NOTE (8 November 2017): This guide was written in the first months of Early Access, and much of it is out of date. Complete overhaul and rewrite coming soon.

This is a User Interface and Tutorial walkthrough. It's not about how to play the game better so much as how to play the game effectively, as in knowing how to do anything you might want to do.

I'll be updating this as changes are made, if necessary. I've literally killed every save I've got, so this may as well be the first time I've started the game.



First thing's first, if you want to use a controller, you will need to press the A button before the game starts using it. Once you have the game using a controller, your keyboard and mouse will no longer work in the game until you click the right mouse button. So you can't really use a combo gamepad-KBM setup. I expect this is because of technical reasons, and therefore unlikely to change.

Okay, so you start up the game with a default profile, and since you already have one you're likely to skip it... but... your profile is where you change your ship's colours, in the "Customize" menu.



Once you are in the colour change screen, you'll find that when using a controller, scroll bars are controlled with the right stick and not the left stick or directional pad. This is consistent throughout the game.

If you'd like to create a new profile, you have to click the profile first, then "New Profile."




This will give you a default profile name of "Clockwork Crew," which in this case I will keep.



That will put you into the ship colours menu, and once you're done there it will take you to the main screen again.

Now let's look at the options. There are a LOT of options.



Starting with gameplay, you have mouse and controller sensitivity at the top; I crank my controller sensitivity all the way up on both fronts. Then you have the option to show damage numbers and distance numbers; these may or may not be to your liking, but I turn them both on.

And the "relative controls" option is important. Some people hate the way you move by default. If you are frustrated by movement, try turning this off. Or on. Whichever you like better. I leave it on.

If you turn it off, you can also turn "throttle mode" on or off. In throttle mode, you turn the engines on and they stay on until you turn them off. If you turn throttle mode off, then the engines go off whenever you're not actively keeping them on.



Moving on to the next option area, "Weapon Config" is outrageously complicated and confused the hell out of me. Basically, this screen lists every single kind of weapon there is in the game, and there are five weapon modes.



The first weapon mode is called "Battle Wagon Mode." You do not have to fire manually in this mode; the computer will target and fire for you. You can override the computer by manually pointing where you want it to fire, or by manually firing.

The other four modes come out of the box configured in a way that matches the icons. When you are in a given weapon mode, only the weapons you have turned on for that mode will fire.

Battle Wagon Mode has everything turned on. Target mode has everything turned on. Cannon mode only has cannon weapons turned on; cannons primarily damage armour. Laser mode only has laser and beam weapons turned on; beams primarily damage shields. And missile mode only has missiles and the special "Krule" weapon turned on; these primarily damage a ship's hull.

This is a very advanced sort of topic, so I won't really cover it at all here. The default configs will work just fine for now. Many people never take the ship out of Battle Wagon.

If you mess up the configs and are very confused, there's a handy "Default" button to put everything back.

The sound configuration is pretty straightforward.



The controller map is also pretty familiar, for anyone who has ever used a game console. This is not a static image - it updates based on the custom configuration.



And that custom configuration is under "Input."



It only shows the configuration you are currently using, so you need to switch control sets to configure the other one. Right click the mouse for KBM, press the A button for controller.



I myself am playing the game using a Steam controller, and I have made only three alterations to the default controller mapping.

- I have moved the "shield boost" command to the left bumper, so it is just above "engine boost," because I have accidentally pressed Y to reload far too many times, and the boost functions seem related anyway.

- I have moved the "tractor beam" to the right bumper, because there are a limited number of buttons I can hold down while dragging with the right-stick touchpad.

- I have moved the "tactics" command to the X button, because it needs to go somewhere and this is somewhere and there's no good reason not to put it there. I am somewhat annoyed that this does not alter the HUD button on the main map screen, which I apparently cannot remap at all.

If you create a control conflict, the conflicting controls will turn red, so it is easy to find what needs to change and fix it.



If you look at the controller map again, your custom config is reflected there.



Now that we're at the graphics menu, there's a lot of stuff to configure. As you can see, I have everything turned all the way down and my framerate is still kind of bad, but my laptop is well below required specs for the game and still plays tolerably. Each graphics option tells you how much of a difference it will make in performance, and the battle to the right will automatically update based on your choices here, so you can see the difference immediately on most things.



There's another weird little interface thing here: when using a controller, you can jump from the list to the scrollbars by moving the left stick or d-pad left and right. This is also consistent throughout the game.

The display configuration is basically just your screen resolution and whether to run in full screen mode. Reducing your screen resolution doesn't change how much of the game is being displayed; you'll see the same objects on screen no matter what, just at a lower resolution.



That's your configuration, so let's move on.

Once you've got the configuration set up, you can start your game; Multiplayer is not yet available, so you have to choose single player.



Once you're in there, you have four options. Continue and Load are pretty much what you would expect from any game that has saves at all, and since there is no save right now I have to create a new game. I can either start a campaign, or a sandbox game.



But the warning at the top of this screen is not kidding:



There's a boatload of stuff to configure in sandbox mode. Don't even look at it right now. Just go back and select "New Campaign."



I'm leaving the difficulty slider at default. You can put it wherever you want. Once you do that, hit start, and...



They tell you the game uses synth voices. The "Skip" button can be confusing here; it only skips this one message, so you won't miss the rest of the conversation. If you've already read the text, go ahead and skip to the next bit. The "Auto Page Turn" option will automatically move on to the next screen when the audio is done, which is a nifty little feature.

Then they give you a chance to turn those synth voices off.



Turn them off if you like, I'll leave them on. Then you get a long, boring expository sequence about galactic history that totally spoils the original SPAZ if you haven't played it.



You can whack the B button several times or hit ESC to skip this. Then you get an announcement from Carl.

Well, you're going straight into the fire with this one.



This is probably the first time you go "oh dear God how do I turn those voices off" if you don't like them, and you'll go looking for the checkbox in options - but you won't find it. What you actually want to do is set the "Speech" slider in Sound config all the way to the left.



I'm not doing that, but this is usually where people suddenly go "HOW DO I TURN THIS OFF?" so I thought I'd tell you. But in gameplay terms, you now get this sudden space battle.



The controls will match your current control scheme. This game is kinda smart.



If you pause, you'll see that you have a "Combat Tips and Tricks" option.



This might be a little confusing right now, but it's worth reading later when you know what you're doing.



But most importantly, there is a little aiming reticle on your ship. You can easily miss it if you're not looking for it. Use the mouse or the right stick to move this reticle and point where you want to shoot. The game inexplicably does not tell you this.



This battle is an excellent place to get used to some things, but if you want to try out weapon modes you are out of luck. There aren't any yet. You're locked into manual fire and can't switch modes. Pretty much everything else works, though.

This is also a great place to adjust your graphics to taste, in a battle that is pretty much as complex as battles are going to get. If your system can't handle the game, this is where you will know it, and it's in plenty of time to get a refund.

Remember, if you don't like how the ship moves, you can change this in the options.



Now, the combat screen is insanely complex, but here's what you need to know right now. The major thing to look at here is the red indicators.



There are two kinds of ships in the game: strike craft and mother ships. Strike craft get a single triangle for their status. It represents their health; as you damage them, the triangle will shrink from the sides until they lose all their health and die.

Mother ships are a little more complex, and have three different indicators. The top one is their capacitor, which is the energy they have available for weapons and shields. If it is white, the capacitor is recharging - the ship cannot fire weapons or boost shields. This would be a good time to attack.

Underneath this, there is a narrow bar representing their shields. Shields can be reduced most effectively by lasers and beam weapons, but cannons and missiles will damage them slightly - cannons do one-quarter damage, missiles one-half.

And underneath that, there is a wider bar representing their health. Health is reduced most effectively by missiles, but to a lesser degree by cannons at half-damage and lasers quarter-damage.

Finally, there is armour, which is handled on a per-part basis. There's no bar on the interface for it, but as a ship part's armour is reduced, it will start to look black and damaged and eventually on fire. Then it will break off. Cannons do full damage to armour, while lasers do half damage and missiles one-quarter.

You don't have a lot of control over this right now, the ship having what it has with no ability to change it, but weapon config should make a lot more sense now.

Once you've had that battle, you enter a long series of boring tutorials. There is a lot of information you need to learn, and there's no way around it - you need to have it explained. This is a weak point in the game right now, but the developers are working on it.

To begin with, at the conclusion of the battle, you'll have to reconfigure your ship. You should watch the video. I didn't watch the video and I got confused. Seriously, watch the video.



Your ship is built out of a number of cores - one primary core, and additional subcores. Right now, you have one additional subcore on your ship for a total of two, but you can use a total of three, so you're in the ship menu to add another subcore.



You'll need to remove either the nose or the engine (holding down the tractor beam button over the part), and add the new subcore to the ship (holding the tractor beam button and dragging it into place).



You'll add the wings to the subcore, on both the left...



...and the right.



Finally, you'll put the nose or engine back on.



You again don't have a lot of options here. You'll have more later. For now, this is a bunch of basic training. Jamison will tell you to change the camera, then Carl will tell you to reload. There is a lot of information in this screen, but you can't use much of it yet so I'll defer that until a bit later.



Reloading is simple enough, just follow the prompt.



Next you'll have to go blow up some stuff. You'll find that your weapons can only fire for a short time, and then they need to rest a bit. Different weapons need different rest times, but right now you have what you have and it is what it is.



Okay, now that we're getting into shields, I can explain this stuff in more detail. Look at the interface elements pictured here on this interstitial screen.



On the upper left you have the reload indicator; when you're reloading, this thing pops up and you can see the little thing at the bottom filling up. That little thing is YOUR capacitor. Remember I said when your opponent's capacitor is empty, he can't fire weapons or boost shields? Neither can you. If this is running low, you should prepare to take cover while you reload. Since reloading is free except for time, if you're in a good place to reload, you should go ahead and reload.

On the right, you have an image of the "Cone of Fire" and "Missile Lock." The cone of fire is where your weapons are going to hit. If the opponent is in range, the centre circle will turn red. If it's grey, just don't bother firing. Missile locks are dynamic; if you have a missile lock on a ship and fire a missile, but the ship is destroyed before the missile gets there, you can move the missile lock to another ship and your missile will target that ship.

Under that is a picture of the boost meter. This is not related to your capacitor. You can boost engines even when your capacitor is empty, so long as you have boost left. And above that meter is the missile ammo, which shows how many of your missiles are ready to fire. You don't have to buy ammo - it replenishes automatically.

Once you boost your engine, you'll be told to test the rez drive.



This means you have to go to the tactical screen...




...which looks like this.



Go to the starmap. You'll get a short help screen. Read it.



The critical thing to remember is this: time only moves when you do. This is a key understanding in the game. You have all the time in the world to stop and look at all the information you want, as long as you don't move. (Well, or start a process that takes time. You'll figure those out as you go, though.)

And now you get the starmap.



This makes your first automatic save. Since it is literally impossible for your progress at this stage to be any different, ever, this save is the one you should load instead of starting a new campaign in the future. That will skip all the boring tutorial stuff.

Now you have a whole new interface. I'll go over it bit by bit, starting at the top.



The topmost line is your resources - Rez, Goons, Scrap, and Cores. Rez is your fuel, you use that by moving. Goons are your crew, you use them to repair the ship. Scrap is money, used to buy things and repair strike craft. And your cores are the size of your ship - you have a certain number, and there is a maximum number you can use (up to 15). Right now, you have three cores, and you can only have three cores. That's three current of three maximum, so it's shown as 3/3.

Underneath this is your level. Unlike many games, this game starts you at level zero, and you have to earn even level 1. You do this by earning experience, and you need 200 to make level 1. You have 10 to start with, because you get 10 for entering a new sector you've never seen, like the one you're in right now.

Next under that you've got your current missions, in green. These are the things you're supposed to do right now. Below that, if you have tutorial messages turned on, you'll have a red "Read This!" where Carl lectures you on reading the damn tutorial:



Then the ship's computer does a cursory job of explaining the screen I'm explaining right now.



Below that, you get blue alerts that tell you useful things you might not know. I have one telling me about speed. You may have a different one, or several, or nothing at all. They pop up at various times. You'll get the speed one first, though.

To get to these buttons with a controller, there's a button you have to hold down to select one. At this writing, you can't remap that button, so it's always the right bumper. Hold it down and use the left stick or d-pad to select a button, then - while still holding it down - press A to activate it.

If you're using KBM controls, just click the one you want.

At the bottom of the screen, you have the nine core buttons of the interface. You get to them the same way, but they all have different functions. I'll cover them from left to right.

First, we have the "Build Ship" button, which will take you to the ship builder interface. You will have access to any parts on your ship and in your inventory, but no additional parts.

There's a more reliable interface than your tractor beam here, which Carl will explain a little. The drawback, however, is that this interface is only available in "Build Ship" mode - but your tractor beam can be used at any time, even in combat. If a part gets knocked off your ship, you can simply grab it with the tractor beam and put it back on immediately.



The tactical menu has certain advanced build commands on it...



...along with a "Build Tips" option that will tell you what all these mean and how they work, down at the bottom - scroll all the way to the end for this info.



Second, there is the "Inventory" button which also has a certain "trade with yourself" aspect. If you put things on the right side, you can drop them as part of a scavenge field which you can then loot. Someone else can loot it, too. It's like throwing your stuff out the airlock.



Third is the "Repair" button, which is only active when your ship is damaged. If it's purple, your ship is infected with the zombie virus. Either way, you can spend goons to repair it. You can also dock at a starbase and pay scrap to repair your ship, if you're low on goons.

Next is the "Engine Mode" button. You can set your engine to three states: normal, boosted (which is faster but burns more rez), and conserve (which is slower but burns less rez). This only applies on the starmap, not in combat. Select but do not press this button - or just hover over it with the mouse - to see how much added rez your ship's size and cargo are burning.



Next in line is the "Strike Craft" button. This is where you spend scrap to repair your strike craft, if you have any and they are damaged.

Then we have the very meaty "Faction Info" button. I'll put this off until later. After that, you have the "Captain Info" button, which brings up all the info about you in the same format as you'll see on other captains. Up at the top you'll have your inventory, then a bunch of events you've seen or caused around the galaxy, and your relations with each faction.



The events lists will fill up fast, pushing the faction relations down the screen really far, and all the way down at the bottom you have the list of what perks you've selected with each level.



Then there's a "Catalog" button, which is initially disabled so I'll put that off until I get to the "Trading And Parts" section.

Next is the "Lore" button, where you store various bits of the story you pick up. You won't have any at first. If you skipped the intro movie, you can watch it here.



Finally, you have the "Tutorials" button where you can review all the various messages you have gotten both in tutorials and in the course of the story.



Last on the list is the "Reset Camera" button which moves your view back to centre on your ship, if you've been looking around the map elsewhere.

Since we've just talked about how to reset your camera back to where your ship is at the centre of the view, we should probably start out the next bit by talking about how to get something else at the centre of the view.

If you're using a controller, like I am, you can move the cursor around with the right stick and the view will automatically pan to keep the cursor in the centre of the screen. If you're using a mouse, you can left-click anywhere on the map and drag it around the screen, or use the arrow keys to pan the map.



You can zoom in and out with the scroll wheel, or with up and down on the d-pad using a controller. You can zoom all the way out to the entire map...



...or all the way in, to not much more than your own ship.



If you'd like to move to some arbitrary part of the map, you can right-click with the mouse or press the X button on the controller. You'll move directly there, and stop when you arrive.



If you see something interesting, and you'd like to go there, you can left-click on it or press A to get a menu with "Move To" as an option.



Once you're there, you'll be able to interact with the object. In this case, you can scavenge some resources from the wreckage. I've opened the help menu from the upper right for reference.



By cross-referencing the icons in the dialog with the legend in the upper left, you can see that by scavenging this wreckage you will receive 28 rez and 180 scrap. So you should do that. This will cause time to pass - you'll see things moving about while your scavenging progresses.



At the end of your scavenging, you'll find that you can only get 100 of a resource from one scavenging run. So for the last 80 scrap, you'll have to scavenge a second time.



Once you've finished scavenging a wreck, it disappears and will not return. Wreckage is created by space battles; once you scavenge it, that wreckage is gone.



In similar fashion, Lore nodes - blue book icons - will disappear once you have scanned them. You can also see three other new types of location here:

- The bandit hive, with the segmented meter and skull icon
- The resource node, with the segmented meter and goon icon
- The build location, with the home icon and added stuff around it



In other news, as I started to go to the bandit hive so I could talk a little more about that, two captains from the Sovereignty of Science faction came through the system - and one of them decided to attack the bandit hive. You can see the horizontal lines indicating he's busy, and the animated particle effects showing a battle is in progress.



With most other games, you could sit there and wait until the other captain was done, but these effects are just that - effects. When you don't move... time doesn't move. You can sit here for hours or even days, and the battle will never finish unless you do something that lets time pass. This might take some getting used to.

So in the meantime, I'll just go on about my business and continue talking about Lore. We'll talk more about bandit hives when I'm finished here. On the way to this lore node, a bandit raced out of the hive and flew past, but he didn't bother me.

Good thing, too; we have roughly equal threat ratings - the 5 under both the bandit ship in the upper left, and my own ship in the centre - which means my chances in the battle are about 50/50. You can also see that the blue ship has a threat level of 29, so I should really not be messing with that guy.

You can see in the dialog here that when I scan this lore node, I'll receive the lore item for "The Lock-Down Wars," 25 rez, 100 scrap, and 30 experience. That's pretty good for taking no risk at all, so I'll totally do that. I can either "Scan and View," which will immediately take me to this piece of lore and tell me some of the story, or just "Scan" which will put it in my lore menu for later. I'll just pick "Scan."



Once I'm finished scanning, and I've collected my resources, I can see that the captain who attacked the bandit node is repairing his ship, likely because he got the snot kicked out of him and had to run away.

I can tell this because the segmented metre around the bandit hive is not empty, and the number on the bottom of the hive is not 0. Furthermore, the captain's threat level has dropped to 18 - some of his ship's parts were probably destroyed in the battle.



The number on a bandit hive is not a threat level, incidentally, but I'll talk more about that later. (Of course, you should be able to tell that when a threat level 29 ship loses a fight against a bandit hive with a 1 on it, these levels don't mean the same thing.)

For now, when I go to my Lore menu (using the HUD button to navigate there), I can see that a "NEW" lore item has been added to "The Lock-Down Wars" at the top of the menu. All the rest are locked, because I haven't found them yet.



When I use the left stick (not the right stick, because of reasons) to move the "A" from the right side of the screen to the new lore item, I can press the A button (duh) to see the lore item.



When I leave this screen, everything is pretty much exactly the same. Time does not pass. Remember this! It takes some adjustment to get accustomed to the way time works in this game.

Now, let's go have a look at the goon node farther south. Notice as you travel that other captains are going about their business, and that you are expending rez for fuel.



If you hover the cursor over one of the captains - remember, when you stop moving, they stop moving - it will outline the captain in a colour indicating whether he's friendly (green), hostile (red), or neutral (yellow).

You'll also get a handy readout of his captain status, with even more detail than his "Faction Info" entry. Here we can see that Vorgon is indeed neutral toward us, with a relation of 0, and level 21. He has fully repaired his ship and restored his threat level to 29; he charges a 100% markup in trade; and if we beat him in combat, he's worth 2,561 experience. He's got a speed of 83 and is carrying 51 rez, 45 goons, and 193 scrap. He has 3 strike craft.



However, if you go to the "Faction Info" screen, you can now highlight this captain in his faction's list, because you've seen his ship pass through the same sector...



And you can click on his button to get a menu of options...



And one of those options is "Captain Info" which gives you a whole lot of info. You get combat and personality info, right up at the top where you can easily see what kind of captain this is and how tough.



Inventory and witness info, so you know what they're carrying around and what they've seen, along with how they feel about it. Particularly in the early game, this information will tell you what you should do if you want people to feel a certain way about you; it gives you a good indication of what captains think when they see people do things.



Personal activity info, which lets you know how this particular captain behaves around the galaxy, and gives you something of a window into their thought processes.



All their relationship numbers for every faction and captain. These represent the way this captain (Vorgon, in this case) feels about these factions and captains, which in turn indicates how he's going to respond to them - if he has a strong positive rating, he will help them in combat, while if he has a strong negative one he will attack them or help their enemies.



That's just, a tremendous amount of stuff. It can be overwhelming, but you don't have to get deeply involved with every captain. Mostly, you'll care about combat and personality info so you know how easily you can defeat this captain, and inventory so you know what you stand to gain from it.

As you get more involved with politics and factions, you will start to care what captains think about other captains, but you don't have to do that for a while. Actually, you don't ever HAVE to do it; you can completely ignore that if you like.

And at the moment, I'm mostly interested in this goon resource node.



You can see that the segmented metre around the outside is only about half full, which means this node is only carrying about half its full capacity. If you let a node get all the way to full capacity, then harvesting it will return double its normal maximum.



In practice, this will almost never happen, because once a node goes over 50% capacity captains go chasing after it. So it's not usually worth your time to wait for it, because another captain will probably show up. I'll go ahead and harvest this now, which gives the usual circular progress display...



...and then I get what was available in the node at the time.



Now the metre around the node is empty, but it will fill back up over time, and the node can be harvested again - unlike wreckage and lore.



A natural thing to wonder is what happens if multiple captains try to harvest a node, and what happens is that the first captain to start harvesting gets it all. They don't share with everyone else. Start first, you get the whole thing. If you start late, you'll be "interrupted" by the other captain taking what you're trying to harvest, and you'll get nothing.

Isn't it kind of hard to believe that we haven't left the first sector yet? Precisely none of the galaxy has been explored beyond that.



I'm kind of a perverse player. Whenever the game tells me "go do this," I will do pretty much anything and everything else to avoid it. And right now, the game is telling me "go to another sector."

No! You can't make me! *PTHBBTT*

Well, that's pretty childish to begin with, but there's also only so much you can do in one sector. I had some wreckage and lore, but I took that. I have a single goon node, but I can only carry so many goons and besides that's boring. There's no starbase to sell anything, although there is a space to build one. And the only thing left is this bandit hive.



Well, the problem is, bandit hives have a much higher threat level than I do. I could certainly get some resources by fighting this hive, but since it's threat level 20 and I'm threat level 5, there's no way I could win.

The good news is that bandit hives pump out bandits, which are a much more reasonable threat level. This one has a threat level of 6, which is a bit more than me, but not so much that I don't stand a chance.



The bad news is that bandits tend to run away, so this one buggers right off out of the sector.



Now, there's a way bandits work, which is that they get sent out of the hive at a rate of about one a minute.



If nobody fights and kills them, they will start to multiply. I just flew around for a minute and now there are two bandits.



And what bandits do is go out and gather resources. This one is ransacking the goon node near the hive; once it's loaded up on resources, it will head back to the hive and deposit those resources to fill up the progress metre. When the progress metre is completely full, the hive rating goes up, and the hive gets stronger.

I don't have a lot of specifics about that right now (how much they need to gather, whether they need a certain amount of each resource, how much the metre goes up each trip), but I'll add them here as I get them.

As you can see, this bandit is already being approached by another captain. That gives me a useful opportunity.



See, nobody likes bandits, so anyone who can defeat them will jump at the chance. That brings up this red circle combat interface, which slowly shrinks until it touches the fighting ships. While it is shrinking, however, you can go over there...



And you can interact with the ships by clicking or pressing the A button...



And then you can jump into the fight yourself.



This gives you an ally, whose indicator is blue. You can have up to four ships in combat at once; this can be one on one, two on one, two on two, or three on one where you probably don't want to be the one.



At this early stage of the game, you probably can't even reach the fight in time to help.



I mean, you can try... but it will be over before you get there.



Which is just fine, because you get yourself a share of the loot. In this case, not only did I get some resources, but I also got my first strike craft.



And then, on top of that, combat makes wreckage! I can scavenge that now. Plus, I got 67 experience just for showing up. That's a pretty compelling reward in the early game, and assisting with bandit fighting is very low-risk.



I'll get the usual progress metre, and then some stuff.



Now, because this is a first-come, first-serve system, I have to scavenge the wreckage before moving at all - or one of the other captains will start scavenging, and I will lose the race. Then I get nothing. If you forget about the wreckage and move, which I do more often than I like to admit, don't bother going back; it's a waste of time.

Well, since I've nothing more to do in this one sector, I'll move to the next. Here, I have two scrap nodes available, and another bandit hive. Still no starbase, though.



Immediately, I find a fight I can join. I can jump in here with the other captain to fight a stronger threat level 9 bandit.



Since I have strike craft now, I can go into this menu, where I turn on the "auto repair" option. I don't know why anyone wouldn't enable this. It does spend scrap behind your back, but why wouldn't you spend it anyway?

If on some off chance you don't enable this, the strike craft button will light up yellow and you'll have to select it on the HUD to manually repair your strike craft. This is boring, so I don't recommend making a habit of it.



Of course, once I get into the fight, I'm every bit as useful as ever. As in, not at all. "Hey, I'm here to... oh. Oh, you're done. Okay."



But I gain a level! Now that I'm level 1, I get a "free" perk that lets me use actual purchased parts on my ship, and then I have to pick one of the three others. This is a very basic sort of progression that doesn't really add much to the game... it's certainly not an RPG element in any sense of the word... but it does improve your abilities and give you some amount of choice in how they evolve.



Then I repair the ship, which requires goons, but I've been ransacking a lot of those.



Repairing the ship doesn't cost goons like currency; it's just, you know, dangerous. The goon cost is how many of your goons you can expect to die from various accidents and mishaps while making the repairs.



And now that we have two bandit bases, we can compare them. The level 2 base in this sector is significantly stronger than the level 1 base in the last one.



But no matter how you slice it, I need to find a starbase, so I can tell you about how starbases work. I went through a couple more sectors before I found a starbase for the Sovereignty of Science.



There was a fight going on there, but four captains had already joined. That's the limit, so I can't join the battle, which is why the "fight" ring is grey.



The red tag on the base means that the Void Militia has put a bounty on it. That means they'll pay you a reward if you can destroy it. And as you might guess, this is because they're currently at war with the Sovereignty of Science - even though the negative relations are reasonably minor.



When the fight is over, the base is destroyed, so there's nowhere to dock and trade.



Well, that's just great. But let's take a quick look back at that earlier screenshot:



See those blue lines leading away from the starbase? Those lead to other bases in adjacent sectors that belong to the same faction. So if I want a starbase, I just have to go in one of those directions.

So let's head for one of those two starbases. Here's one...



...and here's the other.



I'm going to zoom out so I can get them both on the screen.



Now, the one to the south is just a regular starbase...



...but the one to the north is the faction capital. You can see the little ornaments around it.



Let's look at these a little.

Since they're both in the same faction, they both have the same faction skill - Power - which is the same one the Sovereignty of Space always has. That's stable from game to game. The threat rating is just like a ship; if your ship exceeds this rating, you can probably fight the base and win.

The Markup is how much things cost at this base. Lower is better; a higher percentage means higher prices. I won't bore you with the actual math, because it's easy to figure out if you actually care.

The Stock Time is how long it takes to regenerate a new set of parts - if the base doesn't have what you want, it will be this many seconds before it has all new stuff. This also means that if you can't afford the thing you just saw, you have this long to come up with the money and buy it. (Just give up, man, it's not happening.)

Next we have the three different kinds of ship parts. As you can see, each base stocks small noses and wings, but medium engines - it has one of the two required bases to stock medium noses, but none of the required bases to stock medium wings. It also has two of the four required bases to stock large engines.

Under that, the resources available here - rez, goons, and scrap. The scrap is used to buy things from you; the rez and goons can be purchased.

Notice that the smaller starbase has more resources, even though it has a lower threat ranking - if you were going to attack one of them, it's the better choice.

All the way at the bottom, you have the station information. The capital starbase has 33 cores and 15 strike craft; the regular one has 25 cores and 12. This is where your threat rating comes from - your ship capabilities.

I'll land at the faction capital, where Carl gives me a helpful info screen. There's a second one, too, which you should read. But mostly I want to go over a specific piece of information here.



The major piece of information you need to know about starbases is the local technologies, because these dictate the type of parts you can buy there. The icon on the left is a type of part the base can specialise in - wing, nose, or engine. As mentioned earlier in this part of the manual, there will need to be two of a specific part connected via trade routes - as in, the path between them does not pass through another faction's territory - for the starbase to stock medium parts, and four of a part for the base to stock large ones.

The other icon here indicates a technology that gets a bonus for the part's star rating. Each of these technologies in the network grants a bonus. When you look at the complete network, you can see that the Sovereigns of Science have two bases specialising in shields and one specialising in power. Their faction bonus is also power, so a given part will have two shield bonuses and two power bonuses if it is manufactured here.

Parts from other factions are obviously NOT manufactured here, and some parts from THIS faction may also have been manufactured earlier or elsewhere. It gets complicated, but as a general rule, you can expect parts at a given base to have the same stats if they have the same star rating.

When you first land at a starbase, you get a number of options. The top one, "Fight," is generally a Bad Idea. You can tell from the colour of the button; if it's a fight you will almost certainly lose, the button will be red. If it will be a tough fight, but you might win, it will be yellow. If you can probably beat the snot out of this base, it will be green.



There are also other options. One of those options is the arena. I'll devote a whole section to this later, because it's important. The arena starts out a great place to earn experience, then becomes a terrible place to make money.



You can only repair your ship if it's damaged; repairing it at a starbase costs scrap instead of goons, and time doesn't pass when you do it. This may be a strategic consideration. I have not done the math on whether you can make a profit by selling the goons to cover the scrap cost.

The junkyard and "Jettison Junk" (not shown here, since I'm not carrying any) are mostly useful in the early game, unless you refuse to load a save after losing a battle; the junkyard is a place to pick up free parts, which you will then want to replace as you can afford to do so.

Having replaced these junk parts, you may still have them sitting in your inventory taking up space, which burns fuel for nothing - so the "Jettison Junk" button will appear, and with one click all your junk is gone.

Continuing the game with junk parts after being defeated is rugged and manly and generally to be preferred. It's what the AI captains do. You're a manlier man than some script, aren't you? Of course you are. Even if you're a woman.

All the way at the bottom, you can pay to upgrade the base, which makes sense if it's your own faction (you will both join one and later start your own, as you continue the campaign) - but the bump in faction relations is probably too small to be worth it otherwise. You still might want to do this if you're trying to improve the quality of parts at a given faction's bases, but I'm not done figuring out how that works yet.



But the most important part is the Trade button, which is the primary purpose of starbases. It's also a huge subject, so it gets its own section.

The trading interface is very much like the inventory interface, but comes with this handy additional feature of things you can actually buy.



Now, what most people are worried about in trading is the parts you can get for your ship, and to a lesser degree the available strike craft. But it's worth noting that stations will also sell (and buy) rez or goons, which means that since resource nodes generate rez and goons infinitely, you can earn infinite scrap by selling them.

Of course, since scrap nodes also infinitely generate scrap itself, the availability of infinite scrap was kind of obvious already.

What's not obvious, however, is where parts come from. The clues are scattered all over the interface, but they never really get explained - it's a puzzle you're expected to put together yourself.

Looking at all indicators, it appears - and I could be wrong on this - that there is precisely one way parts come into the game. Every 45 seconds, each starbase gets a brand new shipment of parts, which is called the "Stock Time" and shown on the initial starbase screen. When this time elapses, the starbase is "Restocked" and has more stuff.



If no other captain docks at the starbase between restock times, the base simply gets more parts. But when captains dock, they buy and sell parts. So between restocks, a captain may buy something from the starbase, or sell something to the starbase - the latter occasionally putting older parts into the interface.

Captains also buy and sell both rez and goons, which in turn affects the availability of scrap - which the starbase uses to buy things. Everything is accounted for. And each starbase also sends out transports, which go to nearby resource nodes and collect resources that they bring back to the starbase.



This is, incidentally, the same way bandit hives upgrade themselves - the bandits gather resources and bring it back to the hive, and as they collect resources the metre fills up until the hive can upgrade. Starbases do the same thing, upgrading as they collect resources, but they also collect resources by trading.

Your ship has eight statistics, listed on the right hand side of the picture.



From top to bottom, these are:

- Weight, which is not affected by star rating. Heavier ships are slower.
- Hull, which is your ship's health.
- Armour, which is tracked on a per-part basis.
- Shield, which protects your armour and hull from damage.
- Turn, the ability of your ship to turn quickly.
- Thrust, the general movement speed of your ship.
- Reactor, the speed of reloading your weapons.
- Capacitor, the pool of energy available for shield and weaponry.

The bottom seven statistics may be modified by bonuses on any part.

By default, parts come with a certain base set of statistics. Engines, obviously, give a bonus to thrust.



Noses give a bonus to shields.



And wings give a bonus to turn.



The size of a part also matters; a medium wing has significantly larger stats...



...and a large wing has even bigger ones.



As a general rule, a medium part usually has about three points to a small part's one, and a large part gets about five.

In addition, different factions give different base stats to their parts; the Miners Conglomerate specialises in armour, so their parts have more armour. But the South Beak, for example, is from the Civilian Ascendancy - which specialises in hull strength. Compared to the Burn Box, it has less armour (40 instead of 45), but a bonus to hull (11.6 where the Burn Box gives nothing). It still has the same weight and thrust, though.



You also get different stats on the other three factions' small engines. The Void Militia specialises in shields...



The Sovereigns of Science in power, which includes both reactor and capacitor...



And the Sun Hunters in engines, for both turn and thrust.



These stats are automatically modified based on your level perks, as well. So if you look at a part
just before you go up a level...



...it will have different stats after you select the +20% armour perk.



There's a handy shortcut to swapping parts on your ship: if you sell an equipped part of a given size, and also buy a matching part of the same size, the part you just bought will be equipped in the same place as the part you sold. Here, you can see that I've highlighted two equipped junk parts, and two new missile-toting port gliders.



When the trade is executed, you can see in the centre display that the new port gliders are automatically equipped.



You can do the same thing in the inventory screen, by sending the parts you want to equip into the scrap field, then swapping them with the parts you already have equipped.

If you open the Faction menu, it might look really complicated, but the pieces are relatively simple.



The top line is the name of the faction, in the game colour of that faction. Underneath this, you have buttons to look at other factions. Each faction has pretty much the same interface.

Under these two buttons, you'll see the names of the other factions in the game, and the relations this faction has with them. I haven't delved far enough into this to know much more than "positive good, negative bad" - but that's pretty much enough right now.

The exception is independent captains, who aren't really a faction and don't really have faction relations. They just plain don't have that part.



There's one more thing I want to cover before I get to the captain display.

All the way in the upper right is a "help" icon which will show you a map legend. This will show up on a lot of interfaces, and with a controller you hold the "Back" button to open this. (That can be confusing. I thought it was asking me if I wanted to go "Back?" but I couldn't figure out how to activate the button and if I right-clicked over to the KBM interface the word "Back" went away. But maybe I'm just an idiot.)

There are basically so many pieces of information crammed on the screen in some parts of SPAZ 2, they could not possibly write a label on all of them. So instead, there are DOZENS of icons and symbols which you will eventually know by heart, but right now it's a dizzying wall of complexity. Relax, you'll get there in time.

So let's talk about the list of captains. At the top, you'll see "Members," and the same kind of thing you get for your cores: the current number, and the maximum number. (There is no maximum number of Lone Captains.) This maximum number is dependent on the number of starbases they have.

Underneath that, you have a list of every single captain in the faction. There's a leader, and then there are all the members. You can only look at the initial details of the leader, at first, but as you pass by other captains on the starmap you'll be able to look at their details as well.

Those details include, on the right hand side, a picture; a current image of their ship, so you have some idea what's on it; and then their name, level, relationship to you, distance from you, and number of starbases owned.

Relations are, again, something I don't know much about beyond "positive good, negative bad." But as you can see in the original faction info image, even without moving anywhere or doing anything, there are people who like and dislike you just on principle.



At the bottom of the list, you'll see a "Sort" button which lets you sort the list of captains based on name, level, or relations. And then below that is the "Close" button to leave this screen.

(TODO: update and expand)

Each faction puts different weapons on different sizes of parts, because of their specialty. When you make your own bases for your own faction, you can select any specialty for each base, not just one. The base specialty and local features dictate how bonuses - and hence, star rating - are awarded to newly-manufactured pieces.

(TODO: star ratings and such)

In the next five sections, you'll see the image from the in-game lore screen for each faction, displaying the actual parts... engines on top, noses in the middle, wings on the bottom... from small on the left to large on the right. (With the inexplicable exception of Void Militia wings, which are shown from large on the left to small on the right.) You can also see each faction's unique core design just above the small engine.

Immediately after that, you'll see a table listing the name of each part by size.

Finally, there's a table showing the weapons available on each individual kind of part - engines, noses, and wings - by part size. In each column, the letters S, M, and L mean all the listed weapons in the left-hand column are available on a part of that size; the letter X means it is not available on that part at all from this faction.

I still need to cover some other things - trading, mostly, and arenas. There's still plenty of stuff. I just haven't gotten there yet.

But I wanted to get this out there, so it could answer the questions it can answer. If there's anything you really want to know about, ask in the comments, and I'll try to answer it there AND get it into the guide somewhere.

This is about two-thirds of my notes, but it's all the farther I've gotten with the screenshots.

Thanks go to:

Lemure because of some conversation interface tips
Pipsqueak because of Battle Wagon mode details
Blorf and Narlak because of duh