Rich Explorer Guide

In the Rich Explorer scenario, you start off with a good amount of material resources, but only 1 person.

In-game, this is classified as a very difficult scenario.

Skills

You must choose a colonist that is capable of survival skills. This includess:

• Dumb labor: Hauling, cleaning and cutting plants.
  • Though hauling can be done with animals, cleaning and plant cutting have to be done by colonists.
• Construction: Building shelter to live in.
• Medicine: Treating oneself when injured or sick.
• Cooking: Making meals out of raw food and butchering creatures. While you can substitute raw berries for meals early on, it's not a reliable source of food.
• Violence: Defending oneself from mad animals or raiders, as well as hunt for food.
  • You can substitute it with Construction (building turrets) or Animals (training attack animals) in a pinch, if you're unlucky enough to be incapable of it, but overall it's not recommended to do so.

If the colonist doesn't have these skills then it's best that you reroll until you have one that does. You don't need them to be interested in all of them, but if you do then it's a plus.

Some skills will make survival easier, but are not essential:

• Animals: Training animals isn't quite a necessity early-game, but will greatly compliment you in combat, provided you have sufficient food to train animals.
• Growing: Growing food crops. If you don't want to exclusively rely on hunting or gathering. Your early food stocks last for quite some time, and for 1 lone colonist gathering raw berries/agave can allow you to survive.
  • This does not guarantee that a colonist is capable of plant cutting.
• Social: Recruiting new colonists and trading. If you are lucky enough to capture a raider then you can use your Social skills to turn them to your side.
• Mining: Extracting mineral resources. Useful for replenishing your supply of components or steel in early-mid game before traders show up who sell components.

Some other skills are better left for future colonists:

• Crafting: Making equipment and misc crafting. In early game there is not a need for crafting yet, so this can wait.
• Intellectual: Unless you started off in an extreme environment and need essential research (such as Hydroponics) then it's better that you focus on building up a working shelter for survival first, as research merely assists survival.
• Artistic: Early on you should not be making sculptures yet.

At the beginning

The rich explorer start means that you have enough time to start off a decent crop plot and harvest from it, as well as build up a base with suitable defenses.

Starter weapon

Charge rifle

You start off with a charge rifle, a mid-late game ranged weapon with a high DPS. While this is fine for most people, you may want to watch out for Brawlers which will be upset by wielding a ranged weapon.

Settling down

At the start of your game, you should have your colonist build up a small roofed area to store your things under. Also build a small hut where your lone colonist will be living, and a table and chair to prevent the infamous 'Ate without table' debuff.

If you want to save effort, it's recommended that you board up one of the many ruins and use it as a temporary shelter.

Defenses

Like other scenarios you can build sandbags or move chunks around to provide cover for yourself.

Besides this, you have a good start ahead of the other starter scenarios in that you will have Gun turrets researched already. This allows you to build improvised turrets to hold off enemies until more colonists settle down.

Turrets should be surrounded by cover.

See also

• Basics - for survival in the default scenario.
• Intermediate Midgame Guide - for continuing expansion. Having only 1 starting colonist should be irrelevant at that stage.