With Frontiers and the sale, there’s probably a lot of new players coming to the game so I wanted to put together a list of some lesser known tips and tricks. Some of these may already be well known but a lot of them are either things that took me a long time to find out about, or things I see people asking about a lot. Some of these are probably gonna be useful to experienced players too. I’ll add more things to this thread over time.

Reply with your own tips and I’ll add some good ones to this post too!

• The mining laser is faster the more it heats up. When you use the mining laser, the heat bar in the corner goes up and eventually the laser changes colour. For maximum efficiency, try to keep the heat bar almost full without overheating it. It will mine twice as fast this way.

• The melee jetpack boost. This one’s been around since the game first came out so it’s probably more known but it may be worth mentioning for newer players. When you’re on the ground, if you melee and then immediately hold jump/jetpack, you get a significant forwards boost. This is probably the fastest way to move around without vehicles and it doesn’t require any upgrades.

• You can refine oxygen to get carbon. By around mid to late game, you reach a point where you have so much money that you can bulk buy almost any of the main resources from trade terminals instead of having to mine or farm them. The one exception is carbon, which as far as I can tell never appears in trade terminals. However, you can just bulk buy oxygen and refine it into carbon.

• Use the smallest terrain manipulator size for maximum resources. The number of resources you get from mining things with a terrain manipulator seems to be more based on time spent mining rather than the actual volume you mined. So by changing the size to the smallest, you can get far more resources from each ore deposit. ( This thread about this inspired me to make this post )

• Use medium / large refiners to make resources that you don’t have blueprints for. This one is somewhat relevant to expedition 3 specifically. One of the objectives requires you to make herox but you don’t immediately have the recipe for it. However, some resources like herox can be made in refiners which do not require you to own the blueprint. A lot of these recipes can be found on the wiki.

• The main story will unlock a lot of blueprints quickly. I know personally I mostly ignored the story when I started and just kind of did my own thing for a while but I got annoyed with how long it took to unlock certain base parts or equipment. But if you just follow the main storyline first, it will unlock a lot of important things for you far quicker than if you were to do it manually.

• The first freighter you rescue is free. In the early game, you might come across NPC freighters which are very expensive to buy directly. But after traveling to a couple new star systems, you will eventually warp in to a pirate fight. If you save the freighter from pirates, you can get it for free. If you want an S class, you can just reload a manual save from before you warped into that system and repeat that fight until you get lucky and spawn a free S class freighter.

• Use the space anomaly to escape space fights with pirates or sentinels. If you get in some space trouble, you will be stuck fighting for a while without the ability to pulse away. One simple way to get around this is just summoning the anomaly and entering it.

• You can turn off PVP or multiplayer altogether in the settings. Going into the settings > network > multiplayer will give you options to turn off certain parts of online play. I would recommend at least turning off PVP and others editing your bases to prevent griefing. If you’re having issues with glitches / crashes, turning multiplayer off entirely may help. Nothing in this game actually requires multiplayer, though some aspects are more fun with it on.

• Use the space station teleporter to save the station to your teleporter list. If you ever want to warp back to a certain star system again, simply fly into its space station and find the teleporter there. Just opening the teleporter menu will register the teleporter to your list and you will then be able to warp back to it from any other teleporter.

• Using your jetpack against a vertical wall does not use up jetpack fuel. If you need to get out of a hole, just walk into the wall and boost up.

• To save launch fuel, land on marked landing spots. This is not just landing pads, if you land on any landing spot that has the green circles, it won’t cost any launch fuel to lift off again.

• You can teleport to any of your base computers, even if the base doesn’t have teleporters. If you just want to mark a cool place you want to return to in the future, just putting down a base computer is enough for you to later warp there with a teleporter.

So, inspired by a couple posts I saw about doing this expedition the “hard way” on its original run, I decided to give it a try.

First issue is by avoiding the early dieing milestone, I don’t have the hermetic seal plans. On the other hand, you can buy seals from any minor settlement, so I repaired the manipulator off the bat and started tunneling. Got lucky and stumbled into a cave early on so I milked it for every bit of cobalt it had to make a full stack of Ion batteries. After that I tunneled to my ship, since it was near a monolith POI, and started heading north.

The trick here is that POIs such as minor settlements tend to line up in North-South lines on planets, so going directly north from a known POI increases my chances of finding one. The prep plus the run took a good few hours probably, but I got my seal, and I’d already repaired the launch thrusters before I left the ship so I could call it in on the landing pad and finish the repairs. Hard Part 1 done!

Second issue is the “build a base on an infested world” milestone. Since I didn’t die early, no base computer plans. However, all planets(I think?) have what’s known as “wild base computers” – pre-placed base computers anyone can claim. The kicker is that you can find these using the commercial maps from the space station – they count as a Shelter slot. So, I went and grabbed a whole bunch of nav data from hopping between POIs with save points over on a more hospitable world, grabbed a bunch of maps, then headed to the nearest infested world.

I actually had to go get a second set of maps once, as it kept finding other Shelters first that I had to clear, and I had to mark all the other types of waypoints without clearing them to eliminate them from the selection. Once I found one though(which has a purple base icon like other player bases), I laid down my base and checked off that milestone. Hard part 2 done!

(Quick note here: If you don’t plan to keep the save, delete your base after getting the milestone, or at least once you’ve finished the expedition. If you delete a “wild” base it restores the wild base computer so someone else can use it. There’s still only a limited number of these per planet so be considerate!)

Everything else is no different from a normal run of this expedition, and while I haven’t actually finished it yet, from what I read on those other posts when you finish the final milestone it “kills” you so you still get credit for that leftover milestone back in part 1 without any extra effort. I don’t expect that part to have changed, given it’s plot-relevant.

Main reason I haven’t finished it yet, though the finish line is in sight? I want to get all my memory fragments upgraded, so going to see how far along we get those first. If I want to keep this save around later, having a full set of high end gear would be nice.

One tip in general I’d like to add: one of the anchor planets(or systems at least) has beetles. Tame one! Since they fly, they’re perfect to ride across some of the crazy vertical terrain in this expedition without risking any fall damage. Plus, you can summon them anywhere and don’t have to plop down a geobay or fuel it up(other than via life support). This made some of the regular stuff so much simpler without having to go mole-man(which in itself doesn’t help as much when you have a deep valley to cross).