Hi, thanks for reading! I really like this game but I had to try several different things to be able to get a foothold, hopefully this helps you get one. Feel free to ask questions in the comments if you need any clarification.

Before I start: mad respect to Snowpig for their guide on how to play Hard on patch 2.6. It's gone now for reasons that will become obvious soon, but I took many of the ideas from their guide and adapted them to this new version. The concept of firing underperforming workers and hiring new fresh ones to replace them is key and was all theirs.

BE PATIENT PLAYING THE GAME. It's almost as if the designers want to make a point or something about sustainability, rushing will get you a slow spiral into nothingness in week 2.

General things to remember:

• This guide is designed for 2x speed. Faster than that, the numbers don't pan out. Slower than that, I can't stay awake.
  
• TAKE YOUR TIME BUILDING THINGS ALL THE WAY OUT. No need to wake up colonists if you have nowhere for them to work. Otherwise, they are just gobbling up that precious seaweed and desalinated water and getting ticked off at their lot, dragging down morale.
  
• There's a morale penalty of -1 per day now when you hit 50 colonists so be prepared for it.
  
• Don't use the stock blueprints for structures, they take up space needlessly. Design your own and Tetris them in- expanding to that next ring is going to get expensive.
  
• Don't keep more than 2 days' worth of food/water in the larder at the beginning. You need to liquidate the extra resources on the market. Don't go below 1 days' worth of food, though, it's a huge morale hit if you do.
  
• IF YOU WANT TO KNOW HOW TO PRODUCE SOMETHING, OR WHAT RECIPES AN INGREDIENT IS USED IN- Press F2 and drag the item into the "Required" or "Produced" boxes on the right and left to see what you can do with those mushroom cap pill sleeves, for example.

The two biggest changes in 2.75 are:

• You can't buy trash on the market any more, which forces you to build an Alpha ship from the beginning.
  
• You can influence morale with entertainers.

• Survive long enough initially to feed and water yourself (pretty trivial, really- collect trash, recycle trash, fatten seaweed, dry seaweed- also desalinate water)
  
• Keep morale high enough not to spiral into oblivion (build a disco right away)
  
• Harvest your first tomato crop (extra morale + nutrition is like a reverse avalanche from bad to awesome)
  
• Build a 2nd Alpha Hangar to look for Flora (be prepared to find nothing a lot of the time)
  
• Repair Seeds, Build another Farm, Grow Grain, Grind Grain, Bake Bread, Sell Bread for sick profit (seriously like 25k for 1000 baked loaves I think?)
  
• ...infinity and beyond (I am stoked to build this thing out)

To start, buy the materials for and build the following:

• an Alpha Hangar + Alpha ship (no enhancements yet)
  
• a 2x Apartment Block
  
• a 3x Desalination Plant (you're going to sell and buy back lots of water in the first month)
  
• a Seaweed Farm with space for 1X Drying and 2X Fattening (reserve the slot for it, but you don't need to buy the second Fattening Blueprint to be used for Composting right away)
  
• a Recycling Plant (duh)
  
• an Entertainment Building

Also, 100 or so seaweed rations and desalinated waters from the market. Your initial menu should be 2 seaweed portions and 2 waters.

Then, slowly buy the necessary blueprints, staff and bring the buildings up to speed in this order:

• Hangar
  
• Apartment
  
• Entertainment
  
• Desalination
  
• Recycling
  
• Farm

Remember to take your time and spend your money slowly. You're going to be here for a few hours; you can always speed up the game later.

While you slowly bring all these buildings up to speed it's time to address an unfortunate reality of 2.72. As much as you may want to build an elder council of learned thawsicles, Versatiles tend to be very emotional, and unsatisfied with the state of the new world, such as it is.

To that end, approximately every 7 days you will need to fire your Versatiles and thaw new ones, since their morale will sink dangerously low, even though other classes' morale is rising due to the weird mechanical techno at the disco. I guess they are just emo or something. Worst case scenario is replacing 6 Versatiles- 2 Janitors and 4 Musicians- every 7 days, with bad luck. There appears to be a domino effect once those special little snowflakes hit 40-ish Morale and they rebel and leave the colony- who knows where they are going- which drags the rest of the group's morale down also.

Don't feel bad about sending them back to cryo or dumping them overboard or whatever you imagine it to be- we're in it for the species, here, people!

You should be able to wheel and deal as a water/rations vendor until you're able to build a Tomato Farm with a Seed Lab for 4.6k around day 11; make sure to fully upgrade your ship while you do to make sure your production line stays active. Careful not to get overzealous with it, you can find yourself without organics when you need them most if you don't watch the maintenance.

Don't forget that to start farming Tomatoes you also need 6 batteries for $C2400, 8 Farmers for $C250-350 each and a Director.

I got my tomatoes planted at day 24, cycle 17. What a day. What a lovely day! To finally see the lights on the farm spinning...well, I nearly wept. I started with 6 farmers and 241 cycles, by the time I filled it out to 8 farmers it was going to take 179 cycles or about an ingame week.

While I waited for tomatoes to come in, I bought the blueprints for seed recovery and recruited 4 scientists, a maintenance blueprint and techs to go with it. All along we're buying seaweed on the market as needed and optimizing those whiny Versatiles.

Harvest tomatoes on the morning of day 32 and add them to the menu. Recover 100 seeds. From there it's up to you! I strongly encourage you to work towards making a bread next, it sells for a disgustingly large amount of money on the market.

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If you loved or hated the guide or if you have questions, please feel free to comment below- and have fun!