Getting Started on Foot

The ground tutorial mission was not bad, was fun. But then I got thrown out into the world. Missions are always far away, not very rewarding, if you die its done and you've wasted your time. I know I'm doing it wrong. That is why I'm asking for help.

How do I get started? Which missions are easy? Allow me to get materials and not get bad rep with good factions. I don't mind going after pirate bases etc. At this point now money isn't an issue and since foot missions dont pay much I'm only doing it to get to start upgrading suits/weapons.

Any good starter systems? Missions? Guides?
 
I feel you, I got so stressed out at first. Courier jobs are a nice easy start, just find a computer terminal to locate the person you're looking for, hand over the goods, have a mooch around. There are also smuggling missions under Procurement which are the same except you can't get scanned by security on the way to your customer or they'll start getting shooty.
Salvage jobs are always pretty chill, you might have to deal with a few scavs, but they don't always turn up.

Reactivations (under Support, don't come up often, also show up in Thargoid recovery systems) are also great, look for "restore power..." not "find a power regulator..." so you won't have to, well, find a power regulator, and they'll send you to a settlement that needs the regulator inserting in the power centre. You can take any loot you find it's not even marked illegal. Again you may get a few scavs.

When you've got some G3 gear and you're ready for some murder, look for Combat missions which aren't marked illegal, they'll send you to a criminal faction where you can steal and murder without getting any fines or bounties. (These settlements also have Interstellar Factors so you can pay off any bounties you may have picked up if you dock there too) Here you can get used to the mechanics of avoiding guards, stealing identities etc and if you mess up you can shoot your way out of it without getting a price on your head. Get used to the settlement layouts, and most importantly, get used to finding and deactivating the settlement alarms - learning to do this will make all the other missions go much smoother.
 
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Not to toot my own horn (and I prefer not to advertise here) but feel free to check out any of my guides. They aren't specifically aimed at "getting started" but the things you can learn are all mostly achievable in relatively basic (Grade 1) gear, though not all as easily. And that really is the first, most important thing you can do... get out of the basic flight suit and get yourself a weapon. Maverick is a great start as it opens up a lot of mission types to you (it lets you use the arc cutter, which you need to break through panels). With that and a decent main weapon (anything but the RPG or Oppressor, really - they're decent in the right hands but not good for beginners). Best sidearm by a huge margin is the Tormentor, though. The thing is deadly all on its own, fully upgraded.

The easiest on foot missions are the transport ones, I think. No weapons required, just get a maverick suit (better than the flight suit for oxygen reserves and looting capacity). Basic premise is take something to an NPC. Visit the settlement, use any terminal (looks like a flat screen console) and search for them using the "staff" tab. Another variant is go to a settlement and locate an item but they do have a couple potential hoops to jump through (i.e. finding where the object is, getting to it and potentially opening a locked case, which is still somewhat easy when you use the terminals as they should show you the code you need and you don't often need to access anywhere restricted). It's pretty hard to fail these missions and they're pretty chill to complete. But they pay very badly. Then again, so do almost all on foot missions (still something that annoys me about Odyssey).

The next easiest missions, to a degree, are the salvage types. Most of the time you're just going to a location to grab something from a crash site but the problem with these missions is they can trigger scavengers in drop-ships and... honestly... for a totally new player, given the pitiful rewards for these missions, the difficulty of these scavenger spawns can be extreme. Almost not worth bothering with until you can at least hold your own in combat. But, if you avoid that, then they're mostly straight-forward and give you quite a lot of good loot in some cases (particularly the illegal ones, which aren't illegal at all and you won't get in any trouble doing them except for scavengers attacking).

The "illegal" variants of non-combat missions (so, basically, heists, sabotage etc) are quite challenging but do not require any combat, if done right. They pay the best of basic mission types as well (still awful rewards but material rewards can be good and you'll need to do these types of missions to unlock engineers anyway, so you should do them). I cover a lot of this stuff in my videos. They're my favourite mission types. They're just quite easy to fail in some cases, particularly without any help/guidance.

What used to be a great introduction to on foot game play was the restore settlement variants (listed under the support tab) but these aren't very common these days, which is a shame. If you can see them, they're a great way to get into the mechanics of the game with lower risk (but not zero risk) of scavengers. Quick tip about scavengers though... they'll never enter a building. So you can use buildings to hide (and even better, if you've got an ammo box in there and the power is on, you can stay inside indefinitely as you slowly kill them at whatever door they're camped at). There are lots of guides for this mission type (I've not specifically created one, but you can use some of my guides to learn how to use stealth to make this stuff easier - somewhat anyway, NPCs now have extremely good eyesight for NPCs and will see you quite a lot easier than they used to).

Combat missions just aren't easy for new commanders. Not any of them. If you've got FPS experience then you may be able to adapt well enough to still complete them but you will absolutely need at least a G1 suit (maverick or dominator) and a G1 main weapon (i.e. not just the starter pistol). Sadly, no one really ever thought to make the combat have any sort of "entry level" and the experience you had of combat in the tutorial is never replicated anywhere else in the game (really annoys me that one too). There's lots of advice I could give you for combat, but it would take more than the total of this, already very long, post. Don't avoid it entirely, certainly not if you like FPS games and can get a decent suit and a couple nice guns going. It's fun enough (very fun if you really get into it) and Combat Zones (CZs) are easily the fastest way to make credits in the game on foot if you don't do exobiology (which I won't go into as I am not an expert on that at all - it's a good way of making credits and can be passably fun, in my experience, but I'd suggest you search for a guide on it if you're interested). But CZs are the best paid by a huge margin, otherwise (if you can do the high intensity variants, you can clear 10-20m for one CZ). Basically, each combat scenario requires different skills and tools. Avoid the illegal ones unless you want a bounty on your head. Maybe even just start with low intensity CZs in a G1-3 set. You can use this thread to maybe find some partly upgraded items, too (but you'll need a fair amount of credits for that).

Honestly, this is a big topic on its own. It's something I may cover one day. Until then, you've got a couple links here I'd recommend from great content creators:

Down to Earth Astronomy's getting started guide

Burr Pit's combat guide for beginners

There are more, I just wouldn't recommend them all (and I'd recommend avoiding some as they're absolutely just "flavour of the month" get rich quick content grabs that are long outdated). That said, my stealth combat guide is actually slightly outdated now as scavengers behave differently to how they did back then. I may revisit this and make an up to date guide, just warning you ahead of time in case you did decide to check my videos out.

Finally... Ask here! This place is a great resource for help and guidance; so if you're not sure about something in particular, or want more information about something specific that you encountered, this is a good place to ask for help politely. Good luck on your journey, commander :) o7
 
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I feel you, I got so stressed out at first. Courier jobs are a nice easy start, just find a computer terminal to locate the person you're looking for, hand over the goods, have a mooch around. There are also smuggling missions under Procurement which are the same except you can't get scanned by security on the way to your customer or they'll start getting shooty.
Salvage jobs are always pretty chill, you might have to deal with a few scavs, but they don't always turn up.

Reactivations (under Support, don't come up often, also show up in Thargoid recovery systems) are also great, look for "restore power..." not "find a power regulator..." so you won't have to, well, find a power regulator, and they'll send you to a settlement that needs the regulator inserting in the power centre. You can take any loot you find it's not even marked illegal. Again you may get a few scavs.

When you've got some G3 gear and you're ready for some murder, look for Combat missions which aren't marked illegal, they'll send you to a criminal faction where you can steal and murder without getting any fines or bounties. (These settlements also have Interstellar Factors so you can pay off any bounties you may have picked up if you dock there too) Here you can get used to the mechanics of avoiding guards, stealing identities etc and if you mess up you can shoot your way out of it without getting a price on your head. Get used to the settlement layouts, and most importantly, get used to finding and deactivating the settlement alarms - learning to do this will make all the other missions go much smoother.
YES the restore power ones. I'm not even sure how to smuggle as there doesn't seem to be any stealth in this game. I'm still G1 and I was at a spire today and I can't even do any damage to revenants ad I've seen vids of people taking t hem down easy.

Deactivating alarms eh. Problem that makes all this so frustrating is that unlike first person shooters.. one mistake and its 10 mins to get back or going again. I'm so used to respawning the act of needing to go through some process to get back into the fight is infuriating.
 
Not to toot my own horn (and I prefer not to advertise here) but feel free to check out any of my guides. They aren't specifically aimed at "getting started" but the things you can learn are all mostly achievable in relatively basic (Grade 1) gear, though not all as easily. And that really is the first, most important thing you can do... get out of the basic flight suit and get yourself a weapon. Maverick is a great start as it opens up a lot of mission types to you (it lets you use the arc cutter, which you need to break through panels). With that and a decent main weapon (anything but the RPG or Oppressor, really - they're decent in the right hands but not good for beginners). Best sidearm by a huge margin is the Tormentor, though. The thing is deadly all on its own, fully upgraded.

The easiest on foot missions are the transport ones, I think. No weapons required, just get a maverick suit (better than the flight suit for oxygen reserves and looting capacity). Basic premise is take something to an NPC. Visit the settlement, use any terminal (looks like a flat screen console) and search for them using the "staff" tab. Another variant is go to a settlement and locate an item but they do have a couple potential hoops to jump through (i.e. finding where the object is, getting to it and potentially opening a locked case, which is still somewhat easy when you use the terminals as they should show you the code you need and you don't often need to access anywhere restricted). It's pretty hard to fail these missions and they're pretty chill to complete. But they pay very badly. Then again, so do almost all on foot missions (still something that annoys me about Odyssey).

The next easiest missions, to a degree, are the salvage types. Most of the time you're just going to a location to grab something from a crash site but the problem with these missions is they can trigger scavengers in drop-ships and... honestly... for a totally new player, given the pitiful rewards for these missions, the difficulty of these scavenger spawns can be extreme. Almost not worth bothering with until you can at least hold your own in combat. But, if you avoid that, then they're mostly straight-forward and give you quite a lot of good loot in some cases (particularly the illegal ones, which aren't illegal at all and you won't get in any trouble doing them except for scavengers attacking).

The "illegal" variants of non-combat missions (so, basically, heists, sabotage etc) are quite challenging but do not require any combat, if done right. They pay the best of basic mission types as well (still awful rewards but material rewards can be good and you'll need to do these types of missions to unlock engineers anyway, so you should do them). I cover a lot of this stuff in my videos. They're my favourite mission types. They're just quite easy to fail in some cases, particularly without any help/guidance.

What used to be a great introduction to on foot game play was the restore settlement variants (listed under the support tab) but these aren't very common these days, which is a shame. If you can see them, they're a great way to get into the mechanics of the game with lower risk (but not zero risk) of scavengers. Quick tip about scavengers though... they'll never enter a building. So you can use buildings to hide (and even better, if you've got an ammo box in there and the power is on, you can stay inside indefinitely as you slowly kill them at whatever door they're camped at). There are lots of guides for this mission type (I've not specifically created one, but you can use some of my guides to learn how to use stealth to make this stuff easier - somewhat anyway, NPCs now have extremely good eyesight for NPCs and will see you quite a lot easier than they used to).

Combat missions just aren't easy for new commanders. Not any of them. If you've got FPS experience then you may be able to adapt well enough to still complete them but you will absolutely need at least a G1 suit (maverick or dominator) and a G1 main weapon (i.e. not just the starter pistol). Sadly, no one really ever thought to make the combat have any sort of "entry level" and the experience you had of combat in the tutorial is never replicated anywhere else in the game (really annoys me that one too). There's lots of advice I could give you for combat, but it would take more than the total of this, already very long, post. Don't avoid it entirely, certainly not if you like FPS games and can get a decent suit and a couple nice guns going. It's fun enough (very fun if you really get into it) and Combat Zones (CZs) are easily the fastest way to make credits in the game on foot if you don't do exobiology (which I won't go into as I am not an expert on that at all - it's a good way of making credits and can be passably fun, in my experience, but I'd suggest you search for a guide on it if you're interested). But CZs are the best paid by a huge margin, otherwise (if you can do the high intensity variants, you can clear 10-20m for one CZ). Basically, each combat scenario requires different skills and tools. Avoid the illegal ones unless you want a bounty on your head. Maybe even just start with low intensity CZs in a G1-3 set. You can use this thread to maybe find some partly upgraded items, too (but you'll need a fair amount of credits for that).

Honestly, this is a big topic on its own. It's something I may cover one day. Until then, you've got a couple links here I'd recommend from great content creators:

Down to Earth Astronomy's getting started guide

Burr Pit's combat guide for beginners

There are more, I just wouldn't recommend them all (and I'd recommend avoiding some as they're absolutely just "flavour of the month" get rich quick content grabs that are long outdated). That said, my stealth combat guide is actually slightly outdated now as scavengers behave differently to how they did back then. I may revisit this and make an up to date guide, just warning you ahead of time in case you did decide to check my videos out.

Finally... Ask here! This place is a great resource for help and guidance; so if you're not sure about something in particular, or want more information about something specific that you encountered, this is a good place to ask for help politely. Good luck on your journey, commander :) o7
Thanks! I sub to both those channels but I've avoided ground missions. Also the dropship missions were the ones that got me really ticked off and decided not to try. I've got all the suits just all G1 and everything is stock. Need to start my journey on upgrading them no matter how frustrating 'm sure I'll get better. Thanks for the writup I'm going to reread this entirely a couple times.
 
Another thing I noticed is if I'm landing near a crashed ship and I use weapons to kill everyone t heres a pile of bodies I disembark and poof all the bodies are gone
 
There is stealth. Crouching makes you silent. NPCs have basic set routes they follow. Arrow indicator on the mini-map/radar thing helps you avoid line of sight. There are silencer mods for weapons (and one for your feet!)
I can understand why new players think there's no stealth, many/most games with stealth give you varying super powers of invisibility and a clear indicator that crouching is activating some form of hidden mechanic. It took me several hours of trial and error in EDO alpha to work out what was going on with npc interaction, with lots of failure, but ultimately enough success via repeatable actions that made it clear stealth had its use (which was the catalyst for me deciding to do guides in the first place)
 
There is stealth. Crouching makes you silent. NPCs have basic set routes they follow. Arrow indicator on the mini-map/radar thing helps you avoid line of sight. There are silencer mods for weapons (and one for your feet!)
I just snuck up behind one and one shotted t hem.. yes plasma weapons are deadly. Her mate heard it and 1shotted me. SIGH
 
I can understand why new players think there's no stealth, many/most games with stealth give you varying super powers of invisibility and a clear indicator that crouching is activating some form of hidden mechanic. It took me several hours of trial and error in EDO alpha to work out what was going on with npc interaction, with lots of failure, but ultimately enough success via repeatable actions that made it clear stealth had its use (which was the catalyst for me deciding to do guides in the first place)
Yeah I just noticed there is.. I'm going to work on it, thanks.
 
I just snuck up behind one and one shotted t hem.. yes plasma weapons are deadly. Her mate heard it and 1shotted me. SIGH

We live and learn. Or die and learn, I guess 😅

Shield up before you engage! The only thing that can one shot you when you're shielded is the plasma shotgun, and even that won't be able to do it when you've upgraded your suit.
 
Another thing I noticed is if I'm landing near a crashed ship and I use weapons to kill everyone t heres a pile of bodies I disembark and poof all the bodies are gone
Yeah, that's the price you pay for shooting scavs from your ship, but tbh, you're not missing much. It's much more efficient to nuke scavs from your ship where possible.
 
We live and learn. Or die and learn, I guess 😅

Shield up before you engage! The only thing that can one shot you when you're shielded is the plasma shotgun, and even that won't be able to do it when you've upgraded your suit.
Yeah I thought of that right away after I died. I was more curious to see if there were any stealth takedowns.
 
Also, keep in mind that, with the latest update, they decreased the requirements for engineering and massively increased the materials rewards from missions, so engineering your suits and weapons will be a lot quicker, further down the line.
Another thing I noticed is if I'm landing near a crashed ship and I use weapons to kill everyone t heres a pile of bodies I disembark and poof all the bodies are gone
That's a bit annoying, but relatively inconsequential for game purposes, as there are no body mechanics.
The only difference it can make is that you can scan a body and find out if there's a bounty on it, or increase the existing one, at times.
Bounties are so low, however, that it won't impact you anyway.
 
A few tips:

If the going gets tough, the tough call in air support. Advanced Missile Racks. Two small ones are all you need to nuke any site from the orbit. I can't even count how many times they saved my hide early on when a half dozen scavs posed a serious threat to me in my grade 1 equipment🙂

On-foot conflict zones make the perfect risk-free playground for practicing on-foot combat. You even get free grenades and e-breaches out of it if you use Frontline Solutions!

If you want to make decent money with on-foot missions, Larceny is your go-to. Loot everything in the cargo containers and sell it at an anarchy or communist station. Easily 3...6 millions per mission.

The easiest combat missions that also pay very well in materials are legal takedowns. You don't need to worry about staying hidden, just walk in, locate the target, follow them around until there's no-one else in line of sight, shoot them in the head with a silenced Tormentor or zap them with the energy tool in alternate mode, walk out.
 
About using missiles, just remember don't do this in a no fire zone. That includes settlements that are abandoned.

With it being easier to upgrade these days, a decent suit and weapons are all you need to kill scavengers if you use the environment properly. In fact, I'd say the only scavenger you need to be wary of is the sharpshooter. They will two shot you from full shields to death in anything but a decent dominator suit. The difficulty with scavengers is they swarm you in numbers and the sharpshooters stay at the back, making it tough to take them out and avoid the swarm. This is why blocking line of sight is important. Just watch out for their lazer guided grenades (another of my bugbears in this game is this, AI that can drop a grenade on your feet without even seeing you properly and despite you taking the higher ground, when you try to throw the same grenade and it just goes... flying for miles).

For newer players, as much as I hate suggesting the best way to do on foot game play is in your ship, dumb fire missiles are really useful for doing POI based missions (scavenge/larceny/retrieve). These locations have fewer places to hide. Settlements do not. You can easily mess the AI up by keeping moving. And, as I said, they don't enter buildings. I've killed 20+ scavengers one at a time in a building, just using an ammo box and recharge station/battery packs a few times. The key is killing them before they duck for cover, so the Tormentor is good for this. Headshots count, if they have no shields.
 
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Thanks! I sub to both those channels but I've avoided ground missions. Also the dropship missions were the ones that got me really ticked off and decided not to try. I've got all the suits just all G1 and everything is stock. Need to start my journey on upgrading them no matter how frustrating 'm sure I'll get better. Thanks for the writup I'm going to reread this entirely a couple times.
A tip as to get upgraded suits/weapons is that after the Thursday 'tick' - server restart for maintenance - the space stations and Odyssey settlements around in the galaxy get a chance to have one or more upgraded items for sale at the on-foot vendor in each settlement, these can go up to G3 and give you a headstart. This thread lists some of the findings that are available, but you can often find your own pre-upgraded items before others discover them. Usually the settlements/space stations near the big systems are visited first by players, and once an item is bought, it is gone for everyone else (until next Thursday) tick.
 
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