Wildgate Beginner Guide Wildgate Game Walkthrough Wiki

1 Your ship is the character

Moonshot puts it plainly: across all modes, your ship is your home and lifeline for you and your prospector crew. Everything else follows from that.

Personal skill matters far less here than in an ordinary shooter. A crew that keeps its ship supplied, repaired and pointed the right way beats a crew of better shots whose ship is on fire.

2 Ice, fuel and ammo

Three consumables are named, and the instruction is to keep the ship topped up with all of them so you are ready for anyone or anything the Reach throws at you.

The habit to build early is topping up whenever you are not under pressure. Crews lose matches because they were empty at the moment a fight started, not because they lost the fight itself.

3 Crew roles that actually exist

The developer names two directly: a brave pilot holding down the ship, and a clever trickster boarding enemy ships. Around those, a working crew usually needs four jobs covered.

Nothing forces this division, and that is precisely why it is worth agreeing on. A crew where everyone runs to the guns has nobody flying and nobody fixing.

4 Prospectors and what to pick first

You choose from a variety of daring prospectors, each with their own abilities and tools. The store frames it as there being no wrong way to commit space crimes, which is a friendly way of saying the roster is built around different playstyles rather than power levels.

For a first session, pick whichever one supports the job your crew is short of rather than the one that looks most exciting. If nobody wants to fly, being the pilot is the most valuable thing you can do, and it is also the easiest place to learn the map from.

5 Reading the Reach

The Reach is a vast, ever changing procedurally generated map that differs every game. It contains cosmic storms, space creatures and ancient alien ruins with lost caches of loot.

Because the layout is new each time, memorising locations is impossible. What transfers instead is judgement: recognising which hazards are worth crossing for a shortcut, which ruins are worth the time to raid, and how long you can be stationary before someone finds you.

6 Boarding and being boarded

You can mess with rival ships from the inside, and they can do the same to you. This is the mechanic that makes the game unusual, and it is also the one new crews handle worst.

Sending a boarder means your own ship is short a person for the duration. That is a real cost, so it should be a decision rather than an impulse. Equally, when someone boards you, the answer is for one crew member to deal with it, not for everyone to abandon their station and go hunting.

7 Which mode to learn in

Treasure Hunt is described by the developer as the more relaxed looting expedition, which makes it the natural teaching mode. You still meet other crews, but the objective does not require you to seek them out.

Artifact Brawl is the sharpest test, since it has two win conditions and both are contested. Fleet Battle with up to 12 players a side is the most chaotic and the least useful for learning your ship, because someone else is usually making the decisions.

8 Your first few matches

1. Start in Treasure Hunt. Learn the ship before learning the opposition.
2. Agree who is flying before the match starts, not during the first emergency.
3. Top up ice, fuel and ammo whenever nothing is happening.
4. Use chat speech-to-text if you cannot or would rather not use a microphone. It is a listed feature.
5. Treat storms and creatures as terrain you can use rather than obstacles to avoid.
6. Leave with the loot. Escaping with a small haul beats being destroyed with a large one.