Gameplay Guide

Getting Started
So you've finished the tutorial, fobbed an AI with a severe attitude problem off with excuses and gotten hold of a small ship with some weapon mounts... So what the heck do you do now? Chances are you're raring to go out and blast some unsuspecting jerks, so some options for you are listed below.

Familiarize Yourself
If you want to familiarize yourself further with the controls you can view the Controls guide. You can edit the keybindings for any of the controls in keybindings section of the settings screen. Below are some basic tips, tricks and hints which should (hopefully) aid you in whatever you decide to do;
 * After spawning new or modified ship design for the first time, all of the weapon mounts have to be assigned manually to a new weapon, otherwise you will not be able to use them. Assign them by clicking those tiny red arrows on the ship hull, in the UI of your logistics room right after spawning the ship.
 * In travel drive you can accelerate up to 10x standard speed to a max of 2.5km/s, this is useful for escaping, catching up to targets or simply covering long distances quickly.
 * When the last crew member in a ship dies and it is still holding cargo, activating the cargo scoop (with "C" key) will dump the cargo out for you to take. However activated cargo scoop slows down your acceleration and max speed to 1/2 of max value, so don't forget to deactivate it after you are done.
 * When reactors are badly damaged they will explode dropping a few units of exotic matter which is a valuable item, memorizing where the reactors are in a design and prioritizing those when attacking is a quick way to disable a ship and make yourself some cash on the side.
 * When capacitors are badly damaged they ignite surrounding tiles causing fires which can spread rapidly and damage tiles over time as well as consume oxygen.
 * Shooting out the engines of a ship will prevent it from moving far, but if it's maneuvering thrusters are still working it will still rotate which makes docking tricky.
 * Damaging the main cockpit/control room of a ship (the control room with the navigation controller) enough will disable all weapons and movement tied to that control room, in larger designs there may be a second control room with a number of weapons assigned to it which can also be disabled. Keep in mind the crew of the disabled ship will actively try to repair the control room and if they repair it enough they will regain control of the ship!
 * When you've docked to a ship in order to capture it or it's cargo you'll have to fight the crew of that ship for control, shoot attacking crew members and use doors and corners to your advantage and don't be afraid to flee in order to escape death.
 * If your ship keeps getting small holes all over the place and you hear creaky noise, it means your ship is lacking structural integrity. Unless you add more integrity modules to the design, you could suddenly die by suffocating, because of air leaking through those holes.
 * In developer mode you will be able to manually save and load multiple saves without exiting the game, however this feature is not officially supported by the developers and may cause you some bugs.

Researching Ships and Modules from Blueprints
After you use acquired blueprints by clicking RMB, they will appear in your research screen. You can open the research UI by pressing 'I' Key. To advance the research process on any subject you will need the required amount of credits. If you have enough credits you can start the research by clicking on the small arrow next to the caption of the entry.

If you go to the "modules" register, you will see a progress bar in the bottom, which shows the amount of modules of a certain "Tier" you already know. By advancing this bar you will reach certain goals. Reaching a goal will unlock additional modules, usually the missing modules of a branch.

Piracy
The main meat of the game is shooting other people's ships until the people inside die or it's too thoroughly trashed to shoot back. Typically you'll find that there will be a number of trade nodes around the asteroid base you call home and likely a number of unsuspecting tradings conducting their business ferrying goods in between these nodes. You can chase down the civilian ships moving goods around and destroy them to take their cargo which you can then sell for greater profit at the station the trader was travelling to, as the trade goods will yield most of the cash you'll need for research and purchasing items and you start with only a few thousand credits you should probably scrape together an initial investment from someone else's pockets.

As Pirate and SSC ships carry a mixture of equipment pieces, assorted parts trade goods, data cores and sometimes the odd blueprint you can make some money selling the high-level weapons, armor, repair guns and nano auras you can collect from the shattered remains of these ships, and furthermore as some of these pieces (especially the better aura items) will often have values in the thousands of credits, some weapons and armor between $150-2000, junk items from datacores being worth more than empty space, full exotic matter stacks of 128 being worth about 7.5k$ and blueprints being worth 10-20% of the research price you might find yourself discarding relatively low-value equipment pieces.

Trading
If you don't feel like throwing big chunks of metal and high explosive at some unsuspecting spaceman's face then you can always engage in the more peaceful work of trading, as long as your ship has a cargo bay you can buy (or steal from ships you destroy) trade goods from stations that produce them and sell them to stations that buy those trade goods. Remember to buy low and sell high or maybe not buy at all and steal everything from somebody who bought it with their money.

Ship Design
In the logistics screen you can customize all the hulls you researched during your journey. When you edit your first ship, you have a meagre handful of modules at your disposal- control selectors and some conduits. Only researched modules can be replaced from an existing design, which makes the customization at the beginning a little slow. As you accumulate researched blueprints you can begin to customize your ship in more detail. You can acquire blueprints from either the blueprint shops on Independent Trader, Mega-Mall or Shipyard trade hubs (only independent traders exist in the Yellow Zone, and the tier-1 brown independent trader stations do not have an equipment shop or blueprint shop, only a trade depot), or from the cargo bays of pirate (identified by the red-tinted variants of civilian trader ships) or SSC ships (identified by the triangular shape or grey-and-orange/brown color scheme ships with blue lights). As blueprint shops sell only four blueprints at a time and are likely to be selling duplicates that you might already have you should actively search for pirate or SSC ships to loot/destroy/capture in either the Red Zone to the south

Quest Tutorial
You can visit the walkthrough, if you have some quest related difficulties. Be aware that it contains major spoilers though.