How to Rocket in a Spaced Out galaxy: The basics

The basics in Spaced Out rocket mechanics.
This guide will (hopefully) help you build your first rocket that works and explain some things so the process gets less confusing

Introduction

Spaced Out (SO) has the same basic game mechanics as Vanilla ONI but is seen from a different space-oriented perspective. It has a different progression than Vanilla's “straight to making steel for rockets” goal.

Rockets can be built from metal ore and fueled by simple resources like carbon dioxide or sucrose. You could build a rocket at cycle 50 if you would like to, instead of waiting until steel is available or dupes have enough skill points to be pilots.

Only 1 spare skill point is needed in SO to make dupes capable of piloting a rocket.

Starting to build

Rocket modules are not separate buildings like in Vanilla.
They can only be found in the menu of a rocket platform.





After using 800kg refined metal to build a platform, any rocket engines or modules researched are unlocked and can be built on top of the platform. Everything starts from there by clicking "new rocket".


No steel is needed for the first two engines, carbon dioxide and sugar, and a small petroleum engine needs refined metal to be built. Only bigger engines will need steel.

Rocket modules are not static buildings. You can add, change or move a module up and down from the side menu when you select it.

Most rocket engines are filled directly. Only Petroleum and Hydrogen engines don't have direct storage and will need a fuel tank to load them with fuel.

Rockets need ports connected externally to the platform in order to fill any cargo and need fitting internally that connect their cargo to the interior of the rocket but these details are omitted on purpose in order to make this guide simpler.

Rocket anatomy essentials

What a rocket needs in order to launch is the following:

1. Nosecone
   
2. Spacefarer
   
3. Engine
   
   If one of these 3 doesn’t exist, the rocket is not complete. A nosecone is always built on top and the engine at the bottom. Trying to build a nosecone in-between modules, it will be grayed out as an option in the building menu.
   
   
4. Oxidizer
   Some engines will also need Oxidizer along with the specific engine’s fuel so an oxidizer tank in that case is necessary.

You can add any other modules after these 3 (+oxidizer) are built.
Modules are not static buildings. Any module can be built in-between by clicking a module and then clicking the + symbol to add above it or the cog symbol to change it to another module.

There are arrows up and down to move the module to a different position any time you want.
Note: Any inputs or outputs the modules have, will change place so you will need to be careful if you set any pipes


1. NOSECONE
There are 2 options (and the “hidden” one that solo spacefarer offers).

A nosecone, the top of the rocket, can be either a Basic Nosecone or a Drillcone.
The Basic is what a spacefarer module absolutely needs. The Drillcone will be needed later on in order to drill resources from space POI.

2. SPACEFARER
There are two options for spacefarer modules: a Solo Spacefarer Nosecone and a Spacefarer Module.

The solo option has a small interior and comes together with the nosecone attached while the module one offers a bigger room to build but needs a nosecone attached to the top. Both options come with built-in inputs and outputs for liquid and gas.

3. ENGINE
There are 7 engines currently in game that cover different needs and preferences of players.
The first two you will come across would be:

Carbon Dioxide Engine: Small, fast, doesn’t put out too much heat, limited range, easy to fuel.

Sugar Engine: It burns sucrose, needs oxidizer and has room to put more modules. It also provides 60W when in space.

It’s a good idea to start with the Carbon Dioxide Engine and move on to Sugar or better when you need more modules or some power.

Rocket interior

Living quarters for the dupes

What has changed the most about rocket travel compared to Vanilla is the rocket interior. Dupes are not in suspension anymore and you will need them to survive while traveling from one planet to another. After building a spacefarer, either a solo or module one, you can see its interior by clicking at the right sidebar where asteroids and rockets are listed or by selecting the module and clicking the "view interior" button. You can have your dupes in a rocket for multiple cycles but you will need to have sufficient oxygen and food for them to survive. A dupe breathes 60kg/cycle of oxygen and eats 1000kcal/cycle, assuming default difficulty and dupe values.

There are two options of rocket interiors:

• The Solo Spacefarer Nosecone (SSN). All-in-one compact module.
  
  Put this on top of the rocket and you are good to go.
  There is very limited space to build inside a solo spacefarer nosecone, so it's usually preferred for short trips.
  
  
• The Spacefarer Module (SM). Bigger inside.
  
  You can put that directly above the engine, at the top below a nosecone or anywhere in between. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t have a nosecone on top like the solo one so you will also need a Basic Nosecone at the top of the rocket.
  A spacefarer module has a little more space you can work with to make your dupe's travels more comfortable.

*A gantry is not essential to reach a spacefarer module. You can reach modules by building ladders. Ladders will obstruct building modules on top of them so make sure there are no ladders in the way when you want to build new and bigger modules

The most essentials, placed in order, you will need to have inside a rocket are:

1. Oxygen, a dupe won’t last without some oxygen around
   
2. Food, essential for trips longer than 2 cycles
   
3. Bathroom, for your sanity mostly
   
4. Bed, from here on starts the “more luxuries” territory

1. OXYGEN


You have several options for a sufficiently oxygenated interior

• Oxylite in a storage bin,
  -putting it on the highest spot, will sufficiently pressurize the room
  -putting it on the floor, will delete any CO2 floating around but will overpressure the room causing “popped eardrums” to dupes
  There is plenty of oxylite in most starting asteroids, you could dig up and save for space travel before building an oxylite refinery.
  
  
• Algae Terrarium,
  can produce more oxygen than needed and overpressure the room but it also deletes CO2
  
  
• Oxygen Diffuser or Sublimation Station, but powering them will get a bit more complicated than an early on basic build.
  
  
• pumping oxygen through the Built-in Ports (a dupe needs 60kg of oxygen per cycle so you need to do some math there)
  
  
• a combination of all the above

2. FOOD


The best food to travel with is by far Berry Sludge.
It doesn’t spoil and it is so calorie dense it can make a dupe last for many cycles in long flights.
(10kg of Berry Sludge is 40.000 kcal). For the same reasons, it’s a good idea to save early Nutritient Bars, Muckroots and Hexalent Fruits to use them in rockets later on.


Other preferred foods would be Pickled Meal or Grubfruit Preserve because they deteriorate slower.

If the flight is not very long (less than 2 cycles), food is usually not needed, assuming the dupe ate before leaving and will find food where they are going. In normal difficulty, a Dupe can survive for 3 cycles before starting to starve.


3. BATHROOM


Dupes are happier when they can relieve themselves and you get less annoyed if you don’t constantly have to make them mop. An outhouse inside the rocket would be enough to last a long time. Space radiation can disinfect most germs, so they don’t even need to wash their hands afterwards.

A better option to save space and last even longer is a Wall Toilet. You can provide it with water by snaking water pipes all over your interior.

4. BED


Seems like a luxury but after a while, any dupe needs some comforts. The bigger module can fit a bed and even a great hall if you like. That way long trips will get less stressful for your dupes. You can also use a Ladder Bed. It takes up the same space but provides a Ladder as well.

Example of a solo interior

A solo spacefarer interior could look like this:

An outhouse, a fridge to put 10-20kg of preferred food, a gas pipe and vent to oxygenate the interior and a storage bin for oxylite to have some spare oxygen
(I would usually put 1000kg oxylite just in case.. I forget a dupe for several cycles)

The rocket control station can be deconstructed and built in a different place in the interior. You can arrange things any other way you want or fit more/different buildings than this example

The first rocket

The first two most simple rockets you could build, are the ones using the Sugar engine or the Carbon Dioxide (CO2) engine which consume sucrose and CO2 respectively.

Sucrose can be usually found and mined on the starting asteroid or produced from sweetles after they eat sulfur.
CO2 can be generated by dupes or buildings and usually is a plentiful resource in any asteroid.

CO2 engine: fast, oxidizer not needed, power=0w
Sugar engine: slower than the CO2, needs oxidizer, power=60w

A simple rocket could look like this:

This setup could transport dupes between planetoids later on or just launch to a starmap hex and return.

The background scaffold starts unraveling when an engine is built and that scaffold reveals how tall a rocket can be using that engine. Spacefarer contains the rocket control station and the living quarters of the pilot/crew of the rocket. In order to pilot a rocket a dupe needs the “rocket piloting” skill. It’s recommended to choose “Starry Eyed” dupes as dedicated pilots for longer missions.

In order to start sending rockets to destinations (apart from the essentials inside a rocket so your dupe doesn’t suffocate/starve) after filling them up with fuel, you will need to assign a pilot and any other crew you want …



…choose a destination the rocket can reach on the starmap and… launch!



*Launching rockets back and forth will require you to have rocket platforms in both destinations.

*Having a last look at the launch checklist before launching, will let you see if anything is wrong. If a cargo module is not fully filled or a lander is not built, there will be a warning/unchecked box in the checklist.

*Roundtrip should not be activated if you want to launch anything from the orbit of a planet like a rover or trailblazer. It’s useful if you want to drop materials from an orbital cargo module, otherwise it should be deactivated.

What is a first rocket good for?

There are several things you can do with a “first rocket” that has either of the two starting engines:

• Add a Rover Module to send and land a Rover to another planetoid, which will be able to prepare a base for Dupes.
  
  
• Add a Trailblazer Module to send and land a Dupe to another planetoid. You will need to build a platform and also land a rocket to be able to send the dupe back.
  
  
• Add an Orbital Cargo Module to send resources to a planetoid. Those resources will be spread over the planetoid surface as Payloads that need to be opened.
  
  
• Add a Telescope inside the spacefarer module to reveal adjacent hexes. A telescope needs to be built close to exterior walls and also requires power.
  
  
• Add Orbital Data Collection Lab inside the spacefarer module and take some plastic to convert into data banks. Data Banks are required for the end of the research tree.

Landing on a planet

You can land on a planet several ways.

1. You can send a Rover (build a rover module+lander)
   
   
   A. Rover module is built
   B. Rover module + lander (the rover part that will land on the planet) is built
   
   
2. You can send a dupe in a Trailblazer
   
   
   A. Trailblazer module is built
   B. Trailblazer module + lander (the part that will let a dupe land the planet) is built
   
   *If the rocket is fueled/can reach a destination and you select a reachable destination, the landers seem built while they are not
   
   *If a lander is not built, the option to launch it when you are in the orbit of the planet, will be grayed out and not selectable
   
   
3. You can send a rocket to the orbit of the planet and “abandon ship”.
   
   
   “Abandon ship” starts a “deconstruct” sequence for the rocket. The rocket deconstructs in space, dupes inside the rocket crash-land along with half of the materials of the rocket (rocket debris) and everything drops on the nearest planet (in this case, the one the rocket orbits)
   

The first few cycles after landing

Building a rocket isn’t so hard. Sending and landing a dupe isn’t so hard either. Making the dupe last more than a couple of cycles to build a platform and return is the hard part, depending on how you decide to land on the planet and on which planet you are trying to land.

1. The rover way

Send a rover and have your dupes safe at home.
The rover will build the most essential infrastructure for your dupe to start living on that planet over its 10 cycles life (you can send several if it’s not enough).

A rover can:

• dig materials softer than granite
  
• build anything in the first 2 early research columns
  
• sweep, store or supply structure materials for a build

A rover cannot:

• dig anything harder than granite
  
• build a platform or a mini-pod
  
• supply materials for a building to work (e.g outhouse, oxygen diffuser, coal generator, farm tiles etc.)

The above means several things.

1. You can dig using a rover and find oxygenated areas but you will need a way to keep these areas oxygenated and avoid venting everything to space. You could either build a manual airlock, build the entrance behind you with tiles or make the rover build a waterlock moving water from a pitcher pump to a bottle emptier or try making a waterlock by using a naturally occurring puddle, which would be much quicker.
   
2. You can’t build a rocket platform but you can have the rocket platform’s materials delivered and ready so a dupe holding their breath has less things to worry about. A rover can supply the rocket platform with the refined metal and build ladders for the dupe to reach the spacefarer after the rocket lands.
   
3. A rover can’t supply any buildings with materials after they are built so they can start working. An outhouse will be inoperable until a dupe supplies it with dirt.

After the “Way to oxygen” is secured, you can send a dupe to land using a trailblazer and continue what the rover started. This would be a “safe” way to establish a colony without much stress of a dupe dying from suffocation before building the last bit of ladder to reach the rocket.


2. The dupe way

Land dupes using a trailblazer



A rover is not mandatory to start building a base. You could land a dupe to build and dig anything you want without the rover's restrictions of limited build and dig. The problem is you will try it blind. Only the surface of the planet is revealed when you discover a planet so you can’t know for sure where the appropriate place to dig for oxygen would be (yes, you can save, reveal everything and reload the save after knowing everything you want). You can equip the dupe with an atmo suit so they can last until the rocket has landed.

If you want to quickly build a platform and get out of there, the strategy would be the following:

• have 2 trailblazers built out of the same material, every trailblazer lander when deconstructed, gives 400kg refined metal. 2 trailblazers = 1 rocket platform
  
• land two dupes using 2 trailblazers, it could either be 2 trailblazers on one rocket or two rockets with one trailblazer each
  
• landed dupes need to be in an atmo suit otherwise there is not enough time to deconstruct trailblazers, construct a platform and then construct ladders to reach the rocket's entrance all in one breath.

*There is also an atmo suit exploit you can take advantage of. If a dupe runs out of breath wearing an atmo suit (or oxygen mask) in an oxygenated area, they will gasp for breath but no oxygen will be consumed. That means you can have the same reachable pocket of oxygen on a planet for several cycles without it decreasing.

*Another thing to know about dupe breath concerns the triage cot. If a dupe is hurt and you put them on a triage in non-oxygenated area, they can still breathe just fine.


3. The mad way
Crash-landing on the planet by destroying the rocket in orbit.

I would consider it crash-landing even if you dropped a dupe or two in trailblazers alone on a planet, but you can also deconstruct the rocket behind you by starting the “Abandon ship” sequence which would be a more appropriate "crash".

The benefits:

• you will have the materials of the rocket, which will land together with you as “rocket debris” so you will have more materials to work with at the beginning without much digging.
  
• it is the quickest way to land a dupe on a planet

The downsides:

• you get only half the materials of the rocket using the "abandon ship" sequence
  
• everything needs to be retrieved from every corner of the planet’s surface which is sometimes hard to do
  
• there are more chances of a dupe dying because you weren't building quickly enough

*My recommended way would be to land a rover first but if you want to be more excited (or feel lucky enough) the other two ways would be for you

Conclusion

Rockets in SO are totally different from Vanilla. For me, it makes the game more interesting to explore.

Many of the mechanics and exploits that can be used to land and establish a colony are omitted in order to make this guide an introduction to Spaced Out rocket basic mechanics.


Special thanks to Yobbo and Fradow for proofreading and making suggestions for this guide

[LittleFingers]

Thank you so much, I recently just playing and this guide helped a ton.

[Su kAm Ahdi]

Thankyou! This will help me when i start the game again!

[therealivanisovich]

This answered so many questions the in game info didn't explain. Thanks!!

[IHeartElephants]

I am amazed and confused by this.

[Kind Liar]

<3 thansk

[JohnTheJuggler]

This is really helpful. Could you show more sample interiors including for the Spacefarer module?

[mxd_]

How do you deal with heat and temperature? I've got an automated cooling system but I'd like to know your solutions :)
I love the new rockets but dislike the co2 managent. Without glitchy filter system I would be lost..

[sakura.sk]

Oops! I completely forgot that rovers can build manual airlocks now. ^^'
I corrected that part. Thank you!

[Doggxs]

By the way they changed that rovers can build air locks which is amazing.

[Grim]

Awesome guide, makes deciding wether or not to buy the DLC at some point much easier :D