8:22 There's a symmetry mode in the build menu IIRC in the game. It helps you align blocks along various axes.

Hi Frances, suggestion. Get a second ship and a captain. Then tell him to go mine and afk. Edit: Made comment before getting to the end. I would, like most games like this, suggest taking a look at the wiki. You can get much higher amount of materials out of mining captains with upgrades(raw mining lasers, hanger bays/mining fighters, more explored map with more astroids found, mining systems ECT...) After you get some seed capital get a big ship with a cargo bay and a merchant captain, you can make more money and eventually get into owning your oy factories for the real money. You can also find large astroids that are just plain rock that can claim and found mines or sell. They are a great source of rep with factions.

Oh? This is one of my favorite games. I am a builder, I build things in games that allow me to build things. This game scratches the spaceship itch.

I highly reccomend getting some R-Mining lasers, easily the best investment you can make. Though you do need a cargo bay for them, but you'd need one for the refinement lasers too since there is a chance of getting trade goods even with those ones. Also, be prepared to spend hours or even days working on one ship design, it's kind of a rite of passage for this community.

I guess insomnia has its perks when Francis uploads a video

O god I’ve played manny hours of this game and it makes me want to get back in to it again. Had a lot of fun playing on a server with other people but playing solo is also really good and relaxing. They have added a lot of things and in the last few years

Me and my buddies literally just got back into this game. This is an amazing coincidence

"dont need a cargobay" atm u do later

Finally someone that I know playing this game 😅

I'm playing x4 non stop lately and I've been closely watching your videos about it (several times).. So funny watching those and then see you play this game... :)

Thanks for showcasing the game!

Great to see you play Avorion!

Oh, my, I'm so glad Avorion popped up on the wheel! When I started playing this game with a friend of mine we stayed up all night, had a coffee break when the sun came up and then played some more xD If you would like I can shower you with beginner tips, from mining, shipbuilding, questing and (while we won't get to see this at this time) why on a certain day of the year all the planets are cubes. :) I hope you enjoy this game, this is one of my favorite games of all time. To all those who haven't played in the early days, I recommend you listen to the old, original soundtrack song called (Avorion OST) Panorama when you engage in an epic battle with the Xsotan. (The song is sadly no longer in the official soundtrack so you won't find it ingame.)

A little heads-up. In this game there are building blocks that function better when they are one big block, instead of a bunch of smaller blocks. They are volume-based; they get stronger the more volume the block has. Like your thrusters. If you end up needing more directional thrust, for stopping power, turning, or strafing, know that the larger thrusters will the best. So if you make your ship bigger; DON'T add more thrusters; instead, make the ones you have bigger, and move them to the corners of your ship, as you have them here, because they are more effective that way. Cargo space works like this as well. The larger a single block is, the better. Break it down into several smaller blocks and you will get less cargo space per volume. Your engines don't care about the volume of individual blocks. Need engines? You can cram them in anywhere(but beware, the fire jet that comes out of them will cosmetically show through other blocks up to some distance away.) So watch out for the blocks that scale with volume.

on the mining front, just wait till you find R-mining lasers that have 90% efficiency. your mining vessel is gonna get silly i'm sure. because cargo is gonna be important later.

Oooh very interesting! Francis in space is just such a treat I mean at the state of the current ONI playthrough Excited to see where this game goes and even more so where you go with it

Huh... hadn't played this for years, so it's nice to see it's become a lot more complete than it used to be. I remember finding a random shop that sold utterly broken turrets that were just better than anything else in the game, and spammed them until I could just win forever against all comers :D

I have 19 minutes in this game. Because when I bought it, there was a block that you had to add stuff before you could even do anything. And you start off with this nice interface. I love how some games you ignored for over 6 years suddenly seem very nice. And like every game, it's handy to have videos like this that explain the game for real :-).

When building you can use symmetry to build two sides at one. Also there is a huge amount of ships in Steam workshop. You can even get whole faction packs. I'd also like to point out that you can change the size of your engines, and it may be better off to have one large thruster rather than many little ones.

usually you use the captains for your other ships in your fleet. if you plan to make a mining fleet for example,this captain would be the kind you would hire. before you even think about fighting you really should get to the green stuff (next best material,i forgot the name) since that stuff will give you shields and spare you a lot of frustation :)

This will be fun to see you Francis up, wonder what the end game ships are going look like…

I've got 1,300 hours into Avorion, and about 40 items in the Workshop. I say "items" because I have a few turrets and station pieces in there as well as ships. Later in the game you get into building stations for passive income, and to a certain degree for parts for constructed turrets. There are production chains, but they're optional since NPC traders will supply your factories with the parts they need. Cargo bays and a few other block types are more efficient if you combine them. A single 2 x 2 x 2 block gives you more storage than 8 1x1 blocks, because the blocks have interior walls, and that subtracts from the usable volume. Ore highlighting is absolutely essential for serious mining. Asteroid fields get depleted, and a big chunk of the minable asteroids are hidden. Some of them contain a LOT of ore, but some are just ordinary. I honestly think it's a much more enjoyable game if you're at all inclined to build nice looking ships, rather than lumps of blocks. The stuff I've built is mostly Star Trek themed, i.e. Gorn ships from the Star Fleet Battles boardgame, plus some Lyran ships, and a tug from the series Picard. Even if you only use Workshop ships, you can run all sorts of interesting looking ships. The main drawback to using Workshop ships is that some of them are hollow shells, and adding functional blocks like power, shields, and thrusters can be a huge pain if they haven't even bothered to put in placeholder framework blocks.

Yay, love this game. Engines and thrusters don't care about occlusion, they can be armored or buried in the hull or whatever. They both get a bit glitchy visually if buried in only a thin sheet of armor though. Thrusters do care about distance from center of mass. At least for yaw, pitch, and roll. For braking it doesn't matter. You first few ships costs iron, then the next costs titanium, then naonite, and so on. At the end you may end up with a dozen or more ships in your fleet. I think there is a max. Some blocks like cargo bays and crew quarters like being in bigger single blocks rather than many smaller blocks spread around the ship. Flying bricks is pretty much all I make too. Sometimes I'll get fancy and make a brick with sticky out bits, or a circular brick. You can naturally overlap blocks a bit. IDK if that's just an editor limitation, or design choice. Plus you can grab subobjects in the workshop that are many different utility blocks with massive overlap. Like a 5x5x5 cube containing a 5x5x5 block of shields, batteries, generators, thrusters, and gyros. It's cheatyish because you're a smaller target with more bits, but the blocks still exist to get shot at. They help some people make fancier designs. I prefer my ugly bricks to flying other people's pretty ships most of the time, but you do you. I do like getting fighter designs from the workshop though. Some Kushan resource freighters for miners, Starfleet designs for beam fighters, starfurys for chaingun fighters, and so on. Great tip on keeping a jump loaded. Coulda looted those pirates though, the NPC ships rarely do. Some of the hidden roids are 'rich', some not hidden ones are too, basically more glowy bits == more ore and less rock. Integrity field generators are great even after you get shields. Always include them. I like having a block in the center, with strips or dots around the outside to make sure every bit is covered in the field without costing too much power, mass, or materials. Best first episode of this game I've seen.

If people like more aesthetically pleasing ships the game has some prefabs available, and also the Steam Workshop has thousands from some very creative folks!

This is great. I just started a play thru my self. I have not beat this game in years. Remember. Workshop has great ships. This pay thru is going to be all star trek. My last was all star war's. All my ships are a big giant block when I build them :) That Mining captain is going to be great when set him out on his own.

Francis, tier actually makes a pretty big difference as well; there's a hidden tier value system that reduces your output against it if you are a lower tier, and increases your output if it's a higher tier. Specifically, it affects the efficiency. Higher efficiency also results in greater yields, even if not as high a damage output. Also, there's a major difference when building to use non-cuboid building. EDIT: Also, having salvaging lasers on your ship is always worthwhile. So is using the merge function to combine blocks of a similar type; you usually take less penalty and get more of a benefit from a single large block. Only real downside is if it gets blown up, you lose all of those fused blocks, instead of just the one blown up, ablatively.

So, a few tips: Go into your key options and give Toggle Flight Assist a keybind, which is Inertia Dampeners and Thrusters (and Gyros, though I find it better to build ships without any). Early game it's very useful to toggle it on/off as needed. You don't need Flight Assist when you're just looking around, so that power can be used to, say, recharge your hyperdrive. Similarly decelerating from boosted speeds is actually not impacted by your inertia dampeners, so turning your flight assist off allows you to boost for longer and cover larger distances. Though do be careful about overshooting a target (or, worse, accidentally shooting *into* it), and keep in mind that decelerating from what I call cruising speed - the maximum speed your ship moves at without boosting - does rely on your Flight Assist. Purifying mining lasers do not require cargo space, as they both mine and refine resources at once. Albeit at the cost of *significantly* lower efficiency. A bit closer to the core than your starting sector you can start to find/purchase Raw mining lasers, which only mine resources and require cargo space to store the raw ores for refining later at a Refining Station. The same applies to Salvaging lasers. It's much better to use raw mining/salvaging lasers were you can - the raw materials do require cargo space, Refining Stations you don't own will take a (rep based) surcharge to do the refining for you, and it takes time to do that refining, but you'll *still* end up with more resources per asteroid or unit of time spend mining using raw mining lasers over purifying lasers. Slight correction: It costs 500 Iron to found your *first* few ships. As you build more and more ships the material quality required to found new ships increases, until you reach a point where you can't have more than X ships before you reach the next material gate...unless you pull some shenanigans with Alliances. So, building ships in Avorion. Oh boy, do I have words about that. First, if you're going to make a pretty ship pay very close attention to the button that says "Local 0.5", and the "0.5" one right next to it. Those are the Grid Size and Scale Size buttons. They determine the size of the grid you're building on, and the size of the blocks you're building with. I.E. with Scale Size 0.5 you can have a block that's 0.5, 1.0, 1.5, etc., but not 0.25. Similarly with Grid Size 0.5 you can easily fit a block that's 0.5³ next to another block that's 0.5³, but not a block that's 0.25³. If you want to build pretty ships make sure to start building with Grid Size 0.4, and Scale Size 0.8. Delete the initial root block to accomplish this. Why? Halves. If you need a block that's half as large to fill in some detail at 0.5 scale you can reduce the scale to 0.25 and fit it, but if you need to do it a second time you're out of luck since the game can't do 0.125 scale or grid size. You'll likely set the scale size down to it's minimum of 0.05 and try to cram it in until it's "good enough", but that's obnoxious and ugly anyhow. If you start at 0.8 scale size you can cleanly halve down to 0.4, than 0.2, than 0.1, than 0.05. It allows you to do a lot more levels of detail work cleanly, resulting in much cleaner and prettier ship designs. Next, if you're focussed on building practical ships than there are two lessons you need to learn hard and early. The first is that processing power is a premium resource. Most everything meaningful, from power production to engines to cargo bays to crew quarters, costs processing power. It's a maximum limit to the size of the ships you can build given a certain tier of material knowledge. "Smart Hull", and later on Computer Cores, are worse than useless - you're spending power, mechanics and processing power on an overweight piece of tinfoil when you could have a bigger generator, thrusters, inertia dampeners, etc., alongside regular armor for a bigger and better ship overall. The second lesson is that base Hull (and it's variants) are a trap option. The big limiting factor (if not processing power) for ships boils down to mass, and base hull provides *pitiful* amounts of HP per tonnage. Super Rich Stone is better than base Hull in terms of HP per tonnage, albeit barely. If you want to give a ship HP give it a thin layer of armor, rather than a thick layer of hull. Incidentally, if you're completely new to building ships in Avorion and are looking for some kind of rough guidelines, I'd recommend the following: Acceleration (roughly) equal to Deceleration, at least 1 rad/s in all three rotation stats, Required Energy at most ~50% of Generated Energy (this will vary wildly early game based on what subsystems you use, but it's a decent baseline), and Energy Storage at least equal to Hyperspace Jump Cost, or up to 20x (Generated Energy-Required Energy). That last one is because your ship's battery will charge at 1/20th the rate of it's storage total, meaning a 20GJ battery can consume at most 1GW to charge itself. Early game you're very likely to have problems generating enough energy, but remember the trick to managing your Inertial Dampeners. Okay, that crew "tutorial" was almost malicious levels of actively detrimental. Standard crew in Avorion is largely worthless. They can be assigned to multiple posts, but only contribute 1 workforce and draw a full salary. Professional crew contribute 1.5 workforce initially, and slowly become silver/gold starred professionals that contribute 2 and 2.5 workforce respectively, while still drawing only a single full salary. You can transfer these upgraded professional crews between ships or stations freely, BTW. The bonus for having more crew than strictly necessary only applies to Engineers and Mechanics, which manage your ship's engines/inertia dampening systems and your ship's hull respectively. Having more crew thus increases your ship's speed/handling with Engineers, or passive repair speed for Mechanics respectively. It's worth getting the full 200% bonus from having extra engineers, since the extra crew space required - particularly if you hire professionals rather than whatever high school dropouts a given station was happy to dump off on you - is more than paid for by the increased performance. Under default settings you do actually need to have a Shipyard in a sector in order to build certain types of blocks, including generators. The green hammer and gear icon confirms there is a Shipyard, meaning you can build said blocks. There's two alternatives you can use to jumpstart your economy. At 20:50 look at the asteroid cluster in the bottom-left, and notice the *giant* asteroid there. That looks like a claimable asteroid. Most asteroids of that type can be claimed and sold to a nearby faction for a ton of money/reputation (basically the higher your reputation the more money, but the less reputation you gain, if any), and one such asteroid is (near-)guaranteed to spawn in your starting home system. The second option is to look for hidden caches, which you can open to yield good money and a random turret, system upgrade or (rarely) building knowledge. Hidden caches are basically floating in space, usually among asteroids that make them no easier to spot, so use an Object Finder system upgrade to find them. One note: Yellow hidden mass sectors have a higher chance of generating claimable asteroids, hidden caches, and other goodies, but also have a chance to house hostile pirate base. You can exit your ship and send a drone (hit T) to the hidden mass sector and scout it out. Fun fact about the Xsotan, they are not hostile towards you when they first jump into a system. If you fire any turret, though, including a mining turret, they will turn hostile towards you. You should check the galaxy map before jumping into wormholes. It'll show roughly half of a wormhole's line, which is enough to give you a rough idea of direction and distance. Likewise it's a good idea to send a drone through a wormhole rather than your actual ship, given that nothing prevents wormholes from exiting right into a pirate base. The captain mission system is complicated, but generally you can hover over relevant numbers and the game will explain why something is(n't) awful. Ambush chance work as you'd expect: The more reckless, weaker and easier to pick off the higher it is. Note that only the traits of the captain initiating the mission have any effect. Captains assigned as escorts don't apply their traits, for better or worse. The increase in mining DPS not making a difference is, I assume, a quirk of the way that the game abstracts mining in the background. As for the second captain not bringing in as much as the first, traits. There are a number of traits that affect command speed, ambush chance, resource/money yield, or even combinations thereof. Early game mining is indeed that simple, but you'll quickly run into complications trying to expand. As said you will start needing higher tier materials to build more(/better) ships, and Persecutors will spawn to stop those trash mining ships from travelling further towards the core until you upgrade them. And further upgrade them to keep pace with the pirates who will ambush them, even in safe space, if they're left as unarmed sitting ducks in a tinfoil box full of rocks. Closer to the core you'll find better materials, and will get more all else being equal, so leaving mining ships stuck in the starting sector isn't a viable long term strategy.

Know you from kenshi videos, glad to see you play another game I love.

Hey Francis, find a scrapyard, get salvage-lasers and you can get Credits, gear and Metals at the same time. BTW: Founding-Costs for news ships vary, soon you'll need titanium to found a new ship, then naonite,... Oh, the naonite-area shouldn't be that much closer to the core, generators made from naonite produce more power and naonite is the first material that allows shield-generators. You should also take a look at those hidden mass sectors, you might find an asteroid-field or a wild scrapyard there.

Hahaha, that was funny, you marked both ends of the wormhole, when on the map it is evidently a wormhole, by the giant long line connecting the two.

love this game, cant wait to see more!

the magic of building in a vacuum. cubic structures for the win

This is an extremely cool game! Do not let the blocky look deceive what you are capable of. If you buy this on steam you have the ability to download blueprints of a metric butt ton of really cool ships from the workshop. I have a few hundred ships I have subbed to and all of them are really cool. I have about 30 Starter ships I have made myself. This game is well worth the entrance fee. I have a few hundred hours in the game and I have not played out all of the missions.

you just revived this game for me thx XD

you will need cargo holds later, mining is much more effiicient with miners that mine ore that has to be refined in a refinery then if you use mining lasers that refine it in one go. the difference is massive. if i might spoil something: the salvage operations can begin as soon as the enemy shields are down.

The Mining mission works better in unpopulated space (so sectors without space stations and the like), you can assign multiple ships to the same mission and it will boost resources, assigning different mining turrets can change the resources gathered (higher efficiency turrets generate more resources (1000 ore in an asteroid hit with a 20% turret generates 200 resources). There are "R" style mining turrets which generate unrefined ore, you need cargo holds to use them, and you must refine the ore at a resource depot, but the efficiency is much higher, Mining Missions using "R" turrets produce way more ore. If you want to build out a fleet fast and cheap consider the Salvage Mission (again this mission works best in unpopulated space), like the mining mission it will deliver resources, but it will also find subsystems, turrets, money and cargo (and you really want "Lucky" captains for it if you can). The same comments on turrets apply, including "R" style Salvage turrets, and on multiple ships. The Merchant Mission is the one that will make you the most money, BUT, you really need a ship with a large jump range, decent cargo, and a large budget (it takes money to make money). Merchant missions will almost always need an escort warship.

i picked this up when your video indicated this would be next. its a nice and simple version of space engineers. there are lots of little turrets that do all sorts of things. rail guns, are easily my fav so far. so far im up to the 3rd material and just rushing my way towards trinium. been lazy and just using the ship upscale on my first design adding modules as needed. but it rips through stuff so no reason to fix somthing that isnt broken.

"*chainsaw noise* we're back" :P

Love the end song!

minimal mining ship=Pipsqueak.

As soon as you can swap out your mining lasers from purifying, you get like 1/4 of the amount you could getm but you will need cargo space when you finally drop the purifying lasers.

To answer your mining question, you _could_ add cargo bays... Another fun fact, the volumetric size of the blocks you build directly correlate to the specs of the room. Want more speed? Bigger engines! Etc.

Very keen to watch some more of this game. I've got like 250 hours into it a year or so ago. Can be pretty fun.

My corvettes have a single subsystem for Arbitrary weapon slots, which allows 4 total weapons and 1 point defense... the whole ship is cheap as well, at a few thousand iron and titanium, or about 5k titanium all iron is converted to it. So long as I manage to outfit 4 rare armed turrets at 30-40 DPS, that's a potential of 200 after including the point defense, and saying I have 4, that tends to delete pirates rather quickly... not sure about bosses though. I do know they are great for smaller escorts, with a 200% on engineers, they can also intercept at a rate of about 900m/s with the AI controlling them and 1800m/s when a player is. Overall quite proud of my ship :D

Keep them coming Francis! :D

The part of this game i thought you would enjoy is the economy and factory chains you can setup and optimize and eventually turret crafting which requires alot of sub components and factory chains

forgot this game existed....and forgot its in my library

I find the most difficult part of this game is building ships that don't look like either boxes, or penises.

Francis, was there ever an end to the last Rimworld playthrough you did? I feel like you got 3/4 of the way through and then it ended without any resolution. Do you have plans to finish the series or will that be the end of it?

Can't wait to see what stupid warbrick you'll build in Terratech, Francis.

You can also just talk to your mining ship after you get a captain in it and tell it to mine in the sector its currently in. Then you will actually see it flying around and mining. What you did was assign a mining "mission". I find, early on anyway, that having them mine this way actually gets you more ore per hour, but they can actually deplete a system of ore.

Take a look in the ship yards of each faction you come across. The devs who made Avorion got pretty good at making algorithmically designed ships that actually look good and distinct for the factions. A nice compromise between building a brick and using the steam workshop could be to have the shipyard build you a ship and then customizing it.

Its a great game!

One of the funnest things I've done in this game was make my ship an asteroid and launch it into enemies

Last I played, Salvaging completely outclassed literally any other activity you could do. That said, since you're going down my personal list of games still, evidently, I assume Empyrion, Interstellar Rift, or Evochron are next.

Heh, forgot about this game. I can't run Starfield, so might as well install this! 😂

Still saddened by the 2.0 update. It went from a game desperately in need of some polish in a genre I really liked, to a much more polished game in a genre I have little-to-no interest in.

a lot of games that have MP today spin up a server for SP (running locally) it to make the game logic more simple

Having a single player game create a server that you play on is not too uncommon for games in which multiplayer is an option. For example Minecraft Java creates a server that the client interacts every time. The reason for this is that single and multiplayer development is unified.

Trash Panda made me smile.

bok bok, he didn't liberate himself from the building restrictions :-) Wont last long :-) One of the fastest starts is to scoop the loot that the pirates or fighting factions drop. You actually warped out of the system with a green drop after you mined the "motherload" Midlle mouse button to lock the rock that your mining captain highlights, shows you how much in there... and how much you get is to cry 🙂

You had the name said correcty

It's a tad better than Lego Minecraft in space. :)

Ship names: Picasso and Braque, the founders of "Cubism" art.

Avorion is an old game I got it years ago and forgot it existed

Brick ship and crush others...... Exactly what my first build was designed for in Space Engineers. If that's a thing in Avarion aswell, I might actually grab this. Looks like it's a bit more of a fun game than SE, honestly. Also, correct me if I'm off here, but it seems a lot like a simplified, though 3D version, of Cosmoteer...?

Do you have more vids of avorion? I chked your channel for Playlist and didn't see one :(

You totally can make ramming ships, just make sure to put in more than one layer of armor blocks in front. Also, naonite can be used to build shields, and IIRC trinium makes the best ship computers. And don't forget the integrity field generator.

heres an idea: Create Borg's Cube :D

Build drone miners makes life easier

Francis is my go to rimworld professor. Has he updated his killbox to the new Singularity Killbox that has hit you tube? Would love to see his expert opinion!

Great game. For what it's worth, I build the tops of my ships flat so I don't have engines blocking my camera view.

It's been so long since I've played this game, might need to fire it back up again after finishing my current ONI game

It will be more expensive with following ships, more high end ore to start the ship.... So not 10 ships fleet ... yet :)

so....MINECRAFT.....in space? 🤔

If you place the thruster block in the front, you might not need a second thruster block.

Soundtrack reminds me of Plebs

You missed a claimable astroid in 21:30, you could a claimed it and sold it for a couple hundred thousand credits.

Such an unrated game..

Hi Francis, if you haven't played and are interested, I'd like to watch you play a Total War game, take over the whole world with different strategies 😅

Let's see if you can figure out how to strip mine this one.

This kind of looks like EVE but for people like me who want to shoot spaceships and mine raw resources but don't want to go MMO. Which uh...might have been a bad thing for me to learn about.

Efficiency > design^^

This is quite the game but can be a bit grindy.

no storage blocks needed for inventory?

Will you play ENDZONE: A WORLD APART ?

so this is like besieged?

comment for the algorithm

you should try going medieval

first boom, 25 seconds!!!! love your stuff!!! keep it going!!!

have you ever tired SPAZ 1?

To fast, you leave the poor beginner behind. I have to keep going over the same 10 seconds of vid to catch everything you say. 😁

i honestly expected you to skip this one since while its not as bad as From the Depths its still pretty time-wasty

Play armor core 6 pls

With your dyslexia, most of the names in this game will be completely beyond you. Sadly. But the names don't have any meaning, other than to differentiate one faction from another; so there is that.

Shio building is terrible because anything cool looking or with even the thinnest armor makesnyour ship slow as fuck. This is more like a ocean simulator with how ships move rather than space

On online single player game... Ew. But other than that I like the idea

its pronounced "avorion"

Yawn... Kinda boring...

Watched through Starsector and have been playing Avorion for a few weeks now. Guess it was just meant to be 🥹