Takes too long!!

[Kriken Overlord]

I am uber-noober

So the Fool injectors let you "ignore" the radar, letting you cut out time?
I have them on my Tie-fighter, how do I use them.

[lex_talionis]

Press and hold "I" and away you go!

oh, and btw - i love your signature

[ecmanaut]

I don't agree with the fact that you need witch-drive fuel injectors... they are a luxury. Very rarely do I use them to run away (i.e. protect myself) and they certainly don't return any value. So I think they are a "nice to have" rather than a "must have", especially at the start of the game.

While not the first thing to buy, it's definitely early on the list, say, perhaps after the large cargo bay. Not to protect your life, but to protect yourself from tedium, which this post is about at heart. Third on the list, and for the same purpose, I'd put the docking computers.

The upgrade from, as a neophyte player, taking ten, or even twenty, minutes to do one single cargo run, to one where you're down below two minutes, from commodity market to commodity market, gets you to break-even quickly for that investment. Just to not have to line up with the stations (and perhaps crash and die if your concentration slips the last few seconds), but rather tap D (shift-d) and be in as soon as you're in the station's range (S marker) cuts a healthy few minutes, and being able to outrun or circumvent other ships that mass lock you using the fuel injectors saves another few minutes once in a while.

Next upgrade I would recommend comes more or less for free, and it's replacing the not very useful default keyboard bindings for something that works for you. I'm not saying the defaults are bad for everyone; someone has to like them, after all, but I can't tell how much cargo I've dumped in space (d) trying to dock a station (D), or not been quick enough to find the proper keys to access the ecm, missile controls, scanner zoom controls and so on.

I'd suggest thinking of your keyboard as less of a keyboard and more of a shuttle control console and how you would organize gauges and controls, not what happens to be written on the keytops. I've set up mine to use

• a/z for accelerate/decelerate (left hand's middle and index finger),
• s/x for zoom in/out (similarly),
• q for jumpspace (sort of like accelerate, but even more -- goes intuitively well above the a binding),
• tab for the fuel injector (similarly -- also a large key it's easy to get to, which can be crucial when in a bit of a bind),
• space to fire (left thumb, typically),
• c for the comms log (rarely used, but I tend to miss messages, and finding and holding that key is easy enough even if the room is pitch black),
• § (the key between tab, 1 and escape on a Swedish keyboard) for the energy bomb -- again a key you want to find quickly when in need of it,
• return for automated/instant docking
• backspace for cargo ejection
• ' (a key close to backspace, again on a Swedish keyboard) for cycling what goods to eject,
• ./- (the two keys next to right shift) for previous/next target,
• n for next missile (goes next to m for firing),
• ,/; (the key opposite m, unshifted/shifted) for arming/disarming the missile and
• < for the ecm (a handy extra key we have in Sweden between z and left shift).

Those were the important things I needed to change -- I haven't actually touched g and h yet, figuring it might be a bit much to learn in one go, but I'm thinking of perhaps putting them above the missile related commands somewhere, as it's a region of the keyboard you reach easily. (I'm on a MacBook, where the arrow keys are located just in the same region, so my right hand typically rests there.)

When editing the keyconfig.plist file, at least on a mac, you can actually ignore most of the mess of picking out the proper ASCII numeral for each key; printables, at least on the mac and in the US ASCII range, can be put in there as String values instead, so you can read what you're doing and get a quick reference to all (well, most of) the keyboard commands while you're at it, when you've forgotten where you put things (as online references won't be much of a help to you any more).

If you'd like to get half way to your own configuration similar to this, feel free to start off my version as a baseline. A few other keys have been changed too so be sure to map all you things want where you want them -- I'm guessing most of you won't have an ö key, for instance.

As a bonus, these controls make the game a whole lot easier to play in a pitch black room, should you want to. It's kind of cozyishly comfy, actually, and quite restful for the eyes.