Quick Start Guide
Overview
This is a guide for new players of Evospace to introduce them to the game, and guide them in learning the basics. It will cover what the various menu screens do and how to access them, and walk the player through building their first simple production lines.
Welcome to the world
Welcome to Evospace. Presuming that you just entered your first world, you will find yourself standing on a small platform, with a device in one corner. If you have not moved yet, look down - you are standing on it. That device marks your current "Home Location", and can be moved later should you want to. For now, this is going to be your first mini-factory, and this guide will walk you through the basics of how to build a simple production line.
To begin, let's take a quick tour through the game's menus. At the bottom center of the screen is a Hotbar, and will have two items on it. The first is your Multitool. This is used to pick up manufactured items, harvest plants, or dig into the ground. The second hotbar items are Basic Platform blocks, and you start out with 999 of them. Try using your Multitool [Press the 1 key and Left Mouse] to remove one of the blocks from your starting planform, and then replace it [Press 2 and Left Mouse] with a Basic Block.
To access your Inventory, press E. The center window is your inventory, and the right window is the Parts Catalog. The catalog has four tabs you can select : Unlocked (things you know how to make), Favorites, All items in the game, and Search results. You can drag items from your inventory to your hotbar for quick access. To clear a hotbar slot, right-click on it.
In the lower left of the screen are a number of icons. The top five can be used to set the time of day. The two underneath those are for research, and the last two are for singling you are flighting (once you have a Jetpack) and a toggle to highlight inputs and outputs of machines. Don't worry about any of these for now.
Collecting resources manually
Now it's time to gather some resources. You will need to go out and find some Copper Ore and some Fuel. Walk away from your starting platform and notice that there is an indicator in the upper left of the screen telling you what you are looking at at. Don't worry about getting lost - you can always return Home by pressing Escape and using the Teleport to Home option.
Copper is smelted from either of two ores called Chalcopyrite or Malachite, both which you can find in colored rocks - Black with red stripes or Green. Chalcopyrite can also be found in reddish patches of ground. Once you find some, use your multitool to gather about 30 ore.
For fuel, you can either find some Coal in Black rocks or greyish patches of ground, or harvest some Logs from trees. Again, get about 30 units of fuel.
Once you have your resources, return home. It's smelting time.
Making Copper
You start out with 99 Stone, which you can use as an initial building material until you have Copper. If you need more stone, mine the rocks that are scattered about in the world.
Now to smelt the Copper ore into copper, we will need to make two machines. Open your inventory, and look at your Unlocked Catalog. In the Stone section, click on the Stone Furnace and the Stone Smelter to make one of each. As you are making items, you can see the progress in the lower-left of your screen.
Open your inventory, click on the Stone Furnace, and close the inventory. You will see a ghostly furnace in front of you. You can rotate it using the R key if you like, but it's orientation will not matter. Pick a spot on your platform, and use the left mouse key to put it down. If you want to pick it up again, you would use your Multitool. Notice that on the top of the furnace, there is a dashed red circle. As it's a dashed line, it is an Output, and as it's Red it's for Heat. Right click on the furnace to access it's interface.
In the middle of the interface is a progress bar. Above that to the left is the Input area, currently empty. Drag the fuel you collected into that empty box. The furnace is now creating heat, but as it's not being used, it's in a paused state - no fuel is being lost.
Now open up your inventory again, and select the Stone Smelter. On the bottom of the smelter is a solid red circle. That tells you that it's the input side for heat. Put the smelter on top of the furnace, so the red circles touch each other. Then the heat from the furnace will flow into the smelter.
Finally, open up the smelter (right click) and put in the Copper Ore. You will see Copper Plate being created in the output area of the smelter, under the progress bar.
Researching new machines
Before we look at the research tree, we need to do some preparation. You will need 16 copper plate, so pick that up from the smelter.
Create one of each of the following : Stone furnace; Copper Sterling Engine; Copper Compact Generator; Copper Computer. We are going to assemble these items to create Research Points so that we can unlock new machines.
Put down the Furnace. On top, put down the Engine (connecting the red circles). The engine has a dotted Yellow circle, as it coverts heat into motion (i.e. Kinetic energy). Connect the yellow side of the Generator to the engine. This has a dotted Blue circle, as it converts Kinetic energy into Electricity. Finally connect the Computer.
Now fuel the new furnace, and we're ready to do some Research.
Press J to access your research tree. We are going to unlock Automatic Mining, but it's locked behind two other technologies. So first, research Basic Machines by clicking on it, then clicking on Start Research. Once that's complete, unlock Automation and then Automatic Mining. If the research progress stops, you've probably run out of fuel.
Mining
Now we don't want to keep going out and manually mining ore - it's time to automate that. Build the following : Three Copper Hand Generator; A Copper Drilling Rig; and a Stone Chest.
Next we want to find a place to drill for Chalcopyrite. Press M to open your map. If the ore names are not shown, use the Options button, and select Ore Names. Find the nearest Chalcopyrite Ore to your home and walk over there.
Select the Drilling Rig from your inventory, but don't put it down just yet. Check the text at the top of the screen to make sure that you are over the Chalcopyrite deposit. Next, select your Basic Platform blocks and build a 6x6 platform. You can Drag to build a line of blocks, or Shift Drag to build an area. You could build directly on the ground, but it's easier to keep things tidy on platforms. If there's any dirt on top of the platform, the multitool can remove it. Now place your drilling rig, checking that it's going to mine the correct ore.
On the back of the rig, there are 3 Kinetic inputs. Attach your hand generators to these (match the circles using R to rotate) and once placed, use Left Clicks to wind them up.
On the other side of the rig, there's a square output port. Put your Chest right in front of it, touching the rig. Now the rig will happy mine ore for you while you are away doing other things.
Next Steps (Homework)
Here's some ideas that you might want to do to move forward.
- Feed and Empty your copper smelter. Use Chest and Robot Arm to feed ore into the smelter and take out copper plates. Use Conveyor to move items from place to place.
- Replace the drilling rig hand generators with sterling engines. You'll need a fuel source (Atmospheric Condenser to feed water into a Automated Farm to feed wood into Furnace)
- Make copper more efficient. Middle Mouse click on some Chalcopyrite ore. To the right is a series of machines that prosses the ore into different forms. Multiple plates can be made from a single ore.
- Build one of every Copper object. Understand what they do, and how they might fit into production lines. Middle Clicking on a machine will tell you how it's made and what it can do.
- Move from Copper into Steel. As you move up the resource tree, your machines will become faster, but need more energy.
Closing
We hope you find this guide useful. If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to put them into the Talk page, and we'll review them. Also, if you have any questions, we have a Discord channel here : General Discord Channel