Hydroneer – Starting Tips

Tips to Start New Game

When you start, you own a small plot of land call Ember Cradle.

On that land there should be a shovel, a bucket, and a pan among other things.

Use the shovel to put dirt into the bucket, and once you have 4 scoops in the bucket then tip the bucket over into the pan.

Then drop the pan in the river and pick it up again. Use the brush on the pan and you will get ore, and or shards, or gems.

When you have done that for a while you can go up the hill and sell the ore by placing it on a table at the gem vendor.

You can leave the ore in the pan for convenience. Then just press the Sell button and viola, you have HC.

The real currency in the game is ore though, you will need lots of it, so don’t get too cocky about the amount of HC you’ll make early on.

Do not sell shards, they are used as power for water pressure pumps (big pipe with a door you can open) to increase water pressure. You can smelt the shards into a bar. You can put a bar or shard in the pipe thing.

there’s also the fact that CANNOT sell Shards. If you have them in the Pan with other Ore and bring it to the Jeweler, the other Ores will sell and leave behind any Shards. They, literally, cannot be sold.

As to their use, Shards, like other Ores, can be turned into Bars via Smelting. Smelting (for ANY Ore) can either be manually performed via a Crucible, Furnace, and Bar Mold, via the basic Smelter (purchased in the Shop in Bridgepour), or via the Logic Smelter.

Shard pieces or Shard Bars are used to power Pressure Tanks. Pressure Tanks restore water pressure, which is what powers all the equipment in Hydroneer.

As the water travels through Pipes, it looses water pressure across each segment of Pipe that it crosses, until the pressure drops to zero. After that point, it will no longer power any Harvesters, Conveyors, Miners, or Gem Compressors.

A Pressure Tank with a Shard or Shard Bar in it will restore water pressure to the same level it was at when it left the Intake Pipe. A Pressure Tank that’s empty will block water from traveling past the Pressure Tank.

Shards/Shard Bars do decrease over time, but it’s very slow. By the time one starts to worry about Pressure Tanks, one probably has enough Shards on hand to create several Bars of a few hundred weight. If one places a 200 or 300 weight, or larger, Shard Bar in a Pressure Tank, it’s likely to last several weeks, if not months, of REAL TIME play, unless you play 24/7.

Anything in the weight range of 1+k will probably never need to be refilled…

The water tank on the vehicles are a small Cloutium (brassy-looking) box, which fills up with water for fuel. You can use pipes to drip water into them, or use a bucket/pan to tip water into them.