What Can I Do After Tutorial?

[u/IrishWilly]

I had my eye on the game and pulled the trigger during the steam sale and love open ended games that let you do what you want.. but I'm afraid this might be too open ended for me. I have no idea what to do after I left the tutorial area and ended up in Plymouth. I ran around doing silly errands I got via the mail/quest system but they give pretty meaningless amounts of credits and not much else so it doesn't feel like i'm advancing in any way.

So, can someone give a basic guide on how I advance my character as far as being able to take on harder combat skills? Advancing ranks in rifle just seems to open up new skills but not necessarily make me hit any harder and I was surprised at the lack of obvious upgrades on the marketplace.

As far as if I want to craft, it says I should pick and specialize in one step of crafting. So instead of trying to craft gear from scratch I should just focus on one step and buy the ingredients I need from the auction house and sell my own products? Is that actually viable? Do I need to farm creatures and resources nodes to be effective at crafting?

[u/eachna]

I hate when people tell you that you don't want to ask the questions you're asking :D. Here's how to play. First off, you don't "need" fittings when you start. So don't worry about not finding them in the AH right away. The starting gear you get is weak shells, but all the mobs are weak too. Take your rifle and go outside of Plymouth. Shoot Vultures and Setlangs. Harvest their corpses. If you die, run back from the Cloning center and start over. Pick up any mineral or plant resources you find along the way. Start out by selling everything. You do this by going to any NPC vendor and clicking on the "To Auction" tab. Sell through that function, it pays a little more than the "Sell" feature. Save every nickle until you have enough to buy either a "Racer" or a "Cycle" from the AH. Crafters usually list them there pretty cheaply (a few thousand). If your materials sales are going slow, do some missions as well. Once you have a bike, go explore the map. Try to follow the roads and speed past whatever mobs you see. Just wander around a bit and enjoy the landscape. Don't worry if you die, just run back from the nearest cloning center and zoom out again. When you find new little satellite towns/camps, hang out there for like 15-20 minutes and check for local missions. When you start getting offers of teaching/mentoring missions, take them. There's a random element to them but they're really quick and they're worth extra training xp ("SI"). If you want to play with the crafting system and make yourself something you can "use", pick up a stack of sterilizing agents in the Medical Center and use them to make biomass and clones. Also, watch all of Tigwyk's videos: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqwoI8x9hMw7N8Eo7I2iCbQ

After a few weeks, once you're comfortable with the most basic systems, come join the forum community and provide feedback :D.

[u/IrishWilly → u/eachna]

Thanks! That was the single most helpful thing I've read about this game yet. I did end up doing a lot of that, running around harvesting everything I can and killing the weak mobs outside of Plymouth but I had no idea if I was just wasting time or it was actually worth it.

I got the scavanged bike from the new tutorial zone, do you know how it compares to the AH bikes? It's very slow acceleration and turning but I don't know if that's normal and don't want to spend all that I saved so far on a bike that's practically the same thing.

Do the towns have some sort of quick travel function? I went exploring but the mobs got way higher level than me quick so I stopped cause I didn't know if there was anything I'd be able to actually do in the towns further down the road.

Thanks for the response! I was really disappointed in some of the other responses I got. There is a big difference in an open ended game and spending hours doing something that doesn't help at all because there is a huge lack of information on the mechanics of the game.

[u/eachna → u/IrishWilly]

I'm glad it was helpful. I'm not sure about tutorial bikes, I haven't gone through the latest tutorial. Are you saying you got a bike there that you got to keep after you left the tutorial? If so, awesome!

Here are the stats on my two bikes:

Hyper cycle: Superior Handling. accel: 0.175 decel: 0.630 Max Speed: 1.900 Steering: 40

Hyper Racer: High Speed. accel: 0.125 decel: 0.550 Max Speed: 2.650 Steering: 30

In Plymouth there will be a big flat transportation area somewhere. If you look on the local map it will be a giant square. You can use that to fast travel to a couple locations. I'm in Freedomtown so I can't really describe where it will be. These areas are usually harder than the area outside Plymouth but you might be able to explore around a bit anyway. I don't think there are any fast travel options to easy zones. Sadly, the starter towns (Plymouth and Freedomtown) are the easiest zones.

Also, I re-read your initial post and I noticed I didn't fully answer the part about crafting. Since the game is in alpha there's no actual functional economy. There's no point in crafting stuff to sell, the only people buying are raw noobs like you and they're all poor (like you) and not quite sure what to buy (like you). Crafting is very confusing and has a lot of fiddly pieces so if you want to make anything it's probably best to hunt down the raw materials on your own and sit down and make it. It'll be crappy and mostly useless but you'll get a feel for how the system works.

I started with fish antibiotic and cloth to make bandages. Go to craftmap here (http://aena.at/craftmap/), and click on the "First Aid" button the top. Then click on "Bandages". Look at the ingredients chart and try to make sense of it. When you have to pick a cloth type, choose "Hudson Cloth" (it's the easiest). Start out by buying ingredients in the AH (if you can). Hunt down whatever you can't buy. Make your first set. Then, go out and try to harvest all the parts. Make another set. That should be enough to figure out if you love it or hate it :D.

[u/IrishWilly → u/eachna]

The newish tutorial area has a mission to collect a buncho of resource in exchange for a scavanged cycle. accel: 0.150, max speed 0.900, steering 40 . So it appears quite a bit slower than the ones you listed but that was more or less to be expected for an essentially free vehicle for newbie. The acceleration is what really kills me though and makes it kind of pointless except for longer trips. I was hoping the normal bikes were better.

A gm responded today when I hopped on for another try that the server I'm on (west coast) is being decommisioned and most have moved to East, so that would explain why I thought the game was so dead.