Space Suit Only Survival

Space Suit Only Survival is a challenging custom game mode.

The Challenge

Typically, you start in a Drop Pod with a  Survival Kit or at your faction base's  Medical Room, where you have access to at least basic production and life support. In this situation, you typically start by mining stone. Not in this custom mode!

You can challenge yourself to forego the Survival Kit luxuries and start the game floating in space near a planet with just a space suit and jetpack. You may start with tools or without, but you will have no components to build anything, and no spare hydrogen/oxygen bottles. Mining stone/ores is meaningless since you have no means of refining or assembling.

You are at an immediate risk of your life support running out in the first 10 minutes. So how do you even play the game?

Tips

First off, expect to die a lot the first times you try this.

Since you are lacking equipment, your only chance of survival is to immediately find a passing ship or space station. Sometimes you cannot catch up with them, or they are too wrecked, or they are hostile. But you will get better over time and survive longer; you'll recognise advantageous encounters and you'll get better at "hydromanning".

All you need is one lucky run.

• Unknown Signals are always unarmed and always give you a small amount of components and sometimes free tools.
• Economy stations start out neutral and provide a Safe Zone, power and oxygen to travellers. If you made some space credits (e.g. by completing contracts or by selling the cargo of unknown signals), you can buy suit reservoir refills of oxygen and hydrogen, (and later also ship tank refills).
• Many encounters are either unarmed or lightly armed so you have a realistic chance of capturing them. On the other hand, some will send hostile drones after you.
• Inventory management will become an issue early on. Which cheap blocks can you build that let you store inventory?

Every run will be very different, depending on which random loot, which encounters, which blocks, which components you'll get first.

Set yourself a goal / winning condition, such as building a (mobile) base from scratch with certain features, or having earned so-and-so-many space credits.

Tip: If Economy is enabled, your starting inventory may contain a datapad with the GPS coordinates of a neutral NPC station.

Prerequisites

Create a new world (typically Star System, but any will work).

In the World Settings, enable the following settings:

• Enable Space Suit Respawn
• (Optional) Auto-healing - It's easier with healing, and hardcore without.
• (Optional) Spawn with tools - It's easier with tools, and hardcore without tools.
• (Optional) Permanent Death - optional hardcore challenge
• (Optional) Enable Economy - It's easier with economy and harder without.
• Disable Progression
• Enable encounters:
  • Enable unknown signals
  • Enable drones
  • Cargo ships
  • Random encounters
  • Enable Planetary Encounters
  • Enable drones
  • Global Encounters Cap - Default is 1, can be 0 to 2. Usually these are out of reach in this game mode, but you can choose to include them.

You can customize the difficulty. To make it easier, allow yourself more encounters, or more neutral encounters. To increase the difficulty, allow yourself fewer encounters, or more hostile encounters (pirates, drones, military factions). On PC, you can optionally replace or amend vanilla encounters by mods like M.E.S.