Paladinofdoom's Preload and Game Basics Guide



Hello, this is a guide for complete newcomers to StarSonata, and will be the first of three guides. The others will cover The Nexus area, and how to level a character to three hundred from zero. It is intended to answer as many questions as I can think that a newcomer might possibly ask, without simply becoming a FAQ list. Aswell as a walkthrough to guide a player on their way.


The Beginning

So, you've made an account on StarSonata – Welcome to the game. The beginning levels can be a little tedious, as can leveling at times, however, the game quickly becomes more interesting, fun and addictive as you gain levels and develop your character – and make friends, of course.

If you are reading this before choosing a name, please be advised that to PM someone, a player must type the following:

/w “Person's Name” Message

Therefore try to avoid sticking too many items of punctuation next to your name, or having many repetitive letters in your name that require people who PM you to stop and count before trying to talk to you.
But your name is up to you. There are very few limits on what your name can be, you can have just about any symbol from your standard qwerty keyboard in it. Names involving profanity, or similar, will either have the account banned, or the name changed. This is one of the rules that the admins have set for the game, it would be a good idea to read the rules thread of the forums.

Game Rules:
http://www.starsonata.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=29901

So, once you've entered a name and clicked Create Character, you're ready to begin.
Upon logging in, you'll be in an area of space known as Preload, which is where all new players start. You may see some of them flying around.

The ship you'll be in is a small white triangular ship called a 'Zebucart'. This is one of the most basic types of ship in StarSonata, and you'll soon upgrade into something more exciting.

Your ship will be near an AI base. AI bases are owned by AI factions, such as Earthforce. Earthforce are the faction that owns Sol (our solar system), and a few other galaxies. Their job is to keep the peace, and their galaxies are always protected.

Protected galaxies mean that firing upon an AI or player within them will result in hostile retaliation from the police ships and bases in the system. Luckily, there is a feature called Safety Lock, which I'll talk about in a second.

Take a minute to familiarize yourself with the User Interface (hereafter referred to as the UI), in the top left corner you'll see two white-blue bars, which display your shield and energy total, and a third below it, which displays your visibility.

Shields – These protect your ship from attack, and have a set bank and regeneration rate dependent upon your gear, ship and skills. When they reach zero, you are ejected from your ship in an escape pod, and can return to it when the ship's shields regenerate fully, or when five minutes of real-time has passed. Your ship will be surrounded by a blue field when it dies, this is called a Stasis Field. When the stasis field turns a light green, or yellow, colour, simply fly over the ship in your escape pod to get back inside.

Energy – This, along with shields, are vitally important to the operation of your ship. Energy is provided by an item on your ship called an Energybank, or just an 'Energy'. Like a shield, it will have a set regeneration rate and bank. Some energies also give bonuses to various stats, such as damage, or range.
Energy is used to provide power for the various items that you can equip to your ship, such as your shield, weaponry, radar or cloaking items. It can also be used to allow you to deploy drones, missiles and fighters (these will be covered later in the guide.) If you reach zero energy, your shields will start to degenerate, and your weaponry will not function. If your energy is not regenerating at all, you should unequip some items that are draining the power until the bar begins filling up.

Visibility – Another important stat, though less important for most players than the Shield and Energy bars. This determines how far away you are visible. Other players will see you depending on this stat, and how powerful their radar items are.
Press Space Bar, you'll see that your ship just fired it's Ion Cannon, press it again and watch the Vis bar. You'll see that it jumped to a higher value for a short period of time. Firing your weapon increases your visibility, using your engine does the same. You don't usually need to worry about this unless you are trying to be stealthy, or have chosen a stealth class – more on classes later.


To the left of the Shield, Energy and Visibility bars is information regarding your ship's hull, speed and your current credit total.
Hull determines how much you can fit inside your ship. Every item has a hull stat. Move your cursor to the inventory panel below the shield, energy and vis bars, and click on your Ion Cannon.

Below the inventory panel, a square will fill with information about the item you have selected. Telling you about the weapon's damage, and various other stats.
In this panel, scroll down, and you'll see the weapon's size, weight and tech level. An item takes up hull equal to it's size.
The speed stat is dependent upon ship, class, and augmenters. Some items also increase speed.

Unless you've moved already, the speed indicator will say zero. Now press W, or the Up Arrow key. You'll see that your ship just thrusted in the direction that it was facing, and that your speed stat has changed. Hold down this button until the speed stat stops changing, this will be your maximum speed.

In StarSonata, distance is measured in unnamed units usually referred to as 'distance' or 'units'. The distance you move per second is equal to your speed stat, and each unit of distance is equal to one pixel of movement.
So if you want to work out how long it'll take to get somewhere, you just divide the distance by your speed to find the time, just like you might when applying Newtonian physical laws to reality.

Click on the AI base, and press V, then wait until you come to a stop at the AI base.
V is the autopilot button, and pressing it will make your ship automatically move to the target, and stop there.
Sometimes you'll be unable to autopilot somewhere, this happens usually if your target is too near a source of interference, such as a star, and you will have to move there manually.

Aside from the Up Arrow or W key controlling thrust, you can also use the Left Arrow or A to turn your ship to the left, the Right Arrow or D key to turn to the right, and the S key to slow your ship down.
Note that the S key slows your ship down at a slower rate than if you turned your ship around 180 degrees and thrusted in the opposite direction to that which you are moving.

Below this is the credit indicator, this tells you how many credits you have. Credits are, self-evidently, the form of money in StarSonata, and the amount of credits you can expect to find owned by players in the game ranges from the thousands to trillions. At the lowest levels, a few million credits may prove difficult to attain, but this quickly changes, as will be addressed later in the guide when I talk about methods of generating income as a lower level player.
With credits you can purchase items from other players.

It is important that you understand that StarSonata's economy is mostly player-driven. There are many items that can be purchased and sold to AI bases, however, this is usually low quality relative to the other items that are available. The best items are built by players, or acquired through killing various computer controlled ships (usually referred to as AI ships), and if you wish to gain these items, you will need to raise money to purchase them from other players, or find them yourself. Due to the vast amount of items in StarSoanta, it is usually a lot more difficult and time consuming to find an item yourself, rather than purchasing from a player.
I said that StarSonata has a mostly player driven economy, this means that prices are constantly changing with supply and demand, and it can be challenging to keep up to date with prices. To find out what an item is worth, you can type into All or Trade chat, saying something similar to “Price Check : <Item Name>, please.” or “PC <Item Name>, please.” Usually a player will answer within a minute or two, or maybe several. If price checks that you receive conflict, then work out the middle point between them, and that is usually about right.

To use the chat interface of StarSonata, look at the bottom of the screen. Where you will see a large rectangle, with several smaller rectangles below it.
There are several types of chat channel that you should see on the bottom of the screen.
These are:

Event – Here you see information to do with what's happening to your ship, and type in chat commands. When you pick up an item, for example, you'll receive a message saying so, and what it was.
To see the chat commands available to you, type /help into Event chat.
All – This is for general communication, and occasional questions, though it is preferred if new players direct their questions to Help chat, mentioned below. Here you can talk to other players, and all players receive whatever you type here.
Trade – This is where people advertise their shops, and items that they are buying or selling. Keep an eye on this tab for things that are popular, or that you might be able to provide for some profit.
Help – Here is where new players should ask questions. Only certain other players receive help chat, and they have all opted in, to assist new players in learning how to play the game. Ask a question here, and wait for a reply. It may take a little while for a reply to occur, since other players are usually busy with their own things, but wait, and someone will reply. Repeating a question over and over again – if the question has not passed off the upper edge of the chat window, is likely to annoy other players, and lessen the chance of receiving an answer.
Galaxy – This is where you can send messages to other players in the same galaxy as you at present. Only they will receive the message.

Optional Chat Channels:
If you right click a chat channel, you'll see that there's a list, some of which will have ticks by them. You can remove a chat channel from the list by deselecting it on the list, or add a new one by clicking on it.
The optional chat channels are Team, Squad and Moderator chat.
Team chat will appear when you join a team, and will enable secure communication with all other online team members.
Squad chat will appear when you join a squad, which are formed when players are working together for whatever reason. This will show what items that the other players in the squad pick up, and also allow communication with them.
Moderator chat is for experienced players who have volunteered, and been accepted, as moderators. Moderators look after the Trade and All chat channels, and make sure that people who spam, are abusive, or similar are stopped – either with warnings or with mutes for a period of time, or permanently.

It is easy to stop yourself from ever being muted or warned. Simply be polite in public chat channels, do not spam them, and make sure that you only type in Trade Chat when you are saying something that belongs there. You can find a full list of the chat rules elsewhere on the forum. People who spam excessively also typically earn the contempt of other players, so expect yourself to be treated less politely, or even with hostility, if you do this.


Aside from the above, the only other things worthy of mention in the UI are the map, and the menu buttons.
At the top edge of the screen are several buttons such as Character, Options and Help. The character button will show you information about your character, such as Skills, Skill Points, Credit Total, and similar. And also allow you to see information about your team, squad and possessions.
Options allows you to change graphical options, and key bindings.
Help will open up an external web page to the StarSonata website's tutorial page. Which you won't be needing once you've finished reading this guide.


Now, on with playing the actual game.

The beginning of StarSonata concerns an area called Preload, and then The Nexus. To ease you into the gameplay, there are a few missions in Preload that teach you to do things such as how to fight, buy and sell items, and about damage types.
The missions do a good job of explaining what they want you to do. So this guide will just cover how you control your ship and such to do these things.

First you need to dock at the base, to do this, press R. You'll see a new panel appear on the screen, including a section devoted to missions. Double click the mission name (there will be only one) and another window will appear. Read through the mission description, and you'll see it is asking you to kill a Flyswatter Larvae, of which there are several in your galaxy. Click Accept Mission, and then the Undock button.

Your Zebucart is equipped with an Ion Cannon, which is known as a magcannon type weapon, due to the way the projectiles track, and the damage type.

In StarSonata there are seven damage types. These are:
Energy, Physical, Laser, Surgical, Heat, Mining, Radiation and Transference.

They are all fairly self-explanatory as to what they are, but five of them have special effects that are note-worthy.

Surgical damage, when used to do the killing shot to an AI ship, will cause it to drop more than the regular amount of items.
Heat damage often causes fires to appear in the target's inventory. These will slowly do damage to the target ship, and shooting it many times will increase the amount of fires, and the total damage done by them.
Radiation damage, when used to kill an enemy ship, will cause the ship to not be destroyed. However, it will float continue to move based on its velocity, thrust and turning which it possessed prior to death. To retrieve items from the ship, you must shoot it with a non-radiation weapon, such as a surgical one. The reason that the ship does not die is that radiation weaponry is used in a process called 'capping' (capturing AI ships). Which will be discussed below in the section devoted to generating income.
Physical weaponry usually has a knock back effect, and which will push the person using the weapon, and the target when hit.
Transference damage is StarSonata's method of healing. Weapons that do transference damage do negative damage, and therefore heal a target when hit. The weapons also do damage to whomever uses the weapon, so long as their target's shield is damaged. A ship cannot die from using a transference weapon too much on a target, your shields will drop to one, but not below. It is not a good idea to allow your shields to drop that far, though, as you will be killed in a single shot.

Using your Ion Cannon, you need to destroy a Flyswatter Larvae for the mission from the Earthforce Base that you just acquired.
To do this, click on a Flyswatter Larvae ship (they are the green ships, not the grey ones), position your ship close to it, and press the space bar. You'll see that your ship will fire a projectile from it's front, and that it will track toward the target. If you aimed properly, the target will be hit, and you'll see a yellow bar appear over it, indicating the shields remaining.

The AI ship will retaliate when attacked, and attempt to destroy your ship. Luckily, the ships in this part of space can barely damage your shield, and you should regenerate faster than you can take damage. So hold space bar, keep moving and aiming, and watch the Flyswatter's shield bar drop to nothing. At which point it will disappear in an explosion, and possibly leave behind some yellow circle shaped objects, and potentially a red and white square shaped item.

The yellow circles are coins, or credits. And they drop from most AI when killed.
The red and white square is an item, and are frequently dropped, but not always.
To pick up items, maneuver your ship above them, and press C. To pick up items you will need hull space. If your ship lacks hull, the game will tell you so in Event chat. To see what you scooped, swap to Event chat and look. You will need an item called a Scoop to pick up items from space.
Once you've done all this, you can go back to the station and dock, and you'll see that the mission status will have changed to read 'Complete'. Double click the mission, and finish it.

You'll receive an item called an Enforcer Scout Charger. Chargers are items which improve your shield regeneration rate, at the cost of electricity. Double click the charger to equip it, or right click on the item and click equip.
Many items can be gained as mission rewards in StarSonata.


There are a couple more missions to do in this galaxy, and you'll be able to do them now that you fully understand the controls and UI. The missions will explain what you need to do.
Eventually you'll receive a mission that tells you to go to the next galaxy.

In StarSonata, each Circle on your map will show the position of a Galaxy. You can move between galaxies using wormholes. There are several types of Wormhole in StarSonata, and you require a Skill called Warp Navigation to travel through some of them. At the moment, you'll have a Warp Navigation skill of zero. Which means you'll only be able to go to galaxies on the map which are green coloured.
Galaxies which are blue coloured require warp 1, red requires warp 2, and purple require warp 3. Warp 4 is for special 'shortcut' galaxies called Juxtaposition and Concourse. But you won't need to worry about those for a while.

To warp through a wormhole, simply fly your ship close to it, or autopilot on top of it, and press the 'F' key.
You can also autopilot between galaxies by double clicking them on your map. At the moment you'll only be able to do this to autopilot to galaxies that are one jump away from your position. (you can increase this range by using a skill that we'll talk about later on).

Once you warp into this galaxy, you'll see that it has a sun, two AI bases, some asteroids, and many little ships called 'Mini Volcoms'. These are pirate ships, and you can destroy as many as you wish.

The AI bases here are important for early income, since they have stable trade routes between each other.

Dock at the Silicon Valley base, click on the 'Trade' tab at the top of the panel that appears.
You'll see your screen fill with various tabs from Tractor Beams to Scoops, each panel shows you which items of that sort the base has for sale. It'll also tell you the price to buy, the price if you sell the item to the AI base, and some other information such as size and tech level. If you click on an item in the trade window, it'll tell you information about it.
Click on the commodity tab. Commodities are massively important in StarSonata. They are used for everything from building ships, to missions, to fuelling some energybanks. The base will be selling silicon, and buying microchips.

The other base in the galaxy buys silicon for a higher price than the first base sells for, and sells microchips for a lower price than the first base buys for. They are also locked in a stable trade route. Which means that the prices will always remain this way, so you can trade as much as you like to produce income.
When you leave this area, buying and selling commodities from AI bases will cause them to alter their prices. Selling to an AI base makes the price go down, and buying makes it go up. (This only applies to commodities, not to other types of item.) and therefore the trade route will become unstable, and eventually you'll need to find another one. More expensive commodities such as Promethium will become unstable faster than cheaper commodities like Metals.

At this point, it would be a good idea to upgrade your ship to something a little better.
To do this, you must first get a bit of money. Which you can do by following the trade route back and forth for a few minutes. I suggest buying a new ship to do this, either a punka.dll, or another zebucart. You can buy ships by going to the ships menu of the trade window.

To pilot higher tech ships, you require a skill called piloting. This can be trained in this galaxy to level 2. Do this, and purchase a Helga class ship for 250k credits. (Where k stands for kilo, or thousand.)
Look at the ship stats, you'll see that it has higher hull and such than the zebucart, and also has some inbuilt bonuses.

After outfitting this ship, you can fight the mini volcoms for some more xp to level up a couple of times. To level, you require 1,000 xp. You get xp based on how close your level is to that of the AI you kill. You can see how much xp a kill granted you, and how much xp you have left till you level, on the event chat tab.

After doing this, you're ready for higher and more complex things. There are a few more missions in Preload, and you can always get a few more credits from the trade route. When you're ready, fly to The Nexus warp and warp. (Don't worry, you can come back to the Preload Galaxy later on if you wish.)

PICTURES...You probably know that though

Well done on the guide Paladin, very comprehensive . Just one thing to point out though, you forgot to include physical in the damage types .

Oops, fixing now ^_^

Agreed, very comprehensive. You might want to include a table of contents, or add in headers for each section.

yep, working on that in a minute. Couldn't remember the code for bold, and stuff. So I didn't do that on my phone when I wrote it.

I noticed something misleading. You said that dying would cause you to eject in an escape pod, but I can see some newcomers being confused and not equipping one if they assume it is automatic.

Iirc, you spawn with one equipped in your Zebucart.

I believe this is the case. Shall check.

Seriously? Damn, I'm starting to think this game really might be too carebear.

You spawn with the equivalent stuff in EvE, eventually Infinity, and all decent space MMO's.

yeah paladin its easy but where can i learn to level up while i am lvl 50-100?

I believe this guide is not meant to be a grind manual, but rather a way to introduce new players to the intricacies of SS, and - as such - it is just about perfect. Wanna lvl up in a relatively fast manner with little to no expenditure? Go SD and buy a house in Copper.

TL

"it's Ion Cannon"
"it's size"
"it's front"

should all use "its" instead.

Also, your bit on warp nav is a bit confusing since you speak about green/red/purple galaxies but a new player will only be able to see the green ones. It would be more helpful to say that the purple wormholes are the only ones they can access, and that warp nav 1 will give them access to the grey ones as well, and so on.

Don't know if you're still working on this, but the organization is a bit odd at times. You tell them to move around and AP to the AI station, but don't tell them how to dock until many paragraphs later. Move stuff around so all the navigation tips are together.