Put simply, this documents starting a new game and advancing to the point of earning at least 1M E$ per dive using this guide:

https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3332050641
I tried to document everything but didn't always remember to take screenshots, and left out some details so as to not be too spoilerish.

All of this took place over several days and I'd say it represents about 10 hours or so of playtime, but i didn't keep careful track.

I played the game on a Steam Deck rather than a desktop computer, but the game works the same way on any system. (The UI is a bit more cramped on the steam deck's screen though.)

There's not much else to say, so lets get started.

I created a new game using these options:



Seed is 242 for anyone interested.

As I advised myself to do, I hire one crewmember in each job. Fortunately I get lucky and there are cheap options for all positions.



That's about the best you can expect to do without getting super lucky.

Actually I did get kind of lucky because I got an experienced Astrogator already for only 5,300/month, which goes against what I said about spending less than 5,000 each, but that's still a very good deal for Expert experience.

For some reason, one of the zero experienced astrogators wanted more money. Well screw that.


Ok, so I know I said there wasn't much you could buy for your ship that's worth anything at this point, and usually there isn't much point, but I figured I would test that to see if anything is possible at all.



Looks like I managed to save enough money on crew that if I took my lidar to the pawn shop and replaced it with radar then I could get 10,000 E$ in exchange for downgrading that. This isn't much of a sacrifice at this point.

That let me get a little more propellant for my first dive and a little more ammo. This isn't much, but it helps some and it's the only worthwhile thing I could find to do with the ship itself at this point.

So I just launch to the closest edge point using Hohmann, and I end up slightly in the negative due to filling the tank and ammo. You might be allowed to do this with dive fees, but it's not really ideal because you won't even have 10 E$ for a beer or anything similarly cheap. Oh well, who cares.



Ok, so some people have wondered why they don't see the NPC miners as soon as I thought they should. i think it's because of their inexperienced astrogator, but I don't notice this because I lucked out and got an experienced one. So I spot them right away.

So lets see what happens trying to hail them.



Ouch, strike out on the first one. My astrogator recognizes a former employer who she is not happy with. So that's a bust.



Ouch 2, no luck there either. The pilot recognizes the second captain, but that captain doesn't like my pilot too much. So we're not getting any help here to start with.

Therefore I'm going to have to give up on that and just fly 10km or more at a heading of 90 degrees and start mining.

So I fly 20km just for good measure and do some mining, which is pretty uneventful except for my geologist having an unhappy conversation with an NPC.



Ouch 3! I realized that I forgot to spend money to take everyone out for entertainment before the dive. They probably started out with a neutral morale, but then got a little unhappy after some of these unhappy NPC conversations not to mention the boring 4 day cruise to the rings on the cramped ship.

It's not too much money though so I just pay it to avoid problems and after this the routine vegas-like entertainment will brainwash everyone into constant contentment.

Also, looks like there are some weird transponders out there but I don't know where they are so I just ignore that stuff in favor of mining and not wasting fuel on chasing things I might not find.

Anyway, i uneventfully shoot roids and collect ore. I travel another 10km deeper just for the heck of it, but I'm not sure it helped any. However the extra fuel and ammo might have helped a bit since it looks like I'm below the 30,000kg of the default tank and below the 1,000kg of the default magazine.



Ok, well that's a lot better than I thought I would do. Ignoring some of the lower valued chunks and having more ammo to get more chances at higher valued chunks helped, as did having some extra fuel.

So now I'm all set for some nice upgrades. I should be able to get both the arm and the MWG after one dive which is better than usual.



Damage doesn't look too bad. i can ignore all of this except the reactor which needs some fixing up. Low mechanic experience means that I can only repair it once but that's enough.

Ok, so first priority here (after repairs) is to fix the unhappy crew problem with a little brainwashing entertainment.



With default starting morale this can take a few days of cheap hotel and brainwashing sessions, but no big deal.



And now everyone is all super happy and the ship is repaired.

I seem to have lost the screenshot showing my first upgrades, but basically I have enough money to get the manipulator arm and the MWG, and I upgraded the capacitor to dual or the turbine to twin, or maybe I managed to do both.

Then I'm broke again, and I overdraw my account on the next dive fees, but no big deal.

Ok, so I launch again to the ring edge, but this time I've got the manipulator arm, a MWG, still have the starter mass driver, and a slight power upgrade to help keep the ship from shutting down.

The miner NPCs spawn as usual and fortunately I get a waypoint from the first one, but the second one seems to not be recognized by any crew. Well at least he didn't make them unhappy.



It's the usual "big lidar contact" not too far away.



The waypoint is just a barren moonlet but no big deal, at least the mining was decent, i could fast travel past the fringe, and mining also went much faster with the arm and MWG. So overall, much faster than last time.

I make it back with only slightly less E$ worth of ore than the first time. Otherwise, nothing noteworthy.

Fortunately I didn't get damaged much so didn't need to spend much on repairs.



I'm thinking I should be able to upgrade my ship to a KX37 now if there's one in the dealership. Fortunately, I get lucky and there is one!



This looks pretty affordable, so after waiting a day for repairs to be done on my K37, I trade it in for Silent Song, a slightly beat up KX37.

It's beat up a bit but not much and the repair cost comes out of my Insurance account anyway, so this is no big deal. Also my mechanic skills up.



With only one mechanic this will take over 4 days, but who cares because I don't need to save time right now anyway.

i don't repair the RCS thrusters though because I'd rather just use the standard ones and don't want to pay to replace all of these. So after keeping some stuff that the new ship came with and adding the important stuff from the previous ship my balance sheet looks like:



And after all that rest and entertainment.....



The crew is all brainwashed-smiley and enthusiastic about finding those Obonto Habitats that they keep seeing advertisements for.

Ok, so dive to ring edge again, but this time with the extended bed KX37 with better cargo capacity.

Hail miner NPCs that appear.

This time I get pretty lucky and get two waypoints.





So bla bla bla, friendly yapping, get two big lidar contact which turn out to be useful but don't have much impact on the upgrade track so I won't mention details. Anyway, mining continues at one of them.

While mining I happen to hail a salvage ship which has something more for me though.



Too bad I'm too broke to buy any more insurance parts credit, but looks like the salvager has a waypoint for me to check out. If I'm lucky it might be a derelict which I can easily tow back.

So I go there and find....



Oh look, it's a pirate trying to bait someone in with a lifepod. Not quite as good as a derelict, but for me it's almost as good because he seems to be a bit asleep at the wheel and fortunately I'm pretty good at combat. I also have the arm to tow his disabled ship back.

I put 10 rounds or so into his ship with the EMD-14 mass driver. Maybe that's overkill, but I'd rather make sure his propellant leaks out as quickly as possible and fixing the damage doesn't bother me. My mechanic could use some more practice.

So I grab the lifepod and throw it in my extended cargo hold with the ore I've mined, mine a little more ore, grab the ship with the manipulator arm, and head back to the station.



This doesn't even count the value of the ship, but this is a decent ore haul and I got a lifepod worth 50,000 E$. So that's pretty good.

Now lets go see what we need to do with this disabled pirate ship and what we can upgrade further.

Well the pirate ship is beat up enough that even just fixing it up not much beyond 70% is going to take a long time, but won't cost much money and all that repair money will turn into sell value anyway. And the mechanic will get some practice.



Once I can sell this thing I will have gained about 550,000 E$ from that dive.



But for now I can strip some equipment off the ship to get a little bit of fast cash off it in the short term. Afrer doing that and some other stuff the balance sheet looks like this.



So basically, brought back a seized ship, sold ore and got paid for lifepod retrieval, had to pay wages and some services, bought 100,000 E$ of parts credit for 50,000 E$ from Jameson's Insurance, and also managed to upgrade my reactor core, turbine, and capacitor to something a little more ideal.

Also got a rail gun since the power upgrades make it at least usable in short bursts.

And finally, hired some inexpensive backup crewmembers.

So go out diving again, nothing amazing to show screenshots of here so I'll skip most of that, but I did manage to load up some floating frozen corpses that pay 20,000 E$ each.



So basically a good KX37 TNTRL worth of ore plus 170,000 E$ in frozen corpses and something else I think. That's pretty good.

Now lets see what I can do with the money, and if I can sell that pirate ship.

About the only thing noteworthy here is that I intentionally over-repair my ship to help the mechanic train up, so repairs take longer than normal.



By now I can also sell that pirate ship that I captured.

Only thing special here is that this time I try to hire some "wingmen" to help collect ore, since I actually have money and don't launch completely broke again.



Unfortunately, right now trying to hire more than one at a time seems to be a bit buggy for some reason and the second one you hire tends to just disappear with your money for no reason. (This has since been fixed.)

So the one in the screenshot above seems to have disappeared on me, but I managed to get two of them to return by just trying to hire them at every opportunity.

Sometimes they also just return too early, perhaps from running out of fuel, and don't bring back much ore.

But this seems like a decent haul to me, KX37 plus some ore from two other ships.

Here's why I suggest sticking with the K37 thrusters at the beginning. I thought I'd try these out, but they get damaged easily and can't cost effectively be repaired. So they get expensive.



Ok, so now I'm getting to where I should be able to at least buy up the stripped hull for that Cothon-217 that I want, and luckily the dealer has one!



It might look like I can't afford this yet, but i can temporarily take a piece of equipment on my ship to the pawn shop and buy it back after I strip the Cothon. So that's what i do.



So basically this shows:

• Come home with about 417,000 E$ in ore and sell it.
  
• Rearrange some stuff on the ship that doesn't cost much. (Mostly ditching those ion thrusters.)
  
• Not quite enough for the Cothon so I pawn my fuel rods for 80,000 E$.
  
• Buy the slightly used Cothon-217.
  
• Repair it.
  
• Strip it.
  
• And I think I forgot to show it here, but buy my 12x fuel rods back and then I'm still left with a decent chunk of money similar to where I started before the last dive.

So with the Cothon-217 hull secured, I just need to go out and earn a bit more money so I can trade in or strip the KX37 and equip the Cothon with minimal stuff.

Nothing special here. I just come back with a decent load for a KX37 and also manage to disable and capture another pirate ship named Second Class Word.



I'm not really bothering to describe in detail, but in all of these otherwise uneventful dives I'm trying to pick up new waypoints and I manage to discover some Obonto Habitats.

After repairs on my ship and the captured pirate ship, it looks like my insurance balance is down to 38,295 E$ and this is going to take a while. but at least the Cothon is almost fixed up.



Before Second Class Word is ready to sell though, I can strip some valuable equipment off of it.



This enables me to buy a Nakamura MPU for now and use it on the KX37 to effectively increase cargo capacity. (Not sure why it looks like I bought a Mitsudaya MSU but I think I selected it by accident then switched it to Nakamura MPU.)

I also buy a BWM-T535 for my main engine since I like it as a compromise between power and efficiency. That plus the ability to extract propellant from chunks makes it easier to set xenon drive usage to 0% and not spend so much time in transit. I decide to mess with the RA-K44 just for the heck of it.

Unfortunately I seem to have lost some screenshots of previous upgrades, or I forgot to take them, but the Steam Deck beta client seems to have been losing screenshots lately for some reason so I'm not sure.

But anyway, not properly noted in some of the previous upgrades are some minor ones, like the NDCI Autopilot, HUD, trying out some ion thrusters, and stuff like that.

But also, on one of the previous dives I deployed a bait beacon, that is the B8 Claim Beacon, in a maybe decent mining area, but the real point of the beacon is not the specific area, but to attract various "trouble" that might be profitable.

So for this dive I end up mining around my bait beacon and it's starting to pay off in the form of at least one derelict ship and possibly another one.



Tired Juggler is my bait beacon, MRS-3003 Useless Attitude is this Cothon derelect that I just found, SE1-3958 seems to be a salvager, and BLT-5718 is most likely the derelict that it's heading toward (because it doesn't seem to be headed to the one I'm next to right now.

So I think it would be really awesome if I could recover both ships, and thankfully my least useful crewmember (the pilot) has volunteered to try to fly this Cothon back. This would allow me to use the arm to grab the other one, and still get this one.



Unfortunately the Cothon seems to be busted, so I try to race over to where the other possible derelict might be.

I get there just in time to grab it with the arm before the salvager does, and then the salvager starts heading for the other derelect.

Then I can't get a crewmember to fly this BLT-5718 K37 back, and I decide the Cothon is probably more valuable than a K37, maybe, so I abandon the K37 and race back to the Cothon at 100 m/s, just barely beating the salvage ship to it.

Unfortunately I manage to torch the Cothon with one of my RCS thrusters as I'm trying to stop my ship, and the Cothon explodes. Oops.

So then the salvager ship heads toward the K37 again and I race back there, barely winning the race. These salvage ships seem to be kind of fast lately for some reason.

So at least I manage to make it back with the one ship that I didn't accidentally explode, and I think I even managed to buy some insurance credit from the salvager.

The MPU pays off by letting me load up my processed mineral storage and that lifepod is probably what came from the exploded Cothon, so I manage to come back with almost 495,000 E$ of cargo and a K37 derelict.

The RA-K44 thrusters really are prone to excessive wear. However the BWM-T535 is great because I can crank up the thrust on that all the way in Tuning and it barely gets any wear.



The derelict is pretty beat up but repairing it will be worth it and I can strip some stuff off before it's done if I need to.



Good thing I managed to buy some more insurance credit.

At this point I've discovered a few Obonto Habitats and I think I'll go try to sell them some stuff just to see if I can make any more money that way, even though I don't have the Cothon-217 ready.

This dive doesn't go so well in some ways because I fooled around with Obonto Habitats and tried to hire wingmen that didn't deliver for some reason. I think this North Wraith abandoned me early because he blamed ME for him getting zapped by the Obonto's MWG.

Anyway, I manage to sell some stuff to an Obonto, so it doesn't look like I came back with much but it's actually more than this. I also picked up Underground Resolution, another derelict or pirate ship (can'r remember which).

See balance sheet next.

Finally some things are coming together here.



Second Class Word is done being repaired, so I sell it off (which isn't that much because I already stripped it in my chop shop).

I buy a bunch of insurance on my last ring dive, two buys of 100k each.

I sell 106k E$ in minerals to obontos.

Acquire Underground Resolution, which I start repairing then strip down to gain some E$ before it's done.

Sell this other ship, Subtle Revenge, which I'm not exactly sure when I acquired.

Buy even more insurance from the station services.

Then hire the other two backup crew members.

Now I strip down what has been my main ship, Silent Song, the KX37. After that I have three stripped ships, (including this pirate K37 that I'm just going to sell.)



And I have 3M E$ in cash which will be good enough for equipping the Cothon-217. Finally!



And this is what I end up with after fully equipping the Cothon.

I crank stuff up in Tuning....




And now the balance sheet looks a bit incomprehensible, but you probably get the idea.



I'm not left with much cash right now, but once that pirate K37 is done being repaired I can sell that for around 250k E$, and I'm ready to bring in some money with this Cothon now.

So after 8 dives taking one hour each on average (thankfully not all on the same day), the glorious Cothon-217 "Bender" is FINALLY ready to fly.

So first I try using the strategy of selling to an Obonto Habitat that is offering a ridiculous amount of E$ for something.

I managed to find 5 of these habitats on previous dives, and it looks like one of them has a pretty good offer.



So I set up the Geology as shown and start circling around. This place is horrible for mining so it takes forever to find this Pd. But I managed to find a good few loads, it just takes too long because I'm afraid to astrogate to a better mining location.



There's the first part, but it looks better when you don't know how long it took to find the Pd.

Then I realize that I had some better mining waypoints only 30min away and should have just gone to one of those. Doh!

After running out of drones, I come back with this chunk but of course that doesn't tell the whole story. For that I'll get out the balance sheet, but you can kind of tell by looking at my total E$ balance in the upper right because I started out a bit in the negative after buying nanodrone components.

Overall this just took way too long, like 2 hours or something. Such is the problem dealing with Obontos and why people would tend to just look for a good place that has lots of W.

At this point I stop keeping track of upgrades, and later I just fiddle around rather than try to get a Titan ASAP, but you can already estimate how long it would take to get to that point if I was really in a hurry.

But to finish this up I'll describe repairs, show the balance sheet, then a final dive with the "just mine W" strategy.



I just replace all the NAGHETs, which costs about as much as one repair on each one and takes very little time.

Gotta love the cheap repairs on those CL-150 lasers, but the repair time is pretty huge and that's what's taking so long here.

Finally the balance sheet for that last dive:



But man, that took waaaaay too long. And i could have shortened it tremendously by astrogating 30min away and 30min back.

Final major and obvious upgrade: the Mitsudaya-Starbus MSU with its 90% mineral efficiency, and I can easily afford it now. I also decide to try out the Elon AGILE thrusters just for the heck of it, and otherwise start messing with stuff.

I fly off to a place with a decent amount of W and just fill up with that. No real Be around to speak of though. Here are the results of that, and it didn't take very long.



And they lived happily ever after, the end.

I didn't time this too well, and I didn't even document it that well. Sometimes I forgot to take screenshots and sometimes I think maybe my Steam Deck's OS/client screwed up somehow and lost some screenshots, but hopefully all this was useful.

Though that one dive took way too long, and some dives will take longer than others, I'd estimate that each dive plus setup for the next probably averaged out to an hour each or possibly a little more since I probably underestimate.

So to summarize everything, I think we can conclude that these strategies are pretty sound and a decent amount of progress can be made in the game per hour.

This work © 2024 by NimrodX on Steam Community is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0[creativecommons.org]

Anyone who wants to translate this guide to any language is free to do so based on the license mentioned above, but please let everyone know about your translation in comments below and link to the original English guide somewhere in your translation.