...and those that are not up to date with the most recent changes. What are the 10 most important starter Tips for surviving the first hours in Alpha 8.0 in YOUR opinion?
First, do not land on the mountain, try to find someone near the lake. More food and a smaller spider population. Another great recommendation for everyone is to hunt desert golems. The experience and the ore that does not exist on that planet you get. These three things allow you to have a normal play without frustration.
Can give only Singleplayer tips: .) Right after the Start pick all stuff you find. Use your Suit Constructor! You can sort the stuff when you settle for the night. .) If you do Robinson Protocol don't push yourself to exaustion to achieve all in one day Nothing is achieved by that .) Collect Ore-Stones and Crushed Stones alike, any Starter Ore the area lacks can be supplied by transforming crushed stones. .) All Food you find fits a certain purpose. Plant Protein is a vital Supply for Food, Berries and Vegetables are good to regain health .) Cut Trees to wood loggs. You may chose to build a Chainsaw or, like me, using a Shotgun. .)Wood Loggs are main source to supply you with Bio Fuel .) Chose the place for you home, temporary or not, WISE! .) Wreckages are good starter homes and easy to built up to a base or Operation. .) Building a base of your own requires a suitable area. Flat at best to pick incoming attackers quite early out of the sky. .) Base building without at least one Gun Turret (plus ammo and sufficient Energy) mounted provokes certain distruction. A base on a lake is nice but if you want to loot the Attackers/Drones you may have to swim quite often;-)
Pick and craft herbal leaves into medical supplies ASAP. The crafted products will not expire however the components do. You'll have the antidotes ready when the time comes. Make a chainsaw and burn through 2-3 biofuels to get wood. This will give you a decent ongoing supply of fuel for a starter vehicle when the time comes. Make a shotgun and ammo when you are able. Up close it is brutal. A lot of this is preparatory work. I usually spend 30 minutes to an hour getting ready then start knowing you are able to cope with most situations.
Activate the Robinson Protocol as the very early part of it will lead you to important starter gear and resources. Do not waste precious time on the first night by using the tent. The first night is particularly valuable as hostile enemies do not spawn until partway through the 2nd day. Craft your T1 drill as soon as possible once you've got some biofuel as ECubed mentions. The very first night is a great time go down and dig iron, copper, and silicon deposits underground as it's less important that it's dark outside than when trying to explore and there are not yet any hostiles. The ones near the Wreckage will be suitably close together and will provide a decent early start. If you're drilling manually, drill at a shallow angle so you do not get stuck. Alternately you may press F5 to deploy a drone with a 50-meter range from you which can drill remotely provided your drill is your character's currently active tool.
Once you have a small amount of ore, like 80 iron or so (and copper and silicon), you can make a basic HV. At level 5 (which is very early on) you can make an HV out of a blueprint that will have a constructor, mini gun turret, gatling gun, fridge, and detector. This is a game changer! Suddenly you will be able to craft better weapons, and you will find ore and POIs much more easily. The gatling gun is a fast way to level up quickly. Those spiders give up something like 500 XP each, and drones and golems give up thousands! Example of a basic level 5 HV: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1405598065
If you set your base up in the swamp or marsh, you will have excellent access to medicinal plants. Kill dino's for eggs to use for making the med packs. Even the child parasours have eggs. A 3×3 grouping of grow plots can be lit with one grow light over the center plot. If you plant 1 fruit, 3 spice, and 5 veg you have everything you need to make 1 emergency ration, minus the buds which you must forage for.
Heh, I was actually contemplating writing this up as I've started and restarted a couple times and made some realizations about optimal and non-optimal approach. Keep in mind, this will reflect the bias of my own playstyle, which one might term "Assault From the Bunkers!" This will assume starting on a temperate default world and without doing Robinson Protocol (which I find boring). 1. Most important resources will be: wood (fuel, etc.), grain (sprouts, bread, plastic), ores, water (H20, and O2). You want to identify a location where these are all convenient. Marshes seem to be the go to spot for grain and also tend to have water handy. If you can find a spot with copper, iron, silicon ores, grain, trees, honey, and some other plants within a kilometer diameter you are golden. Try a random seed by the name of "Elverius" . . . I forget if it was seed code # 1, 2 or 3. I think it was 3 . . . 3. First priority is fuel, second is a motorbike. You'll need to cut trees, pick fiber and either break rocks or find ore deposits and mine. You'll also be needing to gather food stuffs along the way. Once you have a motorbike, always keep it in your hotbar handy in case you need to run away fast. 4. Third or fourth priority is a base: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1422461750 This can be put into the factory at level 3, and will serve through the "early to middle" stages of the game. It is intended to be spawned underground so that it is safe from drones. This version is the least equipped, numbers 2 through 5 feature progressively more internal machines and features, with 5 being a "fully functional" base which can serve until one has a warp SV or small CV put together. As noted in 1, pick your base to be proximal to resources you will need. 5. After gathering 75 to 100 each of two of the ores, use the third one as the site where you will create an entrance to your under ground base. Start your tunneling about 35 to 40 meters away from the deposit marker and gently slope down until your tunnel is fully underground. Do NOT breach the surface, keep the entire cave fully covered (Drones will sometimes shoot at cores which are near the surface even though they are covered, but these shots may not do damage. However, if the whole base is buried they don't seem to be able to detect the exact location of the core or shoot at it). Gather 75 or 100 of the third ore, and you should now have enough materials to put one of the BA_BareHouse_# bases into the factory. 6. Tunnel away from the ore cave you have been enlarging at the same level. Try to get 10 or 15 meters away from it and then begin to slope downward gradually (so that you can jump/climb back out). Once you are down about 25 meters or 30 meters below ground level (use the "debug info" function on the console: type ~ then di, then Esc. The DI info will appear on upper right, and includes your Z axis coordinate in the game world, i.e., "elevation" relative to the bottom of the planet) you are ready to spawn your base. 7. Farm at least one grain so you can refrigerate it and be able to build plastic. 8. Now you are going into an "exploration" phase. Motorbike might suffice, but an HV would be even better. Find promethium and mine some, at least 100 ore, preferably an entire "small" deposit. Now with plastic and a sufficient level you can make the T2 drill. The difference between mining with the T2 and T1 drill is like the difference between a TI-84 plus calculator and an abacus . . .
HV as soon as you can. A simple HV can serve as an interim base until you are ready to start building a proper one; a lot of the stuff you'll need to do early on can be done in the HV Constructor. Closed cockpit will keep you warm/cool while the engine is running, and you can add a few cargo cans to keep your stockpile in. Hit up Village PoIs; there's a low level of threat if you avoid the bat-dog things and sometimes the loot crates have enough ore/ingots to build your HV straight away. Add some Harvester blades to the front, and five minutes in the trees will get you enough wood to turn into several hours worth of biofuel. The blades can also be used to deal with the more dangerous wildlife from a slightly safer seat. Chuck on a Detector for a radar boost, a fridge for your food, and a medical station for fixing up your owies, and you're good for a long time. And using an HV as a 'base' early on also means you won't get drone attacks until you are ready. **edit** This is the one I use. MTI Four B Level 3, 130Cu/120Fe/100Si @lvl3 **/edit**
Some of the tips given in the previous posts are really neat, and technically the safest, most efficient way to start. But I'll post my tips for starting with an overland base first. It's my way of playing, a more "natural" way of starting, albeit not the fastest or most efficient. In Alpha 8, the safest way to start a base is by using solar power. Get your chainsaw, biofuel, chop some trees, and start building a wood base around the steel blocks already present in the wreckages. Recover metal from the blocks you don't need, and keep the most of it there, as it's way stronger than your wood blocks. That, or directly build your wood base in a good spot with resources. By using solar power, you're bypassing the drone attacks, which only start after you place your first generator. Solar panels are cheap enough so that you can have a full 15 panels setup in the first hour of play. That's enough for a medium base with most of the luxuries: advanced constructor, fridge, cooking machine, medical stations, growing lights, and some other things. It's a good way to start slow, safe, and learn the ropes of the game. Perhaps easier for new players. Stay safe!
1: this is a survival game, think of everything in terms of survival. 2: number one covered everything, why are you still reading.
MOST IMPORTANT TIP EVER! (in my opinion at least; your mileage my vary) Use your Drone (F5). It can do everything you can do, but it can fly and hover and get into smaller spaces. Drill, Mine, build, salvage and explore around corners safely.
I want to highlight using the drone for corpse retrieval. You will die and the drone will save on frustration. To get the drone (and the jetpack, and immunity to temperate planet temperatures) you need armour. So getting that armour should be one of the first priorities.
1) Use your drone. Your drone is basically a disposable second player. You can use all your non-weapon tools from your drone, and enemy turrets respond to your drone as well, so you can use it as a distraction to make turrets focus away from your position, or to scout enemy activity. You can also use it to enter areas you do not wish to enter, such as using it for mining so you don't get stuck in a hole, or using it to gather in space from within the confines of a sealed vessel. You can also use it to loot enemies as well as your own corpse. 2) Use the factory. It's far easier to design things in creative mode and then spawn them via factory. What's more, the factory can take anything you plug into it that has a resource cost and use it for the design. So you can feed weapons, devices, blocks, etc, and it will add the value of the component parts to your build. What's more, the craft time for the factory is based on the time needed to craft all those components from ingots, so you'll reduce the crafting time substantially by feeding in ready-made components like whole devices, computer chips, etc. 3) Design for your current means. Build an extremely simple HV for the lowest resources you can manage as early as you can manage it. The added mobility and utility drastically outstrips the cost even if your intention is another grander project. Don't wait until you can get the best thing right away, build in steps. Also remember that if you upgrade to a new design (like going from a simple HV to a better HV), you can deconstruct your old build and feed its parts into the factory to fund your new build. Nothing is being wasted. 4) When performing salvage, whole blocks are best for pure yield of materials, but that only matters if you're going to reuse the devices, or feed them into the factory. Otherwise your best bet for raw material salvage is the T2 Multi-tool. It's worth salvaging in whole blocks and saving them for later salvage until you have a T2 Multi-tool unless you need the resources immediately. 5) Make a farm. Try to have at least one of everything in that farm. Once you figure out an optimal 'rotation' of food you want to create, build another farm for that, but always have a general farm that has one of everything, and harvest from it regularly. It can save you in an emergency. 6) Take your motorcycle with you everywhere. It's not just your basic transport to be replaced by the first HV you get. The value of having a transport you carry on you is tremendous. It's a quick escape from a swarm of monsters, or a dash through a hostile environment. Most of all, if for some reason you're separated from your main vehicle, you always have a fallback mode of transportation that isn't costing you stamina. 7) There are multiple solutions to every challenge in the game. Observe your surroundings carefully. Watch for places you can be attacked from, and seek places where you can attack from safely. Look for alternative routes to avoid dangers. Sometimes terrain will block an angle of approach for an enemy turret. Sometimes a POI will have hidden passageways to exploit. 8) Keep your multi-tool on you at all times. Beyond its typical use for salvage and repair, you can also mouse-over any block with it equipped to see the name of the targeted block and its health. This is good for telling you how effective your attacks are for destroying a given block, and it can also tell you if a block is not what it appears, for example a combat steel block with very low health is probably just a thin wall, which might indicate a hidden passage behind it. Sometimes a block that is painted to look like its surroundings is actually a trapdoor block, or a spawner plate. 9)Be aware of special keys and functions. Your drone is F5. There is a shoulder lamp on your suit, as well as a jetpack, both of which have keys for their use. There is also a key called 'auto-rotate' (O by default). It will flatten whatever you are piloting to the horizontal axis of whatever environment you are in. Use it on land to make your SV or HV perpendicular to the ground - good for stopping and disembarking suddenly. It is also very useful in space so that your CV can be oriented the same as your SV to make launching and landing much easier and cleaner. There is another key called 'auto-brake', which will enable or disable your ship's automatic breaking. Usually you want this on for better control, but if you disable it in space, you can propel your ship in a direction and it will just keep drifting in that direction without needing any thrust, allowing you to save on fuel when flying long distances. 10) Have fun. Don't be discouraged when you lose. When something doesn't work, try a different method, or a different weapon or tool. Check your building tree to see if there's new tech that might help you. Be patient, don't take unnecessary risk when you can't afford the cost of failure.
Always have a spare weapon in a cargo box somewhere. Just in case there are complications on getting your stuff back.
-Make multiple Survival Constructors to process ingots and bio fuel. Running a constructor in a base or hover vessel takes a lot of energy. -Turn off your constructors when you're not using them, this will save you bio fuel. -Mount a harvester on your starter Hover Vessel, then use it to kill spiders, this cuts down on ammo costs and still gives you experience.
1 tip: Watch "Ironman" series on YouTube. Season a8 just started. There you will see different approaches on hard start, 1 life.
Have patience, do not try to conquer the world in two days. Other than that, all the basics have been said.
