Getting Started Guide

So you've just bought the game and now you are ready to play, here's a few tips that will help you survive the first few game days. The first time you load into the game on a new character you will be in your mostly empty ship. The Ship Locker has your selection of starting items; you will have the matter manipulator, two types of farmable crop seed, 10 torches, a flashlight, and two-handed sword. In order to open the ship locker just target it with your mouse pointer and press E or middle mouse button. Put your sword in the R slot and the flashlight in the L slot.There is now a beam down button in the upper right hand corner of your screen, you do not have to stand on the teleport pad to use it. Your ship will be in orbit around an average sized level 1 forest planet. The first order of business once you've beamed down to the planet is to find some wood. Sometimes there are no trees in the immediate area around the beam down point, it might not even be a forest biome that you've landed in. In that case you may need to travel a bit to find some trees, use your matter manipulator to knock them over and gather the unprocessed wood logs.You will also need to find some cobblestone and use the matter manipulator to mine it, it will break 2 blocks at a time, you should mine at least 20 blocks of cobblestone. Now that you have some wood you can turn it into wood planks, the basic crafting menu is opened with the wrench button in the upper right hand corner of your screen. You will need to use the wood planks to make a Crafting Table, place the crafting table on a flat space on the ground. You can place the crafting table by moving it to a hotbar slot or you can simply drag the table to a spot with your mouse pointer.In order to use the crafting table now you just need to mouse over it with your pointer and press E or your middle mouse button, this will open the crafting table menu. Now you should use some wood planks and your 20 cobblestone blocks to make a stone pickaxe and stone axe, these items will help you to gather materials much faster. Also you should use one of your torches and some unprocessed wood to make a campfire, you will need this to cook your first meal and keep you warm at night.Once you have done all this, you need to find some plant fibres, so look in crevaces for any hanging vines, you can break the vines off with your matter manipulator or the stone pickaxe. Once the vines break you should be able to gather some plant fibres which you need to craft the Hunting Bow, you will find the bow on your basic crafting menu; you don't need the table to make one. You can also use those plant fibres to craft bandages which can help you counter the very common poison damage.Once you have equipped the hunting bow in one of your hotslots you can try to get some raw alien meat. You should hold the mouse button down until your bow is fully drawn, so the arrow will hit with max damage. Arrows fly in an arc so you have to get use to aiming the bow, once a target moves into melee range you will be unable to hit with an arrow. It's possible to kite the creatures sometimes or shoot them from a position where they won't be able to reach you.Once you have some Raw Alien Meat, place your campfire on the ground and target it with your mouse pointer then press E or your middle mouse button. This will open the campfire cooking interface which is only used to cook alien meat; all other food recipes require a Wooden Cooking Table. Now that you have a bit of food to stave off death by starvation, you should start looking for some metal ores to mine.You can find deposits of the ores you need near the surface by day, at night you won't be able to see the ores on the surface as well. You will need at least 20 iron ores to craft an Anvil, and you will also need lots of copper to craft your first set of armor. You will need another campire and some cobblestone blocks to make a Stone Furnace, which you need to smelt all ores into bars.The copper armor set provides a little more protection but still not enough warmth to keep you from freezing to death at night. You can not skip the copper armor set and go straight to iron armor because you will need a full set of copper armor to craft the iron armor set. You should probably just take shelter once the night begins because the night-time spawns are a bit tougher than the creatures that spawn during the day, especially if you are not well equiped. You can build a basic shelter from wood planks or packed dirt, or simply mine out a room under the ground.At night the temperature turns cold and you may notice a thermometor appear at the bottom of your screen. Your body temperature will drop slowly if you are not standing near a campfire or torches. If the temperature gauge goes to zero you will start taking damage and die, but it's pretty simple to warm up by standing near two torches.Now starting forest worlds tend to be ore poor; it's much easier to mine the soft materials found on a desert or arid planet type, in order to reach those worlds you will need to fuel your ship. While you were collecting wood from trees you should also have collected some strange seeds. Those seeds will produce a sapling planter when you try to place them in the world, and you can place them side-by-side and full trees will grow without any space between them. You should find or make a flat dirt surface and plant enough trees that you will be able to collect a full stack of 1000 unprocessed wood.You can place that stack of wood into your Stone Furnace and convert it to coal at 10 wood to one coal, so you should get out 100 coal from a full stack of wood. 100 coal is exactly the amount you need to fully fuel your ship for one warp jump between star systems, it will produce 200 units of ship fuel. Once you have your coal, just beam up to your ship and find the fuel bay near the pilots chair, press E or middle mouse button to open it. There will be 6 slots for fuel and you can place your coal in one of those slots; once you have placed it press the red FUEL button to convert it into ship fuel.You are now ready to fly your ship, target the pilot's chair and press E or middle mouse button to bring up the ship navigation interface. You will notice there are X, Y coordinates given in red digits which can be either a positive or negative number. Its possible to type in exact coordinates for any star system if you wish to find a specific planet. There might be other landable planets around your starting planet, if this is the case you can travel to one of them for the cost of 1 ship fuel.When you click your right-mouse button over the navigation interface it will zoom out to the system level, where you can see if there are other planets in orbit around this star. Right-clicking the map again will zoom out to the sector map level and left-clicking the map will zoom in. Traveling to another planet in the same star system will cost you 50 units of ship fuel, traveling to a planet at any other star system will cost you 200 units of ship fuel.Star systems in the alpha sector may include moon type worlds or asteroid fields which you should not travel to, as you will need a tier-4 Survial System in order to survive the airless environs of those places. You may also notice Snow type planets which will freeze you if you are not properly prepared with warmth gear. When you are hunting for Raw Alien Meat, you may get some Leather; you can use this with a Yarn Spinner to craft sets of Snow Infantry Gear, which provides the maximum warmth value. A combination of Snow Infantry Helmet and the tier-2 Steel Armor should provide enough warmth to visit the snow worlds.Now you know all the basics for playing Starbound, there are many hours worth of content to explore and discover here.