Unlocking "Unnamed Space Idle" Quiz

When you start the game, you are in command of a very simple spaceship - one laser cannon and a shield generator are all you have to defeat enemies with. Don't worry, this will soon change. The first thing you get to add is a computer. You actually have this from the start, but you need to kill a few enemies to have the resources to activate it. Once you have made your first compute power, you assign it to slots that will let you gain much needed combat power.

Congratulations on defeating the first boss! It drops one of the key systems of the game: a synth unit. This unit allows you to make materials out of collected resources over time and then use these materials to create and improve modules. At first, you can only make a simple weapons and shield boost, but your choices will quickly expand - in the late game, you have over twenty-five modules to choose from. Module management is critical as you can't activate all modules at once. You can however freely change your module configuration at any time to focus on whatever is most important to you.

Whoa, what was that? This wasn't your typical salvage drop, but a shard of exotic matter. Instead of upgrading a ship core with it, you can put shards into one of initially two, later up to five colored slots of the just discovered V-Device. Not all shards can go into all colors and they will usually differ in ability depending on where you put them: The first shard type, the battle shard, will always add to your firepower and shields but it will also have a secondary effect: In the red slot, it improves your fire rate, but in orange it boosts compute speed. Like modules, shards can freely be moved at all times.

They are upgraded by merging shards of the same type and power level - at first a manual process, but later you can automate that.

You've done well. Well enough in fact, that your commanding AI is entrusting you with a bigger ship: You now have access to the Frigate. It has a second weapon slot (effectively doubling your firepower and, once you have discovered other weapon types, run two types at once) and a utility core slot you can't use yet. Unlike the previous devices, core and ship switching requires a prestige (restart from sector 1) or a retrofit (of which you have only a limited amount per prestige, so you need to use them wisely, such as first running a build-up configuration and later switching it to a farming one).

Prestiging does reset a lot of things - your created synth modules and resources are lost as are all compute levels and resources - but you keep your shards and synth levels, making it much easier to come back to your previous power level and then push on.

The reactor at first seems very weak: You need to burn void matter to create some energy which can then power up one of seven systems: Your weapon, shields, engine, synth, compute, salvage collection and... wait, you don't have that yet. Each system has a power requirement and, for now, you can only switch it on or off and the more you run, the higher a penalty cost you will pay. Later, you'll be able to level up those boosts (costing a lot more energy). Reactor management is crucial to progress, but you'll be able to automate it soon enough.

Finally, two sectors after you got the frigate, there's something to do with that utility core slot. You get a compute utility which will improve your compute speed and power. Equip it and prestige or retrofit and feed it some salvage to boost its levels - your compute setup will reward you for it with more of that much needed battle power.

At this point, you should probably have a look at your achievements and AI upgrades. You had those from the start, but they were not yet that helpful yet. Achievements grant AI points which you can spend on automations. There are also occasionally reward codes and events that give you extra AI - a few reward codes are permanently available, so you might as well grab and enter those to get a useful automation or two (shard auto-merge is so great!)

Research is a passive system: You just have it and every enemy you kill will provide you with some research points. How many you get depends on the sector you are in: One wave of enemies will generate as many points as the density indicates on each of the three research branches. That would be pretty slow going, but you can also focus on one of the branches, speeding up its progress. You have to complete one line of research before starting the next one on the same branch, but if there are multiple options on one line, you can do either of them first - sometimes a decisive advantage!

At sector 11, something comes into view. It looks like a space station... but it does not yet do anything. You will have to conquer it by defeating sector 13, which will unlock a base grid for you. Only a few of its slots are available at first, so you'll have to make materials which you can then spend on unlocking slots, upgrading production or making parts and components. The latter of those are what you really want: You can't spend them on anything, but the more you have, the more a specific system will get boosted the next time you prestige (sorry, a retrofit won't do that). For now, you have only one base which, conveniently provides more firepower and shields.

It will take a while until you can boost base progress with synth modules, shards or other mechanics, so at first it's all about proper configuration. Base slots can affect neighboring slots, which makes booster units very useful: Each booster multiplies the output of all adjacent producers (but not other boosters) and multiple boosters multiplicatively stack on one producer, so if you can get a producer with four adjacent x10 boosters, you'll have 10,000 times the regular output. (These numbers are still quite a few prestiges away however!)

Challenges - a prestige with different, harder rules, requiring a specific goal to complete the challenge - are a part of many incremental games and USI (players usually refer to the game using the initials) is no different: There are four challenge types with five levels each, each of which bases progress on one specific system: compute, synth, reactor and bases. If you succeed, the respective system will receive a very powerful boost, thus completing challenges is essential. (You can set the game to notify you when you have enough stats for any specific challenge, so you won't have to worry about too many missed tries).

Now that you have done a challenge or two, it's time to head deeper into enemy space and... that's a warp drive! It comes with some cores that slowly charge up (initially one per five hours, but you can speed that up a lot). Spending a core charge lets you jump to a special location in space where you'll battle a few enemies and, if successful, gain Warp Essence. You can rerun that warp location several times in one jump, going up in difficulty or trying a different strategy on a narrow fail, until you run out of time (you have 6 minutes per jump). Completed warps provide a multiplier to essence gained and two early essence upgrades will also let you apply that multiplier to your weapons, shields and compute speed - a very useful source of steady improvement!

Like research and base benefits, all warp bonuses survive prestiging, so it is often a good idea to do warps just before you prestige when your power is at its highest.

Is this all starting to sound overly complex? Yes, it is complex, but the way abilities are introduced one by one make for a very smooth learning curve and, unlike most games of this kind, you won't either be spending most of your time copying proven setups from a guide or geting nowhere - it's easy enough to discover things by yourself.

The bad news is that crew is quite a bit away from the previous unlock. (You'll get to play around with two new bases in the meantime however along with discovering new shards and synth modules.)
The good news is that by the time you unlock crew, you'll have enough experience managing the previous aspects with ease. And you'll need that because having crew changes things around.

Initially you start with one possible crewmember. You activate them and slowly gain a few levels in their two stats, which translate to rank points that can be spent on upgrades. Levelling stats and ranks also gives permanent upgrades, which, among others, let you unlock different crew. At some point, progress becomes very slow, so you retire that crewmember and grab a new one from a biosleeve. They benefit from their predecessor's experience, making learning faster and once you have done that a few times, you can gain mastery in that member - unlocking a powerful new ability of your choice (this is one of the few places you can really make things hard for yourself by picking wrong - no going back on those) and letting them gain more levels.

Ideally, the mastery ability you picked will help you get the next mastery on another crew and so on - which will unlock all 8 crew. Then you level them a whole lot, prestige, claim bonuses and ultimately approach the final frontier past sector 71: You are given a list of seven difficult tasks: Max out reactor, warp, compute and synth, complete all challenges, max out a rare shard and defeat the sector 74 boss.

Do that and you win...

...and your prize is...

...the opportunity to *really* start playing the game!

You get a new, capital, ship and new capital opponents that are battled separately from the smaller enemies you know. Over the next few sectors, most of your known systems will be replaced with new versions of themselves. And just when you have processed all that information, you are at sector 80 and your only way out is back to the start - you could technically try to move on, but you simply lack the strength. Thankfully, there is another mechanic to help you. Read on!

Reinforcing is the second (and, as of version 0.75, final), reset tier. The first times you reinforce, it's really a New Game Plus - you lose everything except your achievements and automations and start from the very beginning, with some generous extra abilities and boosts to make your life much easier.

In addition, reinforcing unlocks new post-capital upgrades you can earn, which lets you break that sector 80 barrier, only to find another one at sector 90. Reinforce again, get to 100 and reinforce a third time to finally break free.

Yes, you're free. You can now reinforce whenever you want (although doing so will only help you once you have beaten your previous maximum). Each sector from 101 onward will give you an additional powerful bonus on the next reinforce. Reaching those sectors, however, also largely depends on your mastery of a new mechanic: Fleet battles. Those are minigames on a separate battle screen where you manage resources to win skirmishes, upgrade your fleet and acquire artifacts which in turn grant you more main-game abilities. Completing one galaxy's worth of fleet battles unlocks the next one in a sequence that will grow longer as the game is being added to (in late 2025, eight galaxies were available).

In parallel, you also keep progressing up the sectors - beyond 140 - and discovering more upgrades and replacements for your systems. One final main mechanic remains to be found at the end of galaxy 4.

Beating the fourth galaxy's boss unlocks Unstable Transit - an effectively infinite additional galaxy you can battle in when not needing your Astrium fuel to do main-galaxy battles. Unstable Transit also grants a type of artifacts, but these are unlimited and you choose with each play which system you wish to apply your upgrade too - just don't focus too exclusively on one of them as diminishing returns will hit hard.

Completing more galaxies will also let you unlock new Unstable Transit scenarios with more complex rules and more ships that in turn yield more artifacts. And thus, the quest to one day become like Ender Wiggin and turn the infinite stream of battles into a glorious ultimate victory continues... who knows what awaits in the sectors and galaxies yet to be found.