Volcanoids

(Note these tips were added when the game was in Early Access. They may be outdated.)

• Follow the quests to get your first drillship. You get it for free, then feel free to disregard the rest of the quests if you want.

• Don't bother trying to destroy a drillship until you get some grenades. You can shoot or pickaxe out modules but explosives are ten times faster, and fairly cheap to boot.

• The game is not terribly clear on this, so: If you do want to capture a drillship (you never have to do this, to be clear) you need to destroy every wall and module on a ship, including the ceiling. When the alarm goes off, before the ship explodes, use the panel right there on the drill and put a new core in the ship. Then you'll just have to fix every part of the ship you broke!

• Mines are great for getting a bunch of ore at once, and they do refresh after every eruption. There's a mine for every resource available at every tier, including coal.

• Your starting pistol sucks but makes getting headshots pretty easy. Upgrade to a shotgun ASAP, it's only two shots before reloading but makes getting headshots trivial.

• This isn't necessarily a before I play thing but if you make it to Tier 3, get a Gatling gun. It's amazing in close quarters and gunning down an entire drillship with a gatling was my favorite part of Volconoids.

• Copper armor disappears nearly instantly, but so does your health. Level 2 and 3 armor each double the armor values of the previous tier (Copper armor is 100, next is 200 then 400). If you're going to do anything even slightly dangerous bring a full stack of 5 armors.

• Once you hit Tier 2 you can create Hubs, which you can set to automatically craft stuff. Set up automatic ingot smelting and turret ammo creation once you get there so you can actually go do stuff.

• The underground maps and caves are pretty half-baked. I never felt the need to surface in the second cave map. Just don't worry about them unless you have to go there for story reasons.