System Era Works’ Astroneer seems to be the next hot thing. The game recently entered into Early Access on Steam and also launched into the Game Preview program on Xbox One. For gamers curious about how to get started and what they need to build, craft, explore and survive, there are some beginner guides available to help teach you how to play.

YouTuber Petard put together a quick tutorial video to help gamers get started with Astroneer. You can check out the six minute video below.

You can press ‘Q’ to quickly pull up your backpack, which will showcase your life support readings. The yellow meter is your battery power so you can terraform with your tools. The blue bar at the top is your oxygen meter. If you stick close to bases you can revitalize your oxygen.

You can acquire resin and ore compounds to create new base structures, such as solar dishes and tethers. You’ll need to extend your base from your pod by creating nodes. This is done by simply extending your base of operations or keeping your based tethered together through the blue power cords using the tether nodes.

The more tether nodes you put down, the farther out you can travel and the less likely you’ll be to run out of oxygen.

After gathering up more compound, you can use it to upgrade your base, turning the resin node into a smelter, research station, or a printer.

Petard suggests building solar stations to power a smelter and research for your early goings. Petard also suggests only using tethers outside of caves to feed you oxygen and power, and then place down beacons to mark the caves so you don’t waste a bunch of tethers everywhere.

Printers allow you to build larger items, vehicles and seats for your vehicles. Research stations allow you to discover the identity of various ores and objects. And smelters let you smelt down items to create new items.

ChimneySwift11 goes slightly more in depth with his 14 minute tutorial, giving you a breakdown of how each of the important items work, and you can best take advantage of them.

Chimney takes players through the step-by-step process on getting resin, extending the base nodes, and getting your hands on some rare material.

He explains that if you move too far away from your base and you get lost, the game will show a home beacon on the screen that will lead you back to your base.

After you collect resin and build up the first node, you can then extend the node with two resin, which will open up the ability to build those larger bases.

He mentions in the video to be wary of terraforming because if you’re not careful you can dig yourself into a ditch and die. So when using the terrain tool be careful how you dig in the environment around you.

In the early goings, it’s advised to build a solar panel after extending the base nodes so that it can recharge your power during the day so you can terraform more and utilize more power without it running dry as quickly.

In regards to tethers… he mentions that you’ll want to place down the tethers in accordance with keeping them all connected. If you place them too far away the tethers won’t connect, and they won’t generate power/oxygen.

Speaking o oxygen, you can suck up oxygen algae that will restore your oxygen if you aren’t attached to a tether, as pictured in the image below.

You can suck up the blue algae to restore your oxygen. You can suck up the yellow algae to restore your power.

Astroneer is available right now on PC in Early Access on Steam and it’s available through the Xbox Preview Program. For more info feel free to visit the official website.

(Main image courtesy of Esill)