Hello! Wow, that post blew up! I had never imagined that my little journal about my space travels and how they were helping me in life would get so much attention. Writing has always been a challenge for me, despite my love of it, and I am glad that posting my writing here is something that y’all enjoy. To everybody that read or commented on Part 1, thank you so much. Your open ears and your kind words truly mean so much to me, and it has given me a lot of motivation to see this through! (Also, my first silver, ever! Wow – thank you so much!) There’s a lot more that I feel that I could say here, but in the interest of getting to the actual journal part of this post, I’ll just say that I am truly grateful for your support, and I’m incredibly glad that my stories have touched so many people’s lives. Seriously, this community rocks. If you are a new reader, you can find part one here.

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Today, I went adventuring. After a brief nap in my ship, I left to investigate the hills around the crash site. After a few minutes of climbing around and taking in the scenery, a radioactive storm suddenly came up on the horizon. With my hazard protection quickly depleting, I looked around frantically for a means of protection, and my eyes quickly settled upon an opening in a nearby hill. As I walked inside, and my hazard protection began to stabilize, I saw a wide cave extending downward in front of me. I had watched a few guides during my break at work today, and quickly crafted an analysis visor. After some quick scanning, I realized that a lot of the rock formations in the cave were made of cobalt! (And other minerals). Knowing that they were valuable from watching a guide, I decided that tonight, I was going to strike it rich.

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It was challenging, at first, to mine with such intensity. I knew around how much money I wanted to have from mining, but the tedium of the thing soon began to set in. As many of you know, I am playing this game as a way to help overcome my prior addictions, and once the game became all about mindlessly pointing the mining laser, my mind began to wander. I really did want to power through this feeling, both because I knew that getting a lot of money would really make the early game a lot more fun, and also to prove to myself that I could exercise a modicum of self-control. I turned on some Twitch in the background, and that helped a lot. I actually ended up getting distracted by the stream a bit, and lost track of time, so I ended up mining way past my goal. Whoops! I also found some things called “Vortex Cubes” – not sure what they do, but they look like one of them would make a pretty cool lamp.

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After my spelunking had concluded, I decided that it was high time for me to repair my ship. I set out in the direction that the map beacon was indicating, and immediately got distracted by something else. I found a crashed pod on the side of a hill, then from there, I found a tower, waaaay off in the distance. My curiosity was peaked, so I headed out in the direction of the tower, to see what it had to offer. It ended up taking a bit longer to walk there than I had anticipated, but it was really cool to see it grow in the distance. I managed to scale it with the help of my trusty jetpack, and accessed some old logs at the terminal on the top. Unfortunately, it seems that my real-life foreign language skills translate into the game, and I was left staring at letters on the screen. I’ll have to make a note and come back to this later.

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Finally, I jumped down and headed over to the beacon that I had found, scanning creatures and plants along the way, and reading facts about them in the pause menu. Apparently, the tentacled creature from yesterday actually doesn’t have any bones, which makes me wonder how it stands up, Truly, nature is beyond human comprehension. I soon arrived at the little settlement, consisting of two tiny houses, right next to each other. I accessed the terminal in one building to win some money via the stock transfer (is this legal?), and found a hermetic seal in the other one. After repairing my pulse engine, I decided to call it a night, as I have an early morning tomorrow. Thank you so much for reading and sticking around! Hopefully this is as enjoyable for you as it is for me – next time, we’re getting off planet, so help me god. I don’t know if I’ll have time to play tomorrow, since I’m gonna go visit some old friends, but we’ll see. Pics below.

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Spelunking!

Like the companion cube, but slightly more….. trapezoidal.

Caught this dinosaur sleeping in the sand

Apparently, this is a rock? Wild

Waaaay off in the distance is a crashed pod, near the bottom of the valley

The tower, but from really far away

A half marathon, maybe more

This alien technology looks really cool, holy cow

I want one

Saw a freighter on the way back to my ship. I hear that you can fly one?

Some methods that you might have overlooked. The most fun to be had is to discover these methods for yourself, but still, I share these ideas as spoilers so you can unlock them as you need.

Some of these tips are so obvious you’ll wonder why I posted them, but then I bet even some veterans will learn something.

Basics

While mining deposits with your terrain manipulator you can press T to enlarge the area to mine much faster.

You may need to have the correct quest selected from the log menu to advance it. This applies to the base computer research, check it with the right quest log selected as often as you can.

Ship

For your first ship upgrade it might be tempting to fix a busted old ship that you find in distress. These usually need a lot of work to get going, and are not worth the trouble. You might be better off saving up 3-5 Million credits and waiting at a Spaceport for a nice ship in your budget to arrive. If you wait at a Colossal archive in a system with a good economy you will see some nicer ships.

Exploration

If you find an outpost or a settlement with a technology vendor you should set up a teleporter nearby – just a base computer, biofuel reactor and the teleporter is all you need there. You can teleport TO an unpowered teleporter, but to teleport back out you may need to add 5-6 carbon to the reactor. If you have the Teleporter menu open and it runs out of power you can still teleport.

Anomaly

If you need to quickly return to your base to grab something you can just fly up to space. Press X while in spaceflight to summon the Anomaly, go in and use the teleporter to go wherever you need to go, when you are done press X again and select teleport back to the Anomaly.

Economy

You can easily smuggle contraband and avoid the authorities by teleporting directly from the pirate station to a planetary teleporter, avoiding space stations.

Exosuit

Increasing your exosuit inventory space makes things much easier. Each systems space station has an exosuit upgrade console where you can buy an extra slot. You can toggle between inventory, tech and cargo slots to decide where to put it. Adding exosuit slots to cargo by buying them quickly gets expensive – it is better to use drop-pod upgrades to expand cargo slots. You can buy drop-pod coordinate data for about 100k each from a technology merchant (or find them in other places) and then use a signal booster to find them. Drop-pod slot upgrades should go mostly into Cargo first to save cost. (perhaps use credits to buy the first few cargo slots, but when it gets expensive, then only use drop-pod method)

Combat

Holding S while in flight combat will help you to keep a target on the enemy once you have them in sights. Blasting enemy shields down and then switching to a more destructive weapon is a good early flight combat strategy. While in space flight you can press X to select recharge then hover over Deflector shield and press Ctrl-1 to set it as a quick bind, It is much easier to recharge in combat with quick binds.

Base

Choosing the perfect spot for your main base is tricky. You might want to build a temporary base early on to get things started until you find that perfect spot. For your first big base you might want a paradise planet with no sentinel activity that has a good variety of resources, but also consider the amount of planets in that system – once you have access to the Exocraft Summoning station you will be able to summon all exocraft you have to anywhere in that system. It’s nice to have a wide range of planets. Electrical wiring is free to build and can clip through structures. Take some time to lay out your wiring nicely so you don’t end up with a big mess. If your base runs out of power you can just throw more batteries and solar panels at it – or have a proximity switch from your battery bank so things only power up when you are near them. You can put a base computer inside of an existing colossal archive (spaceport) and build on to it. This way you will have a trade terminal and a technology merchant at your home base. This is also a handy way to see high class ships arrive that you may want to purchase. It’s also fun that your base will always be buzzing with activity.

Well, I thought about it for a few days and these are the tips I would give to newish players that don’t give everything away. If you can think of anything else early game that is a good tip, but doesn’t give the whole game away then post it up, use >! Spoiler!< (but without the spaces) to create a spoiler.