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Ad-Minister, you have been awoken from cryo-stasis to fulfill Directive Prime: construction of orbital launch facilities for the purpose of new world colonization. Choose your equipment and path wisely.
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Construction Pack - Assumed a lot of building would need to be done

Researcher Pack - On my own, many blueprints would need to be re-discovered, not purchased

(Remember, Ctrl+Right-click to open your starter packs)
- Opened initial stockpile of goods. The Alpha Ship received would help tremendously for recovering materials quickly.

- As a representative of Cosmos, their influence would be tremendously valuable, something to save for later.

- The provided blueprints given by Cosmos would be needed much sooner, but best not to print blueprints that are easily purchased on the open market.

- Construction and Invention packs will help tremendously, and an initial Invention Doc would allow for the immediate advancement of one technology. Which would it be?

(Plan ahead, establish some longer term goals)

- Cosmos Corporate HQ will be vital to my success here. This is my long-term goal.

- Missing aluminum and beta prefabs will be needed. Aluminum is easily purchased on the open market, beta prefabs, not so much. Will need AT LEAST plastic and prefab manufacturing capabilities.

- Plastic production is easily built, though still missing some electrical components. These are also easily purchased, but of course producing them myself would be preferable.

- Prefab production could begin right away, except for lack of raw materials. Constructing the building might also take away needed startup materials.

(Remember, don't just look at what materials you have or are missing NOW.. assume you're missing ALL of them, and then ask yourself: can I purchase them if I wanted to? Or do I need to manufacture them?)

(Don't forget to eat! You'll need some shorter-term goals as well, which are nearly always the same.)

- Want to eat, want to sleep, and we need to be able to recover materials from the ocean floor.

- Alpha Hangar, Hostel should be built right away

- Having said that, Cosmos doesn't skimp on the accommodations. Residential Block is available for construction with just a small Aluminum purchase, but remember it's worthless without the blueprint. Fortunately Cosmos sells that in their private market, which I've been given access to.

- 420 SC for aluminum, that's a blazing good deal! Done! (Don't forget the blueprint purchase too)

(Don't forget you can drag and drop a blueprint from the market, right into the building Org Chart for quick purchase and install! Super fast and helpful.)

- Still enough for the Alpha Hangar, purchased and in place. Now to find a decent pilot. Alpha Missions are standard Vital Reserve blueprints. Purchased and installed, along with our shiny new ship.

(I forgot to eat!)

- Wasn't long before the first few colonists started wondering where the food was at. Producing our own food supply is very important, but I still haven't found a decent pilot for that ship yet. Purchased food and water from Vital Reserve.

- 200 of each should hold us over. Load 'em into the larder first, then assign them as actual items on the menu.

(Remember you can Ctrl+Click to purchase in groups of 100. Shift+Ctrl+Click for 1000)

- With the larder open, just right-click the food to plop it in there. (Make sure you close the market first ^_^)

- Enable the menu and you're good to go! No more starving, whiny colonists.

(Technology can help)

- Torn between direct Seaweed Extraction available from Eco, Assembly Tunnel available from NeoIndustrial, or training for my Directors available from Conservatives

- That Director training would have the most immediate impact, but I'd hate to get stuck NEEDING Heavy Assembly capabilities and not having them.

- Heavy Assembly it is.

(Go faster! Shift-+ to speed this sucker up, starting off is slow!)

- Finally a decent Pilot, but I'm getting bored

- Another choice to make: start water production, or prepare for recycling.. Hmm.. I have just enough to do both actually, so both it is.

- A good template for a Recycler + Assemblyline fit well near the Residential Block; Water Desalination snuggles nicely in near the Alpha Hangar

- Desalination is an easy blueprint to acquire on the open market, but neither Recycling nor Assembly are available to me, this might be a problem

- One generic Green (Eco) blueprint was given to me in the beginning, let's choose Recycling and hope for the best

(Do not use your Yellow Generic blueprint[s] on Building Maintenance, it's only 150SC with Vital Reserve!)

The sleepy colony comes to life.

(Remember that you can "switch" the jobs of colonists you wake up, for a small fee.)

- 2 days in and none of my buildings have decent Directorial leadership. Sick of waiting around. I went on a hiring spree.

(Building Maintenance happens quickly, Directors need not waste their time "supervising" it)

- Director Todd is spending way too much time flirting with the Maintenance Woman in the hangar, who is quite competent at her tasks.

- I instructed her to focus more of her attentions on Pilot Guidance and Mission Planning.

(Use manual mode to good advantage, Directors need not split their skills evenly across all tasks unless you want them to. When you turn on manual mode, Directors give more or less "guidance" to those blueprints that are higher or lower than the yellow lines. This can also be used to fine-tune supply chains, to prevent one input from outperforming dependent outputs, or vice versa.)

- Maybe she wanted to spend more time flirting with her girlfriend, but clever Director Todd found a way to automate Mission Planning, queueing up both Metals Extraction and Organics Extraction for repeated, alternating missions.

- Recycling plant keeping up with extraction. Metals and Organics being recycled successfully. The occasional EWaste mixed in with Metals should allow us to produce electronics, but it's time to face the music: we have no blueprints for Assembly, despite having the facilities.

- Time to get a Science and Tech lab up, quickly. Have all the necessary materials except the electronics.

- Since we need blueprint programming to GET electronics, we'll need to purchase these last few.

- Vital Reserve sells Research and Programming blueprints, so adding those to the SciTech Facilities was easy enough. And with food and water supplies holding decently (indeed water production is going well) I'm in no hurry to pay the extra funds to revive specialized colonists, we'll wait it out and do a little planning.

- A Director!

- With somebody to run SciTech, it was decided to simply queue up a repeating program of scientific research in all major science areas. As innovation was occurring in all areas, our scientist would be able to document their results for further research.
(You can queue up all research types, my screenshot doesn't show it, but you need to set the two repeat / start when stopped icons as well, top-right)

- Using the starting stockpile of invention documents, we were able to get programming started on Green-Eco blueprints.

(Energy management)
- And the lights go out. We were all so busy getting things started that we ignored energy generation status. Fortunately auto-management kicked in, but that creates quite a fluctuation of power.

- Switched over to a more managed energy state, albeit at lower power generation to recharge our batteries. Not much room to wiggle yet, will need to figure out how to get additional energy generation going.
(Tweaking energy becomes ridiculously useful in mid-game and beyond)


- Programming finished on Eco-Green blueprint, Assembly begins in the Recycler-Assembly plant. We have a fair amount of eWaste and Gadgets to break-down for electronics, so instructions given to not only break it all down, but also to assemble basic Control Panels. The basic building block for nearly all electronics.

- Have ALMOST everything we need to get Seaweed Food production up and running. Hired a Director in anticipation of that final Control Panel. Sometimes it's tough to wait, but the extra credits saved by fabricating equipment on our own instead of buying it could come in handy.

- We wait

- Growing impatient. Raw materials for food are stockpiling up, but we don't need food, we need electronics. Without electronics we can't make food.

- Priority order! ALL Alpha Flight Missions redirected exclusively to Metallic Extraction. Organics will resume once farming facilities are up and running.


- Water operations completely ceased, since I forgot to assign somebody to building maintenance. <sigh>

- At least we had a decent supply already on-hand before the equipment failed.

- Will wait for a Technician, rather than expediting one.

- Final Control Panel complete

- Seaweed Farm in place. Let's get it staffed and up and running ASAP.

- Extra blueprint programming needed from SciTech for Seaweed Fattening / Seaweed Drying

- Breakthrough! More technology

(Remember, science research will occasionally give you those little white tech docs that you can use to train Level 1 technologies. Some are very helpful, some absolutely necessary. All the disaster ones are worthless since disasters aren't implemented yet. Also, avoid the ones that require you to have a building/blueprint you don't have, obviously.)

- With the colony springing to life, our Directors are more important than ever. Training them to improve productivity seemed to make sense.

- Also, these deluxe accommodations Cosmos Corp enabled are making a difference. The colonists are happier, with improved morale, and a real spring in their step.

(Morale will make your people work faster. Since I started Cosmos, I chose to take advantage of their purchaseable Block Services blueprint and built Residential Blocks instead. This gives an extra +1 morale to Junior Colonists)

- Food supplies dwindling to nothing

- Have gobs of water, and a ton of unprocessed kelp, but no Farmers or Operators to produce food. Could buy some more food on the cheap from Vital Reserve, but for nearly the same amount I could request an expedited awakening of Farmer and Operator.

- Let's get this show on the road.

(Remember that the red arrows next to colonists means that at the next mid-day Cycle 12 they're GONE. This means two things: 1) if you know you need them but don't yet have blueprints/facilities in place, maybe buy them anyway if you're close to using them, but also 2) DON'T switch roles on them if you need a different role. Switch roles with somebody else because at Cycle 0 of each day, all the empty spaces fill in with new colonists. If you switch roles with somebody who was already about to swap out, you take away one extra slot's worth of potential colonist you need!)


At this point, you have a self-sufficient experimental colony. You can:
- Keep your colonists fed and hydrated.
- You can extract the three basic raw resources (Metal, Organics, Plastics)
- You produce your own food and water
- You can produce your own basic electronics
- You have hopefully only used half of your starting platforms

Playing on anything but the highest speed at this point is still mind-numbingly boring. With enough food in the larder, and good blueprint queues setup, you could probably go read a book or go outside.

Chapter 2 will see us add significant raw materials processing/manufacturing and erect Cosmos corporation.