Beginner’s Guide
Death Isn’t a Complete Loss
Dying in Void Bastards doesn’t completely reset your progress. The tools you’ve constructed and most of the items you’ve collected will carry over to the next prisoner that gets rehydrated. It’s an iterative process. You might die on this jaunt into to nebula, but you might also end up with an invaluable new weapon that your next incarnation can use.
Don’t Plan to Die, But Don’t Plan to Survive Either
Progress in Void Bastards, however small and incremental, is still progress. Use each prisoner you get for as long as you can, gather everything that isn’t nailed down, build new stuff, and leave the following prisoner that much better off.
The other way to say this is: Expect it all to go wrong. Your favorite prisoner with his eagle eyes and short stature is going to get surprised by a Screw and die. Your carefully mapped route through the nebula is going to get short-circuited when you run out of fuel. Just like your prisoners, don’t be precious about your carefully laid plans. You can just start over again, slightly better off than you were last time.
Every Prisoner is Different
Part of the roguelike conceit of Void Bastards is that you never know what you’ll encounter next. This mainly applies to ship layouts, but it also shows up a lot more subtly.
- Chester Stevens is a smoker
Every prisoner you control has a chance of having an inherent benefit or detriment. They’re listed on the left side of your menu under the Bio tab. Some of them are short statured and harder to hit. Some of them are smokers who cough and alert enemies. These attributes don’t have to change how you play, but playing into them (or at least being aware of them) will make the game more manageable.
Your smoker, for example, isn’t going to be able to sneak around enemies, so you’ll know to prepare for a fight. Or, if your prisoner is eagle-eyed, loose items will appear on your map, so you’ll know you don’t have to waste time and oxygen looking around every corner for stuff to loot.
Every Ship is Different
- Your Star Map has lots of information about your prisoner’s current status and the ships available to board
Similarly, each ship has a variety of, er, variables. You’ll see these listed on the right side of your Star Map screen. At the top, you’ll see the kind of ship it is and its features – resources you can collect there, or special locations on the ship like a healing station. Below that are the useful items you might find there. Next, you’ll see the types of enemies you’ll encounter. Those three things are usually enough to determine if you should visit: You’ll know if it’ll have what you’re currently looking for, and if you’re likely to survive the bad guys you meet.
Below the enemies, you’ll see the ship’s (random) attributes. These work like your prisoners’ attributes – some are beneficial and some are harmful. In the image above, you can see that there’s a Warp Key (a useful item that lets you skip over ships on your Star Map) hidden somewhere on the ship, and that one kind of enemy is actually an ally. Other ships will have minimal oxygen meaning you have less time to explore there, or faulty generators and, therefore, power outages.
Pay attention to all of the information the game gives you so you know what you’re getting into. Even if it is mostly randomly generated.
Listen to Game
Beyond the information you can get before even boarding a ship, Void Bastards will tell you a lot about what’s going on around you with visual clues.
- Green means loot
Cabinets, drawers, drones, and anything else you can loot will be highlighted green. Loose items will have a cloud of sparkles rising off of them. Enemies that are just out of sight will generate floating onomatopoetic sound effect text – a floating TAP TAP TAP over a closed door, for example – to warn you.
The Sargasso Nebula is always deadly, but there are plenty of clues to make it (slightly) more survivable.
Plan Your Routes
Both in the nebula and on a ship, use your map to plan farther ahead than your next stop.
On the Star Map, look at the nodes that open up after you hit your next stop. You might pick up some much-needed ammo right now, but the next three ships you’ll have to stop at are full of enemies and you’ll expend it all just trying to survive. Always look (at least) one stop beyond where you’re heading right now.
- Every ship is different, but you can usually plan a loop-like loop through them
The same applies to your route through a ship. On board, you’re balancing your health (specifically, how much damage you can take from enemies), your ammo (how many enemies you can handle), and your oxygen (how long you can explore).
Most ships will have an Atmo room where you can refill your tanks, so plan ahead for that. It’s not the first room you should visit (you won’t need it yet), so map out a rough route that will bring you to the Atmo room toward the end (or the middle) instead.
You Don’t Have to Fully Explore Every Ship
Especially early on, it’s tempting to explore every corner of every ship you visit. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But as your resources get thinner and the enemies get harder, that becomes a dangerous proposition.
Instead, like our advice above about navigating the nebula, have a plan when you board a ship. If the only thing you need is fuel, head to the FTL room, grab the fuel, and leave — don’t go to the helm to map out the entire ship, and don’t wander off course. There’s nothing wrong with just getting what you need and moving on.
Know When to Stop and When to Skip Past
There’s also nothing wrong with skipping over a ship — provided you have the fuel and food to survive the next jump. Some ships just won’t have what you need. Others will be full of difficult enemies. Remember that there’s always another ship, or, if worst comes to worst, another prisoner.
Conserve Ammo and Kill Creatively
Ammo isn’t exactly scarce, but it’s not abundant either, so it’s always best to err on the side of caution when dealing with enemies. Luckily, Void Bastards gives you options.
Tourists are a pretty common, low-level enemy. They’re not overly aggressive or fast, so they’re mostly harmless on their own. However, Tourists blow up when you get too close. This makes them dangerous when they surprise you, but it also means you can clear them out without firing a shot. Similarly, they blow up when you shoot them – and damage anything else nearby. You can use Tourists to take out (or at least damage) other enemies and save your ammo like we did in the video above.
Bushwackers are proximity mines that damage an area around them. This makes them good for patrolling enemies in groups. More importantly, though, you can place them, then shoot them to make them explode on command. Our favorite use of this is to hide around a corner from a Gunpoint, toss a Bushwacker nearby, then shoot it. This takes out the Gunpoint at the cost of one mine and one bullet, instead of several bullets and a lot of health.
You also have the ability to lock doors, and citizens can’t open locked doors. This means you can trap and effectively neutralize tough enemies without actually engaging them.
Void Bastards Tips and Tricks
Choose a normal difficulty level to learn the game
This is the best setting, in our opinion, for knowing the mechanics of the game. Once you get to know it better and finish it, you can choose one of the higher difficulty levels. Also, you may choose the Ironman modifier, which ends the game after the first death.
Death in the beginning is inevitable
When you start the game for the first time you have to play the tutorial and explore the first ship. The hero does not have ammunition for the main weapon and cannot attack enemies. The death of the hero cannot be avoided. You are informed about this by one of the signatures that appear on the loading screen.
Run away from the ship when you have little health left
If you don’t have Ironman mode ON, character death doesn’t mean the end of the game. Despite that it’s always worth striving to keep your hero alive. We advise to exit the airlock only after you will have around 100 health points. This, contrary to popular belief, is a quite small amount of health points that you can quickly lose. Especially, if you find a stronger opponent or tower.
Monitor your oxygen supply
The oxygen supply counter is displayed at the top of the screen. We advise you to watch it especially in the early stages of the game, because by default it only lasts for a little more than 7 minutes. Get to rooms with oxygen tanks (ATMO) to replenish oxygen reserves (example station shown in the image). In the future, the problem of oxygen supplies is not that important due to improvements and genes, which allows to increase the maximum supply of oxygen in the tanks.
You don’t have to fight all the opponents
Void Bastards is not a game in which killing opponents is compulsory. Moreover, getting rid of them is not particularly rewarded (they can leave a small loot). Also, they can respawn. It is better to focus on exploration and a quick search for treasures. Fight only with those enemies who obviously interfere during this process.
Quickly get to the bridge to find a map of the location
Try to locate the bridge (HELMET) before entering the enemy ship. There’s a computer there, and once you interact with it, you can detect a loot all over the ship (an example of such computer is shown in the attached image). Pay attention to the large stars that indicate a unique loot (for example, spare parts for crafting of new gadgets). Also, for an additional fee you may check the position of enemies, but do not spend credits on such service if you have a smaller amount of funds in stock.
In the security room can sabotage the turrets
You should always look around for security rooms (SEC). You can temporarily disable the local security systems (security position shown in the image) or pay with credits for a permanent sabotage. This second option is a good idea if you have to explore a large ship with several rooms in which there may be turrets and other protective systems.
The game can only be saved in between missions
After that, you can safely turn off the game. When you restart it, you automatically resume the game from the same place. If you exit the game while completing a mission (before returning to the airlock), this will be considered as instant death of the current character. After restarting the game you will take control of a new prisoner and have to break through the nebula starting next to the Ark.
Heal the character before you get to a new place
Food is needed to restore lost health points – it can be found in the process of your ship exploration or you may buy it in stores. Try to get as much HP restored as possible before you start exploring another enemy location. Do not forget, however, to save some food in your inventory for the journey. Depletion of food reserves will cause the character to starve and lose health points.
Carefully read the location descriptions on the nebula map
The journey through the nebula is usually very non-linear, as you can choose different connections and reach different places. By selecting the site you can learn about possible rewards, opponents or other possible difficulties (for example, the need to restore power). Choose those sites that have the best loot, but don’t select the ones with most difficult opponents.
Don’t take weapons with low ammo on missions
As you progress through the game you will gradually craft and unlock new weapons and gadgets. Try to choose those guns to which you have a large supply of ammunition, thereby reducing the risk of using all ammo. In the case of gadgets, you can adapt them to the specifics of the mission, for example it’s worth to take Zapper on these missions, in which you fight with mechanical opponents.
Try to have at least 25 credits left in stock
This is the amount of credits required to open some closed cabinets. These always contain some valuable items (for example, parts required to craft a weapon), and without enough credits you will pass your chance of obtaining some cool stuff.
