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Like previous games from 11 Bit Studios,The Altersrequires you to delicately manage your resources if you want to stay alive. While it’s not quite as harsh as their other titles, it’s still very possible to find yourself with dangerous shortages or a progress-clogging surplus if you aren’t careful.
Maintaining the right balance is essential, and different resources will come into play at different times depending on what you need to build. This guide will help you understand all the basics of The Alters' resources so that you’re able to make the right decisions when planning each day.
How To Scan For Resources
The majority of your basic resources will be harvested from Outposts.Metals, Enriched Metals, Organics, and Mineralscan all be collected this way. Outposts must becrafted in the Workshop, deployed over a Deep Deposit, thenconnected to the Base via Pylons. Before you may do that, though, you need toscan the Deep Depositto find the spot where you can deploy the Outpost.
Deep Deposits show up as ashaded section on the map, even if you haven’t found the drill point.
When you’ve located a Deep Deposit,equip the Polygonal Scannerand place probes on the ground so that they form triangles. Each triangle willscan the ground beneath itto find the best drilling point. You may need to move the camera to be able to see how the colors change; blue means you aren’t near the spot you need to be, and red means you’re getting close. The darker the red, the better.
When you find the drill point, your remaining probes willautomatically be collectedand you’ll be able tobuild an Outpost on that spot.Some Deep Deposits, especially later in the game, have the drill point obscured by Anomalies or difficult terrain, so you may need to do some clever navigation to reach it.
You can also find small amounts of resources lying around on the map, and Shallow Deposits that you can extract from once without building an Outpost, but these only provide a little bit of what you need. To complete the mission, you need to exploit Deep Deposits heavily.
Connecting Outposts Via Pylons
Outposts need to be connected to the Base to function. Pylons can connect to the Base, Outposts, or other Pylons at a range of 45 meters, and that includes elevation - you’re able to use hills and cliffs to bypass areas that Pylons otherwise wouldn’t be able to connect through. Later areas require you to be clever with this, so start taking advantage of it early.
Drilling For Resources At Outposts
Outposts must be manually operated - they can’t just extract resources on their own. You can either do this yourself orsend an Alter to operate an Outpost. Alters working at an Outpost have asmall risk of injury, but it’s rare enough and resources are precious enough that you’ll have to take that chance.
You can eventually research Automated Outposts, which produce a set amount of their designated resource each day, but they are expensive to build and require Planetary Samples to unlock. It’s up to you to decide whether the investment is worthwhile.
Every Resource In The Alters
Each resource has a specific use, and you’ll need all of them to succeed.
Extracted from Outposts and found while exploring.
Most crafting and module construction.
Organics
1 per unit.
Extracted from Outposts and found while exploring, produced in the Recycler.
Crafting, module construction, and fueling the Base at the end of an Act.
Indicated byblue veins and gas geyserswhile exploring; stored in a separate tank than other resources, so they don’t take up normal storage space.
Distilled into Metals and Organics in theRefinery.
Advanced crafting and module construction.
Crafted in the Refinery during Act 1.
Building Bridge Anchors to cross the Lava River.
You cansafely discard any extras after Act 1; they have no more use and will just take up space.
Extracted from Outposts and found while exploring
Harvested in the Greenhouse or created in a Food Farm.
Crafting Cooked Food.
Cannot be eaten on its own, must be cooked in the Kitchen first.
ALX
Can be picked up after destroying an Anomaly with the Luminator.
Distilled into Metals, Organics, or Minerals in theRefinery.
Converting ALX requires researching a different tech for each type of resource.
As you’re able to see from the chart above,Mush and Raw Food take up a lot of space, so stockpiling a lot is actually a bad idea. Ideally you should only have about two days' supply on hand to keep it from cluttering up your storage.
