When you start the game, the first real choices you make are your starting legendary officer and your second officer. See the Officers page for more information to help you decide which ones you want. It is generally a good idea to start with one officer of each class, unless you have a specific setup in mind. Having an officer of each class will come in handy when you get to some of the later tasks.
Story Quests[edit]
Resource Collection[edit]
The first step is to visit all the sectors to find out which are still producing and which are not. If the sector is still producing, you will get a dialogue and the option to evacuate the crew from the sector. Evacuation is only useful when a Chruul fleet is headed to the sector, you will not have a fleet available to handle them in the next month, and you can get some sort of fleet (probably a shuttle) in before the Chruul get there. Once you have a fourth and/or fifth officer, your can send them out on supply runs to collect resources. An optimum path will generally appear.
The second step is to restore the destroyed sectors (the ones with a skull) and upgrade the existing sectors. If a sector is always full before any others are, upgrade the capacity. If a sector is not using anything close to its capacity before you get to it, upgrade the resource generation. It is generally best to upgrade asteroids (Materials) and pulsars (Dark Matter) before nebulae (Fuel) and colonies (Crew), unless you are experiencing a shortage of one of the latter. If you are playing the IndieBox disk version, crew is more important because it represents station health. When restoring destroyed sectors, try to leave two of them for Act 2.
The third step can be mixed in with the second step. It involves researching the Drone Control Room, building a Satellite Drone, and deploying it to a sector. You will need a level 4 engineer to build the drones and a level 4 tactical to deploy them. Higher leveled officers can build drones and deploy them faster. See Starbase operations for the construction details. The best places to deploy the first drones are the sectors farthest away from Halcyon 6, the sectors farthest from the supply run path, and the sectors that fill faster than the others.
Alien Side Quests[edit]
The first time any of the four alien races sends a fleet to you, they are just introducing themselves. The next time they send a fleet, they will offer a quest, even if your only choice is to kill them to stop the bombardment.