Starship Theory: First Steps

This guide goes through one strategy of the first things you should do to try and ensure survival in the early portion of your Starship Theory game. While not entirely foolproof, I have found it is the most effective method of getting past the initial dangers. Feel free to comment and rate, it is appreciated.

Introduction

Hello and welcome to this guide. If you have stumbled upon this page, chances are you are struggling with the initial steps of survival in Starship Theory. Fear not, for in the following sections we will go through a step by step guide of how to get through those initial stages as painlessly (if not quite as quickly) as possible. While some guides out there recommend a more high-risk high-reward approach, this one is very much focused on safety first. This guide does not aim to teach the controls and basic menu navigation. If you are having trouble with that, I would suggest watching a few Let's Play videos on Youtube, before diving in to this guide.

With that in mind, the first thing I will recommend you do, and this carries on through the entire guide, is to always ensure your evasion is at least +1. If your evasion is sufficiently high, it gives you the option to jump away from dangerous enemy ships, and also makes it easier to dodge the large asteroids that can spell a game over.

Anyways, on to the step by step.

Step 1: Crew Selection

[/previewicon][/previewicon]When you are initially selecting your crew, there are a few main things that you should be looking for. I will put them in list form, in order of priority, to make things simpler, then explain the reasoning behind it.

1. At least 1 person with Engineering skill 3
1. At least 1 person with Intelligence skill 3
1. At least 3 out of 4 people with 3 Skill in either Intelligence, Engineering or Military
4. At least 1 person other than your Scientist or main Engineer with Engineering skill 2

Alright. Seems fairly straight forward, but why this particular set of skills? The reason behind it, is because you need at least 2 people that you can assign as Engineers in the early game (hence needing a Skill 3 and a Skill 2 as a minimum), and we also want the certainty of knowing that at least 3 of our 4 initial people are suitably min-maxed skill wise, to be able to fulfill basic ship functions, such as research, engineering and (to rule out RNG) military operations.

While a Skill 3 Military person, in a roll which also includes a Skill 3 Engineer and a Skill 3 Scintist, is not a bad thing, a roll which incldues either 2 Skill 3 Engineers or 2 Skill 3 Scientists is by far preferable. If we consider early game role requirements, fast Engineers give us the ability to quickly build, repair and maintain our ship, while having a good scientist, preferably 2, gives us the ability to man our Research Station and our Plant bed.

I have included pictures of 2 possible crew setups, that I would consider 'acceptable' to roll with. The first has 2 Skill 3 Engineers and a Skill 3 Scinetist, which will cover most of our initial needs quite well.

The second is not to the above formula, but I have included to showcase as an outside chance. In the second screenshot, we are 'missing' a Skill 3 Engineer, but have had the good fortune to roll a crew that includes 3 Scientists with Skill 3 and a Skill 3 Military person as well. While we do not have the Engineer we would like in this setup, because all 4 of the people are minmaxed in desired roles, and because we do still have 2 people we could assign as early Engineers, the late-game power of this crew makes it one that we would choose.

Step 2: Before Unpause

Now, before you unpause the game, the inital temptation is to start expanding out the hull. Do not do this. What we want to do, is get our initial escape pod fitted out and ready for the Asteroid Field we will encounter almost immediately after the game has unpaused. While assigning your Engineers to start on hull expansion can be a good thing, it makes our ship a larger target for asteroids and can often leave us in the Asteroid Field before our mining laser has been completed.

Now, what you should do instead of hull expansion, is place the following components. We can go in and push out the hull after we have cleared that Asteroid field and hopefully picked up some valuable resources with our mining laser.

Obviously, you should remember to assign at least 2, perhaps 3, people as Engineers. only assign people with Skill 2 or higher in Engineering, otherwise the people with poor Engineering will actually hinder your building speeds.

1 x Mining laser (on the front of the ship)
2 x Small Heat Vents
1 x CPU panel
1 x Small solar panel



Now, once those are built, proceed to go through the first asteroid field. Focus on shooting the smaller asteroids with your single mining laser to try and gain some additional resources. Prioritise Silicon > Metal > Gold > Water.

During the first Asteroid Field, chances are that you will encounter a friendly trader. If this trader is offering to sell Food or Silicon, buy it. If the trader is looking to Buy people, sell a person who does not have optimised stats to them. This sounds rather cruel, but at this early stage of the game it is far better to operate with 3 people than it is to operate with 4. By selling this person, it will reduce our food and water consumption during the early phase, and in exchange it gives us the ability to purchase more in the way of silicon and food from future traders. We can always purchase more people from traders once we have the systems in place to support them.

Step 3: After the Asteroid Field

Okay, now that you have (hopefully) successfully passed through the Asteroid field, you can start expanding your ship out a little bit. Place hull in the way shown below, in order to give you sufficient space to fit a water cooler and a food dispenser. You will need to deconstruct and then rebuild several components. Don't worry, these will be fully refunded for you, all it will take to move them is time. This is the 'optimal' placement of hull and of resources in order to place these two necessary internal systems, and will hopefully keep our crew from dying of dehydration or starving in the short term.



Now, you will notice in the screenshot that I have also placed a template for another Small Engine. Why a Small Engine, rather than the components to get another mining laser, you ask? Well, we go back to the Golden Rule mentioned in the introduction. Always Keep Evasion Positive, at least +1. You will notice that our evasion with only the 1 Engine has dropped down to only +1, which means the next priority for us is to build that engine. There is no worse feeling, than working super hard to get your basic ship set up, only to lose everything because you could not jump out of a dangerous situation, such as an enemy ship showing up.

Fortunately for me in my playthrough, I had a trader which offered to sell both food and silicon, which used up all of my inital starting credits, but also gave me sufficient food the early game, and enough silicon to get that engine built more or less straightaway. If you are not as fortunate as I am in the luck department, it may take another asteroid field or two for you to get sufficient silicon and metal. Don't stress, take your time, and get that engine built. Once the engine is built, move on to the next step.

Step 4: More Mining Capacity

Now that you have 2 engines and basic food and water installed, the next task is to expand your mining capacity, so that we can make the most out of asteroid fields and gather the resources necessary to consider more internal space and consoles. Note that if you have not yet managed to buy food, that you should ignore this step, in favour of expanding out your hull by 1 space to allow for a Small plant box, as otherwise your people will begin to starve. Place this where I have placed an AI or solar panel on the left hand side of the ship.

Use the below as a rough guide of how you should configure your ship at this stage, to make the best use of space, for that initial mining laser.



Note that I have moved the airlock to wherre the inital engine was, and relocated the engine. This is done to allow easier expansion to the left. Do this by first removing the engine, then placing the new airlock, then by building the hull piece where you will place the engine again. Afterwards, prioritise first a solar panel, then another AI then the heat vents. Build the second mining laser last. You can build it with only 3 heat vents, but you can run into heat issues continually firing. Best to go with the safe approach, over the slightly riskier one, though if you prefer to live on the edge do feel free to build the laser first to get more resources.

After you've got the 2nd laser, next we build the 3rd laser, like so:



Notice that I've moved the lasers onto the 3 newly built hull pieces at the very front, allowing for easier mining of asteroids on a collision course with us, and also relocated a solar panel and a couple of heat vents, to allow space for 3 more floor tiles, one of which has been utilised to place the Small plant bed. The other 2, we will use in the next step. If you had not been able to purchase food, you should already have this small plant bed built, if you had purchased food, place this Small plant bed now. Best to get a little bit more self sustain at this point, and get our science skill crew member put to work.

Step 5: Research and Communications

Now that you have a solid mining set up, self sustainability for food, and jump capability (if only just, you will notice we're back down to only +1 evade at this point) it's time to start looking at some more quality of life things. At this stage, I will usually place a Research console and a Communications console in the recently built floor tiles. Research first, then Communications.

The first thing you should research, is the Large Engine. I skip the Medium Engine and go straight for the large, as by the time you have completed the research for it, and have deconstructed your 2 small engines, you should have more than sufficient resources to build the Large engine, and it is far far more cost effective than either the small or the medium is, in terms of the evade given. DYou will need to power down some of your mining lasers during quiet times, in order to power your comms and research consloes, but that's okay. Soon we will be able to research a Medium or Large Reactor as well, which should fix any and all power problems too.

If you are finding you are struggling with storage capacity, you can optionally extend out by 1 more hull tile and place a secondary Cargo hatch as well.

Now that you have a Large engine strapped to your ship, decent mining capability, and self sustainability, the game is pretty much yours to do what you like with. At this point, I usually like to strap a big gun on to my ship (plasma is nice) and research CPU arrays and Large reactors, so that I can relocate all of my Power and CPU generation inside the ship. This makes them much, much harder to be destroyed by passing asteroids and enemy ships, and also makes your hull much cleaner. I also styart to focus on (le gasp) aesthetics, at this point as well.

Keep in mind that the larger you make your ship, the larger threats, ship wise, the game will throw at you. Build in small pieces, and make sure you *ALWAYS* have Jump capability. A second Large engine doesn't go astray.

Best of luck in your endeavours, and feel free to share pictures of your ships in the commets. I love to see how creative people can get, once they get passed the inital early game challenges.

[Seriously Unserious]

Thanks for writing this. I was starting to get frustrated with this game as I kept running into pirates before I could have a chance to get any defenses or jump capability back into my ship. I was wondering if the devs had made this game unfairly hard out of nowwhere after seeing it being a bit too easy from a YouTuber let's play on an earlier version.

[Emery]

Yes, that's the one I mean.

[GE0]

For Communications console, do you mean Navigation?