what tf am I meant to do

[D o h n J o e]

Do I just go around doing jobs, failing, slowly losing everything, praying on RPG? I can't upgrade my ship because I don't know how to get the things I need, or what I need given sometimes it doesn't tell me, I just get an image of a thing and have to figure it out. I don't know how to get better classes or whatever, it all genuinely seems like banging my head against the wall until I get lucky.
I get it, future dystopia, yadda yadda, but man if that is the case, that is not at all fun, lmao.

[NinjaKnight671]

Sounds like your new, so let me attempt to help ya!

First off, Let's say you start from scratch. New game, basic gear and nothing unlocked.

What you should do is find the easiest missions possible, when you are selecting a job you can see the difficulty of it before accepting them.

Easy Missions have easier enemies and smaller maps for quicker completion.

While your on a mission keep an I out for "Chips" they could be called "Class", "Mind" and "Item" Chips, these will unlock stuff for you to use and make when you extract with them.

If your playing on Normal Difficulty, Chips give you the permission to extract early since they are very valuable.

Also keep an eye out for items you need to upgrade your ship, look in your upgrades and see what you need, don't be disheartened if you see multiple stuff you need and can't grab them all, just grab what you believe you need and extract.

Also don't worry about grabbing items the moment you enter a mission, just complete it and grab them once your safe, this allows you to sacrifice some stuff in your inventory if you feel the need before extracting.

Also on the previous topic of missions, stay on Mar's and it's adjacent worlds, they are free of the influence of the Quasimorph's, this allows you to get used to fighting Human/Machine Opponents and to build up your arsenal.

If you do decide to make a move on the other worlds, you MUST stock up on items that reduce Quasimorphosis.

Cigarettes, Alcohol, Drugs. These help slow down the count down timer before you are suddenly thrown into a game of Doom, and unfortunatly your not the Doom Guy.

On the plus side, if the Quasi Demon's do start appearing they are a double edged sword, for they target anything that is not them, so if you ever feel like the enemy is too strong, entering the first stage of Quasimorphosis helps weaken the opposition, just note that if the Quasimorphs win, you gonna be dealing with some nasty foe's.

Speaking of Quasimorph's, no matter what happens, DO NOT let it reach 1000. It's pretty much game over.

Although, if you have the right equipment and use your head, you could beat the Quasi Boss, and be rewarded with a REALLY good item that helps you with future missions.

The benefits they provide are pretty game changing, from transforming into a Quasimorph, absording all the dead bodies to heal and making a Clone with a copy of your loadout to help in a fight.

But this is all LATE game stuff where you are rocking Carnage Armor and wielding a HFG (Literally the BFG from Doom) so don't worry about that.

Before I forget, let's mention combat. When entering a mission, you MUST be sneaking at all times. This allows you to see where the enemy is at and to help prepare.

Once you enter a fight, switch to the normal stance, this allows you to attack twice if needed.

If you feel like gambling or need to run away, swap the Sprinting Stance to make a move three times, be warned that sprinting prevents you from opening doors so you will need to switch out or find an alternate route.

When in a fight, you MUST be in cover, this is not an option, if you are not in cover your basically dead. Any solid barrier you see can be used as cover, some obviously better then others, but bad cover is better then no cover at all.

To end this all, I bring up one little bit of advice.

BRING WATER. That is not an option, you NEED water. If you don't have water, stop everything your doing and find a source of water. Sink, Toilet, those Office things, find them!

Soda is the next best option but save those for the calories.

Reason why you need water is specifically to save yourself, if you are on fire, pour water on yourself! Does not matter if your being shot at or if your being chased, IMMEDIATLY extinguish yourself now!

This will save most of your runs, believe me!

Same with acid, if you get spit on or if a Vat gets broken and spills on you, EXTINGUISH. Like fire, stop everything your doing and spill that water.

While you will still suffer from acid burns after doing so, at least you wont be actively melting from standing in a damn puddle.

[󠀡󠀡]

Upgrading the ship is not necessary, it will make things vastly easier but it is more of a goal to work towards to than anything else.
Ship upgrades were only added the update before the current one and it is massively balanced in favour of the player.

Regarding "better" classes, I would argue you actually start with them, Scouts of Hades is best ranged class and Eclipse of Blades is best melee class, you can make these even stronger via upgrades but they are already good from the get go unlike some other classes.

The thing to know is that enemies in this game are incredibly dumb and operate basically on zombie logic that is they get alerted from either seeing you or hearing noises like gunfire (from anyone) and then beelining to the source, there is nothing more to them, and on normal most characters can see the enemy before the enemies can see you because enemies have a very short range vision by default.
This means that in practice you can just do dumb tactics like holding shift and firing your gun into nothing, positioning yourself into a distance where you can just see the entryway and killing the enemies 1 by one as they rush to the source of the noise.

A character like Victoria Boudicca with a vision range of 9 can completely outrange enemies on all levels.

A melee character can likewise abuse this just by camping at the corner and waiting for enemies to come and chopping them up with high hit count weapons. Keep in mind playing melee requires you to be adept at AP and movement mode management and those two details are the key to victory in general anyway, and mastering them allows you to snowball really easily.

Entering stealth mode and pressing the wait button allows you to "sense" nearby enemies through walls allowing you to tactically plan ahead your movies and check rooms even without opening them.

Do not be afraid to use medkits and focus on making them early on. They can be easily mass manufactured from common resources: plastic, rags and rotten meat.
Disassembling most equipment will yield rags and plastic, which can be turned into bandages and splints.
If you have a bladed weapon equipped you can dismember corpses for meat, which you can take back to the ship where it will "rot" into rotten meat after some time, which is used for making antibiotics.
This is all you need to mass produce med kits and they will really save you a lot because they instantly stabilise wounds and provide regeneration, just bind them to a hot key so you can instantly press them.

At start focus on only doing either 2 floor missions or defence missions.
3-4 floors are pointless at start because they will just exhaust your resources, more room for mistakes/death, you do not have a big backpack anyway and the rewards are not even worth it.

Quasimorphosis isn't as scary as first poster says unless you are playing against Teztclan, then it is scary.
I would argue that it actually makes several zones easier than Mars because it allows you to punch above your weight.
For example you can just stack up Quasimorphosis on 1st floor, then go to second floor and mash the wait button at the elevator and your assassination mission will be just done for you without you doing anything on second floor because high Quasimorphosis killed your target.
Whereas on Mars you have to always take everything on all by yourself.

Lastly every faction has its own weapon and armour types and there is a resistance system, some factions are resistant to piercing weapons while others are resistant to cutting weapons and they field their weapons with specific damage types.
You just have to learn this and memorise this by experience.
Generally speaking Beam weapons are good against almost anything, but ammo can be hard to find unless you work for SBN and/or Dilthey.

For new players I recommend avoiding fighting Realware, Ancom and Teztclan until you know what you are doing. Those are strongest factions imo and are responsible for most of my deaths.
Grasshopper and Planetbridge are very weak targets at any point of the game.
Civil Resistance, Church, Franche Comte, Coreward are fairly weak early but love to manpower spam and can drown you in hordes. Coreward gets tougher with tech progress.

[Vultan]

Skulls indicate how many floors and how many enemies there are on each.
Faction power and tech gives an indication on how powerfull those enemies will be.

Stay on mars untill you get a hang of the game. Quasimorps will wreck you if you leave mars before you "figure out" the game.

If you find/bring a sharp edged weapon/sharp bone you can amputate enemies for food.
Dissasemble enemy weapons for parts.

Get familiar with the 3 different stances you can have and dont open doors or end turn when enemies have a chance to shoot you.

gl hf.

[Varitus]

I'm pretty sure this topic was created because the guy was interested in what is end goal of the game. Liiiiiiiike lets say mgs 5 where pmc management is a huge portion, but there is also story missions moving you forward to some confrontation climaxes. But all guides provided here are useful.

[Lur Nen Rue]

in terms of upgrade

bee-lining into shuttle (and in retrospect trade) change the game so that you can play a mission, send a naked merc and collect stuff then bail out by amputating your head, you will get the loot in your shuttle with less time playing a completed mission with a bonus of reimbursement of a dying merc , of course this only work at current version and not in unfair. trade in other hand lets you buy thing in place that took time to travel so you not progress faction too much on early game

bee-lining into scanner massively raise your survival rate on floor 2+ mission and also whittle down your playtime per mission

[Kanjejou]

is there a place specific to go to do your first missions?

going to one skull mission is still quite hard and havent finished any mission yet.
usually die killed by a random guy that stulock me to death after i failed ot kill him/stun him turn one, or die of bleeding a couple turn later

any planet to favor?

[zverozvero]

Stick to Mars and its moons while learning ropes. No quasimorphs there means you can take time to skulk around and eat corpses when out of food. Loot knife or sharp bone to butcher those and keep eye on Stoves or fuel barrels to cook it.

Use Percy. He is tank character with high pain tolerance, hp and built in armor. Good for both Scouts and Blades starting classes. Dismantled clothes produce rags to bandage wounds. Chance of infection is better than dying of bleeds and those can be processed into infection-free bandages should you find workbench.
Or produce lots of Sorbents and heal infections. Stack of Sorbent feels lacking while learning but after some trial and error even half-stack is usually fine.

[Kanjejou]

I guess I just underestimated the difficulty of game since i did game like the pit a lot.
so i started in hard mode. but the jump of difficulty is insane.

[Physical Theorist]

The best thing you can do is pick normal difficulty and turn on "restart floor after death" when you get good enough to the point you don't need the crutch anymore you can start a second file with it off.

[Kanjejou]

im doing okay in normal. but i still dont understand how the loot capsule work they say they send a capsule not far away but i never found it...

[󠀡󠀡]

Originally posted by Kanjejou:

I guess I just underestimated the difficulty of game since i did game like the pit a lot.
so i started in hard mode. but the jump of difficulty is insane.

If you mean Sword of the Stars: The Pit that game is infinitely harder than Quasimorph.
Quasimorph is the more you play the easier it gets type of game while The Pit is the opposite, the more you play The Pit the harder it gets.
This does not really change whether you play Quasimorph on Easy, Normal or Unfair, it just gets easier to start snowballing in the easier difficulties.

Victories in Quasimorph snowball hard, every piece of loot, to the upgrades, to the unlocks only makes the games easier and while enemies advance too I never felt they were on equal footing in terms of an arms race. You are the weakest at the very start in Quasimorph.

Whereas The Pit is a game of entirely resource attrition and hoping you have enough resources just to survive and pass to the next floor. Every single engagement feels costly and painful. The starting point is where you are the strongest in the Pit with all your starting equipment, by 10-20 floors in you will be running out of durability, ammo, food, supplies or all combined. There is no way to snowball and enemies get stronger at a ridiculous level.

When it comes to Unfair in Quasimorph the most significant feature is the additional AP given to every enemy which allows them more actions, this invalidates entire tactics that are valid in normal and makes the most annoying enemies even more annoying, which is why I do not like playing with that feature on even though I crave more challenge.
Otherwise if you untick the additional AP feature all the tactics that work in normal also work in unfair and it is just a bit more difficult.

[zverozvero]

Originally posted by Kanjejou:

im doing okay in normal. but i still dont understand how the loot capsule work they say they send a capsule not far away but i never found it...

If map is not jammed you will see capsule mark even if it lands in unexplored room. 'Not far' is bit of a troll here cause yes they did send it to your current floor but like Deep rock galactics escape pod it lands as far from you as it can.
Call it in on unexplored floor and remember how mark looks cause its a bit hard to see green on green when you dont know what you are looking for. Capsule is vertical metal tube with green painting and hatch on its side. Dont destroy it in crossfire by accident. Its not very durable.