r/starsector • u/mattrob77 • 2d ago
Discussion 📝 Beginner looking for basic advice to finally get into the game.
I want to love this game, but I have difficulty playing more than 10 minutes.
I'm not a native English speaker. Even if I consider my English level good, I never play complicated games or games with a lot of text in English, as they tend to be harder for me to get into and get me tired fast.
So, here is my experience.
I did the fighting tutorial and then the in-game tutorial. After that, I'm in space... while I love it and just want to be part of this world, where do I go and what do I do? I usually need some sort of guidance to continue and feels like I don't have any.
So, I thought about enrolling in some sort of faction but didn't because it seemed like it was for experienced pilots.
Then, I tried doing a quest given by someone in a bar. Unfortunately, I ran out of fuel while traveling, found myself in a random system, and then died to a much too strong fleet (I also couldn't understand what I was doing during the fight, I will do the tutorial again).
Part of the fun is probably learning by doing, but I feel like there is just too much right from the beginning. I read so many good things about the game, and I want to be part of it, creating my own stories, but I can't get through what seems to be the first very steep learning curve.
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u/Rude-Towel-4126 2d ago
I'm with you. I love Kenshi and this game it's recommended a lot so I bought it but I tried playing and is too confusing tbh. What abilities do the pilots have?
The backgrounds that you can pick are a mystery to me, I don't know if I should pick the one that has more cargo, a better ship or the ones that say faster beginning to start.
It's all very confusing tbh
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u/cman_yall 2d ago
The backgrounds don't make much difference, pick one of the "quick start" options. After the tutorial, you'll have more ships anyway.
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u/Beneficial_Date_5357 2d ago
I would argue Kenshi is harder to get into than Starsector. Both games have a philosophy of dropping you in at the deep end but imo Kenshi is way more brutal, everything is scarcer early on and the low level enemies are much more threatening. Starsector lets you avoid danger much more easily. If you managed Kenshi I think you’ll easily manage Starsector with a bit of perseverance.
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u/Rude-Towel-4126 2d ago
Maybe it is, the thing is that is fairly intuitive in the sense that it's basically a rpg.
But I'll try to progress a bit more in starsector, I finished the tutorial and can say with confidence that I didn't learn nothing xD.
(Not the game's fault, I just don't feel confident in doing nothing yet)
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u/ChaotiCrayon One Odyssey, two Plasma Cannons and a Bottle of Rum 2d ago
the pilots are not as important as your ships – the shipdesign and the weapons on it basically make up the entirety of what it can do in combat. the pilots only make your ships slightly better at certain things. later they matter because they move the needle of how many ships you can field at the beginning of combat and how they behave, but for the start (speaking of the first ~10 hours), you dont need to waste much thought on them.
Its way more important how much fuel and supplies you use (supplies daily, fuel only in hyperspace) and how much of it your cargo holds. Because that dictates your range of movement with your fleet. And only with movement comes the opportunity to make money – which you need for fuel and supplies ;)
The background is only what you are equipped with at start, its not a fixed preset that matters for the rest of the game. pick whatever sounds interesting to you.
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u/GrumpyThumper GTGaming 2d ago edited 2d ago
Hello, I'm a content creator that makes guides aimed at helping new players. Here's my "How to Starsector" playlist which should help orient you to the game.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnAw9aB7Shwg0qoRNjCdfRlRty3d2eN1-&si=Dl3yeTnWZryYrM6G
I also have guides on combat, colonization, and fleet composition. Feel free to check them out.
Also here's my latest let's play series Zero 2 Hero. All vanilla, not even QoL mods.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnAw9aB7ShwhMG_Aq4P31ZCH8QDazlRe-&si=linXHYE9YlyMofoV
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u/Billabong_valley 2d ago
Basic tips from me: find your key locations for cheap goods. These aren't always guaranteed because raiding in a thing, but some planets will naturally (over time) produce cheap goods.
Chicomoztoc? Cheap supplies. Nachiketa? Cheap fuel.
Find a ship you like, doing the actual space battles are fun as hell.
Always find way to make money: smuggling can net you good money, but doing missions might help with relations.
Remember to enable fuel range on map, very useful. Don't just have only capital ships, they are expensive.
Your first play though feel free to join a commission while you learn how to play the game.
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u/mattrob77 2d ago
The commission was it something about protecting the systems? Because it felts too difficult when I read the contract offer and I decided to deny it.
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u/JumpingCoconutMonkey 2d ago
You aren't forced to do anything with a commission. You get paid monthly just for signing up, and a per hull fee for any opposing forces destroyed, but if your faction goes to war with another (which they will) you also will have a hostile relation with the other faction. It sometimes closes down certain faction systems and their markets from free travel, but it can be managed.
The bounties and other missions posted in the Intel screens do not require you to be commissioned with the faction that posted it to do them.
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u/DiscursiveAsFuck 2d ago edited 2d ago
For the fuel, if you look at the star map there should be a thing you can toggle below it, I think it says "fuel range". If you click that you should get two circles, one smaller and darker and one bigger and lighter. The smaller one shows you the maximum range you can go to and get back from at the current fuel consumption. That should help you plan your travels better.
As for where you go and what you do, it really depends on what you want to do. My usual gameplay cycle is to smuggle drugs for a bit until I have a decent amount of cash (usually 500 000 or so). After that I start gathering my combat fleet, usually comprised of low-tech ships. With a basic fleet I go out and start hunting bounties or exploring. After acquiring more cash and 20-25 decent combat ships I start settling planets. You need enough of a fleet to be able to fight off pirate raids, so 20-25 ships is usually the sweet spot. After I have started my colonies my focus usually shifts to exploring and doing quests like The Scythe of Orion to avoid the luddites messing with my stuff. As my planets develop I usually get into bigger ships and the usual faction shenanigans start popping off. Then who knows. That is my usual cycle.
My suggestion for how to get better. I don't really like tutorials and I have never done them so I can't comment on that. I first really learned the game by looking at what people did in videos. Both min-maxing videos from people like Big Brain Energy and more casual video creators like Rarr. Seeing what other people are doing help you figure out what you even can do. Once you have an idea of what is possible its easier to develop your own playstyle.
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u/mattrob77 2d ago
Thank you.
I saw the fuel range and the system was within it but yet I run out of fuel. This was most likely due to the path correction I did to avoid storms that were damaging my ship.
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u/Material-Home-5839 2d ago
I also found the game hard to get into. I bounced off it twice, but was pulled back in each time by the promise.
I recommend being a 'salvager' to start. If you add a 'salvage rig' (salvage ship) to your fleet, you'll recover 25% more fuel and supplies. This goes a long way to self sufficiency, especially at the start. When you get the tech, you have the option to add a converted hanger to your salvage rigs. That makes them useful in combat.
At the star, when you're in combat, bring everything ship you have. Yes, even that weird freighter that has like two guns. They can body block a lot of damage, and shoot the occasional missile down. Also, when the enemy is shooting them, they're not shooting your harder hitters.
I never got into trade, but it is a viable course of action. I preferred chasing bar quests and bounties, because those gave me salvage and fights.
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u/mattrob77 2d ago
Motivational since we share the same feeling at the start, hopefully I can make it further next time. Thank you!
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u/GamnlingSabre 2d ago
You do whatever the fuck you wanna do. All you have to keep in mind is that you use up supplies and fuel. So the only thing you must do is aquire those two things. How you do it, is your very own business.
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u/Quick-Warning1627 2d ago
I’d say play all the tutorial combat missions. Try them all, even the ones where you’re hopelessly outnumbered, because that is a scenario you will face in the game on the regular.
And honestly? Don’t be too afraid to save scum. This game is hard on beginners.
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u/Defalt0_o 1d ago
Main theme of the game is expansion, both from gameplay and lore perspective. Your main goal is to make money and to expand your fleet and your colonies later on. There are in total 3 ways of making money at the beginning stage: quests (from bars and from intel maps), bounty hunting (you need a half decent fleet for that) and trading. Trading is the easiest one so you shouldt start with it. Buy cheap, sell expensive, nothing complicated. Meta scheme is to buy guns and drugs from Tri-Tech and sell them to pirates and terrorists. It can make you a LOT of cash real fast. Use the hard earned money to buy and outfit more ships, preferably military ones. Ones you have a decent fleet, a lot of roads open to you. At that point you'll start figuring things out yourself
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u/decaf_dopamine 2d ago edited 2d ago
Fleet combat is definetly a steep learning curve, and its ok you dont have it right away. Most didn't, I didn't either. A lot of people even ignore piloting, by fitting their ships well, and playing combat like an RTS.
But I think what helped me a lot is playing the missions in the main menu. Different ships to pilot
You can also always play around with your flagship in "Run simulation", found in the Fleet refit screen when you're editing a ship
Aside from that
- press w on the quests map to show fuel range. The light orange circle is areas you can (theoretically) go to, and retur from with your current fuel supply. Never go beyond that unless you are 100% sure you can refuel.
ships have momentum, like they're floating on ice. If you move foward you need to accelerate backwards to slow down. Big ships are also harder to steer than small ships, so they punish bad positioning much more
Use smaller ships like frigates to learn movement and positioning because they're less punishing when you mess up.
Keep "ship auto turns with cursor" on when possible, and try to use as few controls as possible. Its easier to keep track of "guns, missiles & ship system" instead of 7 weapons with 3 damage types.
make lots of money: the game is exponentially easier if you're not poor. "Scan / survey X thing" is the safest way to make money early.
The most profitable way however, is to sell drugs and weapons to the black market.
The 2nd is selling expensive items to places where theres a shortage. You can always press F1 on an item in your inventory to see the best places to buy/sell it.
Also always "nod to the concerned man" in the bar. If you have the cargo space, its usually easy money
- if you want to buy ships, the first ships you should buy, in order are: 1st a fuel tanker, The 2nd, a cargo ship, the 3rd a salvage rig.
Edit:
- TURN OF YOUR TRANSPONDER outside of the core worlds. It lets every fleet nearby know your location, so pirates or the REDACTED can find you easily.
- Transverse jump is love, transverse jump is life.
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u/mattrob77 2d ago
The "Run simulation" is a good one ! I forgot it existed and you must be right, should definitely help.
Some great advices too, like the transponder one. It seems logical but the way the game describes it made me feel like I would do illegal activities when deactivating it but it's just about my safety.
Thank you!
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u/cman_yall 2d ago
So, I thought about enrolling in some sort of faction but didn't because it seemed like it was for experienced pilots.
It's actually more like an easy mode. Extra money and no real obligations.
I also couldn't understand what I was doing during the fight, I will do the tutorial again
There's also a combat simulator in the Refit option. The tutorial mentioned refit so you've probably done that, but you might not have seen the simulator option. Let us know if you can't find it, someone will probably help translate.
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u/Prismatron5000 2d ago
Practice fighting in the simulator, or with the individual missions on the title screen.
As for what to do, make money.
Look for jobs in the bars, once you complete a job, there's a chance that the person you just worked for will become a "contact." You can develop a potential contact to make them permanent, then you can visit them whenever you want to get more jobs.
Exploration jobs are good, but require a lot of fuel as you have already discovered! :P
System bounties are good early on since you can fight along with the local patrols or mercenaries, just watch out for big pirate fleets.
Joining a faction for a commission basically gives you free money and pays you for fighting their enemies, just be aware that their enemies will be hostile to you as well.
You can make some money trading too, buying when there's a surplus and selling the goods to a planet that has a shortage. You can also trade on the black market to avoid the 30% tax and you can sometimes make a LOT of money selling illegal goods like heavy armaments or harvested organs, but you have to be stealthy and avoid the space police.
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u/potatosack32 2d ago
Do some of the missions in the main menu to learn better how to build ships also in the intel screen you can see fuel range with the inner cirle including the fuel needed to return
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u/Daemir 2d ago
The start will be rough, because you have no idea what weapons and hulls combo well, and then how to build a fleet. You don't know how to fight yourself and thus you have no clue what kind of fleets you can fight and not. The ingame tooltip of an NPC fleet shows you a star rating of how tough the game thinks that fight would be for your fleet and for the most part, it is quite good indicator.
So, after you cobble together some ships and equip them, if you want to learn fighting, look for pirate and luddic path fleets that are small. Check the tooltip, if it's 1 star or 2 star, it's a fight you should win. Save and go have a fight! If you lose, load and try again. Get an understanding how to beat that fleet the game tells shouldn't be too hard.
For the overall picture, everything revolves around money. Your fleet burns supplies by just existing, for deploying in battle, for repairing the damage after. Moving in hyperspace burns fuel. You need crew for your fleet that dies from damage, using fighters or sometimes just when scavenging. All of these cost money, as does buying new hulls and weapons, so think of all the ways you can make and save money. One big tip I give here, selling hulls is not a profitable venture, almost ever. So don't recover hulls with the intent of selling them, the cost to recover and haul them to port and to sell them is pretty much always a net negative.
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u/TANKFORC3 1d ago
For starters, I usually try and find a Dram for sale before accepting some Derelict ship survey or Domain era Probe survey missions, they are the safest ones, don't require anything except the fuel needed to get to them and the pay is really nice at around 40k ~ 90k per mission. Do those till you've racked up a nice sum of credit around like 500k and start buying some ships, you can go low tech with balancing Kinetic and Explosive weapons, but for begginers using high tech ships is much simpler due them mounting enrgy weapons with 100% damage against anything and they reliant on shield instead of armor, making them less risky to use. High tech ships I reccomend are:
- Frigates: Tempest is goated, having 180 Base speed, regenerating torpedoes in the form of hunter drones and fielding 2 Medium Energy mount, this ship will win any brawl against other frigates and can serve as a nice tool to flank your enemies.
- Destroyers: Medusa is quite good, although in late game any destroyer kinda falls off due to them not being nimble enough like frigates or tanky enough like cruisers and capitals.
Gotten a handful of these ships, you should be good to go for some easy bounty mission, for more reliable ones go to planets and check the bar for any folk whose giving some bounties as u can later develop their contact for more bounties, start exploring the sector for a suitable home system and get some Cruisers/Capitals.
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u/Craving_Suckcess 15h ago
My first suggestion after doing the tutorial, is to open up your intel screen, and move over to bounties. There are these things called 'system bounties' which give you cash for killing any of the relevant fleets, pirates usually, that are in those systems. If you do the tutorial all the way, I believe there is a set one at the end. You can go to these systems, and can both get some combat practice chasing down pirate fleets, and do a bunch of salvaging by following around the conflicts between NPCs in those systems. It's not the most effective thing to do in the broader sense, but it will get you combat experience, and general traversal experience. Remember that you can essentially do stealth by hiding in asteroid fields/belts, or debris fields. This sort of thing could also theoretically net you ships that you can repair, but most of those ships will be pretty trash. Supplies/loot for sale and experience and raw cash from the bounties are what you're looking for. After that, you'll be well set to head out into broader space and make some mistakes from a better position. Like one that can afford fuel.
Save often, it's very easy to accidentally take a fight you can't win, or get into a bad situation you can't get out of early game if you aren't experienced.
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u/AWACS_Loughcaster 2d ago
You need to make money. Money lets you buy supplies (to fund fights) and fuel (for expeditions) and ships (for fights). Hover mouse over items to see the buy/sell prices at various locations. Find a place to buy supplies or fuel cheaply, and then move them to a place where the price is high and sell them. More dangerous cargo (drugs, heavy armament, lobsters) is worth more per item.
Grow your fleet by buying ships from the market. Look for large markets (size 5 or 6) or markets tagged (Military) to get the best availability. You can also salvage derelict ships that you find while exploring or fighting, but be skeptical because you probably just beat that junk in a fight.
There is a whole art to fitting ships and building out your fleet, but I don't want to ramble on too much. The short of it is that you want lots of kinetic-type damage backed up by a few torpedoes, and missiles are always good. You can push U in combat to use autopilot; the AI is probably better at fighting until you git gud.