Hello, this guide is for new players as the current tutorials are a bit iffy and there is very little information at hand on the internet that is accurate to the current build. This guide includes some workshop ships for you to get started with and at some point I might make a youtube vid (although it is unlikely).

So even though this is for new players, I must assume you can do some of the following:

• Spawn a new ship
  
• Basic navigation
  
• You know how to mine resources from the starting station
  
• You have explored the 4 different factions (in that you've just spawned and taken a quick look around)

In your starting base, you'll get the option to buy insurance. While it's not really needed for starting ships, I'd definitely recommend buying it for T1 and higher mainly due to the hassle of regrinding some rarer resources. Money is much easier to make in this game then say, silicon which takes time to find (or given as rewards for missions).

This is your starting system, there are 3 tiers each representing higher tech, resources and difficulty. Tier 0 is the starting point for all new players and spawns. If you get attacked by skrill, they are the weakest types, and usually no more than 4 will spawn.

I'd recommend starting with Hurles as the home base will be great to grind up resources quickly. When mining, I usually have all three extractors running and instead of plugging the resources into the refiners, I just run between them all and dump them into the vault while reselecting new asteroids to mine. Then when thats done, I'll start refining the ore into usuable resources.

Dont buy the starting ship because it is a waste of money and after 5 minutes of resource grinding, you can build your own directly. Also the ships are rubbish.

Now you can design your own ship or use a prefab design, this is up to you. I've built and tested a few ships that have worked well for me, they are all purpose pve, quick to build and functional. The first one works great for Tier 0.


https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1516075776

She ain't pretty but she will get the job done. Use her to get your rep up with Hurles to 1000 to buy that rift catridge Tier 1. In the meantime, save the resources and grind up for the next upgrade. Refer to the refining section to find out how to make steel.

So once you have gotten some more resources under your belt you'll probably want to upgrade into something a little more sturdy. That will be the MK2, which comes with shields and a rift generator. It still only requires starting resources to build.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1517606849

It still has the 4 autocannons but now comes with 1000 shields so you wont need so many nanobots to keep it repaired. And with this, grab some zanthium and shove it into your rift generator, along with the Tier 1 cartridge, the slot for it can be found underneath the control panel of the rift generator. To put the cartridge in you'll have to have the T1 cartridge in your hand and aimed at the green console underneath for the prompt to insert it. They run out over usage, so you'll need to buy new ones, but they last a very long time.

Now you'll find certain resources like silicon much more common. In your rift generator, you can select a system and if you look at the console, you can see the elements and their spawn rates. You'll also be able to see the faction influences in the system.

With silicon being readily available I upgraded into a more robust ship that can easily handle skrill.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1520166231

I've made a MK 2 of this basic design which is much more powerful and can easily deal with T2, using the same basic design. These can get expensive quickly as you integrate higher tier tech systems into them. The other thing to consider is maintenance cost of bigger ships. The larger they become the more fuel they will need. The more automation you put in, the rare resources you'll need to find to make cartridges for relays etc. etc.

This messed with me when I first started because there isn't much information out about this on the internet, and what is there is a little confusing. Every ship comes with 125 CPU points standard. Shield generators, Armor generators, Weapons and ammunition loaders all cost points. Once you go over your CPU points system stop working. At the time of writing this guide there is a hard cap of 400 points for your CPU.

When I frist built my ship, I got the small shield generator which gave me 1000 shield. This isn't much as a few shots from skrill will drop it down. So I build another 4. Those 4 refused to charge. The first one was fine, but the rest just sat there. The console that hold your ships CPU usage is called a WEAPONS CPU terminal. Hopefully in the future, it will be renamed into something a little more accurate like SHIP SYSTEM CPU, or WARFARE CPU.

So if you have systems that come up with an error message like NO CPU, then the solution is to either rebalance you ship or install a larger CPU capacity.

A few time playing this game, I've teleported onto a station and haven't been able to return to my ship. Some of the reasons have been:

• My ship had a longer distance teleporter then the one on the station.
  
• My ship / the station was attacked by skrill while on board and it pushed me out of range of my ship.
  
• I forgot to turn the engine off and the ship just kept going.
  
• The game bugged out (it is in alpha) and for some reason my ship didn't show up on the teleport list.

There are several ways to fix this, the easiest is to make sure you have a respawn point fitted on your ship. Then just press tab and respawn. There is a credit cost.

I made a bare bones needle ship to use to quickly warp back to the system and my derelict ship, which I then either abandon or salvage using my main ship.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1518433851

When you mine ore, you'll have to shove it into a refinery to make it usable. Here is a quick reference guide for some recipies, a better list can be found at the games wiki: http://www.interstellarrift.com/wiki/index.php?title=Resources

However, I have found some of that wiki to be incorrect and incomplete. But that'll probably be remedied with time.

This is what you use to mine gas clouds. Split polygon did a great vid on general info and how it works:





These are just some quick references, there is an in game encyclopedia that has all current recipies in your GRIP. I'll advise using that because the recipies might change over time, but the in game info is always correct.

When you first start out, from the galactic trade hub you can buy and use two types of drones. Repair and point defence drones. These guys come in container like packets and are deployed via your trash shute and then reclaimed from your salvager.

• Repair Drones
  These guys will follow your ship and repair it when it is damaged.
  
• Combat Drones
  These guy come in two different varieties, armed and empty. Empty drones are throw into your assembler along with some standard ammo to arm them. The difference in price is well worth the hassle. When you reclaim the armed drones from space, they will disarm and seperate into ammo crates and empty drones which you'll have to throw back into the assembler to rearm. These drones do NOT follow your ship, which is a pain. But are useful if you want to sit in an asteroid field and mine without worrying about skrill.

These guys are T3 tech and require a drone bay to be built in your ship. They can be customised to suit your needs, like trading, mining or attack. They are much more powerful then the smaller deployable drones and also much more expensive to build and maintain. However, they look cool as hell when being built and deployed!

So I had a quick look at this building my own station in creative and spawning it. Oooof this will get really expensive really fast. ESPECIALLY if you want to have a uesful station.

To build your own station, you need to have a ship with a ship editor installed. Then go to the area you want to make your station and build it from the editor menu. You'll have to haul all those resources required to build it inside your own ship so forget about spawning in a fully built station with all the bells and whistles.

Instead, make something small and sturdy in creative mode and spawn it in. Then either add in more upgrades manually or have blueprints that you can use to upgrade in stages, which will mean more trips, but also will be a little safer in the long run.

Sadly, a strip miner which you use to mine resource heavy asteroids costs a huge amount of resources to build, and moving all those resources to a new location once the asteroid is mined will be a pain. Unless you have a dreadnought with about 2000 cargo pods, which as a solo player you can just forget about.

So having a viable station as a solo player is a little difficult at the moment. Especially if you're on a hostile pvp server.

A friend pointed out that stations can move, so you can drive them to your desired location, but from some strange reason the idea of a space station at warp fills me with terror. So you can build and deploy near a vaultron and go from there.

You can deploy either heavy drones or smaller (cheaper drones) and they will hang about and defend it. Make sure you have a salvager on board to reclaim empty drones and a rubbish shute to deploy drones. Heavy drones are super expensive at this moment and their functionality is limited to say the least. I'd recommend waiting before grinding out a station or heavy drones to defend it.

These can be bought or made from the 3d printer. I bought mine from the GT travelling emporium, and they do run out after a certain peroid of time. You place them the same way you do a a rift cartridge and they can be helpful in automating tasks or boosting stats on your ship like shields.

In creative you can spawn any ship for free and then add resources directly to your inventory for use in testing. In the text chat box type the following:


/help for commands.

/listresources to list all the resources and their codes.

/giveresinv playername to give yourself the resource. Playername is in italics because this will be your in game name.

So to combine, say I want 10000 Hydrogen, and my username is bellyflop, I would type:

/giveresinv bellyflop RT_Hydrogen 10000

/giveallres playername will fill your vault with all resources, again with playername being your in game name.

This guide is built on my own experience and exploration. It is designed to give you a gentle nudge in the right direction without being to complex or unfriendly. I aim to have more sections added in soon as I experiment and build but I also don't want to burn out. Any ideas or suggestions (within reason) are welcome. I'd also take a look at the developers discord as they respond quite quickly to questions:

https://discord.gg/M4btnDA