After my first incident, my second playthrough is going a lot better. Thank you for asking.
After my last incident, I now knew that the auto pilot cant be 100% trusted, and I should choose my missions way more carefully.
I restarted the game, hopped into my first ship, and starred scanning around the station like last time. This time, however, I knew I got the proper starting mission as it started out the same way as the version in the tutorial I watched.
There’s an alien that was captured, but allowed to keep doing their research. While imprisoned, he sent out a signal which I happened to pick up on, and is now requesting my help to further their research.
I fly around, drop some probes, fly through some anomalies, and am then asked to collect a sacrifical ship & some antimatter to continue the quest line. I of course dont have those resources in my back pocket, so I’m left to my own devices until I can return.
One famous saying I keep recalling is “Don’t trade time for money”. Which effectively means in this case: dont manually fly the ships to mine resources and sell it for credits. Manually getting resources does not scale.
With the few credits I had, picked up the most basic mining ship I could get. By default every new ship also comes with an NPC Captain (I actually don’t know for sure if you can get a ship without a captain). I ordered one up and set it out to work.
For the first few hours of the game I ran some miscellaneous errands here and there to get a bit of change, but as soon as I had enough credits, I immediately invested it into more mining ships. Eventually the pace of purchasining mining ships went from ~2.5hrs to a few minutes.
My first miner would bring in ~50K credits / 30 min. A basic miner was ~250K, so it would be ~2.5 hrs until I could purchase another one. As you bring on more miners, the turnaround time for buying another miner decreases – no longer trading time for money.
Once I had reached 8 miners, I knew I was in a good spot. Trying to figure out when I could buy the next mining ship was no longer an issue. I ended up returning my attention back to the main quest of finding those resources.
Sacrificial Lamb
The next mission called for obtaining a few antimatter cells. The quest explains that I need to leave the antimatter cells on a ship and it would be detonated, sacrificing the ship for the science experiment.
My mining ships were out as they’re bringing in money, I figured I would keep my starting ship as its the first one I got – a bit of nostalgia for my empire. So I went back to the shipyard to pick up the cheapest thing with wings I could buy.
I picked it up, ordered the captain to fly my OG, and told it to meet me at the drop off location. Once we arrived, I parked the sacrificial lamb and made a quick spacewalk to the getaway. We flew out of the danger zone and the mission proceeded.
Ill be honest, I was expecting a grandiose event to take place, but it looked like someone recoded themselves switching between MS Paint windows. It was definitley made in the early stages of development and they havent bothered to come back to polish it up. As all developers know the saying: “Fuck it, it works”.
The ship detonated and there was a bright blue flash of light which revealed an abandoned station which happened to be mine now.
I immediately added a docking port, storage, and a solar panel to the station to start producing energy cells, but I wasnt too sure how to configure the station to buy / sell stuff, so I gathered the resources manually for the first few parts.
with the station being built, I called it a day.