I only downloaded and started playing this game because I saw Scott Manley playing it on YouTube and it seemed interesting.

This guide was written with version 0.60.170202A VECTOR, which was Early Access. Therefore, depending on my diligence and when you read this, it may be all or mostly broken.

Stable Orbit is a resource management simulation. You need to juggle:

They consume oxygen, water and food. They complain if they don't have quarters and get sleep deprived. They use power and generate heat. If the station becomes inhospitable because there aren't enough resources, they will leave.

• Oxygen - Seems that the crew need this to breathe
  
• Electricity - Your station needs this to do literally everything
  
• Water - Again, seems your crew needs this to be alive. Also useful for making oxygen
  
• Food - The crew get pretty angry if there is none of this

• Heat - Damages parts of the station and is the byproduct of everything

Your primary goal is to make space buckaroos, which you can use to build more station. Space buckaroos are generated when crew-members do research and spent when you build anything.

The game provides you with a station "Core." The Core has the following capabilities:

• It can house one crewperson
  
• It can store food
  
• It can store water
  
• It can store oxygen
  
• It can generate electricity

It also has 8 "nodes" to which you can affix other structures (fore and aft, top and bottom, two port and two starboard).

You will start with no crew, which is fine, because you also start with nothing for any crew to do. You will be given an initial budget of 7500 million space buckaroos. That seems like a lot, but building in space is expensive.

For your station to start making income, you will need to get some crew aboard. This is done by building a Shuttle Dock. That crew will need a lab to do science in for space buckaroos to be generated. Each "Active" session in a lab will yield 10M space buckaroos.

Before you build a lab and a dock, though, beware: all structures are (with two exceptions) dead ends. You cannot connect a lab to a lab or a hab to a hab or a hab to a lab or anything else. So before you block all 8 nodes on your station Core, stop and think.

The two exceptions are Trusses and Nodes. Both of these have 6 docking nodes, though you'll immediately use one of them to connect with the source node. You can build these out as far as needed. Both allow for the transfer of resources, but only Nodes allow for the transfer of crew.

It is tempting in the early game to go big on solar arrays. Don't do this! It's easy in the later game to jettison small solar arrays and upgrade, but if you spend all your space buckaroos on medium arrays at the start of the game, you may find yourself with a well powered but otherwise useless station.

Crew members all demand their own bunk (no hot bunking), and will not EVA. There needs to be a route of nodes from A to B if you expect crew to get from A to B.

My advice is to start with a truss and a node. The truss can become the root for your eventual power plant solar array, and the node adds some docking ports for future expansion.

In the early stages you will only need a couple of small solar arrays to keep the station going, so don't go overboard. Also keep in mind that every thing you add to the station will generate heat, so you'll need to balance your construction of anything with the construction of radiators.

Once you have your first solar array up, add some storage modules (one of each is fine) to your station. Batteries will be critical, since your station cannot operate without power and your solar arrays are useless when Earth is between your station and the Sun.

If you open the Station panel (bottom left corner) it will give you some info. Note that all control panels can be pinned, and while it clutters the view, I recommend you do it at this early stage of the game.

The number of space buckaroos you have left. If this reaches 0 and you have no means of generating more, you're going to have a bad time.

The current number of bodies on your station.

The total amount of power you're generating and consuming. You'll see numbers in red or green indicating a net loss or gain.

The percentage is the "charge" in the station batteries.

Below that is the total storage capacity in kilowatt hours or megawatt hours.

Then the game gives you the current number of hours of sunlight the station receives in a day (a number between 10 and 16) and how long it takes to fully charge your batteries.

You'll also get the total number of "night" and how long it takes to completely discharge the batteries.

Generally speaking, you'll want the total battery life to be longer than the number of night hours, or your station may become hostile to the crew in the middle of the night!

The bar indicates how much you have vs. how much the station can store. Then you get the actual amount on the station in kiloliters and an estimate of how long the station can go without refuelling.

Water and food work much like Oxygen.

Be mindful: If you have a crew capacity of 9 but only have 6 people aboard, the estimates are for 6 people. They'll update when the three new astronauts arrive, but if they were already scary, you may be about to have a bad time.

Heat is the station killer. The display will give you a number (unitless) and a percentage. If the percentage is over 100, than the station is taking thermal damage. You need radiators to increase the thermal capactity of the station.

An important number in Stable Orbit is 6. I will explain.

Your station operates in three shifts, and you can assign crewmembers to different shifts in the crew panel (top left corner). The rotations for activity go like this:

1 2 1 2 3 2 3 1 3

That doesn't really matter, but it's a fun sequence. Now, a lab module generates 10M space buckaroos for every active shift. With only the station core and a lab, you can only keep the lab active 1/3 of the time because your astronaut has to sleep and eat and rest. For labs to be 100% efficient, you need 3 astronauts per lab.

This is easy, initially, because the Core houses one and a hab module houes two. Build a single hab, put the astronauts on different shifts, and a single lab will generate 90M space buckaroos a day.

Now things get tricky: habs take two astronauts and labs take one, and you have three shifts. This is where "6" comes in. If you build three habs (6 astronauts) and two labs, times the three shifts...you've got 100% use out of your labs. Pretty soon you'll be rolling in space buckaroos!

You can make a pretty gigantic station out of the tech zero parts!

At least in this version, it doesn't appear that the larger lab or hab modules ever unlock, or if they do, I haven't made it that far yet. (Or I just need to wait for the next update. You saw the disclaimer, right?)

As you build out your station, you will constantly need resources from the Earth. You can get your station to produce its own oxygen with oxygen generators, but shuttles from Earth do not bring oxygen. They bring water and food and crew, and that's it. You can cheat this a little by building oxygen tanks, which arrive fully charged, but that's a stop-gap. Oxygen generators use a lot of power, so make sure you have the solar array and batteries to handle it, and the radiators to bleed off the heat that those arrays and generators will make.

Also be aware that shuttles can only ever deliver 100 litres of water to the station in a trip, so if you're consuming more than that, you're going to need additional resupply missions from Earth. How do you get more resupply missions? By building more shuttle docks! Shuttles won't share a dock, so you may need to add more than one. The station above now has 9 to keep it supplied, though I'd like to see a version of the game where shuttles can share (maybe 2:1 or 3:1) and you just have to pay for extra resupplies instead of burning construction points.

I try to design my stations with the thought that I don't want shuttles getting to close to solar panels or radiators, but the game itself doesn't seem to care, as shuttle pilots never make mistakes.

Maybe we'll see disasters in future versions like space junk and shuttle mishaps.

I also originally worried about the placement of radiators: I'd put them on the "bottom" of the station where the station would cast a shadow on them during the day, or where they'd be blocked by solar-panels or edge-on to the sun. This doesn't appear to matter to the game, though, so my worry was for naught.