Getting into Airmen might not be the most straightforward experience, as without the tutorial you're just thrown into an airship construction sandbox with unorthodox UI choices and have to figure out what even is there to do.

We're here to help you with that.

In this guide you will find a list of possible activities,
all of which can be done by a solo player or a team.

First thing: there is no "Play", "New Game" or any other button of this kind in Airmen.

The default game mode is called an "Expedition".
This is a multiplayer open world style experience on a regional server with PVP enabled.

To play that, after launching the game, you choose:
"Expedition" -> "Captain" -> "Starter Ship" -> "Launch"

There will be some loading.
For a few seconds during loading a "Select Spawn Point" button will be displayed, which will disappear on it's own if you don't click it, and a random spawn location will be chosen for you.
You can let that happen.

You will now see a scene with a ship rotating, a "Select a ( ) Respawn Chamber" prompt, and a "Quick Select" button. Click that button or the golden circle that marks the respawn chamber location on the starter ship model.

Once clicked, the circle fills up with green and you are spawned as a robotic Airmen character onboard your Airship.

Some text will flash before your eyes. Yes, we know it's too much and too fast.
Do not worry about it.

Congratulations. You are now in the game.
Default controls are listed in the top-right corner of the screen and you are free to explore.

Move to the next section to get the idea about what is there to explore.

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Other options to start the game are:

1. Instead of choosing "Expedition" in the main menu, you can choose "Server Browser".
At the time of writing there are 3 servers:
- Airmen Official EU1
- Airmen Official NA1
- Airmen Official NA2 (PvE)
The number of players on them is shown on the list. If you looking to join other players, you might want to check that list to see if there are any on one of the official servers.

2. Instead of choosing "Captain" in the second step, you can choose:

2.1. "Crew" and join someone else on their ship, if there are players online (the best chance for this is on weekends during the community play).

2.2. "Siege" and then "Launch" to spawn on a fort that you will need to defend against the attacking waves of NPC ships.
This is an action-intensive short event, but it rewards you for every ship killed and every wave of ships you complete. It also gives you the opportunity to work with various weapons you might not have on your own ships yet. It's also relative hard to complete, as maintaining repairs of your weapons/engines and dealing damage to attacking ships at the same time is a lot to handle.

are important structures with multiple NPCs and Boards which you can interact with to get a Contract or Extract your ship, plus do some other actions, like ship repair.

Extracting your ship is a way of safely exiting the Expedition, it removes your ship and cargo out of the Archipelago and adds it to your Stockpile. Stockpile is your personal safe / bank of resources.

Forts are marked as blue icons on the map (M key) and they are also listed in the "Select Spawn Point" dialog, which is available right after you load the Expedition.
Thanks to that you can spawn directly at a fort of your choice.

I like Castle Orenvaald the most, because it was the first structure I have seen when logging into Airmen first time at the end of 2019.

Doing contracts for the fort makes you gain reputation at that fort.
The higher level of reputation you have, the more options for Contracts and benefits you get at that particular fort, sometimes you can get a unique benefit, like a cosmetic option unlocked at a certain reputation level.

are what in other games would be called "Quests".
You accept a task from a Contract Board, complete it, and get the reward (quite often the reward is given upon completion, without the need to return to the quest contract giver).
It's worth noting that not all forts give all types of Contracts. The types of contracts available at a given fort are listed under the forts in the "Select Spawn Point" dialog.

There are following types of Contracts:

Transport contract from point A to point B. Your ship needs to have cargo space available and upon accepting the contract, packages are loaded onto your ship. You just ferry it to target location, and upon arriving the cargo is auto-unloaded.
Try to avoid dangers on the way (player or NPC installations and ships, but also monsters).
This is the most chill-out activity oftentimes not including any combat, if you manage to not fly into any danger.

A combat contract. Go to a spot on the map, and kill a target ship.
The target will be shown on your compass at the top of your screen with a red marker, with distance indicated. First the marker shows only the general location of the target, once you arrive close enough, the first marker disappears and a second marker is shown precisely on the target ship.
You just need guns and some survivability. Fun airship combat. Use Q to open the command menu and give orders to your AI gunners and auto-turrets. You can disable target ship by killing it's engines, but personally, I always start with destroying their weapons.

Your ship parts get darker the more damage they receive and stop working gradually.
To repair them, hit them with Right-Click while holding a hammer. You need to have Scrap on you for this to work. Take it from the scrap boxes with E to fill up your blue scrap-level-bar in the top-right corner of the screen. You can also fill-up on scrap by hitting parts (preferably enemy parts) with Left-Click, which works with a hammer, but is Much More Effective with an axe.

This type of contract makes you iterate over time on your designs to keep crucial components covered from enemy fire, play with various damage tanking methods and ship design choices that will allow you to reach damaged components quickly for repair.

Tow a damaged friendly ship from one place on the map to a designated recovery base. This will require a harpoon on your ship, for towing, unless you want to experiment with pushing/pulling the ship without a harpoon (also possible, but that is an entire game of physics on it's own ;D). I find this kind of difficult, as towing physics make your ship bounce in all kinds of unpredictable ways.

Defeat / incapacitate an enemy NPC ship and then tow it to a designated recovery base. It's easier to tow if you kill their ballasts, rudders and propellers first.

Just need some cargo space and axes/pickaxes/revolvers, harvest and deliver a designated resource to a Fort. This is much more effective than just harvesting resources to extract with them, as the Contract reward oftentimes grants much more of a harder to get resource than what you were asked to deliver.

You need to search the area near the map marker to find the items hidden at one of the outposts (small structures with very few NPCs present) and then smuggle them back to the base.

You are given a fort (a structure build with the ship parts, but stationary) with many weapons, tools, tons of scrap for repairs, and you need to defend it against multiple waves of enemy NPC ships.
This is a good way to get a lot of kills on a lot of ship parts, as killing ship parts makes it cheaper to unlock these ship parts in your tech tree later. Sieges also grant you gold.

Achievement - style objectives. No need to "take" them, you've already got them all on your Quests list, available from the main menu, and ESC menu while in-game.

They just auto-count the things you do and upon completion, you can claim the reward in the Quests window.
They reward you with resources and sometimes also unlock parts for your ship or cosmetics for your character.
There are also 3 Daily Quests, different every day, which give you rewards for completing a wide range of tasks.

Another set of achievement - style objectives. Their completion awards cosmetics only. These provide long-term goals if you want to bling your character in a particular style. They are also available in the Main Menu and the ESC menu while in game.

The resources you earn through all the activities are intended not only to allow you to build your own, bigger and better ships, but also to be spent in the Research tree to unlock new ship parts, engines, guns, wheels, legs, tracks, ship classes and at some point the ability to build your own Fort.

You can check the parts you would like to unlock, and what resources do they require, to make decisions on which resources you are going to focus on first.

In general, you can just fly around and do a little bit of everything, or just see what structures, resources, targets and opportunities you encounter. The following sections will list some of the things you can do by just flying around in the open world, seemingly without purpose.

It's the simplest thing you can do.
You need a ship with cargo space and an axe/pickaxe/revolver.
Trees are harvested with an axe,
Rocks (and oil) are harvested with a pickaxe,
Pigeons are harvested by shooting the nest with a revolver.

Hit the resource, till it drops a "parcel" - a canvas wrapped package, then pick that up into one of your empty equipment slots with holding E or shoot them with your grapple to pick up remotely.
Then press E near the cargo pad to load them onto the pad.

When parcels are loaded, Extract the ship with them at a Fort or outpost, to add them to your stockpile for later use. This is the least effective method of gathering resources, but also the easiest to grasp at start.
I've done this a lot in the beginning solo, but it's also perfect for playing with friends, who were just getting into the game.

"Chop trees/rocks together, load them on the ship, and extract at base" game loop.
Managing the logistics of underwater oil mining.
Learning to aim the grapple at packages. Growing to love the cuteness of lo-poly graphics.
Extra fun if you mine the explosive rocks and someone dies or needs healing. Chill stuff.

You can pick up flowers, wake up daemons, summon monsters, and do some other things in the open world. Most of those count towards a challenge or a quest, or add permanent cosmetics options. The world might seem empty at first, because the spaces are vast, but believe me, it is not empty and it is not tranquil, there is a lot in it, it's just not happening at the place where we spawn.

Once you defeat the NPC ship or structure, if they carried packages, you can pick those up either from their cargo, or from the ground if dropped, and add them to your cargo, to extract with them and add them to your stockpile. Some resources can only be gathered this way. You can also steal their scrap to repair your ship with it, or refill boxes on your ship. You can steal their tools, this way you can sometimes get tools that you haven't got unlocked yet, like rifles or boarding knifes.
Sometimes an NPC fort has Boarding Charges in the box somewhere.
You can board such fort and sabotage it from the inside with their own equipment.

Once you fly/drive through a ring glowing blue (they're also marked on the map), the next one will be activated and it will be marked on your HUD. Fly through all of them and you will be rewarded with resources, they also count towards an achievement.

This can be done with a low-flying airship or a "landship" on wheels/tracks/legs/sleds, as the rings are embedded into the ground. You don't need cargo space nor weapons for it. An ideal activity for a small fast ship.

I'm not quite sure why are these called "transmutation rings/loops".
Do they transmute my cargo? I've only did this like 3 times, and further research is required.

The Artifact is a diamond shaped object floating somewhere above the Archipelago, marked on the map. Once you get close to it, it follows your ship. If there are multiple ships close-by, it follows the heaviest one.

Killing enemy ships near The Artifact, charges it, transmuting killed ships into resources. When it is fully charged, the resources are granted to the crew of the ship controlling the artifact.

This can be used for extra income if you plan to fight a lot and adds extra incentive in a PVP context, to attack ships that already charged the artifact with some kills, so you can steal it from them and claim the rewards yourself.

This is a totally optional playstyle, which you can enable whenever you want.

When starting an expedition as a Captain, before Launch, in the bottom-right corner of the screen you can select a faction for which you'll be working on this deployment.

There are three built-in factions you can choose from, but you can use any of the Steam Groups you are in, as a custom faction.

I've made Airships Adrift for this purpose, it's a Public Group which anyone can join.

While working for a faction, you can do Contracts for Faction Factories (big buildings with two smoking chimneys), by pressing G while near them. Faction Factories give only Delivery contracts for 64 packages, so you will need at least 8 big cargo pads on your ship to handle them.

The rewards are good resource-wise, but also, upon completing, you gain Influence for your faction in both the location where you took the contract, and when the contract ended. You can check the level of influence factions have in a given place by hovering over that place on the map (M key).

Once you reach 600 influence in a location, it's marked on the world map for everyone, as belonging to your faction, and you get benefits there.
Other Factions now can't use your factories there, so essentially you gain some control over the territory and logistic facilities there, as factories can be used to repair/restock/rebuild your ships.

You can also invest in an outpost to build additional facilities there, like defense guns, a radar tower detecting enemy ships and marking them on map for you, you can hire a person who will give you different types of contracts than Delivery, build a resource refinery, or even a listening post that will gather evidence on your adversaries over time, which you can then extract with your ship for extra influence, and so on.

There is a lot of content in here.

You can spawn a fort of your own (once you research the necessary parts and design it in the Hangar), and you can build facilities on it that will allow you to refine the resources you gathered among other things. The intention is to give you the ability to deploy both your ship and your Fort on the map at the same time so you can then use your own Fort instead of the NPC one, as your base of operations.

As you can clearly see from the above list. Airmen is basically choke-full of possible activities.
Maybe it doesn't hold your hand, doesn't have the tutorial, throws you into a sandbox with a bag of pipes and bolts, but in the end, it does have things to do, and as any good sandbox ever - it gives you sand and a lot of it.

We haven't even touched upon the subject of ship design, making planes, cars, sailboats, ramming ships, tanks, spider tanks, motorcycles, and riding the dragoons.

Crewing vessels for other captains is also quite an experience. These days player activity on a weekday is near-zero, but I'll never forget the times when we had like five ships fighting the NPC installation in the desert with towering city-block sized spider tanks supporting us with pigeon missile barrages, and how we ended sinking one of those into a river near the Riverguard Island by accident, due to not being able get to the steering room in time through it's internal labyrinth of corridors.

The unique ability to join other player ships as crew gives Airmen something that even Worlds Adrift didn't have - the easy built-in way to get a peek at the ships of players you didn't know before and not through the sights of your gun.

The ability to get familiar with them. To get inspired by the creative ideas of others.
Later on, when you meet them in the open world, while flying your own ships, you can get the "A-ha, I served on that ship" moment. You can recognize Zakdorn's box of death from miles away. You can connect with other players through your creations.

Crewing unique, hand-made ships with strangers, that's an experience no other game has.
And that's perhaps the most valuable "thing to do" in here.

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I can only hope this guide helped you in some way, Dear Reader, to figure out what you can get out of Airmen for your own enjoyment.

Might we some day, see each other in the skies above The Archipelago.
Thanks for reading.
o7