In it's current state, having fun with X Rebirth can be ... challenging. Here's my personal way to deal with it and what I'd recommend to new players.

Do not use. Or at least, not for prolonged time. Create a free play game instead. Read / modify the key bindings. Also, read the manual (right-click on steam). The reason I cannot recommend the campaign is that bugs or imbalance are prone to ruin your game experience.

Loot them. There's lots of "hidden" boxes lying around and they make some significant credits in the beginning. Don't mind illegal goods - pick them up, sell them on the same station, but don't travel with them. Dump them from your inventory just before leaving the platform. Police will annoy you otherwise (I guess the player will end up in one of the prison station modules at some time).

This will become boring and repetitive soon. When that happens, just stop doing it and rely on trading for credits.

There's a game mechanic "in the works" that's actually called trading. It involves capital ships like freighters. Ignore that. It will be a wonderful addition to the game when done. You might spot a little bitterness here. Anyways, you can trade and make lots of credits. The official plan B is trading with inventory items like you picked up before. Ignore that, too. There's too little profit in that. Here's my plan C for trading: Arms dealers, drone dealers, recruiting marines. There are huge margins, sometimes on the same platform, or even in the same room. The small bars in the early sectors are pretty good income.

I apologize for the fact that when trading that way, you have to endure the sights of human-like lifeforms currently present in the game. I hope they will be replaced by robots soon.

You have a spaceship with guns and stuff. So use it. There are little quest-icons found on the outside of space stations (why not INSIDE?!? nevermind). Skull or suitcase in circle.

The ones I like most are:

- Neighbourhood watch, because it takes you to other random zones. Good for some sight-seeing.

- Cartel boss vulnerable, cartel raid incoming, Xenon targeting, etc. anything with immediate enemies.

- Late for a meeting, as you will end up in a dock and trade there.

I don't like:

- Escort needed. Way too slow.
- Anything involving production peaks until the cap ships work.

They're all easy unless capital ships are involved which may happen. A bit too easy for my taste, but it is refreshing to see a particle repeater in action.

Also, random vessels in the civilian lines will be marked hostile when close. Blast them out of space to gain some reputation. They're probably terrorists or something.

Technically you can build a space station with a construction ship. Be aware this a) involves a capital ship, which are in pre-beta and b) is rather expensive. Instead, upgrade your ship first. When you have it maxed, cap ships are likely to work as intended. The game will grow with your progress that way.

Tune your game settings to achieve maximum FPS. Spoiler: Setting shader quality to low, disabling v-sync and reducing view distance to 25 helped alot in my case.

Well there really isn't much thinking involved in the actual game so I will replace that with

Travel zone by zone through all four systems and just look at the great scenics. That's why the information unlocking part is in the game: the stations are simply awesome to look at. They had to somewhat force the player to do it - therefore station scanning.

I didn't mention using drones. Strange.

So that's how the game works for me. I hope this helps some players avoid the early bugs and have a good time.

Lots of this is of course subject to change when the bigger patches roll out.