Unreasonable Ironman: how to not spend a single credit

This is inspired by a post or guide I read of someone not using shipyards/outfitters as well as not hiring crew they couldn't pay for with the tribute they were collecting. If anyone knows what I'm talking about, let me know and I can give proper credit. They used drones from a certain faction to demand tribute from the first planet, but the game has been updated since their post (I believe), so drones are no longer necessary.

Spoilers for: Ships of a certain faction, and Hai, Remnant, and Avgi space (and even more stuff in the final section).

Disclaimer: I am assuming anyone actually wanting to try this has played through the game at least once and has a fair bit of game knowledge. I do not intend to explain where anything is, but there's a find function in the map (button in lower right, or press 'f') to help you find planets/systems you've explored.

For 0.10.14

Disclaimers and etc. aside, this guide is for what is (nearly) the most masochistic way to play Endless Sky. No buying anything, starting with almost nothing, even locking yourself out of any content you can't steal.

The Rules

Allow me to specify what you can't/must do:

• can't purchase anything from shipyards and outfitters
  
• can't let crew salary exceed daily tribute/personal salary
  
• can't capture drones for the same gameplay reason they tend to self-destruct when you try
  
• can't pay bribes for ceasefire/landing rights
  
• must sell everything on your start ship except for hyperdrive, battery, and engines (downgrade to smallest if starting ship has anything larger)

and optional rules if you want to be a stickler for doing everything yourself:

• don't count personal salary against crew salary
  
• never ask for fuel/ship repairs
  
• never get fined for illegal outfits
  
• ammo for weapons counts as outfits (go steal your own!)
  
• find a place that sells supercapacitors (New China is the closest) and replace your battery with one (if you feel that breaks the spirit of the challenge, steal a supercapacitor before anything else)

Not rules, but useful for playing this way, when in the outfitter interface: 'u' will uninstall an outfit or take it out of your cargo hold, putting it into storage and 'i' will install an outfit onto the selected ship(s) from storage or cargo bay. Pressing any number key you haven't assigned ships to will deselect all ships, and you can also ctrl+click a selected ship to deselect it. Trying to install an outfit with no ship selected will put it into your cargo hold. You can store any number of outfits on any planet.

Humble Beginnings

We start with a Shuttle. The Star Barge may seem better to start with for a larger cargo bay to steal larger outfits, but it only has a turret mount, meaning this ship can never deal damage. The Ravager or Annihilator turrets don't take crew no matter what ship you put them on, but they're too big for the Star Barge's weapon capacity. The Star Barge gets soft-locked without drones. I didn't test it, but the Sparrow is almost certainly doomed to soft-lock at securing first tribute. You'll be dealing with really terrible power and shield limitations compared to the Shuttle, for reasons I'll get into. Use the Sparrow for a more hardcore start until securing your first tribute?

So with a stripped Shuttle, we can't do much. You've got space to move some cargo, move some people, but you can't get credit for disabling ships, so no way to increase combat rating and make planets take you seriously. On that note, power is limited to what's in the battery, so you can't even fly that far.

Paying the debt is a thing you can do... if you want. We don't need credits, after all. We need equipment. Best solution: scavenging from the pirates disabled by the militia and merchants in the south.

What you really want to get ASAP:

• power source, ideally an AA fuel cell but a Photovoltaic Panel is enough to limp
  
• a shield generator once you have the power to spare, to reduce number of reloads

Oh, sorry, forgot to mention, things are going to go wrong... a lot. Be ready to reload saves.

Other things you'll want to pick up in the South if you come across them:

• Modified Blaster will specifically be needed later, but for now any low damage weapon works to make friendlies angry so you can loot them.
  
• torpedoes or heavy rockets to steal kill credit, meteor missiles fit the bill (barely)

Once you have this stuff, you can start the GRIND... but there's still more things you can do to make it easier.

Powering Up

So you have a functional 'combat' ship now, and have decided to not be a total masochist by starting the GRIND. What's next? Korath looting. If you did pick up any weapons, should probably leave them behind so they're less likely to shoot you. Either way, hop over to Syndicate Space. I recommend you make Misam your scavenging grounds, but any system that might spawn Korath ships works.

What we're looking for:

• Tiny Systems Core ('olofez carried by Rano'erek)
  
• a set of Asteroid Class engines and an extra Asteroid Class Thruster ('olofez carried by Palavret)
  
• Jump Drive (Rano'erek or Palavret)

Now, here's the thing. I never looted a jump drive from a Korath ship that spawned in human space. They're too unlikely to die. It's annoying. There's another solution... and we're not killing Quarg. Rather than wait here, possibly forever, to get a jump drive, we're gonna go to Remnant space, which means a pit-stop in Hai space.

You'll need a fuel pod or a ramscoop to get to Hai space if you refuse to ask for fuel. Start on Prime in Betelguese and go straight to Hai space. Go north, up to Wah Ki, and if you don't bring weapons, the Unfettered will almost pretend you don't exist. Loot an Unfettered Hai ship for its Keystone. Not all of them have one. Best chance is to follow a banged up Shield Beetle deeper into Hai space. Once you have the Keystone, off to Remnant Space.

If you haven't gotten one yet, you will need a Ramscoop for the Wastes! You can get one from pirate Scouts/Mules in the north of human space. In Remnant space, say hi. Immediately go to Cinxia and trigger the planetary defense mission, join the defense fleet. Loot whatever Korath ships the Remnant disable. If you like, you can loot 5 of the 6 Palavrets of their Jump Drives/Fuel Processors/whatever else you like by landing on the planet to drop your spoils, until the 6th is disabled. Once the 6th is disabled, the mission will complete when you land and the dead will be despawned. I highly advise you take the opportunity to get multiple Jump Drives and a Fuel Processor.

So now with a Jump Drive, ideally a Fuel Processor, and other Korath tech, we can start the GRIND. Nah, still more powerups in Avgi space. What's that? There's no way you can clear the intro with a Shuttle? True, but you can still get far enough through it to be able to land at Feo Platform, and that's all we need. Don't bring weapons so the Aberrant are less likely to shoot you. Their missiles will one-hit kill you in the Shuttle, by the way.

As for getting in and doing the first few missions... Go to Sasquergen, top off fuel, try to land on a planet on the way to Vorpal to get the escort mission, top off fuel in Vorpal (the star only strips your shields, so don't panic), get to Arche. Go south, south, southwest, northwest, south, south and there's a shortcut to jump straight into Symphony without going all the way through the Shroud. Refuel on red stars.

Do Avgi missions until the first combat mission (let the Avgi nuke the Aberrant), and loot stuff off the Aberrants if any get disabled. When you land to finish the mission, Avgi will ask you for help and depending on dialogue choice, you either will have to fight ships out of your combat ability or need more bunks than the Shuttle offers. But by this point, you can land on Feo Platform and you can leave Avgi space without reaching the mission for getting the humans out, so leave it for later. Head back through the Shroud.

Now to camp Arche for outfits off of aberrant ships. We're looking for:

• Ka'het MHD generator
  
• Ka'het Shield Restorer
  
• Ka'het Reserve Accumulator (optional)

And now that we have everything we can possibly get our hands on to barely make demanding tribute possible, we can get to the GRIND. And since we can't kill anything here, I... guess you want a way out of Avgi space: Go to Quartet, top off fuel while dodging missiles, take the wormhole (if you didn't bring a keystone, that's fine, just an extra jump), get to Decet and jump into Human space.

Powering Up: Sparrow Edition

Those of you who know the game well enough or checked the differences between Shuttle and Sparrow may have noticed what the problem with it is: reduced cargo bay. 5 tons less than the Shuttle means you can't get a shield generator better than the D14-RN, or a better method of power generation than Photovoltaic Panels. Despite that, the Sparrow has a glimmer of hope: batteries.

What we really need to make this savefile as viable as a Shuttle start is to clear the first tribute. The game is equally difficult after that. As stated, we don't have reliable power or shield generation. We're gonna need to make up for that. As for what you can get of our tribute demand loadout other than batteries:

• Asteroid Class Steering
  
• 2x Asteroid Class Thruster
  
• Photovoltaic Panel
  
• 4x Modified Blaster
  
• D14-RN Shield generator
  
• Hyperdrive

With all this on the Sparrow, you'll have used up all its engine and weapon capacity, save 1 point of each. Outfit space will be down to 31. This is enough to load 3 of the LP036a Battery Pack, giving you energy storage of 12000. That is more than enough to kill any interceptor the planet is going to spawn, but any damage you take will hit your energy store after your shields, and you need energy to fly as well.

But there's a battery in the game that is doubly energy dense. And it's only 2 tons of cargo space. In the Graveyard, the Ka'het fight each other. If they ever disable each other (or damage each other enough for you to finish them off), you could possibly loot Reserve Accumulators. These shouldn't be needed to secure tribute, but 24000 energy is a much better cushion. If you are going to attempt getting these, the ion storms are your worst enemy. I advise equipping a Fuel Processor for this, to give you the greatest chance of being able to jump to another system when one appears.

The hard truth: Those 4 Modified Blasters are to make up for the reduced shield gen compared to what the Shuttle will be running. Except the Shuttle will have way more than 4x shield gen than the D14. The 3 extra blasters are almost irrelevant if you try to tank the same kind of weapons fire the Shuttle will be tanking. You have to outrange more ships and there's more ships you simply can't defeat. The only reason the Sparrow might still work is if RNGesus not only favors you, but smiles upon you, when he spawns the planetary defense fleet.

Oh, and while the Shuttle will probably manage the whole fight is less than an hour, the Sparrow is gonna take hours because of recharging power at the star between kills. You may need to swap some batteries for more Photovoltaic Panels if the charge rate is slower than what you'll spend firing engines to dodge enemy attacks.

The GRIND

That's not an acronym, this part is just the most infuriating of this style of play.

There's no beating around it: we need 1500 combat rating points for the weakest planets to fight us. And you've probably gotten none so far with how often I've said 'no weapons'. Thing is, you probably can't get any kills in an honest fight. This is why I recommended getting secondaries like heavy rockets and torpedoes. There's no other way to deal significant enough damage against something that is going to try and run away. While Escort and Bounty missions will spawn enemies that won't run, they each have their issues. Escort missions spawn Pirate ships in swarms that love prioritizing you and your charge, and because they're Pirate ships (not Bounty) other factions will get involved and possibly steal your kill. Bounty missions force 1-on-1 fights, but your opponents will eventually get too strong. Don't even think about Marauders.

Use the secondary weapon of your choice to steal kills from Navy, Militia, or Syndicate. I recommend camping Almaaz for the 41 points you get for successfully landing the disabling shot on a Leviathan.

Workarounds for the GRIND

There are none. Sit your butt in that seat and git gud, scrub.

I'm joking. I didn't do the GRIND. Too braindead of a process for me. I spent 20 minutes just trying to get the last hit on a Fury with a Meteor Missile after a bunch of merchants did all the work, got 1 combat rating point, then used the second workaround after proving I could get 1500 combat rating points legitimately if I had the dedication.

The first workaround is savefile editing. For any of you who don't know, your save is in plaintext. You can easily find and edit the value of your combat rating. This, however, is outright cheating, because your reputation scores won't reflect the kills you would've otherwise had to get. But hey, singleplayer game and I can't stop you.

Second workaround is to slightly ignore that no drones rule. I'm not even sure this workaround is faster, but it's certainly a lot less boring. For those of you who didn't notice, there's actually no reason to have to land on Feo Platform... unless you're going to swap a ship's Hyperdrive for a Jump Drive. For those of who didn't notice this either, we haven't needed that 'low damage weapon to anger friendlies' yet. Let aberrants disable a Tremoros, shoot it, board it, go to Arche (leave and come back if you are already there) and land at Feo Platform. Swap the drive... and don't leave Avgi space yet. Get another MHD and 3 Ravager Beams (or 4 heavy lasers back in Human space if you want more shield damage) to load onto the Tremoros. Use the Tremoros to complete bounty missions until you have the combat rating points.

Did you just try to use the Tremoros without changing its engines? Do it if you haven't, it's hilarious. But yeah, that's gonna be a problem. Take off the Remass Injectors and install X1200 ion steering. That'll solve the problem well enough.

Making all of the changes to its loadout that I've mentioned won't leave space for a Ramscoop, and its thruster uses fuel when it's in use. A nice balance for breaking the 'no drones' rule, in my opinion. Don't get it stranded and don't let combats last for too long.

One last note: with just the Shuttle and the Tremoros, you can complete any non-marauder bounty mission on the job board. I won't spoil how, but I will say that for Pirate (not if you're fighting an Osprey) and Warlord bounties, you need a weapon and the Ka'het Shield Restorer on the Shuttle, Tiny Systems Core on the Tremoros. Have fun exploiting the dumb enemy AI.

Bloodsea Tribute

Of the planets that will fight you, you can beat Bloodsea, Clink, Charon Station, Darkstone, or Ingot. Bailey will fight you, but the ships they send are too much for a dinky little shuttle. Interestingly, some Wanderer planets will fight you... but that's even worse than Bailey.

Bloodsea is the one I chose because the pirates already hate me. I suppose some of you might be fine with running from FW militia after getting first tribute, but the person who goes after Ingot first is a true masochist that wants to reload the game for daring to leave a planet at the wrong time of day. Also, if you choose 'not Bloodsea', make sure the outfits you've stored on planets aren't going to be locked out by changing relationships.

The strategy and loadout that I used for Bloodsea should work for all other possible targets. For you madlads attempting this with the Sparrow, you've already seen the loadout you're working with. You'll follow the same general strategy as below, but you'll probably have to return to the star every 1-3 kills. Don't forget there's likely ships the Shuttle can beat but you can't.

If you're going after Bloodsea, land on Twinstar for a good reload point, and more importantly, to make sure you have fuel to jump out of the system once you've won.

What are we outfitting this dinky shuttle with?

• Asteroid Class Steering
  
• 2x Asteroid Class Thruster
  
• Ka'het MHD generator
  
• Modified Blaster
  
• Hyperdrive or Jump Drive to get into the system
  
• Ka'het Shield Restorer
  
• Tiny Systems Core

I kid you not, the only other weapon that might work for this is the Energy Blaster, and only because it has a longer range, making it easier to kite the ships whose damage would outpace our shield gen. I tried Torpedoes, Heavy Rockets, Speckle Coilgun, no setup with them came close to working. Energy Blaster may not even have sufficient damage.

What are we possibly up against? If we check the game files, we can see that Bloodsea will spawn 12 Small Southern Pirate fleets. Further checking, and these fleets randomly choose between pre-determined groups of 1-3 ships that can include:

• Scrappers
  
• Sparrows
  
• Furies
  
• Hawks
  
• Clippers
  
• Modified Argosies

At least, that's what's in the game files. In practice, enough in-game time has passed that Nests have probably been added to the Small Southern Pirates fleet, so they're also spawning.

For other planets, you're up against either 15 or 18 (in Darkstone's case) Small Militia fleets. You'll be fighting a smaller pool of possible ships and each fleet only spawns 2 ships max. If you see an Osprey spawn, that attempt is doomed, reload the save.

Now here's the real difficulty of this: the Modified Blaster only deals 66 shield damage per second. And even with our super-buffed shield regen (for the ship we're flying), 2 heavy lasers is enough to have us dead in seconds.

So of the ships that can spawn, here's the ones that almost guarantee you're going to be reloading to your last save:

• Modified Argosy (2 Heavy Lasers and a Heavy Laser Turret)
  
• Nest (2 D41 shield generators give it shield regen of 61.2 per second)
  
• speedy Clipper (identified by Antimattter Thrusters, 4 Heavy Lasers)

And the ships that are equipped with 2 Heavy Lasers, making them the most difficult combatants that you have a reasonable chance of beating:

• stock Hawks
  
• speedy Hawks (Antimatter Thrusters)
  
• laser Furies (two Fury variants have Plasma Thrusters, these are the slower ones)

If you see no ships from the first list and at most 1 of each ship from the second, you have a decent chance at winning. That's not to say this is gonna be easy. In fact, it took 30+ minutes for me to beat this defense fleet when I finally got a good roll, and I even messed up a few attempts at good rolls.

So, the strat: Demand tribute immediately so you can easily see what you're fighting and don't waste time. Don't worry about getting swarmed, the double Asteroid Thrusters let you outrun anything this planet can spawn, even the Sparrows (barely). Once everything is spawned and you know you aren't wasting time with an impossible fight, start flying left or right. You could fly any direction really, but I'm assuming you aren't playing with a square monitor and it helps to see stuff approaching you from farther away.

Do not ever change direction once you choose one. Planetary defense fleets will follow you an indefinite distance from the planet, and we want to split the ships up as much as possible. Only fight one ship at a time. If more than one is shooting at you, retreat by speeding up in the direction you first started in.

If you need to split up ships equipped with the same thrusters, slow down until they're only barely catching up with you. They'll stop firing their thrusters once they're within a certain range (larger than their weapon range). If you slightly change your trajectory to force them to your side, they'll eventually get far enough away to fire thrusters, at which point, they'll fall behind you. Make sure the ship you want to fight doesn't get too far away, and it'll stay closer to you.

Once you get through the Sparrows, there might be a group of plasma engine Furies behind them. They only have ammo weaponry, just run them out of ammo. Don't slow down too much or the speedy Hawks will catch up (if any spawned at all).

The speedy Hawks are the most dangerous of what you can actually kill. The kiting method I've described above barely works, because these have a D-41 (this is where the Energy Blaster may fail). You can barely outrange their Heavy Lasers but the scatter of the Modified Blaster will mean you probably have to be in their weapon range to deal enough damage to outpace their shields. The much less rage-inducing option is to death spiral. Spin your ship around the Hawk so that their lasers can't reliably deal damage to you while you shoot them. Death spiraling will slow you down too much to stay away from other ships of the same variant, so if there's more than 1 speedy Hawk, my condolences.

Scrappers aren't a threat, even if it's the variant with a Gatling Gun, although the Gatling Gun variant can catch up to you while death spiraling the stock Hawk.

The most tense battle is with the Furies with Ion Thrusters. None of these have Heavy Lasers, but the stock Fury has 4 Energy Blasters. This is what we needed our stacked shield gen for. You're probably going to see more than 1 of these, which means you can't death spiral to reduce their accuracy. Even with our stacked shield gen, you can't tank their damage output. The only reason it's possible to beat one of these 1-on-1 is because of the scatter of their Energy Blasters. The Shuttle is narrow enough to stay in range and deal damage. You will probably still need to fly out of their range to regen shields during the fight with each one if the RNG of their projectile scatter is mean, or if you drift too close.

All that's left is the laser furies and the clippers. The laser furies are basically weaker stock hawks, same number of heavy lasers, lower hull and shields. Their profile also means you don't have to be quite as close to reliably hit them. Of the Clippers you can win against, run them out of ammunition and they should be easy kills after, since they won't have much damage output, if any.

The most annoying part of this drawn out fight is the Scrappers that have Photovoltaic Panels for power generation. You will have to fly almost all the way back to the planet to intercept these and disable them to make the planet give up.

Make sure you demand tribute from the planet before leaving the system! If you have a Jump Drive, you may want to jump to Graffias. Han is more likely to spawn pirates, and Alniyat is slightly bigger, so possibly a longer distance to fly to its planet. Wouldn't want to be destroyed before you can save the game and secure your income, right?

The Galaxy is Yours to Claim

With just 200 credits a day, you can now steal all of the human interceptors. With good RNG, you can even steal a Clipper or a Quicksilver. I stole a Hawk crewed by 4 people.

If you want problems always, you can even go after those other planets I mentioned will fight you, for a total of 1000 credits a day. 11 people on a Bounder is enough to start stealing light warships. A Bounder will also let you finish the Avgi intro, although having chosen the combat choice in the dialogue will mean you need to steal a Prismaios with the Bounder. The real obstacle to progress now is combat rating (again). You need 2000 to get more planets to take you seriously. Once you've got 2000, demanding tribute from all available planets should get you enough combat rating points that you won't have to worry about having enough to unlock more planets anymore.

Obviously, later game ships will get difficult without hand-to-hand outfits. You'll have to capture ships carrying them. Many Marauder ships have nerve gas. Marauder Ravens are the weakest type with it. Marauder falcons and leviathans have the greatest concentration. If you're trying to avoid fines: planets giving you tribute will never fine you and enemy ships will never bother trying to scan you. The only thing better than nerve gas is in... the... Coalition.

Yeah, you aren't getting anything from them any time soon if you don't want to lock yourself out of story content. That's true of a few alien races like Gegno and Successors. Other concerns are Wanderers if you don't know how to Rep farm them (how much rep you get will determine what you can get before they're angy) and Bunrodea if you do their intro (doing their intro will set rep with them back to positive, but if it falls back to negative after that, it's not going above 0 again). Remnant will forgive you for anything if you put a big enough dent in the Korath population.

If you're worried about reaching a point where you need a better fleet to get tribute from more planets, but you need more tribute to get a better fleet, let me just say this: 6 Shield Beetle escorts and a flagship faster than Rainmakers and able to tank Gunboats' heavy lasers is all you need to conquer Earth without losing a single ship. Just fly in a straight line and use keyboard commands to send the escorts after enemy ships then call them back to you when they need to heal. I've done it with just Human and Hai outfits before. If the implication isn't clear, flying in a straight line lets you defeat fleets way stronger than you should be able to manage at all levels of play, because ES AI doesn't understand mobbing behavior.

One last note: I looted a Brig off a Modified Argosy after conquering Bloodsea. Must've been in its cargo bay. Have fun trying to hunt cargo ships and the like that happen to be moving unplunderable outfits if you don't want the rep hit of stealing ships with them installed!

Changelog

9/20/2025:

• amended errors in Bloodsea Tribute section after learning when you'd likely fight laser furies and the clippers from fighting other planetary defense fleets, and also after learning why Nests were spawning
  
• added optional rule about getting fined when I realized that costs you credits, but some people may not care about paying it/going through the effort to avoid them.
  
• updated The Galaxy is Yours to Claim to help with the new optional rule and added some information learned from playing through the mid-game of my own savefile.