What are some good strategies to most quickly get through the "grindy" part of career mode?

[MerlinsMaster]

Hey guys,

I started career games a couple of times recently, and I'm realizing that the beginning part of career mode is this really unsatisfying period in which you have to grind your way through some really silly contracts to unlock the upgrades and technologies to do anything interesting. I don't have a problem with the idea that you have to build up your space program, but I want to get to the point when I can upgrade the VAB, launchpad, and tracking station up one level and have two meter parts as quickly as possible.

So my question is, which things do I want to do first, and in what order, to get the farthest in the shortest amount of time, to get through that grindy phase of career mode, or as I've heard it refered to by some: the "potato phase".

Edited August 4, 2015 by MerlinsMaster

[Grumman]

Open "Persistent.sfs" in Notepad.

Find "funds = " and add an extra few zeros.

Find "sci = " and add a few extra zeros.

Squad should never have nerfed science gains into tediousness.

[Phil deCube]

Check out my tutorial.

[FancyMouse]

(<=moderate difficulty. I play in moderate)

Science:

Material study. Make sure bring two, visit as many places near KSC as possible, and do some flying, and one low orbit one high orbit. Unlock node that enables you to do Mun/Minmus landing. Shouldn't be too far away if it's still not enough.

Then do Mun/Minmus landing. Make sure you take 2 surface samples and material studies, these are the biggest contributors. A single trip that landed multiple biomes on Minmus with all science instruments available at the time can easily give 2~3k science.

Fund: rescue missions. Free money and free kerbals.

Other advice: try as much as you can to batch contracts - meaning a single launch satisfying more than one contract. That's the most efficient way of doing contracts. Also leave some some satellites for free contracts like "Science data from space around xxx"

This is about stock - there are also many mods that gives you more science parts and they can also give you science while having a different experience of gathering that science, making it not that dull. Also some contract mods are also fun which also gives some decent rewards (I suggest the anomaly pack to explore easter eggs)

[MerlinsMaster]

Open "Persistent.sfs" in Notepad.

Find "funds = " and add an extra few zeros.

Find "sci = " and add a few extra zeros.

Squad should never have nerfed science gains into tediousness.

It's tempting.

But I like the challenge. I just want to figure out how to do it more efficiently.

[Superfluous J]

Without knowing your skill level this is really hard to answer, but essentially what you need to do is satisfy as many contracts as possible with every launch, yet also concentrate on getting as much science as possible in that same launch. You should - in a single flight - test a part, reach a destination, and/or bring something along to satisfy as many contracts as you an, as well as take every single bit of science you can along the way.

This means bringing a goo pod AND a Science Jr along, as well as a thermometer and any other science doodads you have. You should take readings EVERYWHERE and your scientist (yes, bring one) should be doing more EVAs than Mark Watney to take the science and reset the goo and jr. The moment you can, you should send him to both Mun and Minmus to land and hopefully land several times on Minmus, in different biomes. He should plant flags to complete contracts anywhere he lands, and every time you complete a contract mid-mission you should hop back to mission control to find another one.

It's a pain, sure, but that one mission will be far less of a pain than 20 individual mission, and be far more profitable. And the grind will pretty much be over. I personally tend to do 4 launches in the early career: One suborbital, one orbital, one to Mun, and one to Minmus. Then I'm ready to go anywhere.

[Evanitis]

My present solution: A serious self-imposed limitation made the routine parts like geting to space or orbit challenging, thus not grindy. Some starting science eliminated the need of rolling around KSC in a pod. 50% science gain ensures that I'm not unlocking the tree in the Kerbin SoI or with the first interplanetary mission.

[Streetwind]

A lot of it comes down to knowing where to find science. You'll discover that with default settings (Normal difficulty), it's actually quite quick and easy to get through the early game.

Also, focus on the world-first record contracts. They throw absurd amounts of free money after you for basically doing what you would be doing anyway (accelerating to orbital speeds etc). You can make half a million funds in a few simple launches with only one or two tech nodes unlocked.

I usually take my time with early career mode, since I quite enjoy it. But if I wanted to hurry up, I would do it the following way:

1.) Accept the contract to generate a crew report from the launchpad. Put a pod with two goo canisters on the launchpad. Generate a crew report and activate both goo canisters. Go on EVA. Generate an EVA report while hanging on the ladder ("Flying above Kerbin's shores"), put report into the pod, drop down to the launchpad, get another EVA report, get back into the pod, recover

2.) Unlock Basic Rocketry. Unlock Engineering 101. Accept the contract to launch a vessel.

3.) Build rocket with a pod, a parachute, three goo canisters, a decoupler, a Hammer solid booster (throttle to 2/3rds thrust), and a quartett of basic fins. Launch. Get goo from flying low. Transmit crew report from flying low. Get crew report and goo from flying high. Land somewhere. Go EVA. Get EVA report on the ladder. Take all data from pod, store all data in pod (resets the crew report). Get EVA report from the ground. Get back in pod. Get goo and crew report while landed. Recover. (I forget if a single Hammer is enough to get above 18 km. If it isn't, take a Flea for a second stage.)

4.) Unlock Survivability.

5.) Repeat the mission in 3.), except this time you remove the 3 goo canisters and pack 4 (yes, 4) Science Bays instead. Make liberal use of radial parachutes to ensure you land without wrecking your materials bays. Don't be afraid to build so you land sideways, since your tall stack of science bays will tip over anyway. Get material science from launchpad, flying low, flying high, and wherever you land.

6.) Unlock General Rocketry. Upgrade astronaut complex to unlock EVAs. Accept mission to escape the atmosphere. Accept mission to orbit Kerbin. If you happen to have 45 science left, also unlock Basic Science.

7.) Build rocket with a pod, a parachute, two materials bays, and a service bay containing two goo canisters. If you managed to unlock thermometers, take a bevvy of them to the pod (not into the service bay, you don't have action groups yet). I recommend 6. Then a decoupler, and below that, a two-stage liquid fuel rocket capable of getting you into orbit. Yes, it's possible with 18 tons and 30 parts... easily.

8.) Depending on how much dV you managed to pack, get yourself into a polar orbit (more costly but preferrable) or an equatorial orbit (less costly). Get goo, crew report and material science from low orbit. If you brought thermometers, remember to get data for launchpad, flying low, flying high and low orbit. Do EVA reports from all biomes you pass over - if your orbit is polar, you can get all biomes on Kerbin in one flight.

9.) Lift your apoapsis above 250,000m. Get crew report, EVA report, goo and material science (and thermometer data) for high in space over Kerbin. At apoapsis, burn to drop your periapsis to 0 km, touching the surface exactly. Counterintuitively, this reentry is gentler than a 35km periapsis from 70x70 km; the service bay will easily take the heat and also has a great impact tolerance for landing on. Try aiming at KSC. The earlier you start practicing, the more funds you will recover from each mission. But wherever you land, remember to check if there's science left to do.

10.) You have now completed the starter World-First record contracts and should be a rich Kerbal. Upgrade buildings in this order, as funds allow: Mission Control, Tracking Station, Launchpad, VAB. You may not have enough funds for all of them, but you can now have up to 7 contracts at once, which lets you farm money efficiently. Also unlock Basic Science (if you haven't already), Advanced Rocketry, Stability and Flight Control. You are now able to go to Mun and Minmus, as well as get science from solar orbit. This took you just four flights, and zero dumb rolling around KSC for dumb science.

You can get by with even less flights, but that starts to get to unwieldly for my tastes, and saves little actual time (in fact you'll probably end up spending more time due to having to build large, wobbly vessels than you save by not flying a quick suborbital hop).

Edited August 12, 2015 by Streetwind

[X-SR71]

This 'Potato phase' is the one before unlocking the 90 science points nodes, right?

I found it to be the most grindy part of career. After a couple of those 90 nodes, it gets way more fun.

Sorry I don't have very good advices for you. It just IS grindy. What I did though, was trying to rush the super simple contracts - like the 'test part in launchpad' contracts for easy pocket cash and couple science points. I didn't take harder contracts until I had some good parts unlocked.

[GoSlash27]

*edit*

Do yourself a favor and check out the "Caveman Challenge" thread. Watch how they do it.

Getting started needn't be grindy.

Best,

-Slashy

[Geschosskopf]

The one good thing science-wise in 1.x is that now a 0-level rookie scientist can reset the Goo and Material experiments by himself, in the field. Used to be, only the Mobile Processing Lab could do that. Shamelessly exploiting this is the key to getting through the grind.

Do what you need to do in the very early going to unlock the following stuff:

* Goo, Materials, and whatever other science instruments are within easy reach. NOTE: using the DMagic Orbital Science mod really helps here as it provides many new instruments (so your ship can get more science per biome) and also lucrative contracts (in both cash and science) to use them.

* The OKTO probe core, which can do SAS. Once you have this, you no longer need pilots at all.

* Enough 1.25m, maybe a few 2.5m rocket parts to build a lander with about 3000m/s dV, enough TWR to land on Minmus with full tanks (this doesn't require much), and a rocket capable of getting this lander to Minmus. This needs the OKTO core as well.

Once you have this, put your 0-level scientist in it and send him to Minmus. Just before you touch the ground, run all the experiments that will work in "space just above". Land. EVA, collect all the data and put it in the pod, resetting the Goo and Materials. Then run all the experiments on the ground, plus get EVA reports and a surface sample. Store all this in the pod, reset the Goo and Materials again. Then hop to the next biome and repeat the process. You should be able to hit 3, maybe 4 biomes this way and still have enough fuel to get home no problem. You'll come home with a couple thousand science points. Spend them, upgrade the ship (especially with more instruments) and then go get the remaining Minmus biomes. Again, you'll get a few thousand science. By now you'll have all the 2.5m rocket parts, maybe even some of the 3.75m. Use these to repeat the whole process on Mun, which takes a bigger lander due to its higher gravity.

Doing things this way, you can pretty much clear out the tech tree in 4-5 relatively simple, not-all-that-repetitive missions.

[Mystique]

Grindy phase won't bother you much, even if you don't use difficulty option to give yourself some extra funds, if you choose your contract wisely. I usually pick 5-7 contract that I can perform in 1 mission, for example: explore Mun (stock landing mission) + orbital observations of Mun + put sat or two in Mun orbit + rescue few guys (usually I send unmanned crafts and pick them by the way), etc. Also don't waste your time on stupid contracts with low cash output like testing parts on launchpads, unless you just want to do it. Fishy (cash efficient) contracts are mostly regarding building orbital and ground bases, they don't require too expensive crafts and usually produces good profit. Again, combine those building contracts with sat deployment, sats are small and you can attached them to almost any mission to deploy during transit.

And consider using stage recovery mod to be able to salvage expensive lifter stages (it's usually not worth to waste time and delta-v to recover each SRB, but if you're hauling a ready-to-use orbital dock up there, lifter itself will surely cost more than a regular manned mission).

Generally, good choice of contract will save you lot of time on grind - I usually do several science+cash grind mission in beginning of career, upgrade most important buildings and then start exploring other planets - it's much more interesting than those Mun and Minmus (which i can't look at for a year already ) and also can generate considerable profit, especially when your exploration missions can count as orbital bases for some contracts

I also suggest to use policy to convert 50-70% of reputation into funds. Who cares what they think about your cute little space program business if you have cash, blackjack and Valentinas?

[Snark]

In my own career games, I find that the money grind is more of an issue than the science grind: that is, I find myself doing missions over and over to add money so that I can upgrade my buildings. The science seems to take care of itself.

The sweet spot I've found for "make lots of money fast" is the "Launch a new station on a solar orbit" contract. Those are worth tons of funds, anywhere from half a million to more than a million. They're quick to slap together, and they require minimal time & effort on my part: basically, just put together a craft that meets the requirements, make sure it has enough dV to escape Kerbin, point its nose at the sky, and floor the accelerator. Pow, boatloads of cash. Two or three such missions are generally enough to upgrade the science facility, tracking station, and VAB, which are the major big-ticket items.

[Superfluous J]

The sweet spot I've found for "make lots of money fast" is the "Launch a new station on a solar orbit" contract.

I prefer to take a trio of contracts to put a station in orbit of Kerbin, then another in orbit of the Sun, and a third in orbit of a planet. Launch a single station that satisfies all 3, and just getting to the other planet will satisfy the Kerbin and Sun contracts. A little more work but - in my opinion - less than 3x the work, for 3x (ish) the payoff, and 1/3 (again -ish) the cost to build.

[MerlinsMaster]

A lot of really great advice from everyone so far! This gives me a bunch of great strategies to use. I think I'll leave this as "unanswered" a little longer, because I'm loving everything that's coming in and don't want to stop the momentum.

[capi3101]

3.) Build rocket with a pod, a parachute, three goo canisters, a decoupler, a Hammer solid booster (throttle to 2/3rds thrust), and a quartett of basic fins. Launch. Get goo from flying low. Transmit crew report from flying low. Get crew report and goo from flying high. Land somewhere. Go EVA. Get EVA report on the ladder. Take all data from pod, store all data in pod (resets the crew report). Get EVA report from the ground. Get back in pod. Get goo and crew report while landed. Recover. (I forget if a single Hammer is enough to get above 18 km. If it isn't, take a Flea for a second stage.)

Just a quick note here - I started a new career last night specifically to work through your list of things to do in a new save; during this flight I did need a Flea to get up to 18,000. On the other hand, I use FAR so that might've had something to do with it. Might need to mention a thrust setting for the Flea; I left it on full myself and Val pulled some pretty serious gees as a result...

[Streetwind]

Hey, it's Val! She probably grinned all the broader for it

[More Boosters]

I suffer the same problems but the SoundingRockets mod I just downloaded helped quite a bit.

If you insist on going stock only, well, I have this help to offer:

You'll get a lot of easy money from science from space around Kerbin contracts, so you should try my Recoverable Sounding Rocket design if you don't already have one. It's exactly as it sounds, it survives reentry and gives you some funds back while doing the mission.

x6 Basic Fins on the bottom

x1 Hammer Booster

x1 Stayputnik

x1 Z-100 Battery Pack **

x1 Communotron 16 **

x1 2 HOT Thermometer **

x2 Radial Chutes

** : Place on the Stayputnik

Gets to around 90 km apoapsis and falls fairly close to KSC. I did not try it with other science equipment yet, however.

Set the Hammer to 46 thrust, this gives you a TWR of 2.39 on take-off, fairly appropriate for a rocket of this size. A bit lower thrust may be more efficient but pushing yourself against the air faster is better for stability and no setup will get this to space high over Kerbin, and I'd be surprised if there existed an early game single stage design that could get to that kind of altitude and survive the re-entry.

I usually get around 96% return on the vehicle so the operating cost is about 300-400. Saving 2.400 may not seem like much but it matters in the long run with how many of these things I launch.

Edit: Also try to do the tourist contracts at Kerbin as those give a lot of reputation to unlock the bigger missions earlier.

Edited July 31, 2015 by More Boosters

[jkool702]

To help with science grind, i reccomend installing [X]science mod. This lets you know what science is available in your current biome, and makes the "collect data everywhere" part much more efficient.

For funds, if you get tired of repeating the same contracs over and over (in particular the "take tourists to kerbin orbit" and "launch a satellite to kerbin orbit" ones) download mechjeb and let it automate it. I'm a big believer that you should try to do stuff first without mechjeb's help, but once youve repeated something 20 times and could do it in your sleep mechjeb helps reduce the grindyness of doing it again.

[Nich]

I just give my self a good chunk of science in the beginning I am not rolling to every dam biome at KSP so I can spend 2 hours to get dumb science 100m from the launch pad IMO. All those biomes need to be removed and the Kerbin desert, poles, and mountains and possibly badlands(I have never been) need to be buffed up. Apparently I just learned you can do splashed and landed in most the biomes

[Mic_n]

don't forget all the different biomes right in the KSC.. Most things there have their own biome (some have multiple, depending on tech level), so you can do a bunch of experiments in and around without going far at all and rack up some quick science.

[ghpstage]

The one good thing science-wise in 1.x is that now a 0-level rookie scientist can reset the Goo and Material experiments by himself, in the field. Used to be, only the Mobile Processing Lab could do that. Shamelessly exploiting this is the key to getting through the grind.

This was certainly true in 1.03, and I doubt it has changed much in 1.04.

I used to aim to get a scientist into orbit on my second launch, with enough fuel to just get over the 250k high-low orbit boundary with both goo and a mat lab onboard. Used to come back with a total of around 140 science, with 60 coming from high altitude, low space and high space material labs alone.....

You do have to make sure you upgrade the astro complex before anything else, and while your scientist is up there however.

Edited July 31, 2015 by ghpstage

[Geschosskopf]

This was certainly true in 1.03, and I doubt it has changed much in 1.04.

Still true in 1.0.4.

You do have to make sure you upgrade the astro complex before anything else, and while your scientist is up there however.

Yup, you have to have the ability to EVA in space for this to work. That should always be one of the 1st building upgrades you get.

[More Boosters]

I just give my self a good chunk of science in the beginning I am not rolling to every dam biome at KSP so I can spend 2 hours to get dumb science 100m from the launch pad IMO. All those biomes need to be removed and the Kerbin desert, poles, and mountains and possibly badlands(I have never been) need to be buffed up. Apparently I just learned you can do splashed and landed in most the biomes

I agree completely. The novelty of EVA'ing on the ground and hanging onto the ladder to get a "flying over wherever" bonus got old long ago. Now it's just a hacky way of going through a kind of grind that should not be there. Just for reference, how much science do you start with? One time I started with science I felt dirty so I deleted that save and started again. After all, a single Hammer can get you above 70k and that feels a bit cheaty.

[Geschosskopf]

I agree completely. The novelty of EVA'ing on the ground and hanging onto the ladder to get a "flying over wherever" bonus got old long ago. Now it's just a hacky way of going through a kind of grind that should not be there. Just for reference, how much science do you start with? One time I started with science I felt dirty so I deleted that save and started again. After all, a single Hammer can get you above 70k and that feels a bit cheaty.

As an alternative to having some science to start with, you can also increase the amount of science rewards, like say to 200%. This by itself reduces the amount of effort required to unlock the tech tree by 1/2. And why not give yourself 150% money as well?

As to the "cheatiness" of such things, it depends on what you're trying to do with the game. Do you see the end of the tech tree as the end of the game, or the real beginning of it? I'm in the latter camp. I mean, what's the point of unlocking all the high-tech stuff at the end of the tree if you're not ever going to use it? But there are those who quit at that point. Those folks therefore want to stretch things out, making it harder on themselves, so they reduce rewards, use entry costs, etc. Me, OTOH, I start with nothing but go with 200% science, 150% funds, and blaze through the tech tree so I can get on with building massive colonies while still needing to pay for them. And I use Custom Barn Kit so that the price of upgrading buildings is higher, but I can hire tons of Kerbals for a low, flat fee (they have no skills, after all). Plus I use DMagic Orbital Science so I can get more science per mission.

With my settings, I can complete the tech tree just by thoroughly pillaging Minmus. So with that out of the way in a small number of missions, the game morphs into an empire-building game. Building colonies is EXPENSIVE, so I'm always having to do contracts for income. And because by this point all the good contracts involve interplanetary trips, they take a long time to pay off. This requires a lot of planning looking years into the future, figuring out how I can work contracts in my favor to build the colonies I want. All the station and base construction contracts at this point actually start having a purpose, and I end up using most of them myself instead of just leaving them sitting there idle. But it might take a decade or 2 before it's fully operational because I can't afford to do it all at once, the unalterable schedule of transfer windows, and the randomness of getting the right type of contract going to the right place. But figuring all this out is why they pay me the big bucks .