Before the expedition even starts, there is a lot to prepare and think about. You will have to select the target system and planet for the expedition and the load-out of the starship. Both of these decisions will have significant impact on the difficulty of the mission.
Selecting the target system
We have limited information about the solar systems in range - we can guess the spectral class of the stars and their estimated mass, but that’s about it. To gather more information, you need to dispatch interstellar probes.
Their utility depends mostly on your selected difficulty level - on Playground, you can view all the information about the target system and its planets right away (in fact, you can even customize the target system to suit yourself), so there’s no need to handle interstellar probes at all. On Game level, the probes are necessary to gather the basic information about the system and its planets. Finally, on Simulation, not only do you need the probes to gather information, you will also only receive this information after the Earth is destroyed and as such, you will not be able to change your load-out to compensate - hopefully, you’ve packed well to fit at least one of the systems you’ve explored.
The interstellar probes are fast and fairly expensive, but they yield very useful information that allows you to pick a target star system based on more than just random chance. And of course, since your starship doesn’t carry them, they don’t cost you any weight.
It will tell you some more detailed information about the star system, including the approximate number of planets and their rough mass and position estimates. So if you’re looking at a Sun-mass, Sun-like star, with a planet about 1 AU far from the star, with about 1 Earth’s mass… guess you’re lucky!
Starship load-out
Now comes the hard part - deciding what to bring with you on the trip. The starship is already being built as we speak, along with the required infrastructure and its safe space dock far from the doomed Earth. You are limited by two basic constraints - price, and mass. For some reason, the world apparently doesn’t feel like pooling all the available resources on this project, which means we have to pay for all the stuff we pack; the mass constraint is even simpler - the starship is designed for a certain load capacity, and that’s it - pack too much, and there will not be enough fuel to get you to our target fast enough. Apart from those two constraints, some systems may also have a hard limit on their amount - for example, you have to bring at least some colonists, the amount of landers you can carry is limited and more.
The selected difficulty level has little effect here - basically, the only difference is in Playground, which removes all the constraints. Want to bring a thousand colonists? Sure, why not.
The items you take can be classified in a few groups:
- Landers - Cargo landers, colonist landers - these limit the maximum amount of resources you can take with you down to the planet; the rest will be stranded on the starship until it finally crashes.
- Colonists - These are the reason for this expedition in the first place; they are very important as workers in the early stages of the colony and the only source of research. However, they also need to breathe and eat, so it isn’t necessarily a good idea to take as many as you can.
- Food and life support - These will buy you the time to construct the life support buildings in the colony and as such are very helpful until you can get the very basics up and running.
- Raw materials - Bringing a healthy stockpile of basic resources goes a long way to making your early days a lot less hectic. Bring some extra oxygen, hydrogen and especially the rare materials, and you don’t have to worry so much about finding a source of them on the planet early on.
- Prefabricated buildings - Well packed buildings take little space and can be built much faster than trying to do the same from scratch. Bringing a prefabricated farm or a solar array will make it much easier to survive the first days on the planet. A basic seed colony is already a part of the deal, containing the command centre, a rudimentary power plant (with limited lifetime) and a basic smelter and factory to get you started.
- Vehicles - Exploration rovers, trucks, construction vehicles, miners, …
- Satellites - Geosurvey, solar, communication, meteorology, imaging, …
- Extras - Interstellar probes (just price, no mass), planetary probes, asteroid miners, …