The Crust Beginner Getting Started — Wiki & Guide

Your first hours in The Crust follow one rule: power and one clean production chain before anything ambitious. This walkthrough compiles the opening routine shared by veteran players and 1.0 creators — from mode selection to your first profitable contract — with every step grounded in their actual advice.

Step 0 — Choose your mode

• Campaign is the recommended first run. It teaches systems step by step, hands you a free rover, and (as Pravus puts it after playing both) is "balanced to provide you these things in a timely fashion," while sandbox's unrestricted pace can leave you priced out of exploration.
• If you start in sandbox anyway, the moderator advice from the game's own discussion forum: take the easiest difficulty, buy a small cargo pod of each resource, and don't try to do everything at once.
• A data point from the field: one new player who "followed the story" hit a resource-money-research deadlock and recovered by restarting in sandbox to learn the mechanics first. Restarting is normal, not failure.

Step 1 — Power before nightfall

Solar is your only early energy source, and the lunar night is long. The community's baseline for the early base:

Symptom	Fix
Batteries not (nearly) full at dusk	Add small solar arrays — veterans suggest 12–15 to start
Batteries drain before dawn	Add small batteries — baseline at least 9
Added more panels?	You probably need more batteries too — "No power, no processing"

Wires run from nodes with limited connection points, so plan pole placement deliberately, and remember the elevator is what carries power (and everything else) underground.

Step 2 — The first production chain

The standard opening chain, as one experienced player lays it out:

1. Identify the ore vein — the opening map starts you next to one; later you'll research the Ore Detector and scan for new veins.
2. Place an extractor on the vein — placement must reach 9/9 coverage; nudge position and angle until it accepts.
3. Belt the ore to a regolith extractor (or Multi-Regolith Extractor later).
4. Belt to a smelter.
5. Belt to storage.

The detail that trips everyone: every building in the chain must be set to the same resource — an iron vein needs the extractor, regolith processor, smelter and storage all configured for iron, ending in iron ingots. Pravus's rule from his 1.0 run: roughly three smelting furnaces per extractor keeps ore from piling up.

Step 3 — The control tricks that prevent spaghetti

• T flips inputs/outputs. Press T on a building to swap which side receives and which ships — the most-quoted fix for belt messes.
• Mergers and splitters build themselves. Drag one belt sideways into another and a merger appears automatically; start a new belt sideways off an existing one for a splitter.
• Combining feeds through storage works too — bulk storage for oxides, small/medium/large storage for refined goods.
• Idle drones are wasted drones. Assign them cleanup: loose ore, moving raw material into bulk storage. The three-chevron tool (bottom-left, next to deconstruct) picks up anything on the ground — three chevrons down (orange) is high priority, two up (green) is low.
• Idle rover = expedition. Most rover expeditions don't need an Expedition Control Center; send it at the "?" markers — green pickups are free resources, "?" sites needing an ECC pay research points later. A parked rover even trickles a little blue/orange research.

Step 4 — Early money without the traps

• Only sign contracts you can fill from stock. The community example: if you hold 221 Smart Concrete and the contract wants 450, decline — Smart Concrete is consumed heavily by your own early construction.
• Never take the energy-cells contract — you cannot manufacture them at that stage.
• Urgent flashing is not an obligation. Some urgent contracts are mathematically impossible in time; taking a loss on reputation is recoverable, bankrupting yourself is not.
• Reliable early income, per a forum moderator: craft rare earth plates and sell in lots of 100 whenever the market pays over ~600 credits.
• Sell high-value refined goods rather than raw ore when you can — the market's fluctuating prices reward watching it (steel cheap, silicon pricey at any given moment).

Step 5 — Story beats to prepare for

Campaign players get warned about one scripted disaster: Hope-2. When it's coming, get your vehicles back to base and have indoor life-support facilities started early — oxygen, water, ventilation and food production are all prerequisites before colonists arrive, and they take real materials (one creator counted ~142 steel for a single hab door). This is also why social research is worth advancing even when it looks useless early.

What to ignore for now

Colonists (mid-game content in sandbox), mega-projects, trains and roads, gas extraction on the surface, wonders and the patent office — all confirmed real systems, all fine to postpone. Get power stable, one chain running, one contract profile you understand — then expand on the beginner tips.