Fuel isn't obvious.

[Haruspex]

I fired the game up for the first time today and began following the tutorial. The controls aren't as confusing as some have made them out to be, as long as you get out of a Starwars physics kind of mindset. Having extensively played a lot of more realistic flight simulators, it makes sense to me, and I found switching between controls, alt controls, and the computer very intuitive.

My ship started beeping at me stating I had low fuel. The tutorial showed me how to scan and drill for water and how to gather dark energy by flying close to the ocean's surface, but it never discussed fuel. I'm not sure what this ship even uses as fuel. My best guess at this point is that you need to scan and drill for it similar to how you do it for water, but this is made difficult by the fact that this first planet's crazy tidal effect causes it to flood every two minutes.

I would recommend adding a tutorial objective to fuel up after the tutorial to drill for water is explained. Maybe even a less-guided one, like step-by-step here's how you scan and drill for water, followed by instruction to fuel up by scanning and drilling for whatever element is used as fuel. This way the player isn't scrambling around in a panic while the computer blares "low fuel" as the tide repeatedly tries to kill you.

Fun anecdote; my twelve year old son was watching me take my first steps in this game. He's a big time space buff. When he saw the moon orbiting the first planet he said "That moon is huge and close. That would probably cause some crazy tides in real life." A few minutes later exactly that happened. He totally called it.

[Plastik20xx]

How do you get fuel? That was my new problem.

[Noxxii]

Originally posted by Albatross:

How do you get fuel? That was my new problem.

Use the scanner for the specific resource ('HE' is fuel), when the ground you scanned turns purple it means its reachable. Land there and mine.
The display on the computer also shows the depth and location. I'm pretty sure the tutorial tells you how to mine.

[Haruspex]

'HE' was my guess. Sounds like I got it right. I have yet to find any though. All scanning I've done so far for 'HE' has yielded only green on the scanner, and I've hit a Game Over situation by running out of fuel three times now trying both on the planet's surface and the moon.

Now that I know what fuel is and how to get it, I can really look in earnest. Maybe earlier on so I never get to low fuel in the first place.

[Maijing]

Scan across both the planet and the moon. On the scan page there’s a white triangle and white dots to represent your ship and resource spots. Use the left and right arrows to change resources.

[nkm]

@8bitbeard: thanks for the feedback (and anecdote ): you're right about the fact that fueling is a bit unclear. I might add it to the tutorial in the later steps when you must land on Ixo.

[Seeker of Knowledge]

Yeah, fuel and dark energy need's to be much easier to find and gain.