Genesis Alpha One: Welcome to the Wildlands (1 of ?)

Captain, welcome to the Wildlands, aka Alpha One. 

There are a lot of responsibilities placed upon you. You must outfit your starship, allocate your crew, gather resources, manufacture items you need to grow your ship, your crew, and everything you need to fight hostiles, both alien and human, in order to initiate Genesis and create a new home for mankind.

Here are some tips to get you started, as a rank 1 captain. 

Setup

Before you start the game: if you have completed a run before, you can pick some artifacts and a corporation, which will give you some advantages. Personally, it doesn't matter THAT much. And if this is your first run, don't worry about artifacts. 

Ship Layout

3 zones to start: Bridge / Reactor / Crew / Medical as zone 1 (Z1), Greenhouse as Zone 2 (Z2), Tractor Beam and storage as Zone 3 (Z3). Higher the zone, higher the risk, and more it needs to be defended and prevent contamination spreading into the lower zones. Remember block both upper AND lower. 

Your starting ship has a bridge, but needs crew quarter, reactor, greenhouse, tractor beam, and storage. 

When you are ready for hanger, deposit, and refinery, those are zone 4.  

You will need extra turrets and barriers. That means you will need to build workshop ASAP. 

Priority Orders

Priority Orders are ongoing, and never stops. You can leave them when you need crew elsewhere, but you should go back to check on them when situation warrants. 

Understand your bridge navigation interface. Scan your surroundings. 

Avoid jumping into red sectors. You don't have the shields to survive there. 

Avoid any "rogue captains" (they appear with pirate or skull symbols). If you see warning of one, run for the bridge, then command a jump away from the sector immediately. Then repeat the jump 2-3 more times until you can't see them anymore. They will beam boarding parties onto your ship if you stay still long enough, and you are not yet ready to handle them.  

Do NOT land on dangerous planets until you are ready (and you are not ready yet). 

Add reactors as needed to handle the energy load (but remember, there is a reactor limit)

Keep the basic ammo, turrets, and barriers stocked, assign crew to workshop or use yourself to make them as needed. 

Keep tractor and refinery running (you can always dump storage later) for experience (unless you truly can't fit anything else or all your crew are commander rank)

Keep defensibility in mind as you expand the ship, remember the different defensive zones. 

Understanding crew and labor

Every module that produces something or have a function have "workstations". If the workstations don't have anyone "working" on it, nothing gets done in the module. Refinery doesn't refine, tractor beam doesn't tractor, bridge doesn't scan, you get the idea. 

So you need to allocate crew to those areas as you need them, or if it's a very limited task, you can do it yourself by going to the workstation and work on the thing yourself. The more crew you allocate (up to the number of workstations available) the faster the task will go. 

(NOTE: There are ways to add workstations, but that's advanced stuff, will cover later)

You can shift the crew by moving to the "right screen" at the workstation and reassign them from wherever they are to come to this module and start working. Please consult the manual on how that works. 

Understanding Bridge, Sensors, and Jump Drives

Single sector jump requires no jump drive, and no fuel. This also gives you sensor range of 1 (you can scan 1 sector out from your own), but you need crew on the bridge to perform scans of individual systems or debris fields in adjacent sectors (or do scanning yourself).  

(NOTE: You can extend jump range and scan range later by adding jump drives, but that's next level stuff. )

Crew Allocation

You start with minimal crew, so you must shift crews between modules initially. Start with 2 to the bridge so you can scan your surroundings. Then run to tractor beam and setup initial defenses. Once you got those set, assign crew members to tractor beam and start gathering materials. As tractor would be your only source of material for a while, feel free to help out by using a workstation if there is one available. 

Once you get more modules, you have to shift the crew back and forth until you expand your life support, then add a cloning lab to add crew, but that's next level. 

You don't have hangar or shuttle for away teams yet, so you can't land on planets (yet). 

Planning Your Next Move

When you have exhausted the local debris fields, your bridge crew would have long ago finished scanning. Run back to the bridge and look at the results, and figure out where to go next. Remember which planets you didn't mine as you can come back later. Take all you can. 

If you got extra framework (more than 20) you can make an extra Robotnik or three so your cargo can be moved faster. 

OPTIONAL: If you have the blueprints for the alternate bots (black, white, or pink) you should make those, as those have more HP and move faster.  

TOTAL Bots = 8, and that includes combat robots if any. 

It will take a lot of resources to build hangar / deposit / storage / refinery / defenses.  Building one without the others would be a waste of time. Collect enough to build everything at once. 

Workshop Your Defenses

Once you have enough material for a workshop, build one as you always need more turrets and barriers. Once you got the workshop setup, put defenses, both upper and lower, at the chokepoints between Z1 and Z2, and between Z2 and Z3, both upper and lower, as discussed before. However, this can be delayed until you get hangar/deposit/refinery trio up. 

NOTE: Later, when you meet more advanced enemies you may recover weapon fragments. When you get 10, you can research them and build your own. 

NOTE: Workshop also controls which 4 weapons appear in your weapon rack, and if you start with artifacts that gave you better weapons, you may want to use workshop to add them to your loadout. 

NOTE: Those extra weapons are for you only. Your crew are stuck to the "basic" weapons like shotgun, gatling, pistol, and so on, and you can only change their weapon when they reach "lieutenant" ranking. 

Planetfall Preparations

When you have sufficient resources, build hangar, deposit, and refinery. Refinery can take up to 3 crew, while hangar takes up to 4 crew. So you probably need to shift crew between them as needed. Setup defenses as there are often critters that hid in the mineral bins. Start with 2 barriers and 2 turrets in the hangar. You can always add more later. 

NOTE: Refinery size depends on which corporation and which version of refinery you got. Stahlunion gets the larger refinery, but operationally it's the same. 

Take the highest rank members with you. If they are lieutenant or better, approach each, talk, and you can change their weapons to better ones. You have to do this individually though. 

Away Missions

NOTE: I use the term "shuttle" and "harvester" interchangeably. 

Generally, you only need to go with your away team if there are artifact site(s). 

If you go, go for the artifact site first, else, help the crew with mining and defending against alien critters. Killing enemies is a good way to get biomatter and alien DNA/ weapon fragments to expand your tech. 

TIP: If you are in heavy foliage, drop turrets to help defend yourself. Remember to pick them up when you return to the shuttle. 

When the shuttle is full or planet is empty, run back to the shuttle and launch, by selecting the screen on the wall and wait through the countdown. 

Remember to defend the shuttle bay against intruders and hitchhikers upon return, if needed.

Intermission

That's enough to get you started. You can now land on mild threat planets, gather materials. You can now grab planetary artifacts, and handle low level threats. 

In the next episode, we'll graduate to rank 2 captain responsibilities.