A guide by Trumpet Girl and Brock Grocklyn
Your First Ship
This is a Zebucart, your first ship:
Although you don’t see the inside of your ship, your ship is carrying a lot of important gear! Pressing “i” or your inventory button
(bottom right corner of your screen) will bring up your ship’s inventory. Your Inventory
Before we discuss what all that gear is, let’s press some buttons and find out what they do:
If you mouse over an inventory item, a dialog box will pop up with more information about that piece of gear. If you left click on the gear, it will highlight.
Equipping and Unequipping Gear:
If you double click on a piece of gear it will equip or unequip. You can also equip and unequip gear from the information popup. Right clicking on a piece of gear will give you gear options:
Clicking Equip or Unequip has the same effect as double clicking. Some gear you can only equip and unequip while docked at a station. You can drag gear into your hot key bar and then equip or unequip that piece of gear using your hotkeys:
Clicking Check Market Price allows you to see what player stations are selling or buying certain pieces of gear, and how much the gear is being sold for. This is useful if you have scooped a piece of loot and you want to quickly see if it’s worth anything.
Any gear you can unequip, you can toss overboard. You may use this if you don’t have enough room in your ship for an awesome piece of loot. Just make sure you don’t toss your scoop!
This is the same as mousing over a piece of gear, but the information bubble will persist on your screen until it’s closed.Your First Gear
Let’s examine the inventory on your new Zebucart:
An IonCannon is a starter weapon that shoots out little blue balls of energy. While you are welcome to travel around without a weapon, the universe can be a dangerous place, and it’s a good idea to always pack some heat.
FirstLine is your starter shield. Your shield keeps the cold, empty nastiness of space out of your ship, and atmosphere and other essentials insides. This piece of gear is so important that if you try to undock from a station without it, this happens:
Don’t leave the station without shielding!
Coalfurnace is your engine. If you don’t want to float into the deep, dark, emptiness of space all by yourself, you would be well advised to have an engine equipped. If you try to undock from a station without an engine, this will appear in your event chat:
Why then, can you undock without an engine after level 10? Because the universe is a vast and mysterious place with galaxies that you cannot enter with an engine equipped. Imagine that, galaxies so exotic that you can’t even use an engine!
You die, you drop some coins, the world goes on. But wait! When you die without an escape pod you lose more credits. Escape pods are also much better than your spirit for getting around after you die. Your spirit starts out slow, and then keeps getting slower, and slower, and slower...
These three items are non-essential items. The Shipscanner is an item you will be using in your early missions. The missions will tell you more about it. The Shield Salvation Device and Mini Mass Driver Device are your ship’s inbuilt super items. Super items can be weapons or other cool effects that will help you in your everyday wanderings through space.
Other useful items include solar panels, hull expanders, exterminators, shield chargers, overloaders, microwarp devices, capacitors, and other miscellaneous items that can improve the stats of your gear.
Although you could leave home without your scoop, you will miss out on all the loot and credits you could be scooping. As your gear gets more sophisticated, your scoop will as well. Some scoops give you bonuses such as more hull or more speed.
Flux Capacitor is your energy. This is what powers all of your other gear. If you try to fly around without an energy, bad things will happen, such as your shields discharging. You will see this message if you attempt to undock without an energy. 
Why would you potentially not equip your energy in later stages of the game? Well, when you get out into the universe you do have a great deal of free will. Exercising this particular liberty is not recommended.
Radar lets you see your surroundings. How are you going to shoot that alien if you can’t see it? How are you going to dock at that station if you can’t see it? Radar isn’t just about what you can see on your screen, pressing F11 will bring up a detailed radar screen.
Your first ship does not include any augmenters, but they are very important to your ship setup. Equipping augmenters to your ship gives your ship, weapons, shields, and other gear bonuses. There are hundreds of different augmenters you can choose for your ship and each augmenter will provide different bonuses. Before you buy a new ship, read the ship description carefully to see how many augmenter slots the ship contains. Augmenters cannot be unequipped from your ship, but you can blow them up if you need to replace them with new augmenters.Obtaining Gear
The easiest way to get gear is to buy it from an ai station. There are usually several pieces of gear available at each tech level. You can browse the gear in the Trade tab of an ai station.
Other ways to obtain gear include:
• Scooped as loot from killing ai (but not people!).
• Doing missions that give gear as rewards.
• Buying gear from other players.
• Building gear on a space station.
• Extracting gear from ruins
These last two methods of obtaining gear are fairly advanced and can get expensive. They are most likely best left for when you have exhausted the usefulness of your ai station and mission obtained gear.
There are several special galaxies where you can buy unique gear. Micron sells small gear, Gargan sells large gear, Free Market sells expensive gear. There are several other galaxies you will encounter with specialized ships and gear as you explore.
Selling Gear
Any gear or ship that you obtained in an ai station can be sold to the ai station.
Should I sell my shield for credits?
RULE NO. 1 OF SELLING GEAR: Make sure you have a replacement or credits to buy a replacement for any essential gear you sell.
Ready to upgrade to a new shield? Great! Right click on it in your inventory and press sell.
You can also sell an entire ship with all of the gear on it. This is really helpful for when you start capturing ships and selling them for profit.
Be careful! Make sure you have another ship ready to go before you sell your ship.
You can remotely access your inventory using your character tab interface.
