Early Access Walkthrough

Welcome to Habitat! In this early build, we’ll walk you through assembling a habitat, flying your habitat with rocket physics, attaching and utilizing weapons, and taking on enemies in orbit.

Getting a Look Around
When you start the game, you’ll get your first view of orbit – your shuttle and two engineers against a backdrop of Earth. This shuttle and its two rockets are your very first habitat, which you can add items to or break down for components to build something completely new. Move, rotate and zoom your camera. Use WASD or edge scrolling with the mouse. For quick movement, hold down your middle mouse button. Rotate the camera with Q and E, and zoom with your mouse wheel or + and -. You may lose track of your habitat after moving around. It’s easy to get back. Look to the top-right of your screen. The big letter “A” represents your first habitat. Click on the A to return right back to the habitat.

Getting Fired Up
Take a look at your starter shuttle. Move your mouse over the shuttle and each booster rocket to learn about them – left-click on them to fire up their booster rockets and get moving. Click again to turn them off. If you get moving out of control, hit SPACE BAR to perform an emergency stop. Notice that the emergency stop took a certain amount of Omni – your universal resource in this early version of the game. You can find your total Omni reserves in the bottom left of the screen.

How Do I Steer?
Boosters, like the ones on your first habitat, are just big straight pipes of burning fuel; steering a craft with just boosters means turning them off and on in sequence to thrust and turn. For more delicate maneuvers, you need steerable thrusters. There are some floating right in front of your first habitat – they look like big metal spheres with exhaust pipes on top. Let’s attach them to your habitat.

Getting Connected
Left-click on one of the metal spheres. Then move your mouse back to your habitat. Get one of the light blue markers on the sphere near one of the light blue markers on your habitat. Once you see the marker turn green, left-click. This is a valid connection, and one of your engineers will go grab the sphere, bring it back, and connect it to your habitat. Do the same with the other sphere, but on the opposite side of the habitat. You’ll notice your engineers will queue and multitask automatically; you can queue up as many operations as you want.

Fly with Precision
Once the spheres are connected, click each one to turn the thrusters on (the lights will go from red to green). Hold the arrow keys to steer the thrusters. When you hold down the thruster key to move, you’ll be burning Omni, so be aware! (Boosters don’t use Omni). You can click the spheres to turn the thrusters off if needed. Note that ALL green-lit thrusters will respond to the keyboard movement controls, no matter what habitat they are attached to. Try using the thrusters with the booster rockets and emergency stop for full control over your habitat movement.

Arm Yourself
Time to add weapons onto your habitat. You’ll need to defend yourself, as you’ll encounter hostile space stations and nano-machine hunters in orbit. Around your habitat you’ll find an assortment of different junk – some of which has offensive capability. Weapons have to be attached to your habitat before they can be used. Pick what you like – the tank, the T-Rex head, lasers and rocket pods are all good options – and connect one or more to your habitat. If you’re connecting a lot of objects at once, you can build more engineers by clicking the plus-shaped icon at the top-right corner next to your habitat “A” button. When choosing where to attach your weapons, use the C and Z keys to rotate the weapon so you can mount it the way you like. If you end up not liking your attachment job, it’s easy to disconnect them; just click the Destroy Connector button at the bottom of the screen, then click the connection point to break it off. Right-click to exit Destroy mode, then get right back to building.

Fire!
Fire your newly-mounted weapon by clicking on it. Note that some weapon types stay on until turned off. Turn off a constant-firing weapon by clicking on it. Firing weapons, like thrusters, takes Omni, so be careful about how much you use. And, some weapons, such as the tank, impart recoil on your habitat, moving you around as they fire. Be ready to counteract that movement if you need to stay stable.

A Second Habitat? Sure!
You can have more than one habitat. Constructing one is easy. Any two pieces connected together become a habitat that can grow to any size you like. Click on a piece of junk you’d like to use to “start” the habitat, then move it to any open area of space nearby – instead of being green, the marker for the piece will be blue. Left-click to have the engineer move it. Once it’s been moved into place, you can then click a second item, and connect it up to the first. Upon connection, you’ll see a “B” appear in the top-right, which signifies the second habitat. You can now return to it and operate it as a brand new habitat.

Hotkeying
Often, you’ll want to use many systems in sequence, such as quick-changing which booster is firing, shooting weapons in sequence and so on. You can assign any habitat item a hotkey number and activate it using that number key on the keyboard. Hover your mouse over any habitat component you have connected and press either the R key to assign the next available hotkey, or CTRL plus a number key to assign that number directly. Hitting the R key on an already-hotkeyed item will remove the hotkey assignment. Note that keys are universal – the same set applies to every habitat you own, and only one item can be tied to a particular hotkey at a time. Once you have hotkeys assigned to a few numbers, turn them off and on using the number keys to get used to it.

Putting it All Together in Combat
Ahead of you, you’ll see a derelict space station, made of several rockets and a core. It’s dormant and won’t fire back (unlike some of the other stations you’ll encounter), so it’s a good practice target. Using your movement and weapons systems, maneuver your habitat over to the derelict station and try to destroy it. You can choose to try to hit the core, which will destroy the entire station in a huge explosion, or you can try to break off individual items. If you can break off individual pieces, they become available for you to salvage; simply attach them to your own station like any other piece of junk. During the attack, you might get damaged by explosions, ricochets or other issues. Hover over your items to check their health. Click your engineers then click on damaged pieces to attach the engineer and start repairs.

Advanced Connection and Destruction
There are two advanced modes for manipulating your habitat, accessible at the bottom center of the screen: “Build Connections” and “Destroy Connections”. You may want to reinforce existing connections between items – this makes them more survivable under attack as well as less fragile while moving. Click “Build Connections”, then click two nearby light blue points to connect them up. You can even build connections between two separate habitats you own to merge them together. Just make sure you’re close enough before starting the connection. And, you can destroy connections to break off items you no longer want, to split your habitat into multiple habitats, or to even create improvised weapons out of boosters or other moving objects. Click “Destroy Connections”, and click on any existing connector on your habitat to destroy it. Remember – if you orphan an item completely, it will become free-floating and unable to be used until you connect it up to another item or habitat. Destruction of connectors can be hotkeyed! This lets you queue up tactical destruction of connectors to make improvised weapons or escape plans in combat. Just use R or CTRL plus a number key while in Destroy Connections mode, then you can use the hotkey at any time to destroy the connection. Right-click to exit either of these modes.

Taking On the Big Baddies
Now that you’ve mastered construction, flight, and combat, it’s time to take on a bigger challenge. Around the game world there are several enemies – there are space stations with automated defenses that you must destroy, and nano-machine hunters, cloud-shaped entities that will chase you down and fire at you. You will also find some of Earth’s great landmarks held hostage by enemy stations – can you take them out and save the landmarks? (You can add them to your own habitat!)

Secrets and Combos
You’ll find interesting combinations of items will come in handy during your struggle against the enemies. Have you found:
 * The Cyber Statue of Liberty and her patriot lasers?
 * Prisms that can be used to extend and move your laser beams? Try attaching in front of your lasers.
 * The Matter Accelerator, which can apply railgun-like force to any object it touches?
 * The Tether Launcher (Grappling Hook), which can grab onto objects (including enemies) from a distance?
 * The Robot Arm, which can pivot and have any item or weapon attached up front?

Thank You!
Good luck, Commander, and thanks for playing this early build of Habitat! We have so much more we’ll be bringing you over the next few months – we can’t wait to share it with you.