Engineering and repair
Each month, you get a set number of repairs you can make to the Nemesis. Each upgrade to Engineering will let the engineers fix an additional area of the ship. You start with Engineering level 2, which gives you four repairs per month - and all must be in different areas. For instance, you cannot select two Hangar upgrades in the same month. If, however, you would like to allocate an engineering point not towards an extra repair, but an extra repair in a single area, that will give you +0 upgrades per month, with the ability to do two in an area at once. This can scale up to 5 of the same areas per month.
Maximum engineering ability can go up to 11 areas per month. Two of these are provided by drone upgrades.
The Marketplace
You have 314 hi-plat to start with, thanks to Alpha stealing the stellaplex. Most of your materials were already used up patching the ship on Nanyej. You're really low on supplies and will need to purchase some of those regardless, although you can save a little money by going with cheap rations. Each purchased unit of food supplies will last for about one month, spread across the whole crew. (cheap rations make the crew more prone to Exciting Things such as mutiny!
)
Bargaining, bartering, and negotiating is not an option. That's not a thing that happens much in the future. It works more like a supermarket sort of thing. You give people the lowest price you're willing to accept, and if you can't find it, then you're not getting a sale. Trying to wheedle bargains out of vendors is a great way to get kicked out of the marketplace.
Each station will have its own list of goods; these will not change over the course of the campaign, nor will the prices fluctuate. I'm not going to deal with a dynamic market system.
I'm not a computer. When going to a new station, you will usually find a selection of goods you haven't seen before, along with most of what you have seen. Backtracking shouldn't happen much, but most of what does happen can be avoided by planning ahead.
The Stations
When docking at a station, I will arrange for you guys to have "shore leave". Those that want to settle down there and have a hotel or restaurant are free to do so - however, unless
everyone wants to settle down there permanently, I will no longer follow your activities and we'll consider it a "game over" for you. I simply can't keep track of so much at once. Personal limitations. I would love to do that kind of campaign if that's what you guys found most enjoyable - so don't take this as me saying "don't do that"! - but it's something I'd have to focus on exclusively.
When you leave the Nemesis and board a station, I'll give you 50 plat for you to play around with, and you can convert your creds to plat as well at a 1 to 1 ratio. Creds can later be converted back. Plat is used to buy meals, purchase unique weapons and items, and that sort of thing. While you're on a station, you could do that, or... if you'd rather... look for quests. Stations bustle with life, and you can always find quest-givers here and there - if you look hard enough. Sometimes, they will find you. Trouble may find you as well - you'll have to be cautious and watch your back.
On the occasions that a significantly large amount of trouble finds you (or you find it), I will announce it as a mission, meaning everything you do there will earn you a full mission's worth (or half-mission's worth, depending on mission size) of XP. Otherwise you'll have to be content with being drip-fed smaller amounts.
The Starmap
At the moment, the Nemesis is about 1/3 of the way to Fuhodo Station, which is on an asteroid orbiting Fuhodo. If you decide to upgrade your warp engines, you'll be able to choose between visiting either Irihi, Aphenar, or Orctis. Orctis is an unexplored system with which we have little info. This means I won't provide you with a starmap for it (or details on the planets) until you arrive. After you visit one of those three star systems, you may then proceed to Derge, Nektox, or Kalaid, depending on where you want to go.
The nearest major space station besides Fuhodo Station is located around Derge - the big blue star near the center of the map view. It will take a minimum of two months to get there. Time between stars is calculated by counting the number of adjacent hops it would take (diagonal is fine too) to get from one star to another. Your first level of warp travel will let you take one of these hops per month. It would probably be advisable stock up on food, unless you learn of a smaller space station somewhere - somewhere you could pick up supplies. Be aware, however, that food prices at smaller stations tend to be higher because of scarcity.
If you would like to stay in the Nanyej system for a while longer, that's an option too. Just head over to the gas giant of Saloto - there's a small station there where you might find a job.
Nemesis power rerouting
Outside of combat, what's turned on and off doesn't really matter that much. In a combat situation, however, the fact that the Nemesis has a finite amount of power becomes a lot clearer. Depending on how far you've upgraded the ship's reactor, you may have to shut either 9 or 5 systems down to keep the others functioning at peak efficiency. Shutting down only (the limit - 4) systems will give you a -1 penalty to all Nemesis rolls. Shutting down between that and (the limit - 8) will give you a -2 penalty, and so on.
Some systems have longer-lasting effects if you shut them down in combat. For instance, shutting down the medbay causes the supplies and equipment to spoil or fail, and it'll take a month to get the medbay running to where it was again. As such, shutting down the medbay is something you'd want to do only in a desperate situation.
Newly-made systems
Mechs
For those of you not aware, we have mechs now. Mechs in REKT are about 2.5 meters tall and part biological: they retain their human head, kind of like XCOM. They are very tall, very tough, and can be very hard to kill. Building them is not easy, however, and you'll take some penalties to some areas when you do your initial build. These can be removed later in exchange for creds - and you can add onto your mech later as well.
Mech-humans are capable of being separated from their mechs with the help of doctors and engineers - a tricky process - and put into a non-combat-ready body to help you blend in with the little people. Getting back into your mech is pretty easy - the mech handles it mostly by itself. You can start a mission outside your mech and have it remote-pilot itself to your location when you have need of it.
The best thing about mechs, though, is undoubtedly the fact that they can have crazy stats and carry ship-based weapons.
You can equip the Nemesis for Mech creation and upkeep by choosing the Medbay's "Robosurgery Wing" upgrade.
Battle Drugs
For those of you who haven't seen, battle drugs have been massively overhauled and now have a bunch of fun side effects that go along with them. Fun for the whole family! You get phenomenal stats, and the main downside is that you have to roleplay. I mean, it's basically a win-win! It's half-off right now, too, and your first drug is 100% free of
any chance of overdose or addiction.
Illegal augments
Something the Nemesis just is starting to hear more about: Illegal augments such as those Beta saw during the mission on Nanyej. Tartarus Inc. actually has old manifests and instructions for this sort of thing, but they're never really brought out because you're never anywhere that installing them is considered legal... but way out here in the black? Nobody's going to know anyway.
Modify your body with dozens of specialized augments and turn yourself into the powerhouse you always knew you were meant to be - but at a significant cost. You could potentially, in a single mission, give yourself +1 to a specific stat... but that would cost around 9000 at bare minimum. It's a big investment, and bigger still because removing them is tricky (although they can be removed, you only get half of what you put into it).
You can equip the Nemesis to manufacture these by choosing the Medbay's "Back room implants" upgrade.