Helium Rain is a fantastic game mainly centered around a deep economy sandbox in which the player builds a corporate empire (including some pew pew of course!). Those who are familar with the X-series of space games will feel right at home but those who are not may have some difficulty finding the game enjoyable. Helium Rain is not like most space games which involve doing risky missions to up build some bad a** space craft, but instead is focused on building up a network of space stations to dominate the world economy (and a military to protect it). Think of it like Eve except you have a MUCH greater impact on the game world.

This guide is meant to give tips to new players and help them quickly prosper and prevent newbie mistakes. This guide will NOT cover the basic gameplay concepts as these are covered in the tutorial.

Note that I have put 30+ hours into the game and browsed the source code[github.com], so while I am fairly knowledgeable about the mechanics of the game, I still have more to learn. Also keep in mind that this guide was written in Fall of 2017 and while I will try to keep the guide up to date, the guide may not always mirror the current state of the games development.

NOTE: I do not recommend trying to complete ALL of the tutorial missions initially. The gameplay tutorials are essential but military and station missions can be completed naturally. Doing these missions before your are familiar with the game world can lead to wasted $$$.

Unfortunately, the initial one to two hours of the game should really be spent being a glorified Lyft driver. Your first ship, a Solen, is ideal for stacking up Quests and quickly building up a cash reserve. By focusing solely on quests in the early game, you become more familiar with the different sectors, discover new sectors, build up your reputation with the other companies, and most importantly pull in cash at a faster rate then any other early game method.

Here are some tips on doing early game quests:

General Notes

• Remember, stack Stack STACK!! You can make money quickly by doing quests but only if you stack them. Doing quests one at a time is boring and will extend the early game grind.
  
• As you are moving to different sectors, take note of they types of space stations in each sector and how many input and output goods they have on average. This information will be vital when you start trading and building stations.
  
• Quests can generate 1-4K credits a day depending on how well your stacking. It will take a major amount of developing your company to get to the point where questing is no longer worth your while.
  
• Types of quests will change based on the ship you are flying. For example, if you fly an Omen (transport ship) instead of the Solem, you won't get VIP quests but will get much larger delivery quests.

Sector Travel

• It is important to be aware of the travel times between sectors, especially for quests with time limits.
  
• Travelling to sectors around the same planet/moon is quick and only takes 2-3 days.
  
• Travelling to sectors on different a planet/moon takes much longer ~6-11 days.
  
• The "inner moons" Anka and Hela are quicker to get to than the "outer moons" of Asta and Adena.

VIP Transport Quests

• These quests should be your main focus during the early game.
  
• Passengers do not take up any ship space and often several transport quests will go to the same sector so these quests are very easy to stack.
  
• VIP quests will also allow you to discover new sectors so that you can fill out the full world map quickly.
  
• Be aware that these missions have a time limit so it is important to make sure that you will have enough time, including travel time, to complete the mission.
  
• You can find the end destination for the mission before accepting it by looking the [Depature Sector] to [Arrival Sector] line in the upper right side of the Contract menu.

Delivery, Haulage, and Destock Quests

• These quests can also be profitable but I recommend doing them only when convenient.
  
• These quests will stick in your Contracts menu for several days after you leave a sector so many times you will find that a VIP Transport mission will line up perfectly.
  
• For example, you may still have an older delivery mission for Fuel in Blue Heart but end up accepting a VIP mission in Lighthouse, a sector which produces fuel. If the VIP mission takes you back to Blue Heart, might as well buy some fuel and do the delivery mission as well.
  
• The stock amounts for these missions are usually under 50 which makes then stackable for your Solen.
  
• These missions also involve trades which are profitable on their own, so don't just buy the amount specified in the mission, max out your hold to make a couple extract bucks.

The old adage of "it takes money to make money" is especially true in Helium Rain. If your credits hit 0, your company's economy will experience a shift and permanent halt. As you create more automated trade routes and build stations, it is surprising how fast your money can drain to nada if you are not paying attention.

For this reason, ALWAYS maintain a money buffer. Any time you buy/upgrade ships or stations, always make sure a certain amount of money will remaing to keep the lights on. In the early game, this buffer should be ~5K but as your company grows the buffer will need to grow as well (20K, 50K, 100K, etc).

If you do hit zero in the early game you can recover, just halt all trading routes and station inventory purchases and grind out quests in your Solen.

Once you have built up 30K-50K credits, you can start thinking about trading. In order to trade you will need to purchase a Omen (~16K) while keeping enough cash left over to buy 400 items worth of goods on each trade. Your Solen is too small to trade efficently so do not start trading until you can purchase an Omen.


As you may have discovered, every station has input and output goods. Input goods can be sold to a station while output goods can be bought. Input goods are also bought at much higher price than output goods are sold.

This in theory makes trading very simple, any goods you buy at a station can always be should at a profit to another station. The problem is that stations produce goods a limited rate and can only hold a limited amount of goods. Making good trade routes means finding routes where you can consistently buy a whole ship's worth of goods at a sector and sell a whole ship's worth of goods at another sector in minimal amount of time.


There are differences in prices between the sectors but as of now these differences are minimal (developers say they will improve this in future releases). Instead it is important to focus on differences in production and consumption of goods for various sectors.

There are two types of trading opportunities you should look for, high consumption and shortage. The best way to discover opportunities is using the Economy display in the Orbital Map menu.

Economy Table
The economy table is a very convenient way to get a complete picture of the production/consumption of a certain good in every sector. Here is an explanation of each column.

• Production - This is the amount of the selected product produced each day in the sector.
  
• Consumption - This is the amount of the selected product consumed each day in the sector.
  
• Stock - This is the total amount of the selected product available for purchase from all the stations within the sector.
  
• Needs - This is the total amount of the selected product which can be sold to all of the stations within the sector.
  
• Price - This is the current price for each unit of the selected product. Note that this is the base price and the actual price a good is bought or sold for depends on if you are buying or selling.
  
• Variation - This represents the recent change in price for the selected product in the sector.
  
• Details - Clicking this box will take you to a similar table for the sector. The difference is that this table shows information for all the goods within a sector. This can be very useful in creating trade loops.

Route Structure

The ultimate goal is to create a trading route in which each stop in sector involves selling and buying, ie. always buying a product you can sell in the next sector. This can be difficult to achieve, especially in early game, so don't limit yourself to only routes where this is possible but do make sure to try. Often these types of routes are only possible in a trade loop (3-4 sector stops).

Also, be aware of the travel times between sectors in the route. Trade routes are automated so while you may not notice the impact of travel time while doing quests, the amount of credits/hour a trade route will generate is heavily impacted by travel times between sectors.

I also recommend one ship per route, especially in the beginning. New routes tend to be more profitable than adding an additional ship to the route.

High Consumption Routes

These routes will be your bread and butter and should be "set and forget". The key to high consumption routes is making sure the purchasing sector has both high Production and Stock and the selling sector has both high Consumption and Needs.

The reason you need high Production/Consumption is guarantee consistency in the availability of goods to purchase and a need in the market to sell them. The Shortage section will go over some of the problems caused by not having high Production/Consumption.

The reason you need high Stock/Needs is to make sure that a gap in the market actually exists to take advantage of. If either one of these is low, it indicates that one of the other companies is already supplying the sector and you will have to waste time waiting to buy or sell a product.

Shortage Routes

These routes can be very profitible but require some micro management and are often not permanent. The key to shortage routes is to identify a good which has high Needs across many sectors, but not necessarily high consumption, and at least one sector has high Production of the good.

This opportunity arises when there is a net inbalance in the supply and demand of a good that is not fixed for a decent period of time. If you can find a sector that is producing that good at a decent rate (or build your own), you can supply the good across many sectors.

The key difference with the high consumption routes is that sectors with shortages don't necessarily have high consumption. If they do not, you can supply the goods to the sector to close the "Needs gap" but eventually you will need to move to another sector since the goods are not being consumed at a high rate.


While trade routes can be automated (covered in the tutorial), they do require some oversight from the player from time to time. The biggest issue is that often conditions in the sectors change from when you originally setup the route. Sometimes its due to other companies but often you are moving goods more quickly than the sectors can produce/consume.

Throughout the game it is important to monitor your trade routes and modify them when logisitical problems appear.

Monitor

The easiest way to monitor trades routes is paying attention to the credits/hour statistic for all the routes in the Orbital Map menu. It will take several cycles once you create a route for the number to level out but once it has, any decrease in this number is an indication that something is going wrong.

It is also important to track ships on their routes from time to time. Simply view the ship in the Fleets menu and monitor its inventory as you progress through time on day at a time. If the ship is trading in a sector, its inventory should change each day. If this is not the case, there is most likely a logisitical problem in the system.

Modify

Many times when you identify a logisitical issue in a trade route, it can be fixed in the trading route editor without any manual interaction with the ship.

One major issue with the trade route editor is that the default option for maximum wait time for a buy is "Wait forever or until full". Often times a sector will temporarily stop producing a good due to a lack of input goods. This can cause your loop to halt as your ship waits for goods that aren't going to come.

If you set the maximum wait time for buys at ~3-5 days, your ship will stop and try to buy what it can but will eventually move on. You don't want to set this maximum too low if you are trading with multiple stations in a sector, each trade with a station takes one day.

If you find that your ship is not being completely filled or emptied during most of its stops, this may indicate that trading faster than the stations can produce goods. If possible, adding another node to the trade loop will help minimize the time waiting and maximize the time trading.

Research is vitally important to progressing through the game. Types of stations, better weapons, and perks are all obtained through research and its important to keep a constant flow of research points going to maintain a technological edge.

Research points are obtained through quests and research stations. Quests have small research rewards and will not be sufficient beyond early game play. I recommend building a research station as your first station to start gathering research points as soon as possible.

If supplied, research stations will provide a small number of research points each day. With a single well-upgraded research station, you can outpace most, if not all, of the other companies.

Be aware that each time you research a technology, the cost of subsequent technologies increases signficantly. This means that you should think carefully about what you want to research first because later technologies are alot more expensive.

Here are some technologies you should focus on in early game:

• Auto-docking - This is the first one I research just for convience sake. Autodock will shockingly automatically dock your ship. While the AI is docking, you can browse your menus or gaze at your ship (C) which is nice.
  
• Science - This allows you to build research stations and should be the first or second purchase. Research stations produce points at much higher rate than questing.
  
• Fast travel - This cuts down your travel time between sectors significantly, especially to the moons. It will need to research more technologies until this is available but getting as soon as possible has enormous benefits. Your trading routes operate much faster, you can stack more VIP quests, and you can out maneuver your enemies militarily.

Most of your research points will go to unlocking station types to build. Again, remember technologies will get more expensive each time you unlock a new station type so I would make sure you have a plan to build a station before researching the type.

While trading and producing goods will provide your cash flow, it is important that you also expand your military to protect those means. Having a solid military will allow you to maintain peace but also give you the means to eliminate competitors.


In the beginning of the game you will not need to worry a military but once you hit a company value of 300K, the pirates will randomly start wars with you. This means that you should start thinking about building a military when your company has a company value of 200K+ credits. Note that I am taking about company value and not credits in the bank, you can find this number in the upper left corner of the Company menu.

Ideally you should have a military force that is slightly larger than the largest other military. This will help dissuade pirates and other companies from attacking you and allow you to earn some credits by getting involved in wars between other companies.

Note that you do NOT want to have a military much larger than any others, its ok to be the biggest, but only by a handful of points. All the other companies will start hating you if your military grows too large and one day you will find yourself in a war with all the other companies. At some point you will want to put your Caesar pant's on and start conquering the world, when you do make sure you build up your military quickly and are ready for every company to attack you at the same time.

Fleet Composition

I recommend building one or two large fleets of mostly Orcas and Phalanxes with one or a few Heavy Ships. It is important to make sure that your fleet is able to deal damage to fighters as well as large ships and stations. Having fighters and heavy ships in your fleet ensures that you can perform both of those tasks.

Upgrades are also important to manage on each ship. They can be an easy way to add some military points to each ship but you will not necessarily want the most expensive upgrade for every slot on every ship. Especially on heavy ships, weapons upgrade will have different capabilities, most will either be good against fighter or good against heavy ships/stations but not both.


Battles are slightly different than most games, instead of ships being completely destroyed they are generally just disabled. Navies will fight again after being defeated, they just need to be repaired. It is possible to manually destroy a ship after it has been disabled but this is a pain and will result in a drop in reputation.

This dynamic means that wars are usually a battle of credit attrition instead of a single clash of units. If you win a battle, you need to plan for the defeated forces to come back in a couple days and if you lose, you will be able to use those forces again. If you are planning to start a war, you should make sure you have a war chest to fight it with.

Once all enemy ships are disabled in a sector, if the fleet remains in the sector it will start taking over all of the enemy stations. After a period of days (look at progress bars in Sector menu) the stations will be taken over by the victor and be under their control after the war ends unless taken back.

Tactics Tips

AI companies tend to have a single largeish fleet and many small sized fleets spread around other sectors. You can take advantage of the AI splitting its forces by concentrating all of your forces when invading or defending a sector. Using this tactic can allow you to either defeat or cause trouble for a company with a military force that exceeds your own.

When a war starts, it is easy to panic as many of your sectors and logisitics ships will come under attack, but remember that your ships will almost always be just disabled and your stations take a fair amount of time to take over, especially by small fleets. Gather your forces, determine what forces your enemy has in each sector, and then methodologically destroy them one by one.

It is critical that you try and prevent your stations from being taken and so timing is important. Larger fleets will take over stations faster and take many days to defeat while smaller fleets take a long time to capture a station but can only take a day to disable. Identify a sequence of invasions that will allow you to knock out as many of the enemy fleets as possible before they capture your statoins. Researching Fast Travel as soon as possible will make this task alot easier.

Ending a War

A war can be ended by either requesting peace or paying tribute. Requesting peace is usually only possible when you have dominated your enemy while paying tribute is possible any time. The cost for the tribute is calculated by taking a tenth of your credits in the bank and adding it to a hundredth of your total company value. Again this is why its important to maintain a money buffer, if a much larger company attacks you, you can end the war quickly without losing stations if you have a constant amount of cash on hand.

Station building is what makes Helium Rain (and the X-series) different from any other space game. Stations allow you to significantly effect the game world and change your mindset from a lowly space pilot to a powerful business tycoon. All your previous actions were a nice appetizer but now its finally time to get to the main course.

Once you have accumulated 100K+ credits, you should definitely start thinking about building your first station. It is financially possible to build a station before this point, but you want to have enough cash on hand to immediately upgrade the station and maintain a buffer.


Before building a station is vitally important to spend some time thinking about which type of station you want to build and where. There are a couple different dimensions to consider and some trade offs between them so make sure to review all the sections below before purchasing a station.

I recommend building a research station as your first station as it is simple to operate and will start generating research points needed to unlock other station types.

(Most) Station Types

• Research Station - As I mentioned earlier, research stations generate research points each day. This is a fairly simple station and is a must for all players so I recommend building one as soon as possible.
  
• Orbital Telescope - This station will discover new sectors. I DO NOT recommend building one of these stations in early game as grinding out VIP missions will fill out the majority of the map fairly quickly.
  
• Mines - These stations produce the raw materials iron oxide, silica, and water. Water mines have the special quality of not requiring any input goods to operate.
  
• Pumps - These stations produce raw gas/liquid goods like water, dihydrogen, and methane. The major benefit of these types of stations is that they do not require any input goods to operate.
  
• Manufacturing - This is a broad category that covers the many other types of stations which intake one or more goods and produce a new good.
  
• Habitat - These generate people and increase your population. Not entirely sure what population does for you yet but I'll update this when I know more.

Station Costs

The cost to build a station will very alot based on your current situation. These factors increase the cost:

• Total number of stations in your company
  
• Total number of your stations in the sector
  
• A much smaller increase is taken from the total number of

Your first station will only cost ~10K but station costs can quickly rise to 100K after a few stations. It could easy cost 600K to just to build a few stations in the same sector.

Picking a product

Picking the right product to produce is very similar to trading. Use the Economy table and find goods which have high consumption and needs but also have high stock and production of the input goods for the station. Your options will be limited by the station types you have unlocked through research and the availability of a good location.

Picking a sector

Choosing the right sector depends a could different things:

1. Certain stations cannot be built in certain types of sectors. The description of the sector is given in the upper left section of the Sector menu. Look for this terminology to determine if certain station types can be built in a sector:

• Good/Reduced Light - Farms and Energy stations can only be built in sectors with Good Light
  
• Dusty - Iron Ore and Silica mines can only be built in these sectors
  
• Icy - Water mines can only be built in these sectors
  
• Geostationary - Pumps can conly be built in these sectors

2. Cost will play a major factor after the first couple stations. While we would love to stack all our stations into one or two sectors, this isn't really practical. Plan to spread out into a fair amount of sectors.

3. You should try to get your station only a couple days away from a station which will by its output.

4. It is good not to spread out your stations too much. You will need to defend all your stations in a war at some point, and being able to travel quickly between them helps with defense.

Upgrade Stations

Upgrading a station is FAR more efficent than building a new one. Each time you upgrade a station, it has the exact same effect as buying an additional station, but at a faction of the cost and without major price inflation. Also, trading with a single station instead of multiple can save days off of sector stops for automated trade routes.

For each upgrade you will need provide 50 or 100 Steel, Plastic, and Tools and the price generally goes up 10K after each upgrade. Remember that each upgrade will increase the number of resources and credits consumed each day.

Your company could have a huge number of stations but without solid logistics no credits will be earned. Logistics is all about property utilizing transport ships to keep the flow of goods into or out of your station. Achieving your logisitics goals efficiently requires that you balance the amount of ship power dedicated to each task.

I generally utilize two types of fleets to accomplish my needs efficiently:

Automated Logistics Fleets
These are fleets that assigned to automated trade routes which supply your stations and sell off goods. You should try to fit the size of the fleet and the length of the route such that your station always has input goods to function, never hits its output good limit, and the ship (or ships) in the fleet are able to pick up a full load of goods right when they arrive.

Supply
It is a good idea to dedicate at least one fleet to performing ad-hoc jobs. Often the game economy will not be perfectedly in balance and you will need a transport ship to move your efforts forward. For example, building a ship often requires supplying the shipyard with steel, upgrading stations requires a temporary supply of steel, plastic, and tools, or a station may have a certain input good which doesn't make sense to provide via an automated route.

Here are some tips on keeping good logisitics routes:

• If your transport ships are not being filled when they reach the station, it may time to upgrade the station.
  
• A large transport ship is more effiecient in a route then multiple small ships, if you are having trouble keeping up with production, you may want to utilize a Sphinx instead of an Omen for that route.
  
• If you dedicate a route only to a single station, the credits/hour figure for the route estimates the revenue generated from that station.
  
• I generally keep trade routes and logistics routes seperate. Partly for the reason above but also because both types of routes tend to need to change overtime and its a pain to balance the needs of both a logi route and a trade route.

Even in its early state, Helium Rain is a game you can put hours into. Here are some tips I have picked up while playing that have really helped me enjoy the game:

• This game is absolutely BEAUTIFUL but you won't experience this to the fullest extent if you are always in the cockpit or menus. Make sure to spend some time viewing outside your ship (Press C) and without the HUD on (Press H).

• Its a good idea to eventually have a player fleet with a passenger, transport, and military ship so you don't have to merge into or out of other fleets to fly ships.

• At some point once you are strong enough, start conquering! The goal of the game is not to simply participate in the economy but to dominate it.

• I love the soundtrack to this game but after hours its nice for something fresh. I have really like listening to this mix while playing

Space Ambient Mix