User blog:Kaorimoch/The order in which to do things

I've played this game about 10 times in the past 3 weeks since I really enjoy just starting the game up and getting "gud", but once you start on the crystal cave, its boring again. Anyway, the lack of a map, not knowing where to go and how to get blueprints really really sucks, especially if you are starting up the game for the first time. For myself, I made notes as I went along to help me remember what to do and where to go to stop meandering around so much.

Some general advice for playing first -

1) When measuring distance and the time left until you run out of oxygen, plan on a 1 second breath - 3m distance ratio.  If you have 30 second left of breathing and 90m to travel, you'll be ok.  If you have 30 seconds left and 120m to travel, you may make it but you may start running out of breath / fade to black as you arrive.

2) You travel slightly faster when you are not holding anything in your hands.  If you are rushing somewhere, try to do it without anything in your hands for a little extra speed.

3) You don't need to hoard lots of high end resources.  To complete the game, you only need 5 Nickel Ore and 6 Kyanite Crystals.  You might want 2 more Kyanite if you want to build a Prawn Suit Thermal Reactor but 2 Ion Power Cells will fulfill all of your power needs without worrying and one Storage Unit is more valuable.

4) I won't be telling you to avoid monsters and trap plants - that's a given.  Also, there are other items or blueprints you can build or focus on rather than following this guide if you want. Crash site - There are 3 water containers and 3 food rations in this area.  Don't take a flare, they are a waste of space.

Drop pod - Your first desination. Try to obtain about 3 Creepvine Seed Clusters on the way, along with a few ribbon plants with as many metals as you want. You should also grab 2 fish to turn into food when you arrive since you start the game with 50% of your food need bar filled. Once you have obtained the seed clusters, convert them into silicone rubber and make flippers and a knife. Craft a Scanner, Flashlight and Oxygen Tank along with any other useful items.

First 2 Essential Blueprints - Go on a trip to -251,-251 to get the High Capacity O₂ Tank blueprint from the databox (and scan the builder tool inside the circular building, but be fast!). You'll need to descend a long way. Then go to -352, -320 for the Rebreather databox. After that, I recommend going to -500,-500 to scan the exterior growbed. You will need to be fast for the databoxes - waste time and you will run out of breath.

While on these trips, do scan the Sea Truck and Mobile Vehicle Bay parts. Continue building parts such as the Compass and Repair Tool. Build the Habitat Builder when you can - you will need one gold ore (from the Thermal spires area, they are more abundant in the yellow crevices in the ground). Ensure you have at least one First Aid Kit and least 50 units of water while travelling around. Focus on building up your supply of Lead and Table Coral Samples.

Delta Base - Time to visit. It is south of your Drop Pod, and you can get an idea of where south is by going to the surface from the drop pod, looking around and travelling away from the land locations covered with ice. When you pass the Twisty Bridges and keep going past the Thermal Spires, your PDA should pick up a signal from a beacon for Delta Base. Go up and scan everything. For now, the most important one will be the Multi Purpose Room as it is the core of any central hub for a base you build.

Where to build a base? - I like building a base between the Thermal Spires and Twisty Bridges area, preferably on the eastern edge near the Creepvine area. You do have one of those black 4 legged thing crawling around there but you can kill it with about 30 seconds of slashes with your knife. This location tends to be the best when it comes to gathering materials close by. You can build anywhere you want but make sure you have quick access to a variety of necessary materials and not so far away that you lose a lot of time in travel.

Base layout - You can have it anyway you want, but a Multi Purpose Room makes it easier to centralize everything and build items that require one of those rooms. Whatever you plan on doing, I recommend using plot plants and build 4 of them in your base - 2 for the Horseshoe Shrub (found on Delta Island - Can heal 10 points per nut eaten, and the nuts don't go off but they don't really satisfy your thirst) and another 2 for the Feverred Pepper (located in the aboveground ice locations in the west of the map - satisfies all of your hunger and thirst needs). Using the pots will cost an extra 4 titanium over using the indoor growbed, but that thing takes up a lot of room whereas the pots can be placed in front of lockers or next to the Water Filtration system without bothering everyone.

Base Layout - External Growbed edition - As for the exterior growbeds build 2 and make a goal to grow 2 Creepvine Seed Clusters, Gel Sacks, Ribbon Plants, Spiral Plant Clippings and Young Cotton Anemones. You will need a few of these, especially the Gel Sacks and the Creepvine Seeds. Special note - you can make the seeds for the plants by hitting them with the knife a number of times, but once you reach a certain number of times, the plant itself will disappear and be replaced by seeds - make sure you have room in your inventory for the seeds. Special Note 2 - you can pick the plant before the last hit that makes it disappear into a bunch of seeds, replant it and do it all over again. For example, a gel seed hit three times will disappear into a bunch of seeds but if you hit it twice first for 2 seeds, then pull it out of the growbed, then put it back in, you can keep hitting it 2 times for an infinite number of seeds. You cannot do this with Spiral Plants though - you can't harvest the fully grown version. Special Note 3 - The Young Cotton Anemones have 2 varieties - the small ones take only one hit before they explode into seeds, but the larger ones can be hit twice before exploding into seeds - so only get the big ones. Hit x1, harvest, plant, hitx1, harvest, plant etc etc.

Alien Time - Go to the Twisty bridges area, find the flashing pillars down below and follow them to the Sanctuary to get your new best friend. There's only 2 good reasons to have this guy - (1) The sea monkeys will no longer steal things from you once the alien is in your head - instead they will randomly give you items and (2) Ion Batteries and Power Cells. They are so good.

Sea Truck fun time - Once you have built the Sea Truck, get the Mark 1 Depth Upgrade for it to reach 300m, Now, you will need 2 diamonds so you can either search in the crevices below the gold canyons in the Thermal Spires area, or you can go to the next area and use the oxygen plants to get there....

Sea Truck Fabricator and Storage Modules - These are located 350 meters deep in the Twisty Bridges area. There are small entrances in the canyon in front of the cave to Alan's sanctuary. You'll notice it when you descend below and the vegetation disappears, and then a new biome appears when you hit 300m (called the "Deep Twisty Bridges). This area is the only place to get all of the 2 modules you are after and you will need to scan at least 3 of each item to learn the blueprint.  While down here, loot all of the diamonds (there are a lot) and lithium you can find.  Keep an eye on your health, you may need up to 2 First Aid Kits to survive the damage you receive.  You are going good son.

By now you should be low on lead and table coral samples. You can keep searching around the Twisty Bridges for these items, or hold off on building the extra modules while proceeding with obtaining the propulsion cannon and continuing on to building the scanner room below.....

Sea Monkey Nests - Now you need to hit the Sea Monkey Tunnels in the areas north of Delta Island. Each nest has a blueprint in it that you can scan to recover. You will need to get the Laser Cutter (blueprints are near 460, -88) at a bare minimum, but you should make sure to get the propulsion cannon (blueprints are near-478, -138) as well. The Propulsion Cannon will let you access 5 magnetite ores at the next location --

Phi Robotics Lab - Build the Propulsion Cannon, then head west from the Twisty Bridges until you hit icebergs / outer ice wall boundaries with Jellyfish floating around. If you see an alien power cable, head SWS. Follow the walls until you see a pontoon Then, head SW - West following the ice walls until you see orange floaties / dock that you can disembark from. I recommend building a base here, and/or dropping a beacon to note the location. Your goal here is to head SW while picking up a Feverred Pepper. The beacon for the Phi Robotics Lab will appear as you get closer - scan the Pengling robot outside, then head inside. With the Propulsion Tool, head up the stairs to the left and keep going until you hit the area near the entrance to the Teleportation Gate. You should notice an area barricaded by boxes that you will have to get access to by using the Propulsion Tool. Save before you do this. You should start with the very leftmost box and move that out of the way, then keep picking up the next box to the right as you go. Loot any boxes in the location near the boxes you want to move first since the game can accidently "crush" boxes out of existence if a box lands on them (occasionally). Once you move them all out of the way, head inside to loot, and grab all the magnetite up the back. After that, we are going back to base to -

Build a scanner! A scanner room is useless unless you have magnetite, but since you went and obtained it from the back room at Phi Robotics, we can build the scanner room, craft a HUD chip from the fabricator in the scanner room and then use the scanner to locate Lead (Galena Outcrops) and Table Coral Samples, which take time to locate and loot.

Build yourself the 2 items necessary to build a Pengling Spy Bot and remote and now we can go to -

Outpost Zero. There are 5 items to scan outside the base (Snowman, 2 PRAWN suits, one habitat builder and something in a box in front of the main door. Go inside and scan everything you can.  Eat some lantern plants but don't bother growing them at base, the Below Zero version only satisfies hunger.  Now, the reason we went to Phi Robotics Lab is so we can use the Spy Pengling to go into the small hole at the back-right of the main building to loot batteries and water.  Don't forget to start building a Water Purifier back at base - you should have about 3 to 4 solar panels by now to offset the power drain from the purifier while crafting and re-charging batteries.  Once this is done, it is time to start building a -

Prawn Suit - We already have 2 plans from Outpost Zero, but we also need 2 more to finish the suit. We also need plans for a Drill Arm, a Docking Module to attach to the back of the Sea Truck to carry it around with us and (I recommend) a Grappling Arm, helpful for attaching yourself to nasty monsters while you drill them to death as they travel. First, the docking module can be found in the Deep Purple Vents location (397,-573). Drop a beacon, scan all of the Docking Module parts and visit the architect place as well. Keep a sharp eye out for the Spiral Plants - they look like bunch of white threads that sprawl out at the top, and wrapped loosely with redish black circles around the middle. Take some and grow them back at your base. Find at least 2 so you can get 4 clippings - you will need at least one for the Mk2 Depth Module upgrade for the Sea Truck. After that, exit the Deep Purple Vent location, travel south a bit and explore the wreck there for some stuff, since we are here anyway.

Grappling Arm - Head to 531, -824. It should be a little depression in the area that holds 2 sea monkey nests with the plans for the Grappling Arm blueprint (and this is why this game is so damn annoying, the plans for this are in one location within a maze you can easily get lost in). While there, grab Nickel Ores (you only need 5) and as many rubies as you can pocket. You can continue searching Sea Monkey Nests around here for the Sea Truck Horsepower Upgrade and the Ultra High Capacity Tank blueprints. There are other blueprints around here, but I never use them. Then it is time for the final two parts to complete the base Prawn suit at the -

Mercury 2 bow section! (270, -1334) There are 3 suits at the entrance location so scan those. While here, be sure to get the Reinforced Dive Suit Plans, and the Nuclear Power Plant plans. Note - the nuclear rods that are not in a crate are depleted- useless. Don't waste your inventory space picking them up. All of the nuclear power rods inside crates are fully powered so grab those for sure. Will add more later when ready.

Placeholders for now

The Kappa Mines! This place had a few ways to enter it before the final version. It is difficult with a sea truck, but this is what you need to do. The entrance is in one of the canyons in the Thermal Spire zone, NW of Delta Island. It will be in rather thin canyon with a crevice that is still shooting out thermal blasts. You will know it is the right entrance if the cave after the entrance cave has an "L" shape. Go through the entrance, then through the "L" (make sure your Sea Truck passes through the bottom of the L), then take an immediate right and you in the mine. Drop a beacon there to track its location. The only reasons to visit the mine are (1) Large Resource Deposits - Rubies and (2) Prawn Suit Jump Jet Upgrade - necessary for getting around and drilling monsters.

The Kappa Mine Bonus Challenge! Want to have fun in the mines? Try this challenge - take around 30-40 Table Coral Samples with you into the mine. On the way to the bottom of the mine, mine out the gold deposit and grab the power cell in the crate. At the bottom of the mine, mine the copper resources. Now, using the fabricator, craft lots of Computer Chips. There is also one Silver deposit in the bottom of the mine that you can use to craft Advanced Wiring Kits. With the use of the Table Coral Samples, you are turning 3 inventory spaces (gold, copper, copper) into one inventory slot. If you count some of the silver, you are turning 5 inventory spaces into one. After that, turn the titanium you mine into ingots, as much as you can. By now, the Sea Truck should be very low on power (if you aren't using Ion Power Cells) so you will need to replace drained cells with the spare battery you looted earlier. Even after doing this, I end up with about 21% power left. In the worst case scenario, you can always use the Prawn Suit Power Cells if you run low.... You'll arrive back at base with a lot of good materials to store.