That is typical for the start of the game. Are you playing Normal?...or one of the harder modes? Pick normal to start if you have not played before. First thing to do once you gain control of your character is go into photo mode (far right on X menu). This will stop time and allow you to scope out the area. Also, remember which way your character is facing. That is the direction the ship will be found.

Look for a cave nearby if possible. They provide relief from the storm and the hazardous plants inside can be mined for oxy and sodium. You need both for survival. If there is no cave, look for glowing yellow flowers and glowing red flowers. They also provide oxy and sodium.

Once you are in the cave, stand at the edge and mine rocks to fix your scanner. Once you reach the ship, jump in and out to set a save. Now if you die you will start over from this point. There will be a second storm once you reach the broke ship and set out to gather what you need to fix it. Pay attention to which way you are going so you can get back to the ship.

It's scripted. You always start on a hazardous planet. It's to teach you how to survive...

"Oh no, you're nearly dying... Go and find the sodium to recharge your suit... *Proceeds to find the yellow flower, and hopefully remember it's important*."

you are captured by the size of the world you are in and start gathering ressources.
run around for long time, totally in awe.

"repair your ship - find your ship"
you dont have a scanner yet

problem i ran into and i think thats also a tough learning lesson. in worst case, you need to restart then (?) or.. get to build the scanner and run all the way back.

The game gives you WAY more time than you think.

Sure, you start out with 25% of your Hazard Protection remaining, which will deplete in about 2 minutes.

however, once that fully depletes, you will start taking exosuit shield damage. IIRC, it's about 4-5 ticks until it's empty and each tick is about 10 seconds so that's another almost minute.

Then, you have 3 life bubbles (the little + signs under your shield meter). Each one of these lasts *another* 10-15 seconds, so that's another half a minute.

One thing you need to understand about this game, is that it tells you *everything* in the bottom-right popups. Just ignore everything else and watch those.

Or, hit Escape (which pauses the game) and go to the "LOG" tab, and usually much of the same information is found there.

Note that it says to Scan for nearby Sodium. When you try that, it shows you that your scanner is damaged and needs repaired. This is to teach you about how to repair equipment.

To do this, it will tell you that you need 50 Ferrite Dust. If you aim at small rocks around you, you'll see that they give Ferrite Dust when mined.

Mine these, getting 50 doesn't take more than 20-30 seconds to do and these rocks are everywhere. Once you've that done, the game tells you that Tab opens your inventory, click the Multi-Tool tab, and the Scanner tech will start pulsing with a sound effect telling you to click that and then the little box with the Ferrite Dust pulses telling you to click that.

Now, when you scan, you'll see yellow "Na" (The game is teaching you the Periodic Table of Elements, which is cool!) labels around you, find one near you, run to it and grab it, and follow the directions to recharge your Hazard Protection.

Get used to doing this, because this is some of the most basic stuff you'll be doing in the game, recharging Hazard Protection, Mining Beam, etc. It's all done in the same way and the game wants to teach you early how to do this.

Also, I recommend restarting your game, and instead starting in Custom.

Make the following changes:

Technology Damage: OFF (so that technology only becomes damaged during scripted events instead of randomly during battle)
Predatory Creatures: Defensive

You can turn those two back on later once you're more comfortable with the game, but to be quite honest, Technology Damage should never have been on by default, and wasn't even a thing until recently in Normal Mode.

The Creatures thing... Predatory Creatures are seriously annoying. When you find one, it will keep attacking you and chasing you and it will not stop until you kill it... and then another will spawn nearby 5 seconds later and you have to go through all of that all over again while your inventory fills up with the stuff these creatures drop.

yeah my 1st guy died like 3x before I got the hang of it.

Originally posted by Mr. Bufferlow:

That is typical for the start of the game. Are you playing Normal?...or one of the harder modes? Pick normal to start if you have not played before. First thing to do once you gain control of your character is go into photo mode (far right on X menu). This will stop time and allow you to scope out the area. Also, remember which way your character is facing. That is the direction the ship will be found.

Look for a cave nearby if possible. They provide relief from the storm and the hazardous plants inside can be mined for oxy and sodium. You need both for survival. If there is no cave, look for glowing yellow flowers and glowing red flowers. They also provide oxy and sodium.

Once you are in the cave, stand at the edge and mine rocks to fix your scanner. Once you reach the ship, jump in and out to set a save. Now if you die you will start over from this point. There will be a second storm once you reach the broke ship and set out to gather what you need to fix it. Pay attention to which way you are going so you can get back to the ship.

Like Mr. Bufferlow says find a cave for hazard protection and mine all the plants you can on the way there you will need the carbon to fix your laser which will break soon. When in that cave mine stalagmites/stalactites for cobalt. Once you have cobalt & ferrite dust make all the Ion Batteries you can. These are for hazard protection.

Originally posted by Scrump:

Like Mr. Bufferlow says find a cave for hazard protection and mine all the plants you can on the way there you will need the carbon to fix your laser which will break soon. When in that cave mine stalagmites/stalactites for cobalt. Once you have cobalt & ferrite dust make all the Ion Batteries you can. These are for hazard protection.

You COULD do that, but sometimes there's no caves nearby, so it's probably better to teach new players how to do it the way the game intended. If there is a cave, awesome!

If not... they need to know and understand how to start without one. That's why the game doesn't tell you at the very start.

The game instead teaches you about caves after you find your ship when the first storm arrives (which is always scripted to happen during your walk to the Shelter to find the Hermetic Seal). A popup (albeit briefly) mentions hiding in caves or structures to wait out the storm.

That said...

Sodium Flowers give 15-30 Sodium. It only takes like 60 to fully recharge your Hazard Protection, and if you pick every flower you see, you'll soon have hundreds of Sodium especially if you wander around a bit and duck into caves and buildings to recharge whenever you can.

Also, it isn't too uncommon to find fields of like 10+ sodium flowers all grouped up near each other which is easily 300-400 Sodium.

Between that and just randomly ducking into caves to recharge... once you get the hang of it, you should almost never need to manually charge your hazard protection, even without upgrades.

But if you want to make the batteries, you can do that too. I suggest making a few batteries *AND* picking Sodium. Don't just ignore the Sodium plants just because you have a ton of batteries, because you need Sodium for several other things too.

EDIT: Also, since the OP is a new player.... another hint that really helps early-game:

Once you get your Analysis Visor (which is very early, like half an hour in), see those Sweetroot/Heplatoid Wheat/etc plants? PICK THOSE. Don't go overboard though as your inventory is small, but you can easily keep a few on you and/or eat what you forage as you go.

They will either restore Hazard Protection (10% each, each plant gives like half a dozen) or Life Support (5% each). Using these, you can easily keep yourself going for quite awhile without using Ion Batteries or Sodium as most planets have quite a few of these scattered about.

Originally posted by maestro:

The Creatures thing... Predatory Creatures are seriously annoying. When you find one, it will keep attacking you and chasing you and it will not stop until you kill it... and then another will spawn nearby 5 seconds later and you have to go through all of that all over again while your inventory fills up with the stuff these creatures drop.

that's what I use creature pellets for but if you don't have any kill them with mining beam and eat the the drops for health (the meat I don't think the mordite is consumable)

Originally posted by Scrump:

Originally posted by maestro:

The Creatures thing... Predatory Creatures are seriously annoying. When you find one, it will keep attacking you and chasing you and it will not stop until you kill it... and then another will spawn nearby 5 seconds later and you have to go through all of that all over again while your inventory fills up with the stuff these creatures drop.

that's what I use creature pellets for but if you don't have any kill them with mining beam and eat the the drops for health (the meat I don't think the mordite is consumable)

I just find it annoying because once you kill one, a couple minutes later another attacks. Kill that, a couple minutes later, ANOTHER attacks, and it just keeps going on and on and on and on, and on some planets you literally can't do anything without constant creature attacks.

I guess I just have little patience for something constantly nagging me and interrupting whatever I'm doing constantly.