Solargene Tips and Tricks for Beginners

With this guide, I want to help new players who find the in-game tutorial insufficient.

Moon or Mars
You can choose between different starting scenarios. I would recommend to start with the Moon or Mars for new players.

The Moon has the advantage of more efficient solar panels, but nights have a duration of half a month. Therefore power and battery management is essential to survive.

Solar panels are less efficient on Mars, but the night is only 12 hours long.

Make your choice and set the difficulty of your game to the beginner level.

Get a contract to get cash and start your first base

One nation already has a spaceport on your planet. Select that nation and choose a contract to build a base. You get a generous amount of money to build a base in a certain amount of time.

Now select a location for your base. It is good to have various different resources on your map. Ice is good to get water and oxygen. CO2 is essential for various industries. Noble Metals are good to produce electronics and make money by exporting them.

Find a flat spot and build 2 or 3 landing pads. They are free to build and are necessary to import resources and later personnel. Several landing pads are better, because they make the early game faster, since several rockets have to land.

Look in the base building tutorial to see which resources you need to import. You have a generous amount of money, so I advise to import more than the suggested minimum amount.

Build several solar panels and batteries. You later have to increase their number.

Now after you successfully build landing pads, solar panels and batteries you are able to build the real base.

Build pillars, platforms, stairs and an airlock. You can build an airlock by placing a building block and choose at the top the option “airlock” (which is the only option at this stage)
Don’t forget to add a door to the front of the airlock.
Add further building blocks behind the airlock, but now select the option hallway.

Only the first blocks need pillars. Later you can build freely unconstrained by physics, but adding some pillars might improve the look of the station.

Don’t forget to connect the airlock with the hallway with a door. Select the hallway. Below the construction menu, a new menu called “hallway” should appear. Add a few benches and a food vending machine to the hallway.

Now add a pilot drill from the construction menu to the planetary surface. This drill will give you some basic resources if you later assign an astronaut to it.

Add a gas container to store gas and liquids.

Add a storage room and build several storage units.

If you lack resources, feel free to buy them with the “warehouse” after a few minutes a rocket with your new supplies should appear.

A small home
Now it is time to recruit 3 crew members. Miners and industry workers are useful in the beginning. Researchers, Medics and Bio-engineers should come a little bit later. Click on the flag in the crew hiring screen to randomly change the crew roles until you find a fitting combination.

Build crew quarters with beds for your new crew. In the current version, you have to manually assign each astronaut to their individual quarter.

Assign miners to various drill and mining buildings. But check before, which buildings are useful at your location.

Build an industrial room to transform ice into water and later a converter to transform water into oxygen and hydrogen. Water and oxygen are necessary for a lot of industry and farming later.
You have to manually assign laborers to your industrial room.

Look at your energy supply, solar panels and batteries. A power plant room could help during long nights, because power generators with fuel function during the night.

A cafeteria which fits to the colonist nation could increase happiness. But you have to hire a robotic-cook. Also different cafeterias require different agricultural goods.

A hospital should be constructed now. If your station works fine, you need relatively few medics.

A laboratory and a scientist is necessary to start research. You also have to add a server room.
The demand for laboratory equipment and servers rises exponentially with the number of your scientists. A low number of scientists is enough to research key early technologies.

Grow
Expand your station. Expand your crew. Research key technologies like farming. But always don’t forget the necessary power reserves to survive long nights.