Alpha 0 "First Job" walkthrough

Quick overview on your first job:

Get a ship:

  1. Go to the pedestal with a ship hovering over it and configure a ship. Right now, they’re all free.
  2. Put the center cursor over it (mouse or right thumbstick) and then press the interact button. (Either press A or click on it). This will open the ship customizer.
  3. Browse through the available parts, and assemble a ship you like. Press Apply (or the Y button) to attach the parts. Make sure to attach a bridge, a body, and at least one engine before you press A (or accept) to update your ship. You can revisit any time you like.

Now go get work:

  1. Go to the big job board screen, put the center cursor over it (mouse or right thumbstick) and then press the interact button. (Either press A or click on it). This will open the job browser.
  2. List of jobs will be randomly generated on each tab change, and you can look around at them. Inspect the details for the jobs by clicking on the job and then either clicking on the “i”, pressing “i”, or pressing the “Y” button your gamepad. This will switch to the job details and show you important information like how much cargo mass you can carry and how much cargo mass that job is. If you exceed by too much, you’ll go very slowly, or possibly be unable to move at all.
  3. Accept the job you want by either pressing “A” or clicking to accept. At the moment, your ship will just be instantly loaded with the cargo.
  4. Depart through the doors down the gangway/dock to your ship.

It does have a little learning curve to handle the ship, so I’ll break that down right here.
Gamepad mode. For keyboard mode, use the WASD instead of D-Pad, and the arrow keys instead of the left thumbstick, and the middle mouse button instead of the joystick left special.

  1. When you run out to you ship, it’ll put you in third person mode by default.
  2. Use the right d-pad a bit for some thrusters to move away from the dock
  3. Rotate the ship heading with the left stick to point up and out (use the right stick as you like for a good view)
  4. Press the right bumper 1x (or more, depending on how overloaded you are) to put on a bit of main engine thrust
  5. Gracefully exit the station through the hangar doors, and keep climbing to leave the forcefield
  6. Fly around however you like, go to full thrust, whatever.
  7. Use the left special (the two boxes icon on xbox) to switch views. Press on the left or right thumbstick to zoom in/out in the camera.

When delivering cargo - make sure you check if your ship can handle the mass of the cargo. If you’re over mass, you’ll go slower. Possibly not even be able to move (in which case you can cheat and use the d-pad or wasd to just go 0.6kms anyhow and make a lot of money with a lot of patience)
Deliver the cargo by just flying to where the arrow points. To deliver to the moon is still a bit “crash into it” but the rest are set up ok so far.

Landing:

  1. Re-enter the station at a nice slow controlled speed.
  2. Pull up to the dock/gangway with the arrow over it slowly and carefully.
  3. Keep approaching it slowly until you end up in the character mode again.
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