Cosmoteer Starship Architect & Commander: Basic Guide to Career Mode

Cosmoteer is a great game falling somewhere between Factorio and FTL:Faster Than Light.
Both paragons are woefully complicated and getting a corner to start can be difficult.
This guide aims to provide useful starting knowledge with brevity.

At time of writing near to all resources are youtube videos in the range of 10 to 30+ minutes.
Career mode is great but early mistakes can completely derail progression, and busy people who just want to have fun can miss a few useful things on the way.

• Pick a Laser based ship – these use a lower variety of resources and thus need less crew and space micromanagement.
• An understaffed battleship will get a beating by an overstaffed fighter – guns need constant supply which under combat conditions can and will get snagged, this is what you will spend most of your game time optimising.
• Add layers of tessellated 2×1 armor (like bricks) – this spreads damage out over more armour cells compared to solid blocks.
• Use the copy/paste feature and the mirrored placement feature – It makes for somewhat bland ships but getting More Dakka More Faster with fewer clicks is More Better.
• Engines can and should be placed in armoured boxes – Physics be damned when you start building out your ship to big boy numbers, cubes of thrusters pointing ‘inward’ with armoured cells last longer.
• Rooms slow down your crew – do not build your ship out of storage spaces, corridors are there for a reason
• Manual Door and Corridor placement is your friend – sometimes a room is better with More Dakka Doors.
• OSHA is for plebs – barracking crew next to a live reactor/chemical plant/explosive cache is a
  good idea due to shorter paths.
• Bigger Reactors Need Less Overall Crew – S/M/L produce 1/2/3 Installed Batteries per crew trip, fewer trips = more things powered.

• You won’t make a profit through basic trade – Miner or Pirate Privateer are the valid career choices at the moment.
• Crewman 50 costs at or around 1000 Monies regardless of how many ships you have – fewer crew surrounded by more armour = richer.
• Shields and Armour save you money – Every engagement will cause collateral damage to your vessel(s), but you can pay for it to only cost steel instead of copper products and lives.
• The Mining Laser is Great – Time and motion spent on the mining laser (usually only 1 per ship until much later in game) will make up for itself in collecting more resources on one trip before getting interrupted by Rude Strangers.

• Cannons Are Not Your Friend – Cost in ammunition + crew + storage space + collateral damage to perfectly good salvage will rarely work in your favor.
• You can steal Liberate some ships – If a destroyed/abandoned ship has an airlock you can transfer crew to it to take it over once it’s been defeated so watch your aim.
• Battlestar Galactica is a cautionary tale – spread resources and factory facilities through multiple ships and give all of them hyperdrives.
• Space Dwarfs Are Rich – Mining is *very* lucrative in this game, doubly so if you can delegate it to dedicated ships and go Pirating Privateering to aggressively keep them safe.
• Do major renovations away from space stations – if in orbit of a station, any resource you don’t have will be bought and paid for on the spot, this will lead to expensive mistakes.

By Haventree Attack Shark