A few tips for beginners.

[MagicMarker]

Those who have played at least one or two hours, will probably not need to look at this, as it is really intended for absolute noobs.

• Always take all waste water off the traders' hands, as they pay you handsomely for it, and it grants you research points.
  
• Store the waste water, in storage cells at first, and in tanks later, until you have the tech to process it for clean water. By this time, mining for ice becomes pointless, because you have more water than you need.
  
• Use any money you make, to pay off a good portion of your loan... Once you've paid off $2,000, your tax rate will have been lowered considerably (down to 50%), so your trades will be more profitable.
  
• Then start selling large batches of clean water, but always keep a few hundred kg around to hydrate your crew and produce food. Every 100 kg you sell, is worth $150 plus 20 research points now.
  
• When you can afford to research "Basic Liquid Fuel", do so. This enables you to build the Liquid Fuel Plant. You'll need Components, Rubber and Silicon for that device, but then you can break water down into LOX and LH2, which is worth a lot more than the water itself, if you can find the customers for it.

As soon as you can afford to research pipes and pipe bridges, and figure out how to use these things, it's well worth it to automate the processing of waste water. I'm not going to try and explain how to do that part. It can be found in the game's knowledge base.

The above method may take a few in-game days to get something going. At some point, I had nine tanks full of Waste water, and later nine tanks full of clean water. Now I'm at 80 days, and I got rid of most of it, at a steep profit. But I'm still figuring things out with regards to setting things up in the correct order to automate it efficiently, using as few pipes as possible.
It would be ideal if waste water automatically flowed from the Guest Dock and the toilets into one or two tanks, and from there into a few processors, which output only water and some minerals, with some of the water automatically going into food production while the rest is stored in a couple of clean water tanks without any crew needing to move stuff around. Building stuff in the right place for this to work, is the trick.

If anyone knows of methods to improve on this, I'd like to hear about it.

[msor]

Selling clean water is a huge waste. Convert it to fuel. Try to obtain fuel making techs ASAP.

I would highly recommend to stay away from tanks. Because their requirement for placing outside of a ship - they need too much effort for crew's logistics. Waste tanks, probably, are lesser evil, but only if you can build pipes from guest dock to these tanks.

Do not rush debt payout if it's unlocking ships tier. New ships require new type of fuel and old fuel become less profitable. Use it only if you can make newer fuel type.

[MagicMarker]

Thanks for weighing in, friend. You make a number of good points.

Originally posted by msor:

Selling clean water is a huge waste. Convert it to fuel. Try to obtain fuel making techs ASAP.

I would highly recommend to stay away from tanks. Because their requirement for placing outside of a ship - they need too much effort for crew's logistics. Waste tanks, probably, are lesser evil, but only if you can build pipes from guest dock to these tanks.

Do not rush debt payout if it's unlocking ships tier. New ships require new type of fuel and old fuel become less profitable. Use it only if you can make newer fuel type.

First of all, I would like to point out that, although I've had the game for a while, I never played much until this last week, and this is my first actual play-thru. I'm still finding stuff out. I just thought to give other *beginners* something to start with. You seem to have played a little longer, so for you, whatever I'm doing may all seem rather wasteful. But not to the *noob* who knows even less than I do.
As I figure out more about the game, I'll expand the top post with more tips.

In the meantime

The noob doesn't have the tech to build pipes yet; they must *unlock* the tech, which costs tech points. And as long as they haven't paid off their first $2,000 of debt yet, selling *anything* is a waste. The only way to get money and tech points, is to store lots of waste water. But that stuff needs to *go* somewhere. Tanks are more efficient than storage and also cost less to build. And for clean water tanks you don't even have to do research. And storage needs to be built on modules which can *not* be removed again. Tanks *can* be removed later, if you don't need them anymore.

Breaking down water into LH2 and LOX is all great, of course, if you have the tech to do so. Fortunately, that tech isn't too expensive, but then it takes a while before you have the parts to make the Liquid Fuel Plant and a lot more time to actually produce LOX and LH2... And then you still need to find customers to sell that stuff to. Or you must store it somewhere... apparently in tanks!

In the meantime, if you have paid off the first $2,000 and thus lowered the tax to 50%, selling 2,000 kgs of water doesn't seem like a waste, but would actually be a good start. You would earn another $3,000 and 400 tech points. Remember, most of that water was obtained by cleaning up waste water that people paid you to take from them. So it's a win-win-win to start with. And after selling some water, you also get to break down a few of those tanks that you don't seem to like, and the pipes :-) All those resources can then be reused.

It may indeed seem wise not to hurry to pay off much more than those $2,000, although at some point you will *have* to, if you want to meet the visitors to sell that LH2 and LOX to, that is. And if you don't sell some water, and you don't use tanks to store the stuff, where the heck do you leave it all? Your station needs to keep growing much faster for the storage, and your tech level grows much slower.

I truly appreciate the tips you offered, but in the beginning *some* concessions must be made to get a start.

[msor]

Water recycling tech is more expensive and located farther than fuel generation. It is definitely not a rookie techs. And it is money negative, as it generate hard waste also, which cost -$400, which is more than profit from selling 16 clean water it generates. Just dump waste water into space - this is starting ways to learn tech point.

Mine ice, convert it to a water and convert water to a fuel - is the way to gain money early. Only after that, you should think about water recycling. And only as a source for additional water for a fuel.

Tanks for a fuel - absolutely not worth efforts, you will sell it faster than it will fill basic storage. The same with clean water. If you have 2000kg clean water - you did something very wrong.

[MagicMarker]

Sure, mining ice is the faster and easier choice to get water. But nobody is paying you to collect ice, or giving you tech points for it. THAT is why you collect waste water. So what do you with it? Build ejectors and dump it? That is what I call a missed opportunity.

I rather convert it... I agree it is a more expensive tech to get, but that's what you collected the waste for, to get the tech points.
And I would *NEVER* suggest selling the Toxic waste. At -$400, that would indeed be a stupid move. But every TWENTY waste water that you convert, gives you only ONE Toxic waste, so it takes much less space to store. And later you can always get the Toxic burning tech which turns it into minerals. No negatives money at all!

Tanks for a fuel - absolutely not worth efforts, you will sell it faster than it will fill basic storage. The same with clean water. If you have 2000kg clean water - you did something very wrong.

Wrong is a VERY strong word... So yeah, maybe I was silly not to convert it to fuel yet. But even though the tech is easy to get, it takes a bit to get the components you need to build the first Fuel Plant. You're constantly in need of more power, more man-power, more materials...

And didn't I mention that I was NEW at this game and still figuring out how to play and that I would expand the top post as I figured out more?

Maybe building fuel tanks is a waste of effort, considering how much water it takes to make a little fuel. But if you don't have the materials yet to build a LOT of fuel plants, making fuel is also slow. So I'll keep selling water for tech points as long as i'm not making and selling lots of fuel yet.

So if, from your perspective, collecting and selling 2,000 kg of water to boost my tech points is very wrong, then from my perspective, dumping waste water is really stupid, since there's water, minerals and more tech points in there!

We all have our own opinions. Let's leave it at that, okay?