Guide · early game
Beginner guide — first steps
You start on Balor, with a ship mining Copper. Here is the exact priority order for your first hours: speed up the loop, keep unlocking, then open research — where the real multipliers hide.
The core loop
The ship mines Copper, fills its cargo, returns to sell at the station. Every credit earned should go straight back into an upgrade — idle credits are lost progress. While you play actively, always keep one upgrade or planet in your sights.
There are 27 ores, from the most common (Copper) to the rarest (Opalite). Each planet unlocks a pricier ore: your progression is reaching ever more valuable ores.
Unlocking planets
The first planets are nearly free: 200, 500, 1,250, 5,000 credits. By planet Chandra the price is still only 9,000, and by Clovis it is 75,000. Golden rule: unlock the next planet the moment you can afford it, no exception — each planet adds a more profitable ore.
The three upgrades
Each planet has three sliders: Mining (amount extracted per cycle), Ship Speed (round-trip speed) and Cargo (ship capacity). The classic trap is dumping everything into Mining. In reality you level them together — a huge cargo on a slow ship, or massive mining emptied too fast, wastes half the potential.
Simple rule: keep Speed and Cargo close to each other, and level Mining just enough to fill the cargo in one cycle. On Drasta, the upgrade cost base is around 3 and climbs by about ×1.8 per step.
Opening research
Research is the real engine of the game: about 150 projects, paid in ores and alloys (not credits), that unlock and multiply your systems. As soon as you build a stock of ores, start investing. Two branches first: Managers (leaders and managers that automate and multiply everything) and Ore Targetting (focus mining on a planet’s most valuable ore).
Don’t hoard ores "just in case": a stored ore earns nothing, an unlocked research pays forever. Sell the surplus, but spend on research first.