Beginner's guide

The loading screen is doing real work — terrain, craters, erosion, classification, siting — and it shows you the seed while it does. If you end up liking a Mars, that string is how you get back to it, and it is in the address bar too, so the URL is shareable as it stands.

The first job on the board is Shift Change, and it is a tutorial that waits for you: it never expires and it sits under any urgent work rather than sinking to the bottom of the list. Lift off, fly to Deep Cut, set down on its pad, pick up four crew and bring them back to the Crew Terminal.

It is flown in the simulator, so it cannot be failed. A heavy landing costs nothing but a dry remark from Mercy and another go, and the hull damage is refunded, because none of it happened. Use that. Land badly on purpose once, just to see what the indicator does.

The engines point along the hull and nothing swivels. So the only way to push yourself sideways is to tilt the whole ship and let some of your lift become thrust in that direction. W pitches the nose down and you accelerate forward; A and D bank and you slide left and right. That is the entire flight model, and once it clicks the rest of the game is judgement rather than controls.

Because you are tilting away lift, going fast means sinking unless you add throttle. H trims you back to the hover setting for the ship's current mass, which changes as you load ore and burn fuel. Use it often.

Tilt alone settles you at about 85 m/s. Space takes that well past 300 — and empties a full tank in about six minutes if you hold it down. The near mines are close enough that you barely need it; the far ones are where the fuel arithmetic starts, and where the auxiliary tanks stop being optional.

PAD, SINK, LEVEL, DRIFT. The HUD tells you which one you are failing, so fix that one rather than everything at once. Switch to the landing camera (3) — it looks down past the belly at the pad and is far easier to judge from than the view over your own shoulder.

If you would rather not hand-fly the last hundred metres, G gives the approach to the autopilot within 50 m of a pad, under 16 m/s and not falling. Height is not a condition: three kilometres straight up over the pad is a fine place to hand over. There is a whole guide to landing, and it is the one worth reading twice.

Mission one pays 800 credits and the first workshop levels cost 1,200. If you are bending the ship on arrival, buy reinforced skids — they raise the safe descent rate and every step of that is a landing that used to cost money. If you are running dry before you get home, buy auxiliary tanks. Do not buy anything because it sounds impressive; the ship page has the full ladder with prices.