How to play Starfoundry
Eleven pages on how the game actually works, written against the simulation rather than from memory. Everything here applies to all six peoples; the peoples pages cover what changes for each of them.
If you have ten minutes
Nothing happens until you end the turn. Orders are queued and resolved together, so a turn is a plan rather than a race. Within that, the first ten turns of any game come down to four things, in this order:
- Find out what the ground is worth. Every tile has a food potential and a mineral richness and they vary enormously. The tile panel tells you what a tile will actually yield. Look before you build.
- Feed and power first. A colony that runs out of food starves and one that runs out of power shuts down, and both failures cascade. A farm on your best soil and a reactor somewhere safe come before anything clever.
- Put trained hands where they earn most. The right trade in the right building is worth half again as much as an untrained colonist in the same building — and nobody should be idle.
- Research toward what you are short of. One queue, one subject at a time. Fix the problem you have.
Then keep going. The rest of this guide is each of those in proper detail, plus the parts that only start to matter around turn thirty.
The guide
What happens when you end a turn
The exact order a turn resolves in, and why it explains most of the surprises.
Power, and what shuts down first
The grid, the shutdown ladder in full, and why a brownout is a warning rather than a disaster.
Food, farms and going hungry
How a sector feeds itself, what a birth actually costs, and how long you have when it goes wrong.
People, trades and how they learn
Why a trained hand is worth so much more than an untrained one, and the three ways to get one.
Unrest: what causes it, what holds it down
The four tiers, what each one costs you, and which pressures can be governed away and which cannot.
Districts: why where you build matters
Focus bonuses, labour reach, nuisance, and the disease that punishes building the same thing everywhere.
Settling a world that is trying to kill you
Severity, sealed habitation, what a hostile outpost really costs, and when it is worth it.
Research: one queue, and what to put in it
Why there is only one thing being studied at a time, and how to choose it.
Designing a ship
Hull frames, berths, what a warp drive actually needs, and why interstellar hulls are big.
Fighting: fleets, boards and taking ground
How an engagement works, what breaking off costs, and why taking a world is harder than winning in orbit.
Saving, and playing signed out
The game you are playing is written to its own slot at the end of every turn — in your browser, and on the server as well if you are signed in and have chosen to keep it there. You can turn that off in settings.
Playing signed out is playing properly: guest saves live in your browser and work exactly the same. An account adds save slots you can open on another machine, and nothing else.