Ship Control

This is a basic guide on how to gain more control over the movement and weapons of your ships.

Info

Its highly recommended to read through the in-game tutorial if you have not already (if you do not understand something here you might want to revisit the section in question). It contains a lot of useful tips that even some more experienced players might have overlooked.

Also if you need a certain hotkey/setting for something chances are its already in the game hidden in the settings.

Common abbreviations/notation:

• [•]: Indicates a setting
• •: Indicates a default hotkey (Keep in mind that that almost every default hotkey can be rebound)
• #: A number 0-9 on the keyboard

• Hamburger Menu: Menus with many useful features
  

  Hamburger menus

Weapon Settings

Additionally to what the tutorial states you can CTRL + Double-click to select all copies of a part facing the same direction and CTRL + Triple-click to select all copies of a part.

Additionally [settings - gameplay - interface - require ctrl to select parts] may be useful. You should always have a control group for every weapon type on your ship. It's also recommended for competitive players to rebind the hotkeys for the different weapon options :

• hold fire : Weapons won’t fire no matter what, except for chain guns in force fire mode. This is useful to preserve your weapon‘s ammo or cooldown in order to shoot at a more opportune moment. Some players use fire at target and cancel their target selection or simply use manual weapon control instead of using hold fire.

• fire at target : Weapons will only fire if a given target is within the arc and the weapons properly lined up. Great if you want to concentrate fire.

• fire at will : Weapons will shoot if any part of the enemy is within its arc. They will also rotate towards the enemy or the targeted part if one has been provided. Good in niche scenarios.

• autofire : Weapons will fire and continue to do so as soon as their cooldown is ready. Useful for synchronizing weapon fire.

The setting fire at target is especially useful for railguns: You can rotate your ship in such a way that your rail‘s line of fire is in line with the targeted part. This allows for incredible accuracy and is called rail fanning. It's necessary to be successful with rails.

Every weapon also has its own hamburger menu where manual weapon control behavior can be adjusted. For example side nukes are commonly bound to left and right click respectively.

Auto-mining

You can easily tell a ship equipped with at least 1 Mining Laser to mine down a whole asteroid. There are different ways to do this.

Method 1 :

With your mining ship selected, press the "Gather/Salvage/Mine Resources" button in the UI (or "G" on your keyboard unless you changed the defaults) and drag a rectangle over the resources you want.

This has built-in auto-gathering, can cover multiple asteroids and floating resources in one go, and can be order-queued by maintaining the Shift key.

Method 2 :

With your mining ship selected and your mouse over the asteroid, quickly right-click any resource in the asteroid:

• 1 time to tell your ship to go to that asteroid;
• 2 times to mine that one resource tile;
• 3 times to mine all resource tiles close to that one you're targeting;
• 4 times to mine all resource tiles in that asteroid;
• 5 times to mine every tile in the asteroid, even ones that give no resources.

This will auto-gather the resources after mining, needs only right-clicks, and makes your ship move as necessary when out of range, but there are issues :

• It's quite timing-sensitive and may require even more clicks. E.g. if your mouse was over a resource-less tile (empty rock) and you didn't click enough times, only empty rock will be mined.
• It cannot be order-queued with the Shift key.

Direct Control

Example of rail fanning

In Direct Control, abbreviated as DC, you have complete manual control over the rotation of your weapons, but that is often not what you want. You can let the A.I. take control over your weapons so you hit the right spot more consistently.

This can be done by:

• Selecting ai controlled in the hamburger menu of your weapons. This will require you to select your weapons and CTRL + Right-click when targeting them.

• Disabling [settings − gameplay − direct control mode − enable weapons control] or toggling the setting with CTRL + ALT + W will set all of your weapons to A.I. controlled and allows you to just right-click opponents to target.

The [settings - gameplay - direct control mode] section also has an automatic brake setting that can lose you a ton of speed if you keep it enabled. It also has the useful "show firing arcs" setting.

There is also a setting to center the camera to your ship or you can use ALT + F.

You can also override wasd controls and use your cursor to point your ship CTRL + Shift + F. This is useful for small fast turning ships and under lag to not overturn as much.

Camera

• You can disable the camera following ships around: [settings − camera − focus follow] and use CTRL+F to center a ship.

RTS

Sometimes you want to control multiple ships so you want to use RTS instead of direct control.

• Hold alt when setting a follow/attack movement command to toggle grid relative attack angles.
• [settings − gameplay − ship commands enable collision avoidance] can be an unwanted setting.

Pip

Pip (picture in picture) is a useful tool that allows you to more easily target the opponents ship. I

recommend enabling [settings − camera − picture − in − picture − In Combat - Show enemy ship] and [settings − camera − picture − in − picture − lock ship rotation].

Then when in dc you can hover over the enemy and press ALT to lock pip to that opponent and just

right click in pip to target a part.

Attack defaults

When piloting a singular ship you almost always want to use direct control but when flying multiple default attack angles can be very useful. You can save one by selecting your ship, right-clicking an enemy, setting the desired angle and saving it using the hamburger menu.

Copying the autoram of a built in

Sadly the game does not provide any option to automatically ram/circle around the opponent, but there is an exploit to achieve the same result, and it's called auto-ram/orbit (this "exploit" is completely allowed even in official tournaments). There are 2 methods of doing this:

• Open your ship in build mode.
• Load in a built-in ship that has autoram. Uncheck everything except for the attack defaults and press okay.
• Cancel blueprint mode
• Save the ship

Manually setting up autoram

Or if you want to recreate the effect manually:

• Build a line of structure in blueprint mode that extends FAR beyond the normal building limits. (2 building grids is a good length (More info))

• Spawn it in creative mode using the ship library.
• Set the structure lines allegiance to pirate using the hamburger menu. Also spawn your ship you want to apply auto-ram/orbit to and command it to move at the line.

• Set the movement command as close to the center of the line as possible.

• If you want to add auto-orbit you need to slightly rotate the ship (you have to experiment but I suggest about 30°).

• Save as attack default.

Piloting Principles

• Keep the basic piloting strategies in mind:
  • kiting: Flying backwards and abusing longer range
  • ramming: Limiting the opponents maneuverability and their ability to focus damage
  • orbiting: Circling around the enemy to prevent a ram

• Use your thrust as much as possible. Especially huge thrusters have a very long ramp up time so you want to fire them as soon as and as much as possible so that you have more speed and are more maneuverable. Some newer players make the mistake of rotating their ships but stop firing thrust completely to finish rotating instead of just continuing to press that forward button.
• Use asteroids: They can make rams harder and help you dodge projectiles (especially missiles). If you have a maneuverable ship like an avoider they are sometimes even required to achieve victory. So you should always think who asteroids will favor and act accordingly.
• Targeting reactors or control rooms is not always the way to go. Sometimes its better to target weapons because they have worse defenses or to target the armor in front of a reactor, so your weapon shots have less spread.

Escaping asteroids

Many players fear asteroids because their ships only have forward thrust, so they can get trapped. An experienced player will of course just not get stuck but what to do if you do make a mistake and fly into a rock?

There are 2 methods of escaping: The straight forward one is to just use your strafe keys in direct control (default: Q, E) as forward thrusters still have 5% thrust in those directions. The second faster but harder to execute one is to use your momentum: When bumping into an asteroid you usually have one corner not touching (Otherwise you made an even more serious piloting mistake). What you want to do is:

• Rotate in the direction where you have freedom to move
• Then you stop right as you hit the asteroid
• Then you just let your momentum carry you out

Escaping an asteroid from a stand still position

This method is works in a variety of scenarios and is even better if you still have a lot of momentum from your initial impact.