1 Salvage everything, sort later
The crafting system is built on breaking things down. You salvage what you can, reduce it to materials, and produce tools from those materials, with an endless array of items available in principle.
Because almost anything reduces to something useful, the decision of what to carry back is mostly a decision about weight and time rather than about value. A junk item you can break down beats an empty inventory slot.
2 Research that buys time
Research lets you develop better versions of what you already make, and medical supplies are called out specifically. In a game where the clock is the enemy, the right way to rank research is by how much time each result saves.
| Priority | Reasoning |
|---|---|
| Medical | Injuries otherwise cost turns you cannot spare |
| Protective gear | Prevents the injuries in the first place |
| Survival upgrades | Longer trips mean fewer round journeys |
| Weapons | Necessary, but they win fights rather than save days |
Weapons sitting last is deliberate and slightly counterintuitive. Combat is not what usually ends a run here, and a weapon upgrade taken instead of a survival upgrade means more trips, which means more elapsed time.
3 The creatures level with you
The game states that you gain experience and power alongside the celestial creatures underground, and asks you to evolve and adapt tactics or perish in the darkness of the mines.
That has a specific consequence: grinding does not work. Spending time to become stronger also makes the opposition stronger and costs you days the camp does not have, so raw levelling is a losing exchange twice over.
What does work is changing approach. If a creature type has become difficult, the answer is a different tactic or a different tool rather than more of the same at a higher number.
4 Nanomachines as a commitment
Harnessing nanomachines unleashes devastating abilities against foes, but sacrifices the ability to physically pummel monsters into submission. The word sacrifice is doing real work in that sentence.
Treat it as a branch rather than an addition. Before committing, ask what your fallback becomes when the abilities are unavailable or the situation does not suit them, because losing melee removes the option that costs nothing to use.
Players who enjoy planning tend to prefer nanomachines, since devastating abilities reward setting up a fight. Players who prefer reliability tend to be better served staying physical.
5 Choosing which ending to chase
You are told to survive long enough to unearth the terrible truth of what happened to the first wave of colonists, or to find a way off the doomed moon, and then reminded that no one said you get both.
Decide early which one you are playing for, because the two want different things from your turns. The truth is found by going deeper and reading what the mines contain. Escape is built by accumulating capability and keeping the camp alive.
6 Reading a failed run
When a run collapses, the instinct is to blame the fight that killed you or the resource that ran out. In a game where every step advances a clock, both of those are usually symptoms.
Three questions find the real cause. Did you leave the camp before it was stable. Did you leave colonists idle when they could have been working. And did you take trips without a defined objective and a turnaround point.
A run that answers no to all three and still fails is a run that lost to the design rather than to a mistake, and that is the point at which the difficulty becomes the reason to play it again.
Carry back anything that can be broken down and let colonists do the processing, since retrieval is the part only you can do. Rank research by how much time it saves rather than by how strong it makes you, and remember that creatures grow alongside you so grinding costs twice. Treat nanomachines as a branch that removes your free fallback, decide early whether you are playing for the truth or for escape, and diagnose a failed run by looking at the camp and the clock rather than at the fight that ended it.
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