Beginner’s guide — soft landings, sharp habits

Start at Babylon 7

Babylon 7 is noisy in the best sense: docking clamps humming, kiosk screens flickering, haulers drifting with tired pilots. Hang here until muscle memory settles. Stretch goals are simple yet telling: learn which vendor buys alloys without clipping prices, memorize the shortest corridors to docking pads, skim contracts that pay credits and teach hauling lanes. Treat the station as a workshop with breathing room before you leap into void without quicksave comforts.

Boot tasks — accept tutorial prompts, accept odd jobs, accept that your first ship will look like a backpack strapped to fuel drums. Buy emergency rations of fuel and repair paste even if credits sting. Map an exit vector from the market so when prices spike you can undock without gridlock. Read patch headlines on Steam before refitting; balance passes love nudging docking fees subtly.

Once comfortable, skim the sibling guides on this wiki: how markets price risk, why acceleration budgets matter, and what ore veins actually repay travel time. Each link reinforces habits you forge on Babylon 7’s walkways.

Controls & navigation

Keyboard-and-mouse explorers live on deliberate rhythm: glide, stabilize, glide again. Memorize binds for interaction, flashlight toggles if present, docking assist toggles — anything that lowers panic clicks. Ships inherit that calm; thrash inputs burn fuel and shred rendezvous brackets. Pause mentally before throttle clamps release; yaw only after velocity vectors respect your docking ticket.

Menus behave like backpacks — inventory, blueprint tabs, corp mail. Learn search flows early; late-game haulers drown tabs and lose rare modules under nested filters. Map screens justify second monitors or bound hotkeys; plot waypoints with buffer fuel. If you share cockpits with friends, agree on callouts (bearing, range, relative closing speed) before fights or mining ops get loud.

When combat appears on your horizon, bookmark the combat guide for detection habits — beginners often lose because they never rehearsed sensor priority, not because aim failed.

Build your first ship

First ships should answer one question: can I return with cargo and dignity? Mass beats dreams here; trim decorative panels before bolting another gun. Prioritize reactor headroom, balanced thrust, cargo volume you can actually fill without idling. Test in safe space first — hairpin turns, emergency stops, cooked thruster overheat margins. Log notes; blueprints iterate faster with scribbles than with pride.

Iterate with friends if possible — each crewmate spots different failure modes (power routing, docking colliders, brittle struts). When ready to specialize (miner, racer, EW skiff), revisit Ship building for module math and blueprint hygiene.

Deploy your first base

Bases are promises to future-you: fewer manual ferry trips, quieter nights, shinier reactors. Anchor near resources worth automating yet defensible enough to survive casual raids. Sketch power first — starving extractors glitch and waste shifts. Lay storage like riverbeds: wide near inputs, narrower toward fabrication. Use signage (even mental) for incoming ore lanes vs outgoing product lanes to avoid spaghetti routing.

Automation feels magical only after manual hauls grow dull. Read Base automation before dropping dozens of drones; synchronization beats raw counts. If economy questions arise while pricing factory output, cross-check trading notes.

Join or found a corporation

Corporations stack trust mechanics atop spreadsheets. As a rookie, favor transparent ops: public haul contracts, published cut percentages, logged loot rules. Founding? Start with a charter even if it is three bullets — who authorizes wallet pulls, how disputes resolve, when members can exit with gear. Diplomacy extends your reach; arrogance shrinks it. Study Corporations for role templates and contract etiquette before promises outpace infrastructure.

Solo remains valid — corps accelerate logistics, not identity. If you prefer silence, invest saved social energy into efficient mining routes and patient market making.