full game tutorial

FARBOUND - FULL GAME TUTORIAL

A ship, alone, in the dark.

You are the sole crew member of a small ship, stranded far from home. Nothing about the ship runs itself. Power has to be allocated, heat has to be managed, air has to be recycled, and every jump between systems risks breaking something. This guide covers every system in the game.

CONTROLS

W, A, S, D or the arrow keys move you around.
The mouse looks around. It uses pointer lock, but if your browser blocks that, you can click and drag with the mouse to look instead.
E interacts with a console or panel. Hold E to install a jump drive component at the Engine housing.
F, while flying in the Navigation view, holds to mine an asteroid or dock at a station, whichever you are near.
C, while flying in the Navigation view, holds to charge the reactor from a star.
Escape closes the open screen, or leaves the Navigation console.
Walking into the base of a ladder climbs it automatically. W climbs up, S climbs down.

The SAVE and MENU buttons sit in the top right corner whenever you are walking around the ship.

THE SHIP

The ship has eight rooms, each independently powered.

Control Room holds the Heat System console and the Navigation console.
Power Room holds the Power Allocation console, and the Backup Power System panel once it is built.
Lab is the crafting and refining bench.
Engine Room holds the Engine housing, where jump drive parts are installed by hand, and the Fuel Generator panel once it is built.
Living Room is the one room that heals you.
Cargo Room is where every raw material, part, and toolkit physically lives.
Airlock has suit charging, cabin repressurizing, and the oxidizer rack.
Corridor is just a hallway. Only its lights draw power.

READING THE HUD

The HUD sits in the top left and shows six bars.

Health is your own condition, from zero to a hundred. It turns yellow below forty and red below twenty.
Power shows current draw against what is available, either the reactor or the battery. It never turns yellow, only red, and only when overloaded.
Heat is ship heat, from zero to a hundred, with twenty five as the healthy baseline. It turns yellow above fifty and red above seventy five.
Atmo P is cabin pressure, from zero to a hundred. It turns yellow below fifty and red below thirty five.
Ship Air is the shared oxygen pool that both your suit and the cabin draw from. It turns yellow below forty five and red below twenty.
Fuel is shown against your tank's max. It turns yellow below forty five percent of the max and red below twenty percent.

Health, how you actually lose it. Health drains at a rate of point one per second all the time, no matter what. Just being out here costs you. On top of that, only Heat and Atmo P cost extra health, and only while they are sitting in yellow or red. Either one in yellow costs an extra two per second. Either one in red costs an extra five per second. These stack. Both in red at once means point one plus five plus five, or ten point one per second. Power, Fuel, and Ship Air being bad does not drain health by itself, but letting them get bad is usually what causes Heat or Atmo P to spiral, which is what actually hurts you.

Healing. Standing in the Living Room heals one health per second, automatically, for as long as you are in there. Medical Kits, crafted in the Lab, restore eight health instantly on craft, with no separate use step.

Death. At zero health you get a screen that says you died, with two options: back to menu, or restart from your last save.

POWER

Every room draws power whenever it is switched on. Control draws thirteen units and is critical. Power draws five units and is critical. Lab draws ten units. Engine draws fifteen units and is critical. Living draws eight units. Cargo draws five units. Airlock draws six units, plus one unit for every loaded Extra Oxidizer, and is critical. Corridor draws 3 units.

Open the Power Allocation console in the Power Room to toggle any room on or off. You cannot switch a room on if doing so would push total draw past your reactor's current output. The toggle simply refuses and shows as blocked. Critical rooms have immediate consequences when cut.

Your reactor's max output rises by charging near a star, covered in section seven, and by building Solar Panels in the Lab, each of which permanently raises your ceiling by 3 units.

HEAT SYSTEM

The Heat System console is in the Control Room. A rack holding up to three Coolant Purge Cells automatically corrects ship heat back toward the twenty five baseline, one cell at a time, at one heat point per second. With no cells loaded, or with the Control Room unpowered, heat is unregulated and bleeds toward zero at one and a half points per second, which is its own problem, since heat above fifty or seventy five is one of only two systems that drain your health.

Craft more Coolant Purge Cells in the Lab, one part each, and load them at the Heat System console.

AIRLOCK

Three things happen here, and all of them need the Airlock powered.

Charge Suit tops your suit charge to a hundred percent and costs six ship air. It is cheap.
Repressurize restores cabin pressure from the shared air pool, at a steep rate of two ship air for every one percent of pressure recovered. If you do not have enough air to fully repressurize, it spends what it can.
The Oxidizer Rack holds two slots. Each loaded Extra Oxidizer returns point seven five ship air per second and draws one unit of power while installed. Craft them in the Lab for four parts and one material each.

Baseline air regeneration, with the rack unloaded and the Airlock powered, is a slow point one five per second. Loaded oxidizers are what actually keep the pool healthy.

NAVIGATION

The Navigation console is in the Control Room and has two tabs.

The Galaxy tab, or zoom out, shows a flat map of the systems you know about. Click a system to see the jump requirements and its system info, which lists every planet and station in order of distance from their star. Unidentified planets show as unknown.

To name an unknown planet, switch to the System tab, zoomed in, for that system, hover an unidentified planet to confirm it is unknown, then click it. A prompt lets you give it a name. That name is private to your save and sticks permanently.

To jump, you need three things at once: the jump drive fully assembled, meaning two components installed, see section eight, enough fuel for that specific route, and the Engine Room powered. Once confirmed, a jump cannot be aborted. Random problems can strike mid jump, covered in section ten.

The System tab, or zoom in, is live three dimensional flight inside your current system. WASD thrusts, F mines an asteroid or docks at a station, and C charges from the star.

Mining means getting within range of an asteroid in a belt and holding F for four seconds. It yields up to ten raw materials, capped by your free cargo space. Mining gives no fuel, materials only.

Star charging means getting within a hundred and ten units of the star and holding C. The closer you are, the faster your reactor output climbs, up to your current cap, but it also heats the ship up, by as much as sixteen heat per second at point blank range. Even without holding C, simply flying within forty five units of a star heats you passively, by as much as seven heat per second, so do not linger unless you mean to.

Docking means getting near a station and holding F, which opens its trade and quests screen.

JUMP DRIVE

Craft a Jump Drive Component in the Lab for two parts each. You need two installed in total. Walk to the Engine housing in the Engine Room and hold E to install one you are carrying. Once both are installed you are cleared to jump.

THE LAB, CRAFTING AND REFINEMENT

The Lab has two tabs, Menu, for refining and recycling, and Crafting, for everything you can build.

Refining converts three raw materials into one part.
Recycling converts one part into two materials, a sixty six percent recovery rate.

Both need the Lab powered, the Cargo Room powered, and the Lab not damaged.

Everything you can craft, and its cost:

Jump Drive Component costs two parts. Install it by hand at the Engine housing. You need two to jump.
Coolant Purge Cell costs one part. It is a heat system battery, loaded at the Heat console, whose rack holds three.
Extra Oxidizer costs four parts and one material. It returns point seven five ship air per second while loaded, in a rack that holds two, and draws one unit of power.
Solar Panel costs four parts. It permanently adds three units to your max reactor output, and stacks with every panel built.
Toolkit costs one part. It is required before building the Backup Power System, and only one can ever be built.
Backup Power System costs three parts and two materials. It is a new panel in the Power Room that comes with a three unit battery. It is a one time build and needs a Toolkit first.
Five unit Battery costs five materials. It adds five units to the Backup Power System's capacity.
Ten unit Battery costs one part and six materials. It adds ten units to the Backup Power System's capacity.
Fuel Generator costs three parts and one material. It is a new panel in the Engine Room, and needs three units of spare reactor power free before it can be built.
Medical Kit costs one part. It restores eight health, used instantly on craft.
Repair Pack costs two parts and one material. It fixes one damaged system, covered in section twelve.

If the Lab itself is damaged, all crafting is offline, including crafting a fresh Repair Pack to fix the Lab. It is worth keeping a spare pack on hand if you can.

JUMP DAMAGE

Every jump takes a handful of random draws along the way. Short jumps may only draw once or twice, long ones more. Each draw is either nothing, roughly a forty seven percent chance, or one of the following problems.

A control power surge cuts power to the Control Room, fixable from Power Allocation.
A total power surge cuts power to every room at once.
Lab equipment damage takes refining, recycling, and crafting all offline, and is repairable.
Oxidizer rack damage stops all air recycling, and is repairable.
A hull breach vents cabin pressure continuously, and there is no fix for this yet.
A fuel line rupture loses roughly twenty percent of your current fuel.
A coolant discharge wipes the active heat cell's charge.
Failed cargo clamps lose up to five raw materials.
A shorted suit charging bank disables Charge Suit, and is repairable.
A destroyed solar panel permanently removes that panel and its three units of output.
A wrecked fuel generator disables the generator and loses whatever was in its hopper, and is repairable.

No damage report is given on arrival. You find out what broke by walking on the ship yourself.

ENGINE ROOM, FUEL GENERATOR

Once built, allocate raw materials into its hopper using the plus one, minus one, all, and clear controls. While allocated materials sit above the two material threshold and the Engine Room has power, it runs automatically, turning two materials into one fuel every three seconds, while drawing three units of power. It stops on its own once the tank is full or materials run out. Unburned allocated materials are returned if you clear the allocation.

REPAIR PACKS

Four systems can be damaged by a bad jump, and each now has a repair button right on its own screen. Those systems are the Lab, the Airlock's oxidizer rack, the Airlock's suit charging bank, and the Fuel Generator. Each repair consumes exactly one Repair Pack, crafted in the Lab for two parts and one material. Hull breaches and destroyed solar panels are not repairable this way. A breach simply keeps venting, and a destroyed panel has to be rebuilt from scratch.

BACKUP POWER SYSTEM

This is a one time build in the Power Room that adds a battery you can switch to as your sole power source, independent of the reactor. While running on the reactor, you can feed spare power into the battery from the Power Allocation screen at an adjustable rate, charging it slowly. Pressing Switch flips the ship onto battery power entirely, disconnecting main power while it is active, and the battery can be overdrawn, meaning it just drains faster, with no hard cap like the reactor has. You can switch back at any time. Feeding only works while the Power Room itself has power and the battery is not already full.

STATIONS

Docking, by holding F near one in flight, opens its screen with two tabs. Trade lets you buy fuel at two credits per unit, up to ten at a time, buy raw materials at four credits each, up to five at a time, or sell all your raw materials at once for two credits each. Every purchase is capped by what actually fits and what you can afford. Quests shows cargo transfer contracts, which each station rolls fresh whenever you jump into that system. Accepting one loads sealed freight into your cargo hold, between fifteen and fifty blocks, and needs the space free. Flying it to the destination station and completing it there pays out between twenty and a hundred credits. Both accepting and completing a quest need the Cargo Room powered.

CARGO ROOM

The Cargo Room holds a hundred blocks of shared storage. One raw material takes one block. One part or toolkit takes four blocks. Backup batteries and any accepted quest freight also take up space here. Nothing, including materials, parts, and quest freight, can be touched at all while the Cargo Room is unpowered.

SAVING

There are two save slots, chosen right after the cover screen. The SAVE button, top right, visible only while walking around inside the ship, writes your current progress to whichever slot you loaded. MENU takes you all the way back to the cover screen without saving. Saves can only be deleted from the slot picker screen, and it takes two clicks: the button flips to say sure for 3 seconds before it actually deletes.

A BASIC LOOP, START TO FINISH

Keep Heat near twenty five and Atmo P near a hundred. only these two systems directly cost you health.

Mine asteroids or buy materials at a station, then turn them into parts in the Lab.

Craft two Jump Drive Components and place them both by hand at the Engine housing.

Make sure you have enough fuel for the route and the Engine Room is powered, then plot and confirm a jump.

After arrival, walk over the ship and check every screen for damage. Repair what you can with Repair Packs, and route around what you cannot fix yet.

Repeat, working outward towards other systems, all more dangerous than home.

Good luck out there.