ostranauts beginner guide: Salvage, Survival & Crew Tips

This ostranauts beginner guide begins with character creation because your spacer’s history, traits, skills, and health shape the opening hours. Character generation is flexible, so do not chase a perfect resume on the first attempt. Focus on avoiding severe weaknesses while choosing skills that support salvage, repairs, navigation, or social interaction.

The character creator lets you adjust appearance, pronouns, romantic interests, previous life events, skills, and traits. The life-history choices can add both useful abilities and lasting scars. You can also trade years of your character’s life to modify traits, but delaying this process may expose a spaceborn character to additional age-related frailties.

Video Highlights:

• Create a spacer through the resume and life-history systems.
• Choose a ship with an OSR rating of Moderate or better.
• Follow the tutorial goals for clothing, tools, lights, doors, and ship repairs.
• Learn time controls before beginning regular salvage work.

Your first ship does not need to be impressive. A modest vessel with a moderate or better OSR rating is suitable for learning the core systems. If the ship offered during character generation is unsafe or unaffordable, consider the long-term cost before accepting it. Declining a ship can cost another year of your spacer’s life when searching again.

After entering the station, follow the tutorial goals in order. Put on clothing, activate lights and doors, collect your tools and tote bag, and learn how to install electrical cable. The tutorial also introduces the Ostraka guidebook, the VIZOR, basic ship maintenance, and the navigation console.

Do not rush through the time controls. Ostranauts uses a full 24-hour day, and normal-speed play can make routine work feel slow. Reduce time when positioning a ship or handling danger, then increase the speed during safe work periods. The FFWD function becomes useful later, but it does not complete blueprints or orders during the skipped period.

Early salvage is the most practical way to learn ship interaction while building cash reserves. The tutorial derelict provides a controlled introduction to docking, suits, airlocks, dismantling, and selling. Treat every wreck as a workplace with hazards rather than as a container of free loot.

Before leaving your ship, check your suit, captured air, tools, and available cargo space. A basic pressure suit can protect you from hard vacuum, but its breathable air supply is limited. Helmet alarms should be treated as an immediate warning to return, re-enter the ship, and cycle the air.

A salvage license is also important. Scavenging without the required license can lead to fines, bribes, or imprisonment. The tutorial derelict includes a temporary license, so keep it with you and confirm its remaining time before beginning a larger trip.

The license-only kiosk pays for items carried or dragged to the selling point. Later, barter zones make inventory management easier by letting you define where goods are stored and where purchases are delivered. Until then, keep valuable parts organized and avoid filling your ship with low-value clutter.

Repairing salvage before selling can improve its value, especially when the part is in poor condition but still functional. The stir welder consumes batteries, so keep affordable Halvorson batteries available. A simple repair loop is effective:

1. Locate a useful part.
2. Check whether it is accessible and safe to remove.
3. Uninstall or drag it to your ship.
4. Repair it when the cost and battery use make sense.
5. Sell it through the appropriate kiosk or store it for later construction.

Use your first earnings to stabilize the ship rather than spending everything on upgrades. Pay outstanding bills, buy nitrogen for navigation, oxygen for breathing, and power for ship operation. If your license is about to expire and cash is short, local courier jobs that begin and end at KLEG can provide a safer bridge than illegal salvage.

Ostranauts combines ship simulation with personal survival, so a healthy character can still die because of a bad airlock order, pressure imbalance, collision, fire, or depleted supplies. Build the habit of checking both the spacer and the vessel before every major action.

Your primary needs include food, water, sleep, hygiene, and comfort. Additional needs cover social and personal goals such as achievement and intimacy. Neglecting these systems can create stress, poor performance, and disruptive behavior. A character who is exhausted or in pain moves and works more slowly, while severe G-forces can cause unconsciousness during a critical maneuver.

A pressure suit can protect you in vacuum, but wearing one for too long can create its own problems. Uns suited characters should not be allowed to open airlocks or enter exposed areas. Use the roster permissions to control who may interact with dangerous ship systems.

Fire prevention is easier than firefighting. Sparks from wiring or welding can ignite fabric, paper, cigarettes, and other loose objects. Store flammable clutter in racks or overhead bins, repair damaged cables, and reduce electrical load with redundancy where practical. A breathable atmosphere near 20 kPa oxygen and 80 kPa nitrogen is comfortable while reducing the chance of oxygen-rich combustion.

Navigation requires patience. Relative velocity toward or away from a target is shown as VREL, while VCRS represents perpendicular relative velocity. When approaching directly, keep VCRS near zero. Match speed before docking, align the clamp with the target’s airlock, and dock below 100 m/s. Near stations or derelicts, keeping maneuvering speed below 200 m/s provides a wider safety margin.

Once the first salvage runs are stable, shift from direct control toward structured orders. Ostranauts becomes easier to manage when work is queued, storage is organized, and crew permissions match the ship’s safety requirements.

Orders let you uninstall parts, haul objects, repair components, or complete other work without manually directing every movement. Blueprints handle construction. If an order is ignored, inspect it for missing components, inaccessible locations, absent tools, or a crew member who is currently off work.

Zones are especially useful during salvage. A hauling zone gives crew a destination for marked items, while a barter zone makes goods appear in selling and purchasing inventories. Forbidden zones keep crew away from unsafe or restricted areas and can be applied to the captain, other crew, or both.

Schedules also reduce micromanagement. Crew members work more effectively during assigned work shifts and recover more fully during scheduled sleep. During free time, they may socialize, rest, or pursue their own needs instead of accepting work commands. FFWD can help pass uneventful time, but check your surroundings first because skipped time does not complete queued construction or removal work.

Hiring should wait until your ship can support another person. A practical reserve of approximately $60,000 to $80,000 in collateral death pay may be needed before expanding the crew. A potential employee’s mood, requested pay, skills, and current circumstances all affect the conversation.

Directly controlling employees can reduce their autonomy and create stress. Use orders, blueprints, schedules, zones, and permissions to guide them instead. Direct control is best reserved for urgent situations or tasks that require immediate intervention.

The first day should establish a repeatable routine rather than maximize profit. Complete the tutorial, perform a small salvage trip, sell or store the best parts, refuel, and create enough structure to repeat the process safely.

A good recovery plan prevents one mistake from ending a promising run. If a character is injured, bandaging can stop bleeding, but recovery still requires time and rest. An immunobooster may help when affordable, but it does not replace safe scheduling and medical attention.

If a fire starts, venting the ship to hard vacuum can extinguish many ordinary fires, although this sacrifices breathable atmosphere. If a collision or pressure accident occurs, stabilize the ship before attempting additional salvage. If a decision produces consequences that only become clear later, use the autosave stack or create a hard save before another risky action.

The game’s open-ended structure supports several long-term directions:

For current game information and development updates, consult the official Blue Bottle Games Ostranauts page. Build choices and systems may change as development continues, so verify major mechanical changes against current official information before relying on older routines.