Steam Community :: Guide :: A Guide to Game Starts

This assumes you’ve gotten fairly far into the game – far enough that you’ve gotten the headquarters and gotten fairly rich as well. I’m assuming a budgeted start, here, so modified games don’t count. (You can always do a creative game start instead of budgeted.)

https://youtu.be/w3W-AwCXFcs

1. Start the game and select the Station Designer start. Click the console table in front of you but, instead of clicking the continue button, pan back and select the HQ plot instead. (00:45)

2. Customize the station the way you want it. Try to keep the number of blueprints you use to a minimum as you’ll have to pay for every one of them! Unless you’ve gotten very far into the game, don’t expect to be able to make an HQ that can build Advanced Electronics from silicon, methane, and helium. If you haven’t gotten all that far into the game, you can create a trade station from a docking bay and a container storage module.

3. Export the station. Give it a name you’ll recognize. (10:18)

4. Exit the game to the main menu and start again, this time picking budgeted start.

5. Pick your player model, name, starting balance, a starting inventory, and so on. Changing these affects your “Money” budget in the lower left. (11:06)

6. Set up your starting ship. (11:58) Again, this comes out of your money budget… mostly. At 12:45, I go set up the crew for the ship. That exacts a cost of personnel.

7. Next I move my starting ship by selecting the Universe editor, zooming/panning the map on the right, then simply clicking where I want the ship to go. (13:04) It’s also possible to pick the sector by name from the dropdown list for the starting sector. Note that the original starting sector of Argon Prime is still known because I didn’t bother to remove it.

8. Next I add a few sectors to my list of known sectors. I set them so I know what stations are in all of them and add satellites to one of them. The satellites add almost a million to my money budget! Having both satellites and knowledge of all stations is likely a waste of knowledge points, but I suppose some stations way above/below the plane could get missed by the satellites.

9. At 14:07, I start working on the factions. I make it so everybody is moderately nice to me, though the Buckaneers aren’t listed for some reason. I also add some extra faction points to the Ministry and the Alliance of the Word because those are such a bother to advance. I turn on knowledge of a few factions, which I expect is another waste of good knowledge points (if you haven’t even seen a ship from a faction, why gain knowledge of them?).

10. Now it’s time to place the custom HQ. Go to the Property section, add a station, look in the drop down list, and – disabled entries for my custom HQs! Why? Because I haven’t done anything with the Story section yet, so I don’t have an HQ to customize!

11. OK, over to the Story section, add the headquarters. For this game, it doesn’t matter if Dal is there or not.

12. Now (15:07) I select Property again and you can see that I have the HQ already added. (It’s going to cost me 325,454 credits, too.) Select the drop down for station options. This time, only the HQ options appear, and they are all enabled. I select the expensive one I exported back in step 3.

13. Next, I go in and give the HQ a name. Before letting my cursor out of the name box, I go to the right and place it where I want in the sector.

14. Now I give the manager some quick skills so somebody can run the station and add a subordinate M trader.

15. I check things over to make sure I have cash (I really hate it when I forget to give myself cash – though it might be fun to see how long it takes to get a big station working when you’ve got no cash to feed it).

16. I did forget something! Research. At 18:48, I set some of those.

17. At 19:25 I export my save. You really want to do that, in case you mess something up!

18. Finally, I start the game! At 21:00 I pop out of the pilot’s seat and promote somebody to captain of the ship. I’ve never found a way to assign a good captain to the player starting ship directly, but you could add a cheap ship with a great pilot and transfer the pilot to your ship.

19. I set the logo (you folks know about custom logos, right?), have the captain dock the ship, and get out to go talk to the manager. Except I recorded this with the Beta for version 6.0 and slammed into the elevator bug. Had I managed to get to the manager, I would have found that I had given her the engineering skill instead of management! It’s always something. Exit game, give the manager some management skill, start again.