hailed for trading and hiring crew.

There are several different types of missions that can be accepted, and they can be characterised as **Bounties, Deliveries** and **Exploration**.

## Creative Mode

Creative mode allows the player to design ships without worrying about credits or resources. In creative mode, no NPC stations or ships spawn. Only Hyperjump relays can be optionally enabled. You can also use various tools in creative mode, such as the Ship Library, New Ship, Doodads, and various helpers.

The "New Ship" button is self-explanatory. When you left-click it the game opens the ship builder on an empty ship were you can start placing parts. You can also access other ship "classes" by right-clicking the button. There are three default ship classes: Terran - where normal ship parts are. Asteroid - Ships made of rock and ore tiles that make up the smaller minable asteroids, Megaroid - Ships made of 4x scaled asteroid parts that cannot contain resources.

The "Ship Library" button allows you to access saved ships in a folder-like structure. You can also access ships saved in the Classic (before steam release) versions of the game. There are also "Lost" ships which are essentially autosaves for ships. If a ship you were building or haven't saved was destroyed, you might be able to find it here. Finally, there are the built in ships which contain the NPC stations, ships and enemies that you encounter in career mode.

The "Doodads" button contains many non-ship objects in the game. Starting from the top, there is the Solar System tab which contains the star and all the planet variations. Note that the planets are only decorative and the stars will still destroy ships. Next, there is the Asteroids tab which contains procedurally generated asteroid and megaroid ships. After that, there is the resources tab. In here you can find all the resources in the game. You can click on one of the resources to select it, and then drop full stacks of the resource on ship storage slots. Then there is the Points of Interest tab, which spawns in the various zones and areas you find in Career mode. Second-to-last, there is the Hyperspace tab which contains the hyperspace relay and beacons. Finally, there is the crew tab which only contains one button to spawn one EVA crew.

The "Select Tool" button allows you to select multiple ships at the same time.

The Hamburger Menu button has several options:

* Play As... Which allows you to view the game from the perspective of a player. (And also spawn and control ships as that player.)
* Change Background... Which changes the background model.
* Fog Of War - Toggles the fog of war. (The horizon circle around your ships)
* Friendly Fire - Toggles friendly fire.
* Use Resources for Ship Construction - Toggles whether you need resources to build ships.
* Ship Destruction Drops Resources - Toggles whether destroying parts drops the resources the parts are made of (And are carrying if it has storage capacity.)
* Clear Everything/Debris/Weapon Projectiles - Clears the respective object type (Debris includes Hyperspace Relays too)
* Battle/Camera/Benchmark Helper
* Auto-Builder - Does not build a ship for you! Instead, it makes the parts of an existing ship slowly appear over time. You can also set the order and duration. It could be useful for construction montages or ship showcases or just showing off a cool ship materializing.