Surviving the first night

This is a step by step guide to surviving the first night. If you don't want to be spoilered, then stop reading now!

Completing the Tutorial

You wake up next to the crater left by your crashed ship and a basic outpost. Your first task is to complete the brief tutorial. Follow each instruction in turn. When the tutorial is complete the forcefield will be lifted.

Take inventory and stay warm

Open your inventory by pressing 'i'. You start off with 5 torches and 3 Ore Extractors. The latter are valuable machines for mining ore veins, but not of immediate survival use. The first are absolutely essential.

Select the hotbar slot containing the torch icon and place one the ground a couple blocks away from your machines. This will supply light, as well as heat when you stand near to them. The suit indicator in the top right of the screen indicates the external temperature and the internal suit temperature. Your suit will automatically keep yourself warm, but this costs energy. If you stand near a torch, you will see the external temperature rising, which means your suit uses less power to keep you warm. Watch out with getting too hot though, that will make your suit spend power to cool you back down!

Gather fuel

The machine with the big laser on it is your central power hub. This is a power generator, that gathers solar power, as well as containing a small fuel generator that can burn materials for added power. It will supply power to the nearby machines and the power storage block.

You can take power directly from the hub by interacting with it ('e'), then pressing 'take power'. At the start of the game your fuel reserves are limited to that supplied for the tutorial which will not last long. Therefore your next task is to gather fuel.

If you have chosen to play on easy difficulty a coal vein and extractor are provided for you, otherwise you'll need to search for fuel. If you are extremely lucky, the impact crater will have exposed a coal vein. But the more dependible source of initial fuel are the trees around the crater. Dig up the trunks and collect them. Now head towards the hub, interact with it ('e') and press 'add resources'. This will start burning one of your logs. You will have to manually add more fuel to it, until you have to resources to automate this process.

With the hub burning logs, you should quickly notice that the graphic on the Power Storage Block starts spinning, which means it is collecting power. You can draw power from there, or wait until it is full and power starts being stored in the hub.

Explore your surroundings

Now that you have low but steady supply of power, you can start exploring your surroundings. Any power lost to keeping you suit warm you can replenish at the hub. Keep an eye on the power level on the top left. If the bar is empty, you will quickly start to cool down to the point where you can pass out from hypothermia.

Make sure you have enough power to get back to the crash site and power up from the hub.

Your suit comes with a scanner tool, which is invaluable for surviving. You can select the tool by pressing 'M'. Now you can scan using the right mouse button, or send out a material ping with the left button. Watch out with using pings unnecessarily, they use a large amount of suit power.

Your next exploration task will be to scan your surroundings. Aim at a block you haven't scanned yet, bring up your scan tool and hold the right mouse button until the popup window in the bottom left tells you the scan is complete. Try to scan all the blocks in your surroundings, including snow, dirt, logs and leaves!

Research your surroundings

Now that you've scanned these blocks, it's time to process the scans at the research station back at the crash site. Open the interface by pressing 'e'. The window will show you a list of your unprocessed scans, followed by how many research points they will grant you once processed. Research points aren't important for now, so ignore them. Process all the scans you have in your list. Each one takes power to process, but if you've been keeping your hub filled with logs or coal, its power bar should be most of the way full, and plenty for processing all your scans.

Processing the scans may result in unlocking research projects, but for now you don't have to worry about that, scanning your surroundings had a more important goal.

Ping your surroundings

With the blocks around you scanned and processed, your suit now knows its characteristics and this allows you to use your material pings to great effect.

In particular, the 'unknown material' ping is what we will be using next, in order to find our first ore vein. Switch to your scan tool and with 'Unknown Material' ping selected, press the left mouse button. This will highlight any blocks in range of you that have a characteristic your suit doesn't yet know about.

If you didn't scan all your surroundings, this ping will return the blocks around the crash site such as dirt and rock. If that happens, scan and process those blocks, then try again.

If successful, you should see a cluster of unknown signatures somewhere underground or inside nearby hills. Keep an eye on your power levels though, there's no need to freeze!

Dig to the veins

Now you will need to dig a path towards those signatures, and see what they are. Scan the ore vein and process it. You will notice that they grant more research points than common materials did. Once you know an ore block, you can go back to the vein and scan it again, and the tool will give you information about this particular vein; how big it is and how much ore it contains (this is not the same).

Use your Grappling Hook ('F') to quickly get back up out of holes you've dug.

If you are not playing on easy then the first ore you want to find is Coal. If you find Copper, Tin or Iron, this will be great later on, but not of immediate use. Try to remember the location if you can, we will get back to them later. If you don't remember, that's fine, we can use the ore ping later to find our way again.

Mine Coal

Ore veins in FortressCraft Evolved can be massive, containing up to millions of units of ore. Digging them up is not a case of clicking a couple of times; you will need to spend power and probably use machines.

With your first coal vein at hand, spend a little time creating a safe path back from the vein to the crash site. You will need to walk this path a lot, so this time will be well spent.

Next, you should top up your power from the hub and make your way down to the coal vein. Put a torch down to save on spending too much power staying warm down there. Then dump all of your power into a Super Dig on the coal vein. You do this by holding CTRL while right clicking. This is an inefficient way of mining but it will get you a small quantity of coal to work with.

At this point you will be out of power, so quickly make your way back to the hub and top up on power. But now you will have a better source of fuel to put in the hub: Coal! The next time you press 'Add resources' it should insert a coal ore block instead of a log. These generate more power, so you will have to do a little less micro management to maintain power levels.

Craft it up

Coal ore also allows you to use the self-crafting window to create new torches. Press 'C' to show this window. It will display all the recipes you can make, and among them are torches. Select the torches and on the right side it should tell you it will require 5 coal to make one torch. Press 'Craft' and it will add a torch to your inventory.

Torches can also be auto-crafted so long as you have at least 5 coal in your inventory. Just try to place one and if you've run out a new one will be crafted for you.

Goal complete!

With a coal vein at your disposal to fuel your central power hub and supply you with all the torches you need, you should be able to survive on the surface indefinitely. From this point on, you can start mining the other veins you've found, or set out to find them if you haven't. Then you can start feeding the metal ores to the smelter to acquire bars needed for crafting at the Manufacturing plant.

You can also think about using your ore extractors to automate the digging. Or, you can spend your research points on some projects to figure out what actually happened to get you on this planet. Or you could brave the challenges of the deep and see what interesting things can be found. It's up to you!