If you've played Rimworld or similar games, you'll feel right at home in Starship Theory, but there are a few differences.

Left click will select a crew member or a weapon. CTRL-# (where # is a number from 0-9) will save your selection in a control group, accessible by pressing it's number. Right click on an empty space will deselect your group.
If you want to fire a weapon, select it and click on your intended target. Mining lasers stick to your cursor and don't need clicking. If you want a weapon to stop firing, you have to select "Remove Target" from the context menu. Mining lasers stop firing when deselected.
Right clicking on a crew member or any component will bring up the context menu, from which you can control your crew or manage your components.
When you have a crew member selected, right-clicking on anything that can be interacted with will "hijack" their current job. Right-clicking on a fire will give an extinguish order, for example. Manual control can be enabled, which basically means a crewman won't do anything unless ordered. This includes eating and drinking, so be careful.
Power controls will obviously turn your components on or off. "Disable/Enable Work" will toggle whether your crew will automatically repair components that experience wear and tear, like engines or reactors.

Manual Control allows you to control your crew RTS style. You can tell them to prioritize specific construction, repair or firefighting jobs by right-clicking even without manual control.

Your ship status on the top right holds information about your ship's systems and structural integrity. Hover over each option to see a description of what it represents.
"Codes" are basically alerts. Code Red means your Engineers won't build, only repair and firefight. Black is when you're done for, and want to abandon ship. Blue is for ordering your crew to enter the ship for a warp jump.
Jump can be used to escape danger, but it charges very slowly and if any crew is outside the ship, it will be left behind.
Autotarget will make your weapons fire automatically like NPC's do.

Your Cargo panel will tell you how much cargo you carry. This includes resources: Metal, used for pretty much everything, silicon, used for basic electronic components, and Gold, which is used in small quantities for advanced stuff like guns and consoles.
Below you will be shown your Food and Water reserves. Food is grown in Plant Beds, using water, and water is mined from ice asteroids. Water is also drank by your crew and is used up much faster than Food. The last resource are Credits. Use them to trade with other ships, and bribe pirates to leave you alone. You gain credits by trading and successful Threats, and lose them by bribing and purchasing things like crew members or other resources. You never trade resource for resource, but indirectly through credits.

Cargo panel also shows your cargo capacity, and your Power and CPU levels. Power is required for most of the ship's systems to function. CPU is a secondary resource used in the same way. Some components don't require CPU, like the Water Cooler, but they do require power. CPU Panels and other CPU-producing components also require power. You'll have to provide enough of both to sustain your ship. Powering components off will disable their function but they won't use up any resources.

Your crew will need Airlocks to leave the ship and work outside on construction and repair. Doors are under inside to separate sections of your ship and have to be closed an opened manually.

You can now quick-save and quick-load with the usual F5 and F9 keys, however, there have been reports that those save files may be buggy, so save manually if you make progress you can't afford to lose.

When starting the game, you might notice a few colored fields describing your starting crew.

Those are their skills. They are as follows:
Agility - determines the crewman's movement speed inside and outside the ship
Endurance - determines maximum hit points and energy, as well as hunger capacity. Which means higher endurance = less lunch breaks.
Engineering - determines the speed of building and repair, as well as engine operation. Very useful to have one or two high Eng crew members, as this skill makes a huge difference.
Intelligence - determines the speed of food production, research, as well as non-combat operations. You want your scientist and botanists to have high intelligence, as well as your pilot, scanner operator, etc.
Combat - determines the operation of combat consoles - weapons, heating and shields.

Your crew will gain experience by performing tasks governed by a skill, so don't worry if you need combat but got a scientist in trade. Just put them on a console and they'll get there eventually.

When starting off, make sure you have at least one person with high engineering and one with high science. It's not absolutely required, but will help you to build and research stuff fast enough to keep up with the difficulty curve.

Your crew member also have their needs:

Top to bottom, the bars represent:
Health - if this reaches zero, that person dies. People are hurt by fires, lack of oxygen, enemy weapon fire, or starving/dehydrating.
Morale - increases need drain when low[cdn.discordapp.com]. If the ship is clean, your crew has beds to sleep in, chairs to work in, tables to eat at and plenty of food and water, this will rise naturally.
Energy - if this reaches zero, the crew member has to rest and can't do any work. Recharges faster in a bed. If no beds are available, your crew will just sleep on the floor.
Hunger - the standard survival hunger meter. You need food on board of your ship, and a Food Dispenser oriented towards a walkable tile to fulfill this need. Your crew will walk to the nearest dispenser to eat when hunger gets low.
Thirst - ditto, but you need a Water Cooler and water instead. Water Cooler can be accessed from any of the four adjacent tiles.
Experience - used to improve skills. Working gives experience, and when experience maxes out it improves the most relevant stat.
Oxygen - basically how long can this person stay in space. Irrelevant for when the ship's interior loses oxygen, as your crew is not in a space-suit inside.

Finally, your crew can perform any of the 6 roles:

General are your janitors. They clean, and firefight. That's pretty much it. It's good to have one or two general crewmen for cleaning but otherwise they're pretty useless.
Scientists will deal with research and making food at Plant Beds. They're crucial for a well-functioning ship.
Operations are your pilots, scanner operators, etc. They operate the consoles that give you various bonuses - Navigation (evade), sensor, and heat.
Military do the same thing, but for combat consoles - Weapons, Shield, Armor, and Mining.
Engineers build and repair your stuff, as well as firefight. You'll need a lot of them early to build faster. In the late game I like to keep 2 or 4 engineers depending on the ship's size.
Captain is a special role. There can be only one, and he needs a Captain's Chair to be of any use. Then he sits in that chair all day, giving buffs to nearby crew based on his stats. Useful to have in the late game, but not crucial early on, so don't worry about delaying a captain.

You can change roles via the Role Panel, or by right-clicking a crew member and selecting a role from the context menu. You can switch them around at will so if you need some more engineers to deal with repair, just switch some of the other crew over for a time being.

Since 28th June update, you can now start with 3 different difficulties that determine your starting ship, as well as resources it carries. The ships are as follows - a military transport (easy), a mining frigate (medium) and an escape pod (hard). The hard difficulty is most similar to what we used to start with - it's one tile shorter, lacks an airlock, and the bottom two tiles are sloped, which means you'll have to rebuild them as square to make any use of them.

Click here to view the starting ship layouts and cargo, screenshots courtesy of TheInnsanity.[cdn.discordapp.com]

If you're new to the game, I highly recommend starting on medium. It will provide the most balanced experience. If you're still having trouble, or want a more relaxed start without much worry about the early game, feel free to go with easy. Finally hard is the "full" game experience - it will be brutal, and surviving the initial stages of the game might prove impossible without a few restarts due to random nature of enemy encounters and asteroid collisions, but once you're through, it will feel more rewarding. Many of my tips later in the guide are unchanged from previous updates - this mans that the mostly apply to the "hard" layout.

Let's get started with improving your ship! Remember that you can stop time with Space, and toggle between normal time and fast forward with Right Alt.

To build and survive you need 6 resources. They are all stored withing a single inventory, in your cargo crates and hatches.

As usual, here they are in order:
Metal - used for pretty much everything. Mined from red asteroids.
Silicon - second priority to metal, used for everything containing electronics. Mined from dark blue asteroids.
Gold - used in small amounts in advanced components. Mine whenever you can, as gold is rare and valuable. Mined from yellow asteroids.
Food - your total food reserves, dispensed from Food Dispensers on your ship. It's produced in Plant Beds existing in 3 different sizes. You need water to grow food, and that water is lost when a batch of food is produced.
Water - used for drinking and making food. Mined from light blue asteroids.
Credits - used in trading. Gain by selling and threatening enemy ships (more on that in Combat section), lose by buying stuff and bribing enemy ships.

Below those are meters counting your storage capacity, power and CPU units. Storage capacity is self-explanatory. Power and CPU are used to run your components. Each of them requires a certain amount of each, and if you can't provide enough, you can't power the component on. Turning something off will free the power and CPU it uses.

Your escape pod at the beginning of the game contains a cargo hatch with 100 units of cargo capacity, a small solar panel providing 15 units of power, a small CPU panel providing 20 units of CPU and using 3 units of power, and a small engine, using 5 of both power and CPU, providing 1 evade.

Open up your planning panel.

The green tabs are categories of components you can build. Prioritize moves clicked components to the top of the task list, so they will be finished first. Remove allows you to remove blueprints and deconstruct existing components.
If you want to rotate directional objects, or build hull corner pieces, use the rotate buttons. Those are bound to MOUSE4 and MOUSE5 by default, so if you don't have additional buttons on your mouse, rebind them in settings.

Build a Mining Laser and two Small Heat Vents from the Utility tab, as well as a Small Solar Panel from Engineering tab.
You'll need the panel to power your second heat vent, as just one of them can't deal with a mining laser on it's own.
Your ratio of heat vents to mining lasers should be 2:1, or ideally 5:2. With 2 vents per laser gray asteroids won't be a problem, but you may overheat when mining larger resource asteroids.


This bar shows your current heat level / maximum heat, and cooling per second. If your current heat exceeds maximum heat, fires may break out on your ship, and your weapons/mining lasers and vents will take damage.

Your crew should have already mentioned that there's an asteroid field approaching. You will always fly into an asteroid field, and you need to make it count if you want to survive.
Select your mining laser, put it into a control group with CTRL-1 (or any other number) and look for red and blue asteroids.
The grey rocks you'll see plenty of can be damaged by mining lasers or weapons, and will break apart revealing smaller rocks inside. This can reveal minerals, so be sure to break some grey ones if there's no colored rocks around. Larger asteroids take longer to break, so focus on small ones at first until you get more lasers. Actual weapons are also very effective at breaking even the largest of asteroid, so you can use that to your advantage.

Watch out for any asteroids flying straight at you. When they fly over your ship, they may impact and deal damage. This can be catastrophic when it breaks your last Ship Core or cargo crate.

In the future, you might want to build Mining Extenders to increase the range of your mining lasers, and build more of them. Where your lasers are placed on your ship also matters, as their range is counted not from the ship, but from the block the laser is sitting on. Placing them on front and sides is your best bet to making the most of them.

While mining, you might be reaching your max cargo capacity. If you mine anything more, it will be wasted, so let's build something in the meantime to not waste any resources.

Expand your ship however you like. To do that, build Hull blocks first, and then build floors on innermost hull tiles to make rooms. Don't worry about doors yet, but build a larger room to place some stuff in. If you can get a 2x3 room inside your ship, go for it as fast as you can.

As soon as that's done, build a Water Cooler and a Food Dispenser. Make sure the dispenser is facing the right way. The green inset panel is it's front. Water Cooler doesn't have a front and can be accessed from any adjacent square (not diagonally).

You should've started with 5 gold in your cargo hold, and it's time to put it to good use. Build a Research Station (remember to rotate it correctly, like the Food Dispenser) and assign one of your crew members as a scientist. Then open up your Research Panel.

As a scientist is working on the Research Station, they will amass Research Points in one of the five categories you might remember from the Planning Panel. Only one category can be researched at a time, and you decide which one by clicking it on the Research Panel.

For now select Utility. If you check the Utility tab in the Planning Panel you'll see that a Small Plant Bed has a tiny blue padlock icon next to it: . This means that component is locked, and requires 1 RP in it's category to unlock. That's why we're researching Utility.

Once you've got the point, as shown in Research Panel, you can click that padlock and unlock the component. This will allow you to place it on your ship.
Plant beds are important, because they allow you to convert water into food. Other than trading, there is no other way to get food, so this component is crucial to your survival.

You will need another crewman assigned to Science to work the Plant Bed. Like the Water Cooler, it can be accessed from all sides. You also need water to make food, so be sure to mine plenty of that.

So far you shouldn't have encountered any hostile ships. If you did, you're probably dead and cursing my name for not warning you about this earlier.

There are three kinds of ship encounters in SST: Neutral, Trader, and Hostile.

Neutrals are just flying by. They won't attack you if you don't fire at them, and they don't offer anything. You can Threaten them, however. If your ship is much stronger than theirs, they will pay you and leave. If it's not, they will turn hostile, so be careful when threatening similarly armed ships.
If you don't interact, neutral ships will leave after a while.

Traders will act similar to neutral ships. The main difference is, while they're still neutral, they will give you a few trade offers. They are displayed under the ship's status window on the right side of the screen and will give you the details of the trade: what you're trading, whether you're buying or selling, how many units are up for trade and how much credits will you get for it.
Be on the lookout for crew member to buy, as more crew is always good, if you can feed them.

Since 1.2 you can also sell crew members. Little arrows on the trade offer will allow you to decide who you want to sell.

Hostile ships will instantly enter combat with you.

Their ship status window is identical to your own, with the exception of missing sensor stat.
Note that you can Bribe you opponent. This means that you will pay them the mentioned amount of credits so they leave you alone and fly away. Bribes do not always work. You always lose credits, however.

The statistics shown are as follow:
Shield - the circular energy field around a ship is a shield. It will stop any projectiles and asteroid that touch it and take damage. Shields are continuously recharged by a special component, the Shield Booster. If you take out their Booster, shields won't recharge. If you take out their Shield Cell, they won't have any shields to recharge. Either way, both are good first targets when dealing with a shielded enemy.
The EMP Turret is very effective against shields, dealing 6 damage per shot (2 damage per second) to shields. It's weak against hull and crew, but it's still worth to have against shields alone, as only the railgun deals more damage per second to shields.
Armor - this is the hull buffer. Armor can be repaired automatically with Armor Repairer, and it's your first line of defense before damage is dealt to your hull. Armor plates increase your maximum armor, and they come fully repaired, so you can build plates first and worry about repairer later.
Hull - your structural integrity. If this reaches zero, your ship explodes. Game Over. You can increase your Hull hit points by building Hull braces, and your engineers will keep repairing it.
Heat - explained in Mining section. Solar flares also deal heat damage now, so be careful about your weapon use when near a star.
Accuracy - your total accuracy, gained via manned Weapons Consoles. More Combat skill your gunner has, the more accuracy you gain.
Evade - how likely enemy shots are to miss your ships, and how likely you are to evade asteroids.

When your ship is attacked, your shields take damage first. When they're gone, the game calculates the hit - the attacker takes his accuracy and adds a random number in 1-10 range to it. That value is then compared with the defender's Evade. If Evade is higher, the shot misses. If it's lower or the random number was a 10, the projectile hits and damage is dealt to armor and components on hit tile. When armor is gone, damage is dealt straight to the hull.

You'll need one, or ideally two Laser Turrets to be combat-ready. With two turrets, you can outdamage enemy engineer repairing, which will help you greatly.

If you can't bribe your opponents and can't win the fight, you can use the Jump Drive to jump away to safety. You need evasion above 0 to be able to jump, so you'll need working engines. You also leave any crew outside the ship behind. Use Code Blue to force every crewman to stay inside the ship for a jump.

You can enable Autofire to let your turrets fire like NPCs do, or aim manually. To aim, make sure your turrets are powered on, and select them, then click wherever you want to fire. Your turrets will now fire until your tell them to stop by selecting them and pressing X (or Stop Targeting from the context menu).
You can focus your fire on specific tiles of the enemy ship to disable their functions. Destroy turrets to stop them from firing, their reactors to cut power, or even their life support and walls so they suffocate. Some fight will call for different strategies depending on enemy armaments. A safe bet is to aim for the guns, if you can destroy them faster than their engineers can repair.

NPC ships will never build new components, but they will repair and replace the ones they've lost. So a destroyed laser turret means that an engineers will soon fly over and build a new laser turret in that spot. You can prevent this by destroying the hull underneath the component, as enemy crew won't think to just move the damn thing one tile over.

That's all there is for basics.

If you want to contribute to this guide, add me on Steam or leave a comment below. Any feedback is appreciated.

If information in the guide are incorrect or outdated, please leave a comment to help bring it up to date faster. Thanks!

Stay tuned to the game's development at reddit.com/r/StarshipTheory.
There's also a community Discord server run by me, right here[discord.gg].
Have fun, and good luck!

Need help with firefighting? Your crew doesn't extinguish fires on it's own? Here's a quick guide to efficient firefighting by Diarmuhnd!