Strategy

[icycalm]

shubn sold 24k worth of ores he got from asteroid belt mining in the time I sold 8k from station mining, so I don’t think there’s any activity in the station that’s as lucrative as the asteroid belt. So Robo suggested we set up a mining operation in the belt, with several small ships mining independently and bringing their cargo to a central location where our big ship will be waiting to load up and make the long trek home to sell the cargo. Also, we set up crafting benches and whatever else we need in the big ship so we can keep teching up throughout this.

The goal is to make a shitload of money and resources and tech up enough to build our own mini-station and equip it with fighter ships as well as equip ourselves with guns and armor, so we can make some raids and perhaps claim some of the non-safe space. But for the first few days we just have to amass stuff and gear up, and the mining operation Robo suggested seems to be the most efficient way.

So first step is to buy the big yellow-red ship, and second step is to set up the mining operation.



Objections, suggestions and all long-term strategy discussion goes here.

[Robomoo]

The way research works in this game is that you get points for crafting different items, and to craft stuff you need ore. To unlock e.g. the first station tech, you need to craft like 10 crafting benches, and I assume that later we'll need to make 100 chairs or 1000 engines and so on. If you're ever not sure what to do, just go out to the asteroid belt and start stockpiling a ton of ore.

For us to make fast progress, we need to have one person doing all the research, and to do this we need to pool all of our ore on one player. This is more difficult than pooling money, because there's no company ore bank, and we can't trade ores with people that are offline. Currently, we can only trade stuff just by dropping it on the ground bit by bit.

I think we should probably also have a second researcher who's playing in a different timezone to the main researcher. All the ore goes to whichever of them is online.

If we're currently building a ship or something, the same tactic applies: we need to all be on the same station and keep meeting up to give our ore to the one player who's buying the ship. I think most of us are on station 3 now.

[Robomoo]

The co-op mining technique me and recoil tried doesn't really work, because it's very hard to find someone again once one of you heads back to the station. If you are in a group and turn your transponders on you can see a marker for each other about 1 km away, but beyond that nothing.

So the best way for us to make progress now is just to keep upgrading our starting ships and mining individually, until we have enough for icy's ship. Researching thrusters next would also speed things up a lot.

[icycalm]

Aren’t there three independent tech trees? So that for now we could have one player from each region specializing in one of them?

Either way, we need one person from each region to volunteer for teching. Robo is in EU. Let us know who else wants to do it. The rest of us just mine and give them ore, at least until we have some kind of station and it gets easier to pool ore.

It wouldn’t hurt to also start a thread in the Steam forum to ask if there are faster ways of pooling ore. I am banned so I can’t post. The game’s Discord is another option.