How do you progress faster early game?

[RaptorSolutions]

I'm kinda stuck at level 19 boss. I have V2.0 gear unlocked but going by guides I'm not earning enough salvage to use the weapons yet, and I've not yet retrofit to the shields, not sure if I should or if it would help.
I see people talk about specializing, is that what I should be doing? I'm running reactor boosts for salvage and compute speed, the compute lab as my utility and I have the damage/shield/salvage/void/compute as modules.

[Dragon]

the first part of the game is just about unlocking mechanics and learning how to use them.

When we talk about specializing it's more just leveraging every mechanics for a single upgrade or stat. your still far to early where you don't have to lose combat strength/reactor Max in order to synth at your maximum for example. higher class ships have more core options and are specialized and require prestige or refit to change to something else. right now you can just swap your Vshards and synth modules to achieve what you need on any run.

If your having issues on the current zone check your weapon/shield choices help counter your highest sector. if you still can't beat it then go over each mechanic as one of them is lagging behind that gives you significant benefits. Base is pretty strong and you should have it unlocked, but it takes a prestige to gain benefits from. sometimes you have to spend time accumulating your newest unlock (like warps/bases/crew) to get back to steady progression but you shouldn't stall more then a day or 2 while getting them up to speed. if you prestige make sure to spend time getting your compute/salvage back to where it was prior or you will feel like your regressing.

[RaptorSolutions]

How do I tell if something is lagging behind? I've also done the compute challenge up to level 2 btw.
But anyway, it seems that one part I know for sure I'm lagging on is for bases, Because I thought I should be focusing on building materials first, so I haven't done any of the B components thing yet, but as mentioned I've gotten up to V2.0 gear. I've also been unlocking and prestiging for slots and am currently waiting for the 6e6 cost slots to be unlocked, those require about 4-5 hours or so so not a big wait. But autobuy is picking up the other upgrades first and I assume I should be getting the cheaper ones first. Again, building materials only, I'm holding off on B components.
And also if that matters, for the previous sector I basically got out by the skin of my teeth.
For synthing, I'm near level 10, the one that needs 512 of the 2nd resource, for the damage/shield. For T2, I've infinite all the T1s.

[Dragon]

there isn't some hidden metric where you hit and you know you can pass the sector as it's the accumulation of all the tabs you have unlocked. everyone will have different values based on where you spent the majority of your time and we just forget to focus on stuff from time to time. You just have rotate your time between stuff that requires specialization. I would ask the last time you worked on all 3 branches or research and picked the best sector you have access to for each one? This is one of the more common ones to let fall behind because it's just in the background for a long time. i think you have a Vshard that can help but not the utility or synth mod available yet. you can see on the navigation tab what research is best to learn in each sector.

Now for your base question, yes generating building materials is first priority, upgrade a booster every time it's available. just do component upgrades right before you focus on your base materials. Initially though running components buildings for a few hours will give you a lot of benefits on your next prestige if still have nor made them. you could see 10x+ gain or more if you haven't even built them yet. I like to make sure my bases are close to equilibrium on their components before i prestige to get the best gains. making components doesn't take away from your building materials once you shift back to gen/boosters so there is no reason to not update every run just to check.

You can also look in the forums for base layouts if you want a perfect one that is fully opened up to take advantage of the boosters.

[Simbu]

There isn't really a hard fast rule, but you should be able to clear 1 sector a day in some of the toughest areas, if not a bit faster then that. My suggestion is to cycle thru everything you can do, and use the stats and info page to see if you are missing anything for your boosts. If it seems like you are making significant progress within 1 minute, then might be a good idea to idle on that for a while. You should also find that you are using prestige within 48 hours, especially with bases unlocked now.

As far as the bases go, for the first base you might just have 1 tile for battle components and everything else materials/boosters, but there are some setups that are more effective then others. Try to find tiles that have the most surrounding nodes, and fill those with boosters. Basically 1 tile surrounded by 4 boosters will produce way more then multiple tiles surrounded by 2-3 boosters.

You should have also just unlocked warps, or will soon, which will start to give you significant gains after you run it a couple times. The next major unlock, at sector 51, will take a while, and switching between tasks will become more important.

[RaptorSolutions]

Originally posted by Dragon:

there isn't some hidden metric where you hit and you know you can pass the sector as it's the accumulation of all the tabs you have unlocked. everyone will have different values based on where you spent the majority of your time and we just forget to focus on stuff from time to time. You just have rotate your time between stuff that requires specialization. I would ask the last time you worked on all 3 branches or research and picked the best sector you have access to for each one? This is one of the more common ones to let fall behind because it's just in the background for a long time. i think you have a Vshard that can help but not the utility or synth mod available yet. you can see on the navigation tab what research is best to learn in each sector.

Now for your base question, yes generating building materials is first priority, upgrade a booster every time it's available. just do component upgrades right before you focus on your base materials. Initially though running components buildings for a few hours will give you a lot of benefits on your next prestige if still have nor made them. you could see 10x+ gain or more if you haven't even built them yet. I like to make sure my bases are close to equilibrium on their components before i prestige to get the best gains. making components doesn't take away from your building materials once you shift back to gen/boosters so there is no reason to not update every run just to check.

You can also look in the forums for base layouts if you want a perfect one that is fully opened up to take advantage of the boosters.

For the first one. I don't rotate the sector choices for the research, just to pickup shards I don't have yet. With that said, I more or less try to keep my focused research either on sector bonuses, or for the many equal ones I work on the lower ones so I can finish them off faster.

As for bases, I don't fully get how B components work, Like since they require building materials, will they fall back down? Or is it that as long as you have B components they make your next round stronger or what? Is it that when you hit a threshold of B components then your multiplier goes up? But anyway, reading around that means I should focus on B components for a bit before I prestige? If it really helps that much, I'll probably give one more day for building to unlock the next slots and then focus on B components for a bit since I'm at 1x now.

Originally posted by Simbu:

There isn't really a hard fast rule, but you should be able to clear 1 sector a day in some of the toughest areas, if not a bit faster then that. My suggestion is to cycle thru everything you can do, and use the stats and info page to see if you are missing anything for your boosts. If it seems like you are making significant progress within 1 minute, then might be a good idea to idle on that for a while. You should also find that you are using prestige within 48 hours, especially with bases unlocked now.

As far as the bases go, for the first base you might just have 1 tile for battle components and everything else materials/boosters, but there are some setups that are more effective then others. Try to find tiles that have the most surrounding nodes, and fill those with boosters. Basically 1 tile surrounded by 4 boosters will produce way more then multiple tiles surrounded by 2-3 boosters.

You should have also just unlocked warps, or will soon, which will start to give you significant gains after you run it a couple times. The next major unlock, at sector 51, will take a while, and switching between tasks will become more important.

I'm following the base 1 guide on steam yeah. But it seems that I might have fallen behind on B components. I basically invested nothing in BCs because I'm chasing optimization of my bases. But that might be giving me trouble in other parts of the game instead it seems. I'll give one more night of BMs and unlocking the next 2 slots, then spend a bit of time on BCs and prestige.

[Dragon]

What you see on your inventory is a stock of saved materials. Components will reduce your stock and you have to build it back up.
But that is not really a concern as you can easily build that back up. if you are not leveling your component building you may need to spend a few hours on that before you start building components. The boost is huge initially, it will start to platou once you reach E3+ components and improve proportional to your Material/Booster buildings. so you only need to do a base run when you see a large change in your rate of generation.

[RaptorSolutions]

Originally posted by Dragon:

What you see on your inventory is a stock of saved materials. Components will reduce your stock and you have to build it back up.
But that is not really a concern as you can easily build that back up. if you are not leveling your component building you may need to spend a few hours on that before you start building components. The boost is huge initially, it will start to platou once you reach E3+ components and improve proportional to your Material/Booster buildings. so you only need to do a base run when you see a large change in your rate of generation.

So basically for now get to around 1e3 BC and then prestige is what you're saying? Then worry about the rest later. I can do that. And work on my synth recipes at the same time.
I'm currently putting my reactor at salvage/compute but if it's going to be a wash anyway, I guess I should swap to synth/research for permanent stuff. And I guess unlocking Shield 10...

[Dragon]

meh you might not even get to 1e3 yet, if you don't see any change after a hour then your good no matter what the value is. you can push it longer but it's not really needed at the lower sectors. but you are basically missing 10-1000x boost to your damage/shields

[RaptorSolutions]

Originally posted by Dragon:

meh you might not even get to 1e3 yet, if you don't see any change after a hour then your good no matter what the value is. you can push it longer but it's not really needed at the lower sectors. but you are basically missing 10-1000x boost to your damage/shields

It can't be that hard right? Like how does it scale compared to BMs? I've gotten up to 1e6 comfortably for that one.
But I guess I'll just need to do it to get a feel for it. Unless there is some list with numbers somewhere? I don't think the wiki has it. And I'll avoid Discord so don't bother if that's the only one. I'll take a google docs thing if there is one though.

[Dragon]

yea i don't use any aids either. but a lot of people get hung up on pushing one thing forever to of diminishing returns for your time compared to other areas.

Best example is Synth. at some point it will take hours for a single level in any material. When it takes you days to get a few levels in a single module upgrade you should shift to progression on something else. you could keep pushing synth but it just gets worse until it takes years to get to the next reward level on a single material. where you could instead gain more synth speed in research, or raise the cap on your reactor, or prestige Base 3 for more synth speed, etc etc.

it's a hard concept because people treat this as an idle where you don't change anything for days to weeks. you progress as fast as you are willing to put in time. maybe there is a few hours here and there after switching it around (yes it's an idle) but not so far as you have nothing to do if you want to do something to progress faster.

in general if what your doing starts to stagnate and you have no significant gains then switch to something else.

early sectors are just learning how to prestige, setup your cores to counter the new sector, and introduce new features.

[76561199215865625]

Originally posted by RaptorSolutions:

But I guess I'll just need to do it to get a feel for it. Unless there is some list with numbers somewhere? I don't think the wiki has it. And I'll avoid Discord so don't bother if that's the only one. I'll take a google docs thing if there is one though.

steam doesnt let me post the link, so
100 has no effect
1000 has 2x
10000 has 8x
100000 has 26x

[RaptorSolutions]

Btw to report back, I'm on to sector 23 by now. Apparently I pushed building materials so high up that it took minutes to get to 100+ base 1 multiplier and I'm at 1.4k now... Also now that I got warp, I'm getting a better feel of how the new shinies help in your progress. Though at least warp is kinder in the sense that it doesn't have opportunity costs like bases do. For bases I was too laser focused on building materials for supposed long term benefits that it actually kneecapped my current short term progress that in turn hampers my long term. But well, something I found elsewhere, but it's best to just do BMs and then for an hour or two before prestige that you only focus BCs, from what I've seen that works out great.

Originally posted by ryan180322:

Originally posted by RaptorSolutions:

But I guess I'll just need to do it to get a feel for it. Unless there is some list with numbers somewhere? I don't think the wiki has it. And I'll avoid Discord so don't bother if that's the only one. I'll take a google docs thing if there is one though.

steam doesnt let me post the link, so
100 has no effect
1000 has 2x
10000 has 8x
100000 has 26x

Thanks, though I apparently accidentally shot right past that.
Btw is that a google doc or some kind of spreadsheet or something? If you can't post a link, perhaps a name so I can try searching for myself. That is if I'm right in assuming it has more data about other stuff too.

[Hunu]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3037896790

This guide has a bunch of stuff you might be able to use.

There used to be a googledoc called "unassorted advice" that is likely still mostly relevant, though the game has been updated a bit since that was a thing.

EDIT:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zfV0R-Kiqqp8YUhaGH95IhW0cgH360bQu1OdZ0nv-g0/edit#heading=h.vlobdqqodn13

This is the one I was talking about.