1. FortressCraft Evolved
2. handbook-Survival
3. source strings
4. review

Starting Guide

Welcome to FortressCraft Evolved

Survival Mode

You have just escaped the Orbital Station on a damaged escape shuttle. It didn't survive re-entry, but luckily you managed to eject safely. Now you will have to survive on this dreadful alien planet!

Starting Out

Your state-of-the-art suit can keep you safe under these cold conditions, but it requires power to do so. The ship's crash site may give you the resources to see you over on the short term, so you should head out there as soon as you can.

Controls

The game controls are listed in a separate guide linked below.

Survival Tips

For those who don't want to read a whole guide, these are some quick gameplay tips. The following pages go into more detail on how to start out.

- During the day, your suit is designed to power its battery with sunlight.
- Your starting area has a Central Power Hub, use it to turn harvested resources into power to charge adjacent machinery.
- You can top off your power suit from the Central Power Hub or pressing 'Q' on the Power Storage Block.
- Interact (‘E’) with the Manufacturing plant to see what you can make.
- Craft torches to heat yourself using the Self Crafting window (‘C’).
- Use the scanning tool ('M') to Scan blocks and process them at the Research Station for new recipes.
- The scanning tool can also do environment scans like the Unknown Material ping to find new ores.
- Pay close attention to the battery discharge rate on your suit, a blue text indicates that extreme cold is affecting your suit and a red text indicates extreme heat.
- The headlamp uses power. It’s great for exploring but don’t leave it on!
- Coal is the best fuel for starting out, but if you're in a pinch you can burn the local flora.
- You may have to dig very deep to find the ores you're looking for.
- You have a large build reach, so use it to place torches across large caverns.

Crash site equipment

The Central Power Hub is your first power generator. It has solar panels, and can burn fuels to generate power. It can only hold one fuel item at a time, so automating the delivery of fuel materials is essential. It has a large internal power storage capacity.

The Power Storage Block can store 250 power and distribute it to adjacent machines.

In order to acquire bars useful for crafting new machines, you will need to process ores in the Ore Smelter. You can manually interact with it, or automate the supply of materials. It will only start smelting once it has received enough materials to smelt an ingot.

You can craft simple things yourself using the crafting window you open with 'c', but for more complex machines and components, you will have to use the Manufacturing Plant. The recipes are divided into categories which you can find by clicking on the coloured squares. At this point in time, the Plant can only use items in your inventory, and crafting things will put them directly back there.

When you start out, your scanner has no knowledge of any materials found on the planet. Any scans you do can be processed at the Research Station and will yield you research points. You can also undertake various research projects here, and develop new recipes for the Manufacturing Plant by spending research points. The research station requires power to operate.

Finding your first ores

Your scanner has the capability to scan for known ore types, but to do this it must know about them first. The key to finding new ores is to use the Unknown Material ping on your scanner. If you use this at first, it will return you all the blocks around you because it doesn't know about them.

So your first task will be to scan your surroundings and process these scans at the Research Station. As soon as you've scanned all the common dirt and snow around you, the Unknown Ore ping will stat returning useful things around you.

Once you've found an ore vein near you underground, you can scan these and process them to teach them to your scanner. From that moment on, using an Ore ping with your scanner will return veins of that ore type.

Extracting ore

Now that you've found your first ore vein, you'll need to extract the ore in order to use it. You can dig it using right click, but this drops only one ore every once in a while and generates rubble for the rest.

A better option is to use your Super Dig mode, which you activate by holding CTRL while digging. This will quickly dig large amounts of ore, but will drain your power reserves at high speed.

Watch out when draining all your power on Super Digging an ore vein, your suit also requires power to keep your body warm! Try to set up a safe route back to your power generator, with torches along the way to heat you back up.

Automating Extraction

A more sustainable way of mining ore is to use the Ore Extractor. You start out with some, and you can place one down next to a vein and fill it with power to make it start digging. It has a small internal storage space, so until you can offload that somewhere else you'll have to come by once in a while to pick up the results.

An ore extractor can mine out an entire vein of ore when it touches a single ore block. Therefore you will not have to move it until the entire vein has been cleared.

Storage Hoppers will accept ores and items from machines and supply them to other machines. This makes them essential in automating any part of the mining and smelting process.

Once you have the resources to spare, Conveyors can help you automate bringing the ore from your Extractor to your Ore Smelter. They are cheap, but you will need many of them to connect your mining operations to your main base. They don't require power to operate.

Surviving the First Night

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.