Hello Friends,
I'm going to describe how Below and Beyond works - in it's frustrating, buggy, counter-intuative state it does actually work. It took me ages to wrap my head around. Read on if you're interested. If you scroll down I have specific examples of how to make each piece I had trouble with work. First I rant a little - so feel free to skip.
Thank you, I really hope thius helps players and Devs. Please reach out if you have questions or comments, and please up-vote if this is helpful.
Sections to be found below:
1. General Feedback
2. How to - Buggy Rocket Landing
3. How To - Finding Missing Vehicles
4. How To - Use the Elevator
5. How To - Fix Stuck Piles of Vehicles (-this may be the solution to rocket takeoff problems)
6. How To - Load Asteroid Lander Rockets
7. How To - Loading Asteroid Lander Rockets (summary version)
8. How To - Leave Asteroid Without Losing Anything Important
9. Standard Rocket Load-out
10. General Asteroid Advice
1. General Feedback:
A lot of this is me dumping my frustrations. #Sorry/NotSorry - I needed to do this before I got to the useful part.
I finally get it. It took so long to figure out how to play the expansion. I feel the idea is great, but the implementation is both confusing (and buggy) and extremely frustrating learning curve. I don't mind a learning curve, but learning how to do something in a frustrating and counter-intuative system is annoying. However, I can totally see how you managed thinking this worked, if you were inside of it and know how it was supposed to work and what you were building.
I think a lot of the annoyance is it feels like it's been made by a different team - so I am now using two types of logic on how to use the game. The way the original game played (and trained me to play), doesn't work for the second type of logic the new team has. And the result is frustration. It feels in-elegant, half done and frustrating. My advice would be to sit down and consider these two kinds of logic, because what the new team has done is add a load of discord to what was a beautiful and smooth game. The logic we used for the first game doesn't hold for the expansion, and it hurts to wrap my head around it.
Additionally the sheer number of events in this version breaks the game - I have event after even after event with no consequence and seemingly unlimited choice of either an insane amount of funding, or tons of research. Completely broken, I no longer have to create research institutes and no longer have to do anything to make money.
Firstly the bugs - I know these have been mentioned to you and that you are working on it. One I would like to point out is the landing of rockets. For all of you having trouble - that save isn't ruined (at least not for me).
To land buggy rockets try the following (at some point, although difficult, I have gotten every one to land).
2. How to - Buggy Rocket Landing:
1. Double click, on the rocket you want to land, and then try. Sometimes this works.
2. Multiple clicks on the rocket icon. Sometimes this works.
4. I find mostly the issue is with the asteroid lander, and if I have a 'standard' rocket waiting to land, and a buggy asteroid lander, I can get the asteroid lander to land by first landing a regular one, and following up with an asteroid lander.
5. If that doesn't work, follow the regular rocket with landing the asteroid lander with double clicks, or then multiple clicks.
6. By this point I have always managed to get 100% of the rockets to land.. Not pleasant, but it works.
3. How To - Finding Missing Vehicles:
I had A LOT of problems here, until I figured one thing out. The vehicles seem to disappear, or 'jump' on the map. I often land supply pods with vehicles in while trying to load the asteroid landers, due to the disappearing vehicles. Often they are empty.
1. Check the caves. A ton of 'missing' vehicles were found inside the cave, all huddled up on one hex at the bottom of the elevator. I think they instantaneously transported themselves there without ever being visible when landing on the surface. It took me ages to find this out.
That's it - check the caves.
I haven't figured out yet if they 'fall' into the caves, or if the transportation was instantaneous because I'd placed an order for some vehicles to go there. I think they are falling, but I am not at all sure yet.
4. How To - Use the Elevator:
1. It matters where you place the order from. Order from the surface to send below. Order from below to send to the surface. Don't order from both or the resources disappear. I checked the top, and it said the button was to send materials to the caves. I went to the cave and checked what I needed. I went to the bottom of the elevator and placed the order - and nothing ever arrived. It took me forever to figure this out.
2. Disappearing materials all seem to be because I have an order placed from the top and bottom (as I frustratedly tried to figure out how to make this work). If you order from the bottom and top, the materials seem to disappear in the middle somehow, rather than getting delivered to either place. I lost tons of my hard-won rare minerals this way.
I hate this implementation. HATE HATE HATE. It's counter-intuitive, and like many things doesn't seem to fit with the implementation of the previous game.
5. How To - Fix Stuck Piles of Vehicles:
When sending vehicles to the caves or back to the surface they end up all on one spot & they seem stuck.
Half of them are stuck forever. Click on the stack, move which ones you can, and delete the others. The stuck ones don't seem to become unstuck.
That's it - delete the stuck ones, and save yourself frustration.
Even better - only send them one-way, or one at a time. Send one, move it, send the next one.
Again - frustrating and buggy implementation.
6. How To - Load Asteroid Lander Rockets:
Long version first, followed by short version below.
This is frustrating too. I think you get it by now.
When you have a rocket on mars you have two options. You click on the rocket and have the options 'Edit Payload' and 'Visit Asteroid'. Both of these options eventually send you to a screen where you choose what you load. Annoyingly there is also a third way of getting there, by going to the mars map, and clicking on the asteroid there. Again annoyingly each option does a slightly different thing.
As you have limited time to send rockets to asteroids it's best to be prepared.
This means load the rockets first, before you have a target. Ideally they should be fully loaded with your optimal cargo, before you discover an asteroid, so you can simply hit send immediately.
You need discipline here, due to the frustrating implementation. There are may ways this could go, so I'm just going to tell one that works, and then say why not to do it one other way.
1. Load rocket. On mars surface, select rocket and click 'Edit Payload'
2. Choose Loadout.
3. Wait for rocket to fully load. This is confusing, but there are things you want to look at here....
Check the "Status' section - select the rocket to find it. At the bottom of this section you will find some green text. This tells you what is happening with the rocket. This gives you hints as to why it isn't currently flying to an asteroid. It will say 'Waiting to Refuel', 'Loading Requested Resources' or 'Waiting for Destination'. This last one is what you want. It essentially means it is ready to go - although there may still be vehicle-related problems.
4. Check for 'Waiting for Destination' displayed in 'Status Section'. This rocket is ready to go.
5. Asteroid Detected. Don't bother sending a rocket to anything else but a newly discovered asteroid.
6. Send Rocket. Once discovered, pause game and click on your asteroid lander. If it displays 'Waiting for Destination' then click on 'Visit Asteroid'.
If rocket is not yet full, wait for it to ready, and send it to a new asteroid after it is ready.
7. Planetary View - Hitting 'Visit Asteroid' sends you to Planetary View, where you then select your newly discovered asteroid.
8. Click on 'Visit Asteroid'
9. 'Load Cargo Screen' - this is where it gets annoying. Don't change anything here, just click on 'Request'. If you change anything, your waiting and ready rocket has to change its load-out - sending you back into the frustrations of waiting for it to load and losing time. I wish this screen didn't exist. Then we would have only one way to load a rocket, and wouldn't be able to screw it up (I say one, I wish the third didn't exist either. If there was only one way, we couldn't screw it up and the system would be straight-forward and intuitive.)
10. Check rocket is heading to Asteroid - you may need to give it a minute or so, while it loads drones and vehicles.
11. If it doesn't fly do the following: On Rocket info screen check 'Requested Payload' Section. Here there is a list of what you asked to be loaded, with either 'Ready', 'Limited' or 'Not Enough' displayed. If all the materials are loaded (x/x) then the problem is usually displayed here.
'Ready' is what you want
'Limited' means a conflict between rockets. You have enough to send a rocket, but you ordered the same thing to be loaded into two, so you do not have enough. You can solve this by cancelling the order in one of your rockets.
'Not Enough' means you ordered more than you have - reduce the order.
12. Often there are issues here, and a rocket that displayed 'Waiting for Destination' now switches to 'Loading Requested Resources'.
12. I find usually the issue here is with Vehicles. The rocket displayed 'Ready', but actually doesn't have the vehicle loaded. My best solution here is to have a rocket waiting in orbit with the vehicles you want to send. Land it nearby and they will often load. If not then there are other problems:
My vehicle issues were often caused by vehicles stuck at the top of the elevator, or simply being below ground. Go to elevator, free or delete the vehicles and then order new ones to fit your order. Send by rocket not cargo pod, unless you want to deal with vehicles falling through to the cave system and then becoming stuck when you send them back to the surface. Annoying I know.
13. Hopefully you have now solved the problems. Let me know if there are any I missed - I might have a solution.
14. If you follow this, you will probably only wasted the first few days. Fewer if you already had that waiting rocket in orbit.
7. How To - Loading Asteroid Lander Rockets (summary version):
1. 'Edit Payload' - place order of load-out.
2. Wait for 'Waiting for Destination' in 'Status' Section of Rocket display.
3. Once ready, wait for a new asteroid.
4. Click 'Visit Asteroid' in rocket display.
5. Select asteroid on the world map.
6. Don't change load-out on 'Load Cargo Screen', just hit 'Request'.
7. Check rocket is underway. Give it a minute, if issues see above. Issues are generally it is not loaded, or there is a vehicle problem, or you are trying to send it before the 'Waiting for Destination' message.
Good Luck - it's really annoying, but I got there in the end.
8. How To - Leave Asteroid Without Losing Anything Important:
1. Once you've landed don't forget to build depots so your drones can unload the rocket. This greatly smooths everything. I build a Universal Depot plus a Metals Depot right next to the rocket. Having a completely empty rocket makes everything work better. Drones will unload your extra fuel and then load it back onto the rocket to fuel it for the return.
2. Once you've built everything and commenced mining, click on each rocket you landed and go to 'Edit Payload' - this is a crucial step to having everything work well later.
3. Choose the preferences for what you want to take back with you. My advice is return with as little as possible - just the crucial building prefabs, and the important resources. If you chose the preferences at the beginning then the drones will load the rockets throughout their stay on the Asteroid, rather than in a rush at the end.
4. At three days remaining, go and check the asteroid and plan what you are going to do (and look for any problems).
5. If possible, begin packing first buildings - leave power and drone hubs (repacking is a late tech).
6. At 2 days, give up, repack the buildings you want to keep. Beyond two days, do not harvest anything - switching off the extractors helps if you are going to leave them behind. It's important to cut your losses here.
7. After the buildings you want are packed away, then give your rockets a destination. Leave as much as possible - you really want to return with only vehicles, rare metals, exotic minerals and a handful of prefabs. Leave behind ALL of those solar panels, batteries and regular metal. If you don't it's likely you will lose rockets in the rush at the end.
8. Select rocket and click on 'Return to Mars'. Leave the settings on the 'Prioritize Cargo screen' - if you want to change anything you won't now have time.
9. Only do a manual load if you have only the one rocket on the asteroid. It gets complicated if you have more than one, and you'll likely lose the rocket.
9. Standard Rocket Load-out:
Two of these rockets to virtually every asteroid works wonders. I don't even need to scan them and generally I get 100% of the Rare Metals and Exxotic Minerals extracted, and don't lose rockets or vehicles.
1 Drone Hub
3 Auto Extractors
1 RC Commander
1 RC Explorer
1 RC Transport
5 Electronics
Everything else as recommended (the standard load-out of construction materials).
Fill Excess space with Drones.
10. General Asteroid Advice:
Keep depots to a minimum and only close to your rockets.
Pay attention to dust from rockets - if you place rockets next to each other, you may end up with dust problems on the drones as one takes off, preventing your next rocket from departing.
If you build drone hubs, it's useful to bring electronics for repair.
Don't bring more than the standard load-out of metal - it's unnecessary.
Make as few changes to orders as possible.
Cut your losses at 2 days.
Use prefabs.
Never Take Colonists - not worth the hassle.
I find two rockets to each asteroid works.
I'm going to describe how Below and Beyond works - in it's frustrating, buggy, counter-intuative state it does actually work. It took me ages to wrap my head around. Read on if you're interested. If you scroll down I have specific examples of how to make each piece I had trouble with work. First I rant a little - so feel free to skip.
Thank you, I really hope thius helps players and Devs. Please reach out if you have questions or comments, and please up-vote if this is helpful.
Sections to be found below:
1. General Feedback
2. How to - Buggy Rocket Landing
3. How To - Finding Missing Vehicles
4. How To - Use the Elevator
5. How To - Fix Stuck Piles of Vehicles (-this may be the solution to rocket takeoff problems)
6. How To - Load Asteroid Lander Rockets
7. How To - Loading Asteroid Lander Rockets (summary version)
8. How To - Leave Asteroid Without Losing Anything Important
9. Standard Rocket Load-out
10. General Asteroid Advice
1. General Feedback:
A lot of this is me dumping my frustrations. #Sorry/NotSorry - I needed to do this before I got to the useful part.
I finally get it. It took so long to figure out how to play the expansion. I feel the idea is great, but the implementation is both confusing (and buggy) and extremely frustrating learning curve. I don't mind a learning curve, but learning how to do something in a frustrating and counter-intuative system is annoying. However, I can totally see how you managed thinking this worked, if you were inside of it and know how it was supposed to work and what you were building.
I think a lot of the annoyance is it feels like it's been made by a different team - so I am now using two types of logic on how to use the game. The way the original game played (and trained me to play), doesn't work for the second type of logic the new team has. And the result is frustration. It feels in-elegant, half done and frustrating. My advice would be to sit down and consider these two kinds of logic, because what the new team has done is add a load of discord to what was a beautiful and smooth game. The logic we used for the first game doesn't hold for the expansion, and it hurts to wrap my head around it.
Additionally the sheer number of events in this version breaks the game - I have event after even after event with no consequence and seemingly unlimited choice of either an insane amount of funding, or tons of research. Completely broken, I no longer have to create research institutes and no longer have to do anything to make money.
Firstly the bugs - I know these have been mentioned to you and that you are working on it. One I would like to point out is the landing of rockets. For all of you having trouble - that save isn't ruined (at least not for me).
To land buggy rockets try the following (at some point, although difficult, I have gotten every one to land).
2. How to - Buggy Rocket Landing:
1. Double click, on the rocket you want to land, and then try. Sometimes this works.
2. Multiple clicks on the rocket icon. Sometimes this works.
4. I find mostly the issue is with the asteroid lander, and if I have a 'standard' rocket waiting to land, and a buggy asteroid lander, I can get the asteroid lander to land by first landing a regular one, and following up with an asteroid lander.
5. If that doesn't work, follow the regular rocket with landing the asteroid lander with double clicks, or then multiple clicks.
6. By this point I have always managed to get 100% of the rockets to land.. Not pleasant, but it works.
3. How To - Finding Missing Vehicles:
I had A LOT of problems here, until I figured one thing out. The vehicles seem to disappear, or 'jump' on the map. I often land supply pods with vehicles in while trying to load the asteroid landers, due to the disappearing vehicles. Often they are empty.
1. Check the caves. A ton of 'missing' vehicles were found inside the cave, all huddled up on one hex at the bottom of the elevator. I think they instantaneously transported themselves there without ever being visible when landing on the surface. It took me ages to find this out.
That's it - check the caves.
I haven't figured out yet if they 'fall' into the caves, or if the transportation was instantaneous because I'd placed an order for some vehicles to go there. I think they are falling, but I am not at all sure yet.
4. How To - Use the Elevator:
1. It matters where you place the order from. Order from the surface to send below. Order from below to send to the surface. Don't order from both or the resources disappear. I checked the top, and it said the button was to send materials to the caves. I went to the cave and checked what I needed. I went to the bottom of the elevator and placed the order - and nothing ever arrived. It took me forever to figure this out.
2. Disappearing materials all seem to be because I have an order placed from the top and bottom (as I frustratedly tried to figure out how to make this work). If you order from the bottom and top, the materials seem to disappear in the middle somehow, rather than getting delivered to either place. I lost tons of my hard-won rare minerals this way.
I hate this implementation. HATE HATE HATE. It's counter-intuitive, and like many things doesn't seem to fit with the implementation of the previous game.
5. How To - Fix Stuck Piles of Vehicles:
When sending vehicles to the caves or back to the surface they end up all on one spot & they seem stuck.
Half of them are stuck forever. Click on the stack, move which ones you can, and delete the others. The stuck ones don't seem to become unstuck.
That's it - delete the stuck ones, and save yourself frustration.
Even better - only send them one-way, or one at a time. Send one, move it, send the next one.
Again - frustrating and buggy implementation.
6. How To - Load Asteroid Lander Rockets:
Long version first, followed by short version below.
This is frustrating too. I think you get it by now.
When you have a rocket on mars you have two options. You click on the rocket and have the options 'Edit Payload' and 'Visit Asteroid'. Both of these options eventually send you to a screen where you choose what you load. Annoyingly there is also a third way of getting there, by going to the mars map, and clicking on the asteroid there. Again annoyingly each option does a slightly different thing.
As you have limited time to send rockets to asteroids it's best to be prepared.
This means load the rockets first, before you have a target. Ideally they should be fully loaded with your optimal cargo, before you discover an asteroid, so you can simply hit send immediately.
You need discipline here, due to the frustrating implementation. There are may ways this could go, so I'm just going to tell one that works, and then say why not to do it one other way.
1. Load rocket. On mars surface, select rocket and click 'Edit Payload'
2. Choose Loadout.
3. Wait for rocket to fully load. This is confusing, but there are things you want to look at here....
Check the "Status' section - select the rocket to find it. At the bottom of this section you will find some green text. This tells you what is happening with the rocket. This gives you hints as to why it isn't currently flying to an asteroid. It will say 'Waiting to Refuel', 'Loading Requested Resources' or 'Waiting for Destination'. This last one is what you want. It essentially means it is ready to go - although there may still be vehicle-related problems.
4. Check for 'Waiting for Destination' displayed in 'Status Section'. This rocket is ready to go.
5. Asteroid Detected. Don't bother sending a rocket to anything else but a newly discovered asteroid.
6. Send Rocket. Once discovered, pause game and click on your asteroid lander. If it displays 'Waiting for Destination' then click on 'Visit Asteroid'.
If rocket is not yet full, wait for it to ready, and send it to a new asteroid after it is ready.
7. Planetary View - Hitting 'Visit Asteroid' sends you to Planetary View, where you then select your newly discovered asteroid.
8. Click on 'Visit Asteroid'
9. 'Load Cargo Screen' - this is where it gets annoying. Don't change anything here, just click on 'Request'. If you change anything, your waiting and ready rocket has to change its load-out - sending you back into the frustrations of waiting for it to load and losing time. I wish this screen didn't exist. Then we would have only one way to load a rocket, and wouldn't be able to screw it up (I say one, I wish the third didn't exist either. If there was only one way, we couldn't screw it up and the system would be straight-forward and intuitive.)
10. Check rocket is heading to Asteroid - you may need to give it a minute or so, while it loads drones and vehicles.
11. If it doesn't fly do the following: On Rocket info screen check 'Requested Payload' Section. Here there is a list of what you asked to be loaded, with either 'Ready', 'Limited' or 'Not Enough' displayed. If all the materials are loaded (x/x) then the problem is usually displayed here.
'Ready' is what you want
'Limited' means a conflict between rockets. You have enough to send a rocket, but you ordered the same thing to be loaded into two, so you do not have enough. You can solve this by cancelling the order in one of your rockets.
'Not Enough' means you ordered more than you have - reduce the order.
12. Often there are issues here, and a rocket that displayed 'Waiting for Destination' now switches to 'Loading Requested Resources'.
12. I find usually the issue here is with Vehicles. The rocket displayed 'Ready', but actually doesn't have the vehicle loaded. My best solution here is to have a rocket waiting in orbit with the vehicles you want to send. Land it nearby and they will often load. If not then there are other problems:
My vehicle issues were often caused by vehicles stuck at the top of the elevator, or simply being below ground. Go to elevator, free or delete the vehicles and then order new ones to fit your order. Send by rocket not cargo pod, unless you want to deal with vehicles falling through to the cave system and then becoming stuck when you send them back to the surface. Annoying I know.
13. Hopefully you have now solved the problems. Let me know if there are any I missed - I might have a solution.
14. If you follow this, you will probably only wasted the first few days. Fewer if you already had that waiting rocket in orbit.
7. How To - Loading Asteroid Lander Rockets (summary version):
1. 'Edit Payload' - place order of load-out.
2. Wait for 'Waiting for Destination' in 'Status' Section of Rocket display.
3. Once ready, wait for a new asteroid.
4. Click 'Visit Asteroid' in rocket display.
5. Select asteroid on the world map.
6. Don't change load-out on 'Load Cargo Screen', just hit 'Request'.
7. Check rocket is underway. Give it a minute, if issues see above. Issues are generally it is not loaded, or there is a vehicle problem, or you are trying to send it before the 'Waiting for Destination' message.
Good Luck - it's really annoying, but I got there in the end.
8. How To - Leave Asteroid Without Losing Anything Important:
1. Once you've landed don't forget to build depots so your drones can unload the rocket. This greatly smooths everything. I build a Universal Depot plus a Metals Depot right next to the rocket. Having a completely empty rocket makes everything work better. Drones will unload your extra fuel and then load it back onto the rocket to fuel it for the return.
2. Once you've built everything and commenced mining, click on each rocket you landed and go to 'Edit Payload' - this is a crucial step to having everything work well later.
3. Choose the preferences for what you want to take back with you. My advice is return with as little as possible - just the crucial building prefabs, and the important resources. If you chose the preferences at the beginning then the drones will load the rockets throughout their stay on the Asteroid, rather than in a rush at the end.
4. At three days remaining, go and check the asteroid and plan what you are going to do (and look for any problems).
5. If possible, begin packing first buildings - leave power and drone hubs (repacking is a late tech).
6. At 2 days, give up, repack the buildings you want to keep. Beyond two days, do not harvest anything - switching off the extractors helps if you are going to leave them behind. It's important to cut your losses here.
7. After the buildings you want are packed away, then give your rockets a destination. Leave as much as possible - you really want to return with only vehicles, rare metals, exotic minerals and a handful of prefabs. Leave behind ALL of those solar panels, batteries and regular metal. If you don't it's likely you will lose rockets in the rush at the end.
8. Select rocket and click on 'Return to Mars'. Leave the settings on the 'Prioritize Cargo screen' - if you want to change anything you won't now have time.
9. Only do a manual load if you have only the one rocket on the asteroid. It gets complicated if you have more than one, and you'll likely lose the rocket.
9. Standard Rocket Load-out:
Two of these rockets to virtually every asteroid works wonders. I don't even need to scan them and generally I get 100% of the Rare Metals and Exxotic Minerals extracted, and don't lose rockets or vehicles.
1 Drone Hub
3 Auto Extractors
1 RC Commander
1 RC Explorer
1 RC Transport
5 Electronics
Everything else as recommended (the standard load-out of construction materials).
Fill Excess space with Drones.
10. General Asteroid Advice:
Keep depots to a minimum and only close to your rockets.
Pay attention to dust from rockets - if you place rockets next to each other, you may end up with dust problems on the drones as one takes off, preventing your next rocket from departing.
If you build drone hubs, it's useful to bring electronics for repair.
Don't bring more than the standard load-out of metal - it's unnecessary.
Make as few changes to orders as possible.
Cut your losses at 2 days.
Use prefabs.
Never Take Colonists - not worth the hassle.
I find two rockets to each asteroid works.
Last edited:
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