Greetings Commander, welcome to today's blog topic.

Today I want to help you plan out your system. Since Hades Star takes a rather long view, one of the skills critical to efficient success is planning. For optimum efficiency you will want to plan out your credit expenditures days in advance.

In the case of the short range scanner, these plans will be months in advance. If you were to read over the official fan wiki, you will see that the cost of the short range scanner escalates rapidly. The wiki currently stops at 9 scanners, but it is known within in the community that a 13th short range scanner (SRS) will cost 10,000,000C. If you paid attention to the wiki, you noticed that each sector scan costs the same amount of credits it took to build the associated SRS. So if you have to build a 13th SRS, that final sector scan will cost you a second 10mil C.

Let's keep that from happening.

Hopefully you are reading this early enough in your progress to save you lots of time, money and frustration. I know that I have already made one mistake with my SRS placement, which will result in my having two sectors to scan on SRS #12.

As with everything in Hades Star, efficiency is key. And that starts right at the very beginning. Below are two examples of a fresh playthrough. This is the starting system we all receive, with our initial desert planet and two moons, and our second planet - the fire planet with one moon.

Desert planets produce shipments with the lowest credit value. If you intend to hoard artifacts, I encourage you to use this starting desert planet to do so. I also suggest placing your Red Star Scanner and Research Station in relatively close proximity to your starting desert planet.

Doing so will help keep your Hydrogen costs down as you fly back and forth from the tech lab and RS scanner. I also prefer to have my diplomacy station and fleet station nearby for the sake of convenience.

This is my system plan. I started in sector A and initially moved upwards to sector 2. Then I decided I loved Hades Star and began doing a lot of research. I read several guides on reddit, found here and here. These got me started, and I followed the hub-and-spoke plan in a clockwise fashion around my star.

Then I started to realize there were problems ahead if I continued, so I did more research and invested more planning.

I found this image through a Google Image search for hexagon maps. It isn't perfect for Hades Star but it is pre-made and I found it useful. Also, I like pen-and-paper notes for these kind of these. I'm old school like that.

So I mapped out, planned out, numbered and color coded my system as it was. And then spent a few days planning and erasing, trying to come up with the most efficient SRS placement I could without starting over.

I got some help from the fantastic people on the official Discord channel, most especially Matthew77b.

Matt shared his own pen-and-paper maps on what would be the most efficient, least costly SRS placement for a fresh account that had not yet made any SRS placements.

So I am here sharing it with you, so that you may learn from our mistakes. Save yourself a few or even 10's of millions of credits.

If you're starting fresh, use this design. And remember Commander, efficiency is success, success in efficiency.