Heaven's Vault

• You can only explore sites once, so look around as best as you can. Check every corner, nook and cranny for items and inscriptions.

• Six is regularly gonna ask you if you're done and ready to depart a site. The correct answer is always no until you've had a good look around through every nook and cranny. You only get one visit to each archaeological site (save one exception where you can make a return trip later in the game), so make the most of it.

• You can check the map while on the river to pick the best routes to keep you within a search area.

• Keep an eye out for ruins when navigating the rivers. They are a VERY important source of artifacts for trade and for inscriptions. If you want to uncover the secrets of the language, you'll need all the inscriptions you can get.

• The game prompts you to take turns to your set destination on the river, but nothing stops you from ignoring them to wander off and explore, although the flow of the rivers might make for a long trip back.

• Trading artifacts to Tapi and donating what he gives you to Huang should keep them both happy and willing to provide you with more stuff to look at.

• The more inscriptions you find, the more quickly you will be able to lock down certain words as correct and add them to your vocabulary.

• Huang can help you confirm or deny some of your guesses for translations.

• As you learn more words, occasionally review your older partial translations. If a word has since been confirmed, the context can eliminate one possibility for other words in the same fragment.

• The more artifacts you find and trade for, the more it narrows down search areas for uncharted ruins. It's better than just blindly wandering around in a search area half the size of the known nebula.

• Going to the
  Unknown Extremely Ancient Site
  is the point of no return, and the game will not warn you of this.

• The main story's pretty nonlinear, but there are branching paths to a degree that can shut you out of subplots, or at least their best endings. Consider what's best for some people when you decide where to take them, there are better options than Elboreth.

• Visit Huang at the University of Iox regularly. Aside from being able to offer similar texts to your finds, he can confirm or deny some of your guesses for you (And he'll even give a brief aside on why a word is wrong). Do the same for Tapi on Elboreth with some of your finds and he'll offer similar pieces in trade to help narrow down Sites. You don't have to give up what you show to see the inscriptions on them if you've already located them.

• On subsequent New Game+ playthroughs you retain your dictionary and the sentences get more complex.