Now that we’ve built some survey ships, let’s send them off to survey.
If your ships haven’t finished construction yet, come back once they do. I’d recommend building at least 2 survey ships, feel free to build more or stick to one.
Naval Organization
The first thing you’ll want to do once your ships have been built, it put them in fleets of their own so we can command them seperately.
First, open up the Naval Organization menu by pressing the ship button.
Image of naval organization button.
Then, locate your ships. In my case, they were both in the Survey Fleet. For now, ignore everything other than the left most panel.
Image of ships.
Then, select one of your ships, and press detach. Then do the same for the others.
Image of detach button.
Now, you should see them in their own singular fleets.
Image of isolated fleets.
Next, we’re going to create an admin command for them. These provide slight boost to the ships inside them, but as you nest more, higher ranked officers are required to operate them.
First, click on the existing admin command labeled GEN (empire name) Navy.
In the tab it opens, select Survey and press Create Admin.
Image of creating admin command.
Now, type in the name for it. I put ‘Survey Command.’
Image of name of command selection.
Then, you’ll want to drag your ships into it.
Image of dragging fleets into command.
Now, let’s assign someone to be incharge of the Survey Command.
Select the command, then on the right you’ll want to choose your boosts. Obviously, the first should be survey since we’re using survey ships. The other boosts don’t really matter.
While you’re here you can go ahead and tick Automated Assignments for Admin Command.
Then press Assign Admin Commander.
Image of assigning admin commander.
You should see this line appear at the top, right below the various tabs. It displays your current commander.
Image of admin commander.
Now, click on the general command and do the same thing, choosing whatever boosts you would like.
Image of general command.
Once you’ve set both commanders, lets start assigning orders for the actual ships.
First, select one of the ships and click on Standing Orders
Image of selected ship.
Standing Orders
This is where we can assign automated orders for our ships to perform whenever we don’t tell them to do something more specific (via the Movement Orders tab).
For this ship, we’ll want to tell it to survey everything in the solar system. In the first column, select Survey Nearest Planet or Moon, that way those are done first, since they have higher chances of holding large ore veins.
Then, in the second column select Survey Next Thirty System Bodies. This will queue thirty bodies to be survyed at the same time. You can also choose smaller amounts which are right above, but a larger amount will keep your ships working on seperate batches of bodies, resulting in slightly improved efficiency, although it doesn’t really matter.
In the third column, select Fuel less than 30% (we’re selecting 30% to be safe, you could likely get away with 20% or even 10%) and below that choose Refuel from Colony or Hub (All) which tells it to refuel wherever it can, which right now is only Earth.
And finally, in the forth column, select Deployment Exceeded and below it Refuel, Resupply, and Overhaul at Colony. That way, once our 48 month deployment ends the ship will reset everything—crew and resources—and restart the 48 month deployment.
Image of standing orders.
After repeating that for all of your survey ships, you can head back to the main screen.
You should see your survey ships start to scan various bodies in the system.
Scanned locations will have a white circle around them (when using the default theme).
Image of survey ships.
While your ships are surveying, feel free to work on other construction or research.
Eventually, you should get a message like this, meaning your ship has finished surveying all bodies in the system.
Image of orders not possible.
Once that appears, head back to the fleet command, select the fleet, and click on the Movement Orders tab.
The movement orders tab is where you can tell your fleet to do specific tasks.
Whenever one of your ships finishes surveying, you’ll want to tell it to move back to Earth by selecting Earth then Move to Location and pressing Add Move.
Image of add move.
Then, head to the Standing Orders tab, and switch everything back to No Order/Condition.
Image of no orders/conditions.
Now, that ship will hang around Earth until we do something with it.
Next, let’s take a look at our resources. Head to the economics window and click on Mining.
Here, you can see your resources on Earth. For me, I’m severly lacking Neutronium.
To decide what you need, you’ll want to look at a few columns.
First, the Production, if you have something with low production, you might want to find a location with better Accessibility to mine it.
Then, Depletion, if anything is depleting soon (less than twenty years) you might want to mine more.
Finally, Stockpile, if a stockpile is at zero or close to it, you are probably using a lot of that resource. If its SP + Production is lower than your Projected Usage (your industry and shipyard tasks) you’ll need more.
For me, the most lacking resource is Neutronium since its stockpile is low (I was using it for industry) and its accessibility and production is low, meaning it’s hard to mine on Earth.
Image of resources.
Minerals
Once you’ve chosen the one or two resources you need the most, head to the Minerals window.
Image of minerals button.
Here, you can search for specific minerals on bodies you’ve scanned.
Below each mineral are two numbers, Amount, followed by Accessibility.
In my case, I typed in 1 for the amount, since I want to filter out everything without Neutronium, and 0.8 for the accessibility, so that I only find deposits where I can easily mine the resource.
You can also filter for multiple resources if you are running low on multiple, of course, you might not find anything with what you need. In that case, you’ll want to establish two mining colonies by repeating my next steps with multiple locations.
Image of filters.
Then, press search.
Image of search.
Here, you’ll see a list of locations starting from the highest amount to the lowest. In my case, the asteroid 2003 AZ84 has a large amount, 73,463 and high accesibility of 0.9, so it’s worth mining.
Image of minerals.
Colonies
Note down whatever location you choose. Then close that window and head to the System window.
Image of system view button.
Here, you’ll want to locate your location. This window also displays a lot of information that isn’t very relevent right now, so just scroll through the list. You might need to mess with the filters right above the list if you chose an asteroid.
Image of 2003 AZ84.
Then, hit Create Colony so we can begin sending automated mines there, and eventually, people (probably not for my location since it has high requirements, but that’ll be discussed later).
Image of create colony.
Research
Finally, you’ll want to get a few researches queued up for next time if don’t already have them researched.
In Power and Propulsion:
- Nuclear Thermal Engine, we’ll be designing a new, better, engine.
In Logistics:
- Trans-Newtonian Cargo Shuttles, for unloading items on ships quickly.
- Fuel Storage - Large, for storing more items.
- Cargo Hold - Large, for storing more fuel.
Image of power and propulsion research.
Image of logistics research.
Lastly, if you’d like you can scrap your survey ships since we’ll be remaking them later. You could also keep them and just refit them once we design newer versions.
In the Shipyards window, you can select scrap at the same place we constructed the ships.
Image of scrapping.
See you next time and don’t forget to save!
Image of saving.
A link will be posted here once the next tutorial is out, until then, check out the resources list for more help.