Ostranauts – Walkthrough Gameplay

By / September 18, 2020 / Guides

Ostranauts Walkthrough Gameplay

Ostranauts is a detailed simulation of owning and living aboard a spaceship, in a solar system where honest living is a slow death sentence. Set in the NEO Scavenger universe, where Earth has suffered cataclysmic collapse, the rest of the System lives on in a state of capitalistic dystopia.

Players will create their captain, build or customize their starting ship from the spoils of their career history, and find ways to keep fuel in their tanks, food on their plates, and the debt collectors at bay.

Setting:

Ostranauts takes place in the same universe as NEO Scavenger, at approximately the same time or soon after. However, it follows a separate cast of characters having their own, parallel story.

In this universe, human civilization has expanded into the solar system, inhabiting many of the planets, moons, and asteroids. However, the collapse of civilization on Earth, coupled with the ablation cascade in orbit, has rendered Earth unreachable. Those colonies unable to adapt withered and died. The rest formed the collection of states, corporations, and factions of the System.”

Main Menu

As with any great game, it has a main menu! Here you can access your options, start a new game or continue a save (Note: Due to a bug with the deletion of save files the devs recommend you to not manually delete saves, but to overwrite them with a new game!). You can also access the ship editor. Which I will talk about towards the end of this guide. You will also find links to the aforementioned socials and a manual in case you need a quick refresher.

To start your first game select “New Game” and choose a save slot.

General UI

Before explaining the tutorial I would like to quickly go through the general ui.

On the left side you have your PDA. This has the following options:

  • Goals: Clicking goals pins your objectives to the right hand corner. Click again to close.
  • Crew: This opens the crew management menu, here you can dictate your crews working hours.
  • Powerviz: This turns on the power overlay which will show you how conduits are flowing.
  • Build: This allows you to give orders to install certain items. A job lot of the item will be put down and your crew will bring the necessary items.
  • Orders: You can give your crew certain orders using this menu, when you’re also stuck doing something the cancel order comes in very handy.

This shows your character, their name and their needs.

A log of what is going in the world, pay attention as the game will warn you of important events here.

This is the clock and your cash, clicking the cash opens your income menu. You can also fast forward and slow down time.

This is the information of every item or person on the tile you are hovering over. Pay close attention to this as there is some important information:

  • Temp: Shows the room’s temperature in Kelvin, a room should not be too cold or hot.
  • Pressure: A room needs to be pressurized for it to be able to hold oxygen. If this start is decreasing there might be a leak.
  • O2: The amount of oxygen in the room
  • N2: The amount of nitrogen in the room
  • CO2: The amount of carbon monoxide in the room/ (Too much co2 is fatal.

Basic Controls

  • Left click: Move character
  • Right click: Open the interaction menu
  • WASD: Rotate the camera
  • Spacebar: Pause and unpause the game
  • I: Open inventory

Tutorial

For now, every character’s life starts in the character creation area known as: Chargen. Your character will wake up in a bathroom on Chargen where you will be free to create your character. You will be prompted with 5 objectives.

Character Creation:

Your first step should be to customise your character. Right clicking on the sink will open up it’s context menu. From there you can press Sink>Use. This opens up the character creation. Here you will be able to change your name, randomize your appearance and change your pronouns.

When you’re ready hit “Done!”. You can either right click the door and use the context menu to open it or left click in the other room. Which will make your character automatically open the door.

Career:

Now that you’re in the next room you will find a yellow kiosk on the left side. This is a Build-a-Resume Center. From here you will be able to build your character’s background story. This will determine your character traits, your background relationships and your net worth. Right click the kiosk to use it. Select a qualification to begin building your story. (Note: In the Early Access it is only possible to choose the “Shipbreaker” qualification.) Follow the prompts on screen and whenever you’re done with all the prompts, press submit to exit the kiosk and move onto the next room..

Traits

In this room you will see two kiosks. The one on the left is to determine your character traits other than your background traits. For example: in your background you may be skilled in electronics, but in the self-care kiosk you will be able to determine your personality traits. You may decide that your character is brave or honest. So right click the self-care kiosk to open the menu. On the right side you will see “Points left X”. You can choose as many conditions as you want as long as your points left are not in the negative. You also can not choose conflicting perks. Someone who is feeble also can’t be strong. Feel free to experiment here and press “accept” whenever you’re ready and remember: The game isn’t all about scavenging, you will also need to lead your crew.

Equipment

Now that you have picked your traits there is only one thing left to do. Choosing your equipment. You may remember from the basic controls that “I” opens your inventory. Under your character’s inventory box you will see three items. These items are essential for your survival, but you may need more, but first it is a good idea to put on your pressure suit. Click on your character and drag off their current close. Then drag the pressure suit onto your naked character. Your pressure suit helmet you can leave off as there is oxygen in your current room. Now you can right click the “Supply kiosk” and use it. The left side of the kiosk is what the kiosk has in stock and the right side shows what you have on you. It would be a good idea to sell your old clothes for a bit of extra cash. On the bottom right corner you can see how much cash you have. The following items are what you should buy in order. Preferably you would get them all, but if you can’t that’s okay.

  • Crowbar
  • Work Lamp
  • A Weber Laser Torch
  • 3-5 Conduits
  • 3-5 Hull Patches
  • 3 Food items (Trenchers)
  • 3 Drink pouches)

When you’re done press accept and then exit. Walk into the next room right click the ground and press “Launch Ship”

Pod

And here you are in your salvage pod almost ready for your adventure into space. Don’t worry too much about every part here as I will explain them later on in the building section. All you need to know now is that you are on a salvage pod that runs on batteries. This means if the batteries run out chances are that you will die as well. You can see this battery here.

Luckily you have a spare! It is the battery on the right side with a white border on it. Now you just need to install it. Right click the battery to install it. A grid will show up. Align the battery with the red arrow facing into the wall (“R” Rotates the battery). This is the output of the battery and all along the ship walls are conduits (They transport electricity). Your character will carry the battery to its location and install it. I recommend you to fast forward here as it takes some time to install a battery.

Now that we solved the power issue we can start our adventure into space. Right click the “Nav Station” on the top and press use. It’s time to fly this baby!

Flying

When you first open the nav console you will be presented with a cheat sheet. Read this carefully and click to dismiss it. You will be presented with the entirety of the nav console. I will explain each part in more detail in the flying section. For now all you need to know is that your ship is the blue arrow, the red arrows are local authorities, the diamond is a station and the yellow stars are derelicts. Either left click on the station or a derelict to target it. Then you must use WASD to move your ship. You can use Q and E to change your rotational direction. If you’re in a spin in a certain direction you can hold the opposite rotational thruster and you will automatically stop.

When you get close to a station or derelict you will notice that your proximity alarm will start beeping. When you’re within 5 kilometers within a station (which you can see by the RNG on the map) you will be able to start docking. Click the yellow arrow on the right to go to the docking menu.

Press the button Select Docking Target. Choose the Question Mark. Go to Docking and press Accept. Will now see a white circle on the left with a green circle hopefully in the middle of it. You may need to use A or D to rotate the ship to find the green circle. Now slowly (Hitting another object in space is generally not a smart idea) using WASD get closer with the green circle and align the white squares with the green squares. When you are within 600 meters of a derelict or 2 kilometers of a station you will get a green light that say clamp align. Press the button close to it that says clamp engage to dock! If the red light turns on you’ve successfully docked. If you wish to undock, Press select docking target again. Pick the target you’re docked at. Press pushback/taxi and press accept. Press clamp engage again and use WASD to fly away from the dock. If you don’t want to do that then. Hit the red cross on the top right, put on your helmet and head out.

For now you’ve learned the very basics of Ostranauts which should be enough to get you going, but there is way more to learn which I will cover later on in this guide. (Under Construction)

Advanced Electronics

Battery

The battery forms the base for electronics in Ostranauts. This is going to be your first interaction with a power source. So it is important you understand it. Power sources in Ostranauts work based on an input and output system. These are indicated by the red arrows as seen in the image below. When hovering over the battery you will see the charge that the battery holds in the top right. For our example below this ~43 kWh. A battery can hold a max charge of ~90 kWh. Toggling POWERVIZ will also show a green bar on the battery that represents its charge. (You can also interact with the battery to open it’s control panel, which shows it’s charge, but this is non-functional now.)

Conduit

The conduit is by far the most important part of the electronics. It takes the electricity from a power source to a device. To power devices install a conduit next to the output of a power source and install conduits till you reach a tile next to the device. This will power the device. Devices have varying inputs some may need to be powered from the back some can be powered from any tile.

The power switch is a variation of the conduit. The power switch allows you to shut off power from where the power switch is installed.

Reactor

The next item is the reactor. The reactor is a power source and is similar to the battery in that it has an input and output. The difference is that the reactor can create its own power.

A reactor needs 3 components to function:

  • A D20 Canister
  • A Liquid Helium Canister
  • A battery

The canisters just have to be present on the ship and will indirectly fuel the reactor.

The battery is to kickstart the reactor and will need to be plugged into the input of the generator. It also needs a charge, 20 kHw seems to be the minimum. anything less will give you a very short window to start the reactor. For a new player I would recommend a battery with a 40 kHw charge as to give you some time to figure out the reactor.

After having everything set you can interact with the reactor control panel.

This screen looks very intimidating, but I think anyone should be able to solve this. I recommend you to try this on your own! I will offer a hint if you’re a bit worried: The ignition sequence panel in the bottom left is a step by step to figuring out how to start the engine.

It’s okay if you couldn’t figure it out after the hint. Here is how to start the generator (hover over the black box):

  • Toggle the switch PWR BUS to BATT (If this doesn’t work chances are you are either hooked up wrong or the batteries are dead, the top left panel shows the charge in your batteries)
  • Toggle the CORE PURGE to RGH
  • Wait for the LAS CAP light to stop blinking
  • Flip the LAS ALIGN switch
  • Flip the PEL FEED switch
  • Flip the CRYO switch
  • Press the FUEL REG switch
  • Press the FWD and REAR switch
  • Flip the MHD switch
  • Flip the ignition switch when the CAPACITOR CHARGE is at READY

Congratulations, if you are here you have started the reactor! This baby generates enough power to last for months. You will need to periodically check up on the reactor though, because it runs on D2O and He3. This panel shows how much you have left:

While the reactor is spinning you might as well give the old batteries a charge. Just change the PWR BUS to CHRG and the batteries will fill up. You know in case you may need to kickstart the reactor again.

With the reactor running you can basically power your whole ship using the output on the reactor.