This guide is meant to teach you everything you need to know to successfully work your way from the Pisces starter ship to the exploration vessel that can land inside the Carrick. If you can’t afford a ship rental upgrade by the end of this guide, I will personally see that you can if you decide to join our community on Discord. We’ll be moving fast and covering a lot today, so if you haven’t already got a basic understanding of the game, I’d suggest doing some research. If you find this helpful, consider subscribing at the end to catch my other videos, news updates, and guides about Star Citizen. Thank you for coming to my Tomato [Music] talk.
Star Citizen is a pretty incomplete game. That’s important to know because it can lead to a lot of ruined game sessions, unexplainable roadblocks, and very frustrating waits for things to be fixed or implemented. However, it is still a unique, expansive, and complex experience. You have four different planets to visit, a dozen moons to explore, dozens of space stations to stop by, and more than 70 completely unique, meticulously detailed spaceships to buy, rent, and rip apart. Keep in mind that after you spend that initial $45, nothing else is required to be able to buy any ship in the game, given it’s been out for a quarter or two. If you really want, you can always upgrade with real money in the future. An important caveat here is that database wipes will require you to earn those ships again while the game is still in Alpha. So, if there’s a wipe at an update, expect to get those ships all over again.
Let’s start with your starting location. If you haven’t made an account already, you can use a friend’s referral code or one of my supporters’ codes, which is linked below, to get an extra 5,000 starting credits. If you’ve already done this, just pick your starting package, of which I will always recommend the cheapest option. You can learn more about all the choices in my starting ship guide. As of now, I suggest the Aurora. Download the client and double-check your specs. 16 GB of RAM is recommended, but 32 GB will really help you here. An SSD hard drive is mandatory for this game to run well. After getting all your prep done, launch into the main menu, and from there, you’ll have four unique cities on different planets to choose from.
Of these four choices, I highly recommend either New Babbage, located on Microtech, the frozen ball of dirt on the outer rim of the system, which insulates newcomers from a lot of traffic but can also find you far away from other activities, or Area 18 at ArcCorp, the bustling ball of buildings that’s pretty central to the system but currently lacks explorable terrain. There’s also Orison, which is beautiful but can be a struggle on older GPUs, and Lorville, which is worth a try as well but lacks a little bit in items and upgrades. Lorville recently got a rework, so it’s looking pretty nice right now as well. Both of my suggested locations, New Babbage and Area 18, will offer you medical gear, weapons, armor, and other items you may need, but ArcCorp is going to require you to go to one of its moons for ground gameplay.
Keep in mind this is your initial starting point. We’re choosing where everything on your account will start and where new things in your account will spawn if you acquire them. The game is persistent, so if you fly somewhere and leave your items or ships in that place, they’re going to stay there even after all the players leave the area and you log off. The same goes for in-game purchases. This is a pretty new addition to the game as of 3.18, but it allows for things like player shipwrecks, weapon stashes, and other belongings to be found and taken by others over days or possibly even weeks.
Back to starting, though. We’re still getting used to the game, so let’s start at Area 18. Currently, this is the only location in the game with a new player tutorial, and that’s going to help us along this path. If you haven’t already been prompted to take the new player tutorial, you should. It’s not the most complete experience and still needs plenty of work, but it will guide you through the basics of the game, and we can break out of it at any point we want. It’s also built modularly, so it will probably update over time as new features are brought in. When you wake up in the game, you’re likely going to encounter some stuttering as the shaders finish loading in. Over time, you may see your performance improve slightly, but remember, the game is still fairly unoptimized. To get out of bed, just tap the F key. You can hold F and select the action you want, but tapping the F key will automatically choose the default action. This is good to know because you’ll be interacting with a lot in the game, starting with your lights, the door, and even the coffee machine nearby that you have to use during the tutorial.
For the duration of this tutorial, I’ll refer to the control hints you see on the right side of the screen for button prompts as well as the tutorial that’s telling you to use them. Keeping those control hints and regular hints that pop up contextually on will give you a lot of awareness about a game that doesn’t do the best at communicating your options. Whenever you don’t need them anymore, you can just turn them off in the pause menu. Once you’ve left your bedroom behind, you’ll make your way to the elevator and call it to your floor. Elevators can be a pain in this game, but both they and trains do physically move throughout the world, so be prepared to wait occasionally. While you may enjoy the slow stroll in the digital world, for all of you like myself who run everywhere, use the mouse wheel to change your movement speed. You can also use the mouse wheel to zoom in your view, and holding down the F key and scrolling through lists on screens in the game can be useful. These two actions sometimes get in the way of each other, so just click the middle mouse button to lock onto the screen you’re looking at.
After heading downstairs into the city, your first goal should be to get geared up for our eventual mission. There are a few things to consider here that will keep coming up. I won’t go too deep into detail, but there will be things you want to consider about your character as you travel throughout the game. First is your health. There’s a deep health system that allows for players to take the medic role, but players also need to keep themselves topped up on health juice when injured. Medical pens will help you with that. Hunger and thirst are a thing in this game—not a crucial thing and still being experimented with, but something to take note of. I say not crucial, but you can die if you let it go too far. Food and water are abundant in the game, though, and cruise water can actually handle both, so if you see those in the inventory, definitely grab them. Because this game persists, as I said, you can actually leave this food and water around on your ships for you and guests whenever you decide to take it out for an expedition, but you actually won’t need it that often while playing this game.
Law and criminality play a big role in the game as well, and your ability to peacefully traverse the journal in your MobiGlas will tell you about local laws, but you should pay very close attention to whether you are in an Armistice Zone and whether you have a crime rating. Both of those are in the top right-hand corner. The personal inner thought menu is a less-used but very helpful tool in the game that allows you to see contextual key bindings based on where you are and what you’re doing. It gives you access to item actions, emotes, favorite key bindings, and even lets you rebind keys if you need to. Holding the F key and right-clicking will bring this up and help you out a lot. I’d spend some time with it and get to know how it works.
While the in-game tutorial will have you interact with your inventory briefly, it’s not going to teach you everything about it. Everything you buy can be sent to your local or your personal inventories. Personal inventories are your backpack or armor slots, while local inventories are the space station, city, or outpost that you’re in. There are also vehicle inventories for ground vehicles and spaceships. Remember, everything persists, so you’ll have to move things between each of these inventories as you find, buy, sell, and drop items. This will be important because when we buy stuff, you need to decide where it goes. Finally, your Alpha UEC is your in-game currency. Anything you buy with this currency is not permanent; it will be lost with wipes, and it is only linked to the Alpha. If it was physicalized, you’d probably be able to lose it. This game allows for any item in your inventory to be looted, so you’ll want to pay attention to where you’re going and stay away from more dangerous areas. Right now, that’s easier said than done, but I am hopeful that the upcoming Star Map, which I made a video about recently, will help us know more about the danger levels of places we’re going. At the same time, though, don’t put too much importance on anything that you do own in the Alpha. Nothing is permanent, and things are always changing. Have some fun and slowly chip away at that fortune you want to earn. There is no rush to become a millionaire quickly, and there are plenty of people who will help you out with whatever you want to do.
Now back to reality. In addition to whatever the tutorial tells you to buy in the shop, you should also grab a gun and some ammo, as well as a backpack. That’s one of those personal inventories I mentioned. If you buy and equip the backpack first, you can actually send the rest of your purchases straight there or, once you have one, to your ship. But you’ll need torso armor to equip the backpack, so of course, grab that too. While we’re here, get a multi-tool with a tractor beam attachment; that is one of the most useful items in the game right now. While we won’t be heading to the hospital on the way out, it is somewhere you’ll want to get accustomed to. Not only will you need to get Med pens or maybe even the medical tool here for our aspiring medic, but you’ll often respawn here after dying. If you want to spawn somewhere else, you’ll need to go to that hospital and set it as your location. We’re going to do that now in the space station up in orbit.
To get to the spaceport, you’ll need to take public transportation. This will be a train or taxi of some sort. In ArcCorp, it is a flying bus. Follow the signs each step of the way and get used to the iconography. After following directions to your ship, that lovely Pisces we saw at the beginning of the video, if you decided to take the new player tutorial, will be waiting for you in the hangar. You can use the Alt + N key binding to call ATC or the F11 MobiGlas comm screen to give them a call. Either way, from here, you can begin getting accustomed to your ship. Just make sure, if you haven’t already, to transfer any inventory items you need to the ship and equip your helmet. You can use double-click to equip in the inventory and shift-click to transfer. You can also use this opportunity to try out that tractor beam you got. It will be useful for loading cargo, moving items and components, and transporting weapons and bodies. Yes, bodies. You can interact with weapons and components on your ships, removing and replacing them with others. Switching from tractor mode to detach mode using the B key will enable this, and when interacting with items, you want to pay close attention to the colors to understand what is and is not possible by rotating the item.
Okay, we’re finally going to get space-bound. It’s going to take a little while to get used to the feel of your ship, so I’d take things slow the first time. To ensure this, use your mouse wheel to lower your maximum speed, just like with walking. This is going to limit the speed that your ship can maneuver, and you can change it at any time you want. It’s very handy in areas like this hangar where you want to move slowly and more carefully. Use those control hints to understand how to move the ship around and get out of the hangar. You can stick around the area for a little while and fly between the buildings for some added challenge and learning flight, or if you’re ready to go, you can follow the waypoints up above the clouds. Keep an eye out for the landing gear indicator down in the bottom left-hand corner, though. Nobody wants to be that derp.
After following all those checkpoints, you’ll use the in-game long-distance traversal system, Quantum Travel, to fly to the nearby station. This travel system is meant to send ships flying through space at 20% the speed of light. Currently, we’re going much faster than that, decreasing travel times drastically. But 40 million km across the star system is no joke, and you’ll still be looking at 10-plus minutes of travel at times. Not to mention, the next star system is three times the size of where we are right now, likely resulting in some pretty hefty travel times for long-distance players. For now, 120 km will take us to our next destination. On approach to the station, and when approaching anywhere in the dark, really, you can press and hold the V key not only to ping and identify objects around you but to see in the dark by painting areas. Night vision is a work in progress, so this is the holdover we have. You can also press the V key to bring up scanning mode, which allows you to truly identify objects like other ships, minable entities, and derelicts. When close, you can use the space brake or thrust in the opposite direction of your travel to slow down. If you feel like it, a flip and burn is actually the most efficient way of stopping. Left shift will boost the effects of your thrust. If you want my advice, never fly directly at a space station just in case this doesn’t work out for you.
Now use Alt + N to initiate the landing process, just like when we took off. You can also press F1 to bring up your MobiGlas, which is essentially an in-game personal wrist computer. Again, from here, you can make a call on the comms channel. But while we’re looking at this, why don’t we look at our other apps? The Vehicle Manager app is where you can customize any vehicle that you have access to at that point in time. After that, the Knickknacks app can track every asset that you own and where in the galaxy they are. Skyline is your star map and will be able to show where in the star system you are as well as your routes, current fuel, and Quantum jump beacons. You can set routes in this app, and eventually, it will allow for local navigation support as well once we get that update I mentioned earlier. The next app is M Trader, which allows you to send currency to other folks, and your Contract Manager displays all available missions, whether you’ve taken them or failed them. The wrench icon allows for repair, refuel, and restock services at landing pads that offer it, and to the right of that is your journal, providing important public information such as local laws, which actually matter, and system-wide announcements. On the far right is Delphi, your reputation tracking app, and a good place to go to understand who you’re running missions for.
Once you’re in the hangar, you can hold the N key to have your ship automatically land for you if you’d prefer, or you can manually land. Landing complete. Have a pleasant stay. Once departed, look for the elevator to take you to the lobby and explore around a little bit until you find the medical center and can find the regeneration kiosk inside of there. This screen will allow you to change your respawn point to this space station and avoid ever needing to spawn on the planet’s surface again if you desire until the next wipe. Now, with your spawn set, your ship ready to go, and your gear acquired, we’re ready to start running missions.
Missions in Star Citizen are not currently the best. They’re mainly singular objective-focused and straightforward, but they’ll allow you the chance to experience the different game systems nonetheless. Right now, you have access to missions in FPS combat, ship combat, salvage, racing, investigations, package deliveries, and other mixtures of these activities at different scales in different locales. More mission types are coming soon, but this is what we’ve got in 3.21. I’m going to give you three different levels of difficulty that should supply you with good money or good equipment and get you on your way to earning your next ship. Feel free to run all of these or skip to the one that interests you the most using the chapters down below.
The easiest missions to run for new players are box delivery missions. In the past, these were reliable missions for new players to see the SES, learn how to fly, and earn some credits. At this point, they have become rather unpredictable and oftentimes dangerous. While the mission may send you to an outpost to retrieve simple boxes to throw in your ship, it may also send you to a crash site or a derelict outpost, which may have hostile NPCs present. You can choose to shoot these NPCs with your ship or engage them in FPS combat, but you are running the risk of losing everything that you’re currently carrying. I would continue to attempt the initial evaluation mission until you get a simple outpost pickup. Either way, when you reach your destination, whether an outpost or a derelict, you should come across a couple of loot boxes that may have weapons, supplies, and more in them that you can throw in your backpack. You’ll be able to get all your gear this way, and you can avoid spending money at stores for the little things. In fact, you can even take your findings back to sell. This is actually pretty useful as you’ll notice pretty quickly that these package delivery missions are not really worth the money. You may also come across a glitch that renders the mission unable to complete. This is a really annoying reality with these missions, and it can be hard to predict when something may break. So keep in mind these missions are more for the experience than the pay.
Now, if you’re actually looking for that FPS challenge, not only will mercenary missions get you plenty of targets to shoot at, but they also pay pretty well. By taking a defend bunker mission, you’ll be able to fight alongside security, denoted by blue arrows, and clear out a group of hostile pirates. Once done, you’ll have 15 minutes to loot dead bodies and caches around the bunker and get all the weapons that were dropped. Make sure not to shoot security, or you’ll end up with a crime stat that is much more trouble than it’s worth. Now, if you grabbed that tractor beam and multi-tool like I said earlier, at this point, you’re going to have a lot easier time getting all that loot and weapons back to the elevator and up to your ship. All you have to do is put that box next to whatever you want to pick up and drag it and drop it into the inventory screen. Once you return to the station, you should be able to sell them all straight from your ship, and the prices can be worth the time for a new player. Clearing and looting bunker missions like this should earn you more than 50,000 credits after just a few runs and will give you a lot of practice.