Endless Sky Tips

Table of Contents.To own a starship: that is the dream that has kept you sane since you began working at the mill at the age of fifteen, saving up money little by little to pay for a captain’s license. In the weeks when you were working so deep in the bowels of the factory that you could not even see out the windows from where you sat, you would tell yourself: one day, I will take to the sky, and be free. One day I will leave this planet behind.You are about to purchase your first ship and set out to make your fortune among the stars. What happens next is up to you. Will you take on the quiet, steady work of a merchant captain? Or join the Navy and fight to keep the galaxy safe?

Will you choose the glamorous life of a bounty hunter and fight pirates for a living? Or will you become a pirate yourself? Or will you journey beyond the edge of known space, seeking friends among the strange and powerful aliens that inhabit the other corners of the galaxy?Starting a New GameAs a new pilot, only a handful of ships are within your price range. Each one is suited to a slightly different personality:The Shuttle is the cheapest and most versatile option. Nearly as nimble as a fighter, shuttles can easily escape from slower pirate ships and even dodge missiles, which is a good thing because they are otherwise useless in combat.

Shuttles are classified as “transports” because they have relatively small cargo holds, and instead their most common use is ferrying passengers: a great way for more gregarious captains to meet interesting people while exploring the galaxy.The Star Barge is a slow ship, but with ample cargo capacity, enough to be able to take on multiple simultaneous delivery jobs. Or, a captain without much hunger for variety can earn a stable living on a Star Barge just by finding a decent trade route and running it over and over again. Unfortunately, Star Barges are a favorite target of pirates because they often carry valuable cargo and are hardly ever able to outrun their adversaries.The Sparrow is the cheapest interstellar ship you can buy that is designed for combat. With enough luck or skill, a Sparrow pilot can earn income by disabling and boarding small pirate ships. Or by turning pirate and attacking civilians. Once you earn a reputation in combat, you can find a more steady income as an escort for merchant caravans, but even so, life at the helm of a Sparrow is risky and uncertain. The safe way to make money in a Sparrow is by mining asteroids, which is described later.Your game is saved automatically every time you depart from an inhabited planet.

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The game also maintains the three most recent previous saves in case you need to revert to one of them (via the “Load / Save.” menu). If you quit the game while landed on a planet, your progress is saved; otherwise, your progress since the last planet you departed from is lost. If you want to be able to return to a specific point in time, perhaps because you are about to make a major decision or undertake a risky mission, you can save a “snapshot” of the current game. These snapshots are never overwritten or deleted unless you choose to delete them. A special snapshot named “autosave” is updated whenever you reach a new milestone in the story line.You can pause the game and bring up the main menu at any time by pressing the main menu key (escape, by default).

The “Preferences” panel lets you view and edit all the key controls.PlanetsHuman beings have been living in space for more than a millennium, and there are always a hardy few who can manage to fall asleep on a space station, pretending that the plink of micro-asteroids against the hull beside them is just the sound of rain on a tin roof, and that the distant hum is something other than the sound of the only machine that keeps them breathing. But most people prefer even the most inhospitable planet to life on a station, so after the new wave of colonization in the last two centuries, nearly every planet in human space that has breathable atmosphere is home to at least one settlement.Every time you land on an inhabited world, your ship is automatically refueled and repaired. When you first land, a description of the planet is shown. (If you switch to a different view like the bank or the trading panel, you can return to the planet description by clicking on the landscape image.) You then have several options of what to do next. Each of the options also has a keyboard shortcut, as listed below.Trading (T)They say that to an experienced merchant, the flow of goods from star to star and planet to planet tells a story, delineating the different regions of human space: the Core, rich in resources, home to many mining planets. Beyond the Core, the Syndicate worlds of industry and manufacturing, where the flow of raw materials from the galactic East meets the overflowing population from Earth and other old, stagnant worlds. To Earth, the constant flow of merchant caravans, bringing food to feed ten billion hungry mouths.

Along the galactic spiral north of Earth, the paradise planets, humanity’s largest market for luxury goods. And farther north, the Deep, a region of ancient stars on the fringe of the galaxy, self-sufficient and isolated. Next to the Deep and even farther north, the last fringes of civilization and a scattering of anarchist and pirate worlds.To the galactic south of Earth: the Dirt Belt, planets poor in resources, passed over by the early settlers, frontier worlds where food and medicine is precious.

Farther south, the breadbasket of the galaxy, where the factories produce more tractors than starships. Spiraling west from there, the Rim: a strip of long-settled worlds and well-developed industry. On the very southern fringes of human space, the pirate worlds, far from the reach of the Navy. And then, far to the east, the systems where human beings coexist with the Quarg, aliens who cannot survive Earth-like gravity and prefer instead to settle the small and nearly airless moons that humanity has no interest in.Most planets have a variety of trade goods available for sale.

You can make a profit by buying at a low price, and carrying the cargo to a different star system where it can be sold for a profit. The trading panel shows the price of each trade good, plus an indication of how high or low the price is. Some goods, like clothing, plastic, and electronics, have prices that vary significantly from system to system, but the total range of fluctuation is relatively small. Others, like food, medical supplies, and heavy metals, are much more expensive in some parts of the galaxy than others, but you need to carry them a significant distance to earn a profit.Once you have explored a system, your ship’s computer remembers the commodity prices there. When you are trying to pick out a trade good to invest in, you can press the map key (‘M’ by default) to view your map.

The systems will be color-coded according to the prices of the selected commodity. You can also click on any star system to see how much profit or loss each commodity would earn there.

Commodity prices will vary from day to day, and will drop if you sell a particularly large load (tens of thousands of tons) on one planet.To buy more than one ton of a given trade good at a time, you can hold down the shift key (5x), the control key (20x), or both (100x). For players with enormous cargo fleets, the alt / option key (500x) can be used in combination with those other keys to sell up to 50,000 tons of cargo per click. Or, you can just click the “Buy All“ and “Sell All“ buttons.Job Board (J)A few particularly wealthy people can afford to travel the galaxy on luxury cruisers or even in their own private transports, but most ordinary civilians rely on friendly merchant captains with a bunk to spare to take them where they need to go. In addition, companies and other organizations on distant worlds sometimes need a particular sort of cargo delivered. Simple jobs like these are collected and posted on the “job board” for anyone who wants to take them on. These jobs pay better than even the most lucrative trade route, especially if you can line up several simultaneous jobs along the same route of travel.When you click on a mission in the job board, its destination will be displayed on the map, even if it is not a system you have already explored. If you already know a route to that system, the route will be displayed; otherwise, you will need to explore the hyperspace paths in that direction until you find a route to your destination.

(Or, buying local maps from the Outfitter can help you to avoid getting lost!) Systems that are the destination of any of the jobs being offered are marked with a yellow pointer, which will be dimmed out if the job requires more cargo or passenger space than you have free. Once you accept a job, it is added to your “current missions” list, and the marker turns blue; these markers are visible in your map whenever you bring it up.Bank (B)The work of a banker is hard: spending your days writing loans to enthusiastic young pilots, knowing full well that many of them will be unable to make their mortgage payments. And worse still, some of them, along with their shiny new starships that were bought with your money, will wander into a fringe system and get turned into a rapidly expanding cloud of debris at the hands of some pirate. And then good luck getting your money back. So, bankers can’t help but spend long, sleepless nights worrying about the fate of those young, optimistic pilots. And more importantly, the fate of the capital investments that those pilots represent. It’s a big risk for the banks to take.

Whether that justifies the exorbitant interest rates that the bankers charge is, of course, an entirely different question.You start the game with a significant mortgage to pay off. Every day (that is, every time you make a hyperspace jump or depart from a planet) if you have enough money to make your mortgage payment, the money is automatically deducted from your account and your credit rating increases. If you miss a payment, the daily interest is added to your loan and your credit score drops by five points. If you have extra money, it may make sense to pay down some of your loan immediately, to reduce the total amount of interest you pay, but don’t forget to leave some money in reserve.If you apply for a new loan, your credit score determines the interest rate you will be offered, and your income history for the last hundred days determines the amount you can qualify for.Space Port (P)The job board works fine for offering run of the mill missions, but people who need more important or sensitive work done will generally want to speak to a captain face to face before offering the job.

So, it never hurts to wander around the spaceport and see if you encounter anyone who can offer you a mission. If nothing else, exploring the spaceport will at least give you a sense of what the local culture is like. Spaceports span the gamut from towering buildings with hangars for incoming ships, to fields of packed dirt with only a few huts or a small village nearby.When you visit a spaceport, if anyone wants to offer you a mission a conversation panel will pop up.

Some conversations just offer you a choice between accepting or declining a mission; others let you ask questions and make different choices of how to respond. And if you make a particularly bad decision, some conversations can end with you dead, or imprisoned or enslaved for life. The universe is a dangerous place, so be careful!Shipyard (S)The degree of technological and industrial development necessary to build starships from scratch is so high that only a few planets in human space are home to active shipyards, although there are other planets that sell those ships secondhand.

So, even before you are ready to buy a new ship it is worthwhile to check what each planet is selling; the ship models that are popular in one part of the galaxy may not be available in others.When buying a new ship, you can either sell your previous ship first, or buy a second ship and use either it or your previous ship as an escort. (You can click and drag the ship icons to reorder them; the first ship in the list is the one you will use as your flagship.) In general, having many small escorts is more cost effective than one large ship, but small escorts are more easily destroyed in combat situations where a fleet of larger ships could have survived with no casualties. If an escort is destroyed, any cargo and passengers they are carrying will be lost as well, which may include mission-critical cargo if it all could not fit in your flagship.Some ships have space for “drones” or “fighters.” These are small attack ships that have no hyperdrives or fuel of their own; they can travel from system to system only if carried within a larger ship. This lack of hyperspace capability generally makes them much cheaper than other ships.

Drones are smaller than fighters, and require no crew, whereas for each fighter, you will have to pay the salary for one additional crew member. Ships with drone or fighter bays come with the bays empty; you must purchase the fighters or drones ships separately. You can't use a drone or fighter as your flagship.If you trade in a ship for one with less cargo or passenger space, and then try to leave the planet, you may have to sell some of your cargo. If there is not enough room for your passengers or mission-related cargo, you may fail some of your missions as a result.Whenever you sell a ship, all the outfits that were installed in that ship are available for repurchase in the outfitter until you leave the planet.

This is especially handy if your old ship had a rare outfit installed and you want to transfer it to your new ship.Outfitter (O)Many starship captains have an almost obsessive impulse to fine-tune their ships, trying to find the perfect combinations of engines, generators, and weapons. As with ships, some outfits may only be available in certain parts of the galaxy, and some particularly valuable, exotic, or illegal outfits are available only in a handful of systems. Ship outfits are described in much more detail later on in this document.

As with the trading panel, in the Outfitter you can buy multiple copies of an outfit, such as ammunition, by holding down the shift key (5x), the control key (20x), or both (100x).Outfits can affect your ship in a myriad of ways. You can hover the mouse over any attribute of an outfit or a ship to view a tooltip explaining how it works.If you have multiple ships, you can select the icons of more than one of them at once by clicking them while holding down the shift or control modifier keys. That allows you to buy or sell outfits for multiple ships simultaneously. In addition, the checkboxes in the bottom left corner control what outfits are shown:x for sale for sale in cargoShows outfits in the currently selected ship(s) and lets you install or uninstall them. (This is the default view.)Shows only the outfits installed in the currently selected ship(s).x in cargoLets you buy or sell outfits directly to cargo instead of installing them on a ship.Shows only the outfits that you have in cargo, and lets you sell them.Hire Crew (H)Extra crew serve no purpose, aside from drawing money from your bank account every day, unless you are attempting to capture another ship. When you board an enemy ship, your odds of capturing it depend on how many crew members you have. And, if you succeed in capturing the other ship, you must have enough extra crew members to pilot both ships.

Welcome to the Endless Sky wiki! Whether you're just looking for more information on how to play the game, or whether you're hoping to help to modify and expand the game's universe by contributing your own stories and artwork, the links below should help you get started. There are additional links in the sidebar on the right.Playing Endless Sky.Story.Contributing content to the base game.Creating ships, missions, artwork, etc.These pages generally describe the game syntax in accordance with the.Compiling or modifying the source code.Descriptions of game engine technology.