Stationeers: Beginner's Guide & Best Tips

Okay, Let Me Be Real With You About This Game

I've got 1,400 hours in Stationeers, and I still remember my first night on Europa. I was hyped, I had my base blueprint in my head, and I thought I understood pressure mechanics from watching a YouTube video. Then I watched my entire base violently decompress because I forgot to weld one singular pipe segment. The air recycler screamed, the furnace exploded, and my character froze to death in the wreckage while my friend on Discord laughed his ass off. This game doesn't just kick you in the teeth — it waits until you're down, takes a picture, and posts it to the group chat.

That's the deal. Stationeers is the most punishing engineering sandbox I've ever touched. It makes Space Engineers look like a mobile game. It makes Kerbal Space Program look like a physics toy. And honestly? I love it more than any of them because the game doesn't cheat. When you die, it's because you made a mistake. Not because the AI decided to be a dick, not because the spawn rates were unfair. Because you looked at a pressure readout and thought, "Eh, close enough." That's the beautiful, brutal truth of this game.

I'm writing this because, let's face it, the in-game tutorial is a lie. The wiki is a mess. And the YouTube channels are all either 45-minute monologues or speedruns of people who've already built fusion reactors from memory. You don't need that. You need someone to sit you down and explain, without an agenda, what actually matters. So here we go. If you're new and you're frustrated, this is the guide that would've saved me about 80 hours of suffocation, electrocution, and explosive decompression.

Why Everyone Quits In The First 10 Hours (And You Don't Have To)

Let me validate you first: this game is genuinely broken at first glance. The early game is a war against entropy. You spawn on a hostile planet with basic tools, a hand torch, and a "portable" generator that eats fuel like a toddler eats candy. Your immediate goals are (1) not dying of oxygen, toxics, cold, heat, or radiation — the game sort of forgot to tell you which ones are relevant today, and (2) building a structure that doesn't require you to hold your breath while you check the weld lines.

Here's the real problem though. Stationeers' learning curve is a wall. Not a gentle slope, a literal vertical cliff. The game dumps atmospheric pressure, gas mixing, power circuits, logic chips, and chemical engineering on you simultaneously and says "good luck." Most players hit that wall around the time their first furnace explodes. That's not a skill issue. That's a game design issue. And I respect it.

The pain points, specifically:

• Oxygen management feels like a full-time job. Early on, you're refilling your portable tank every five minutes. You look away for a second, you're doing the "hold breath" shuffle back to an airlock. Anyone who's played Barotrauma knows the vibe, except here there are no NPCs to help.
• Pressure is a nightmare. You think you've made an airtight room. You weld everything. You put a pressure gauge on the wall. And then the gas just... leaks. Somewhere. And the temperature in your greenhouse drops to -80°C because you accidentally bled nitrogen into the room.
• Power systems are not intuitive. The game doesn't tell you that solar tracking requires external logic, or that your cables sort of function like a fake electrical network. You'll hook up a wind turbine and wonder why your apc is dead.
• The pipe and cable spaghetti. There's a reason the game's community jokingly calls it "Pipe Engineer Simulator." You'll spend hours laying gas pipes, liquid pipes, and cables — and if you forget to color-code them, good luck debugging why nothing works at 3am.

Look, I'm not going to lie. The first ~30 hours are rough. There's a reason this game has a "Learning Curve" tag on Steam with a skull icon. But here's the thing: once the light bulb clicks with atmospheric logic, this becomes the most satisfying engineering game ever made. So let's talk about the actual steps to get you from frustrated corpse to stone-cold base builder.

First Steps That Won't Get You Killed (Day One, Real Talk)

Forget what the tooltips say. Forget what the build menu looks like. Here's your actual priority list for your first few hours on a standard world like Mars (which is the easiest biome, by far — play Mars first):

Step 1: Build a small sealed room immediately. You need a place to drop your portable generator and a few O₂ tanks where the pressure won't leak into the void. Use the "Frame" and "Iron Sheets" recipe. Weld them. Then build an AirLock — the full 2x2 one with a door on both sides. Don't skip this. Pressurizing a single room is fine in the first day. You'll expand later.

Step 2: Prioritize the "Portable Generator" and the "Portable Gas Canister" — you'll use volatiles and oxygen to feed it. Honestly, I spent my first three playthroughs refusing to use the portable generator because it felt like a noob trap. It's not. In the early game, that 1kW of power it gives you is the difference between making a furnace and sitting in the dark. Use it to charge your batteries. Use it to run your Portable Airlock while you're building. Just don't let it run indoors without ventilation — it'll produce CO₂ and suffocate you. Yes, I've done that. Twice.

Step 3: Build the basic furnace (the Arc Furnace is different and it's a trap for beginners). The Arc Furnace processes ores directly into ingots using electricity and produces no gases that need venting. It's slower, but it doesn't require you to pipe oxygen and volatiles into a combustion chamber to get alloys. You'll need copper and iron for your first few machines, so use the Arc Furnace for that. It also doesn't require you to deal with the game's terrifying furnace chemistry yet. Save the explosion potential for later.

Step 4: Get your O₂ generation loop running. This is where the game clicks. On Mars, you have oxygen in the atmosphere, but it's ~20% pressure. You can't breathe that. So you need to compress it. The "O₂ Filtration" machine is your best friend. Hook it up to a power source and an input pipe from an external vent, and it separates the gases. Pick out the oxygen and output it into a tank on your back. This is your first real "system." It takes two minutes to build, and it opens up the game.

Step 5: Stop holding E to breathe. Actually, just remember your suit's internal tank has a capacity. Hold C to refill it from a portable tank. If you see the pressure in your suit tank drop and you're outside, you're on borrowed time. Learn to check your suit's pressure readout first, then panic.

That's the hard "get off the ground" checklist. After that, you'll want to build a bigger base, a real furnace (the combustion one), and start making glass for windows and solar panels. But don't rush that. If you can't master the simple oxygen and power loops, you'll hate this game.

First Steps That Won't Get You Killed (Day One, Real Talk)

Okay, a few more hours in, you'll have a bare base. Now watch out. The game's core loop emerges: build a system, debug it, expand, repeat until you're drowning in exotic materials. Here's the advanced stuff that separates the people who build fusion reactors from the people who rage-delete their save.

Gas mixing is a logic puzzle, not a chemistry experiment. You'll eventually build a furnace that needs oxygen and volatiles at specific ratios. The game gives you passive gas filters and active volume pumps. The trick is to use Pressure Regulators and Adjustable Valves to control the flow rates on each line into the furnace. Don't eyeball it. Use the Logic Reader to read the furnace's internal pressure and temperature, and then trigger a cut-off valve when it hits a threshold. This is basically an electrical engineering degree in miniature. It's also where most people quit.

Let's talk about Logic Circuits and IC10 chips. The in-game tutorial calls them "advanced." Bullshit. They're essential. A simple logic circuit can turn your base lights on when it gets dark outside using a Light Sensor (measure the lumen output) and a Logic Switch when the reading drops below a threshold. That's 5 minutes of wiring and it makes your base feel alive. When you start using the IC10 scriptable chips, you can automate everything: greenhouse watering, turbo fuel mixing, emergency shut-off valves. If you're the kind of person who enjoyed programming a Factorio circuit network, you'll be in heaven here. If you're not, you'll still be okay — the game has a Logic Programmable chip that can run pre-made scripts from the in-game catalog, and you can copy-paste others' code. Don't fear it. Embrace it.

Talon, the auto-miner, is level 3 tech. Don't waste time on it until you have a decent steel supply. Conversely, Gas Grenades are absolute lifesavers if you get a minor leak in your base — toss one in the room, and it'll temporarily repressurize it so you can hold your breath while you weld the damn leak. I always carry one on my belt. You'll thank me when you're in a suit with a small crack and your base is half in vacuum.

Solar tracks aren't hard, just annoying. You'll want a Solar Tracker to get that 10% efficiency bonus. You can build a simple circuit with a Day/Night Sensor that rotates the panels east-to-west based on time. The game's Logic Writer will let you write to the panel's "Rotation" variable, but honestly, a cheaper method is just building a static array angled slightly south (on Mars) and accepting the loss. That's 90% as good as a tracker and 100% less wiring. Optimization is a trap in this game if it hurts your actual playtime. Know when to stop engineering.

And here's a beautiful trick: Hydroponics need 25 kPa of pressure minimum. Don't build a giant greenhouse without knowing that. You can use Ducts (passive vents) to connect room atmospheres, so you don't need separate air pumps for every room. Pressure will equalize slowly. That saved me a huge slice of power draw in my early mid-game.

Common Mistakes That End Your Run (Yes, I've Done All Of These)

Been there, suffocated that. Here's a list of things that have personally killed me or destroyed my base, so you don't have to:

• Welding the airlock's inner door shut while you're inside. The weld tool can deconstruct walls. That day, I locked myself in a 3x3 room with no O₂ supply and no way to get out. I had to blow my way out with a grenade and nearly died in the process. Always keep an emergency O₂ tank on your person, and never fully weld the inner wall of an airlock until you're absolutely sure.
• Running the furnace without checking the gas ratio and melting the machine. A furnace needs hot gasses to melt ore. If you pump in 100% oxygen, you'll get a furnace that burns at 6000°C and then wonder why your steel ingots are now just a lukewarm pile of slag and the furnace is glowing white. Watch the temperature. If it's below 1500K, you're doing it wrong. If it's above 3000K, you're about to have a really bad day.
• Not using the main power grid switch. There's a "Master Switch" on your main APC. If you have an electrical fault, the game will happily fry every circuit in the base until you see smoke. I lost a run because a single stray cable behind a wall shorted out and set the hydroponics room on fire. On day 60. With 40 hours of progress.
• Venting toxic gas into the base. On Mars, there's a ton of CO₂. If you're mining with the fuel cells, you get CO₂ and other garbage in your waste tank. If you dump that into your base "just to get rid of it," you'll slowly transition into a Vitex Gas poisoning death. You don't want to smell Vitex. Trust me.
• Building the solar panels on the wrong side of the base. On Mars, the sun rises in the East and sets in the West, but the game doesn't tell you which way that is unless you look at the sun. I covered my panels with a giant smelter factory and wondered why I was getting 0.5 kW at noon. Tilt your base to face the equator.
• Ignoring the "normal" chips. A lot of newbies see the IC10 chip and think, "That's for big brains, I'll skip it." Then they spend 3 hours manually toggling pumps. Use the Logic Reader and a Logic Switch to toggle pumps based on pressure. It's dead simple, and it will make you want to learn the more advanced logic.

And the biggest one — stopping in the desert overnight without a blanket. Wait, that's a different game. But honestly, on Vulcan, you need to bring a cooling suit. On Enceladus, you're in a mild cool. Check your suit's temperature readout before you leave. It's right under your oxygen. Don't be me, freezing to death because I wanted to "check one more thing" outside the base.

Common Mistakes That Make You Lose Days (And Why I Kept Dying)

We covered the basics above. But let me add one more layer to this, because the game's real time sink isn't death. It's boredom. You'll spend 90 minutes on a pipe system, pressurize it, and find out you used the wrong type of pipe (liquid vs. gas) and now the whole thing is leaking. The mistake isn't the leak; it's not color-coding your pipes from the start. Use the cable painter (right-click with the tool) to make your oxygen pipes blue, your volatiles pipes green, your waste pipes red. That single habit will save you 100 hours over a playthrough.

Also, don't build on compound or soil if you can help it. The deformation physics mean if you patch a frame over a hole, the game gets confused and sometimes deletes a piece of your base's floor tile. I've lost whole rooms to the void this way. Build on a raised frame platform, and never dig directly under your own base.

Finally, don't forget to bolt your portable generator to a table or the floor. If you leave it on the ground, it's just a loose object. You'll eventually run over it with a mining cart and send it flying, and the power cable will snap. That destroyed a few hours of mine when I realized my backup power was physically 30 meters away and the cable was too short.

FAQ (Stuff You'll Search At 2am)

Q: What's the best planet to start on?
Mars, no contest. It has a breathable (low pressure) atmosphere that you can compress with simple filtration, decent solar, and mild temperature swings. Moon is also okay, but it's as dead as a doornail — no atmosphere at all. Europa is a snowball, and Venus is a hellhole. Do Mars, learn the game, then pick a challenge.

Q: Why does my base keep exploding when I turn on the furnace?
You're pumping in the wrong ratio of O₂ to Volatiles. The perfect ratio is roughly 2 parts oxygen to 1 part volatiles (by volume). But even that will over-pressurize if you let the pressure climb past 2 MPa. Use a pressure regulator set to 2.0 MPa on the output tank, and use a Volume Pump on the input to set a flow rate of around 500 L/s. That should be safe. If you hear the furnace vibrating loudly, stop.

Q: How do I get steel? You need Iron Ore and Coal (Carbon). Put both in the furnace (which needs to be hot), and you get iron ingots, then combine iron and carbon in a 2:1 ratio for steel. It's an alloying process. Don't try to smelt steel directly from ore; that's not a thing.

Q: Do I need to pave my base floor? No. You can build on bare dirt, but you'll get a -0.05 cleanliness buff if you use sheets. Cleanliness affects your hydroponics happiness and your immune system, eventually. I ignored it for my first run and my colonist's immune system deteriorated to the point where a simple cold nearly killed me. So, yes, pave the floor. It's cheap.

Q: What's the best way to get early power? Solar or wind? Solar is more consistent on Mars. Wind is great on Europa, but on Mars, you'll get gusts and nothing else. Build a small solar array (4 panels) with a single APC and you're set until mid-game.

Q: Is the game fun solo? Yes, but it's lonely. The AI is, uh, not present. But the engineering puzzle is huge. If you like the vibe of Planet Crafter but wish it were harder, this is your game. I play solo mostly, and it's fine if you're methodical.

Q: Why is my gas tank leaking? Check the temperature. If you're pumping volatiles into a tank that's too hot (over 300K), it'll expand and blow a relief valve. You need to cool the input line with a Coolant Loop or just wait for the tank to cool down. Also, don't fill a tank to 100% full. Leave a 10% buffer for thermal expansion. That mistake caused my first base to blow up when I stored hot water from a geyser in a regular gas tank.