First thing you'll do on your road to greatness will be to create you own character. There are various races to choose from but your choice doesn't really affect anything - just pick the race you think looks cool. There used to be racial bonusses, but the devs took those out during early access because they didn't want players to choose their race based on those.

The only exception is the Novakid who glows slightly more in the dark than the other races and cannot craft melee weapons. They craft guns instead.

This choice has far more impact on your game than character customization.

Casuals don't lose anything when they die. in fact, they can freely just kill themselves to quick travel back to the ship. because of this the devs allow you to just warp back to the ship at any depth. You also won't have to worry about food which would normally be a real hassle.

normal difficulty makes you lose 30% of your carried pixels (your money), all ores, all materials, all foods and some of the more rarer upgrade parts. you can however get back all that you've lost (except the pixels) by returning to the place you died and pick the dropped stuff up again. these items don't disappear even if you quit the game. you also can only warp back to the ship when at a planet's surface, so you'll have to find a way back to the surface when you've had enough of spelunking/mining. you may want to keep that in mind before heading too far down if you're having doubts about your ability to safely get back up.
You also have to make sure you keep yourself fed which in the beginning will be a bigger challenge than you might expect.

hardcore obviously erases your character upon death. only recommended to veteran masochists.

Unless you chose to skip it during character creation, you'll start the game off in your bunk on earth - on the day of your graduation. this section is a very linear 'on rails' experience. just keep moving right, get your matter manipulator, learn the basics of using it and get ready for the game to really begin.

If you want, you can keep an eye out for a piece of yellow cloth underneath a tattered banner later on in the tutorial you can use as a cape. it's only ornamental but you may think it looks cool and keep it. Similarly, there's a flower vanity item you can pick up near the big tree which serves as a head dress which you can only get here.

You'll also get your first weapon in this section and learn how to use it. When the game begins propely you'll get something better soon enough, but don't throw it away! later on this weapon can be upgraded into something pretty useful.

After the tutorial section ends you'll find yourself on a tattered small ship together with your racial pet.

There will be a teleporter, a storage panel, a screen for your AI assistant and the bridge. Because of the damage you can't move the ship to different planets yet, so the bridge is useless for now.

Make sure to open the ship's storage and get the flashlight and some food. The conserved food will keep you alive for a while giving you the time you need to procure a source of food on the planet, which assuming you're not a filthy casual should be your primary objective for now.

When you've gathered all you can use the teleporter to beam down to the planet.

You'll be given a mission to find an 'archaic power source' and in the top right there will be an arrow pointing you in its direction. Actually going there is pointless for now though as you'll then just be told to gather 20 core fragments and although doing this is going to allow you to leave this planet, going there isn't going to help your food situation any in the short term.
Do make sure though to keep any core fragments you find, and don't craft them into Volatile Powder before you leave the first planet! Making bombs may seem cool, but you'll be kicking yourself later when you need them.

However, you will be wanting to get off this starter planet as fast as possible, because as soon as you do a ton of stuff will open up to you making everything (from moving around to gathering resources/food) a ton easier. Everything at its own time, though.

First order of business then is to get a source of food, and no matter what this is going to require you to explore the surface.

First order of business is to cut down a couple of trees (use the matter manipulator on the tree's base) and gather the wood. You'll need it to make most of what you need, like torches, platforms and other useful things.

This is optional (though recommended), but if you've got a decent amount of timber and if you've got a source of cobblestone around (which is likely) you should collect some of the latter as well and construct a temporary Foraging Table (you'll need an Inventor's table first). Press C to open the crafting menu. Here you'll be able to make Hunting Spears which are consumable, but cheap and do massive damage for this part of the game. They also have an increased chance of making the victim drop meat and leather. After you made a good stash of Hunting Spears you can deconstruct your crafting stations and carry them with you while you explore the surface.

Be sure to make a Campfire and carry it around with you. Whenver you need to eat something put it on the ground and roast any of the wild vegetables you find or any of the monster meat you get your hands on.

Move across the planet's surface, and try not to die. Keep in mind that you'll eventually loop around the world rather than reach an end so just keep going.

killing monsters has a low chance of dropping meats and other resources, but it's probably better to be safe than sorry and try to evade monsters rather than face them head on for now. Gathering some basic resources takes precedence.

Keep an eye out for plants on the surface. You can come across rice plants, cotten plants, potatoes, carrots etc. make sure to harvest these and deconstruct them with your MM so you get their seed. when you have enough seeds you can make your own farm and ensure a source of food that way. Also keep an eye out for small flowers. You can collect their coloured petals which will be used for dyes later on and difficult to gather if you need them, so best start collecting early. Cotton plants don't give you food, but it's still an important resource later so make sure to grab every cotton seed you can get your hands on asap.

You'll occasionally come across some caves with vines hanging down from the ceiling. Make sure to gather these vines! By destroying them from the top part with you MM they drop down, leaving a lot of 'Plant Fiber' which is used by a lot of things but most importantly you can make salves from them in your craft menu (press C if you forgot). these heal 50 HP over 10 seconds and will be vital in keeping you alive. make sure to gather a good amount of these fibers, craft some salves and keep them handy on your hotkey bar.

While moving around you'll also want to keep an eye out for some ores. You'll want to gather coal when you see it for torches, and copper for some basic gear.

At some point you'll find an abandonded mine entrance with a wandering NPC near it and lots of boxes/crates and a tent. Your AI will also comment on it. This will be a great place to set up your base. You'll need to place down an Inventor's Table, which will allow you to create more crafting stations.
Your immedate goals will be to create a Hoe and a Hunting Bow(made from the hunting station!). However, both require copper bars, which can be smelted with a Primitive Furnace. Hopefully you did find some copper ore while tracking across the surface, otherwise you'll have to explore the mine a bit for some.
Also make and place a flag in your base so you can easily teleport back here from your ship.

The Hoe obviously allows you to prepare some dirt for planting the seeds you've been carrying. you'll also want a watering can to keep the ground wet at all times so the plants grow the fastest they can.
The Hunting Bow is a decent weapon at the start (though it'll take some practice to use well) and it'll have a good chance of making monsters drop meat and other loot. You don't have to worry about arrows as you automatically have an infinite amount of them. Instead, using the bow will require some of your 'Energy', which refils rapidly over time. If you run out though you will be unable to use the bow for a short while while your energy recharges. The bow also has a special attack which a lot of people don't even know about. hold the right mouse button to charge it and aim for a spot. let go of the mouse button and 3 arrows will shoot up high in the sky and land near where your mouse cursor was. because of the long delay it's difficult to aim and it's not really usable below ground, but if you can hit an unsuspecting victim with all 3 arrows you'll do immense damage.

Now that you have a decent source of food the next order of business is to get some armor and a good sword, which means getting your hands on a decent stash of iron ore. It's very unlikely you found this near the surface already, so you'll have to go down the mineshaft for this.

Make sure to loot every box you come across and be very sure to keep a close eye out for any Core Fragments you find. getting 20 of those is your primary goal, as that will allow you to get off this planet and start making things a lot easier on yourself. You should be able to find quite a lot in the chests in this area. Make sure that you go in with plenty of torches, wooden platforms, salves and enough food for a couple of days.

You'll need 2 iron ore for every bar you make, and you need 8 bars for the anvil. you'll need 10 bars for the armor so that's an additional 20 iron ore. An Iron Broadsword is recommended also which is another 6 bars you need. Therefore, you'll want to dig around in the mine until you find 48 iron ore and head back and craft your first armor and proper weapon.

When you've got your iron equipment you'll have to get back into the mine and keep going untill you find your 20 Core Fragments. if you can't find the 20 you need in boxes you'll have to keep going down and further down until you're practically surrounded by lava. this place is dangerous so be well equipped/supplied.

The deeper you go you'll also find some silver and gold here and there, which has little use to you right this moment, but you should still collect some for later if you're able. If you can, you'll want to carry 10 copper bars, 10 silver bars and 10 gold bars with you when you leave this planet so you can quickly complete a couple of important quests right away that'll help you a lot.

Before you leave you'll also want to make a stuffed teddybear - for which you'll need quite a it of cotton. It's needed for a quest that unlocks a shop that sells pickaxes (which are consumable items but mine a lot faster right now than your MM) and metals for money. expensive, but useful when you're in a pinch.

When you've collected all you need go to where the quest marker tells you to go and you'll find a large warp gate. insert the 20 Core Fragments and you can finally visit the game's main commercial hub, The Outpost, and get the main quest really started.

after going through the portal you'll arrive in the outpost and get told to meet the creator of the mysterious signal.

In this place you can finally sell stuff you're carying for some pixels and buy useful things like food and other supplies. you'll notice a scientist looking guy in the middle of the big building off to your right who will give you 3 quests in sequence. these will give you some very valuable movement skills but you'll need the metal bars I mentioned earlier. I sure hope you prepared them beforehand. Any Tech Upgrade items you find can be exchanged here for slightly different movement upgrades. When you unlock more you can switch back and forth whenever you want at the tech console. If you want to be able to switch your skills where-ever you are you can buy a tech console for yourself for 5000 pix at the vending machine to the left of the scientist.

keep heading to the right and eventually you'll meet Esther bright who'll tell you about the cultivator and how he's a legendary hero who held back the tentacley doom that attacked earth. She'll explain about how you will need to find a number of plot coupons, one for each race in the game. This is sure to keep you busy for a good long while.

If you've not done so yet in an earlier game she'll tell you to go around the Outpost and familiarize yourself with it. press N for inspection mode and keep a look-out for anything glowing green. click them and Esther will give your some details about what you're looking at.

Next order of business is getting your ship fixed up so you can move around to different planets. collecting the racial doodads is gonna be hard without a ship, after all. Fixing a space ship is skilled labour however, and the best fit for the job are the local space prinnies. So, off to penguin Pete you go who you'll find a bit to the right of the main Outpost hub building. He's the red-bearded pirate-looking dude, complete with eyepatch. He'll tell you that he'll need 20 Erchius crystals to fix your ship (it's always 20 of something for some reason). He'll give you the mission to visit the Erchius Mining Facility which you can start by talking to your AI in your ship. It's HIGHLY recommended that you prepare for this trip as best you can, as the game's difficulty really takes a sharp spike in this mission. Make sure you've got plenty of supplies and you're wearing a full set of your first tier of armor (iron). you will surely want a good set of hunting spears and maybe even some bombs if you've got excess volatile powder. the enemies in this mission are tough and can deal some scary damage if they can gang up on you. And then it'll get worse.

The wonderful MongooseCalledFred has made a truly outstanding in-depth guide to this mission and you can find it here: http://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=730711684
It's got screenshots and everything! There's no way anything I write could stand in its shadow so be sure to check it out and give it a like.

Keep in mind that while on Missions you only lose pixels on death and the hunger bar is frozen, so although they're difficult they're not as punishing as they could be.

So, after that whole ordeal is over with you finally get the ability to go to other planets!

Back on your newly renovated spaceboat you can now make use of the bridge section. You'll need fuel to move to different solar systems but you can move around your current star system even without it just fine! If you really want some fuel though, you can buy some at the first shop in the Outpost. It can also be mined from moons but there's no air on those which tends to be problematic. (You can make a special backpack soon to counter this)
There're also stories of invulnerable zombieghoasts floating around moons who really want nothing more than to catch unwary explorers and suck out their souls, so... buying from the store sounds good for now.

At this point most of the game is pretty much open to you. You can choose to continue on the fetch quest Esther has sent you on, or you can go and do whatever you feel like.

You could start one or more colonies on planets. You do this by making rooms, placing various furniture inside (a bed, a light and a door at the minimum, I believe) and placing down a colony deed. You can buy these and more furniture at the Outpost. The NPC's you spawn this way will give you rent (sometimes pixels, sometimes items but you get more stuff if you colonize more dangerous planets) and quests for more rewards. Make sure to collect the rent regularly as it doesn't pile up while you're away. some quests bring more NPC's into your colony. The type of colonist you get when you place the deed depends on the furniture you place down and the quality of everything in the room. making everything out of titanium will bring different NPC's than if you just used wood. The details of the system is super complex and beyond the scope of this walkthrough, but you should at the least get the cook NPC, which is easy to summon by placing 2 cooking stations in the room.

You could also start making money by farming, Stardew Valley style. explore various planets for seeds and plant them at your farm. buy some eggs and herd animals producing all sorts of wild goods. Sell your surplus for good pixels.

You can also try and collect fossils. probably tedious for most but it's there. nothing says achievement like a colony filled with luxurious displays of rare fossils!

You could just explore ever more dangerous planets, unlocking further tiers of equipment - completely ignoring the main quest. Maybe more efficient to do both at the same time though.

If you want to continue the story, you'll want to find a jungle planet so look around your solar map from within the bridge. You'll notice that each planet has a specific set of resources that can be found there, and it's nearly certain that any jungle planet you see will also have Tungsten on it, which is lucky as that allows for the next tier of crafting!

When you've found a nice jungle planet make sure it's selected and press the big GO button, and your ship will take off.

Once there, beam down and you can go exploring again! hopefully you'll be able to find an NPC settlement without too much issue. you'll want to open inspection mode again and once more take a good long look around for any objects that have a greenish glow around them. close those and have Esther prattle on a bit more in your ear and you should see a meter in the top right fill up. Talking to NPC's can also sometimes give a boost to the meter. keep exploring the NPC town (and probably looting every container you come across) and sooner or later the bar should fill out entirely. When it is, return to esther and you'll gain a new mission. at around this point it's probably not a bad idea to go mine for some Tungsten and upgrade your gear - if you haven't already.

Upgrading the hunting bow probably sounds tempting, but you'll notice you need some oil for that. to get that, you're going to need to make a pitstop to a desert world and also make sure to have the fluid-sucking upgrade to your MM. it only requires 3 upgrade modules and is also really useful in cleaning up any poison water and even lava when it's being inconvenient to you. sucking up water and dropping it over crops is also a great way of replacing that tedious watering can.

When you're feeling ready for it you can start the next mission - the Ceremonial Hunting Grounds.
Once again the ever amazing MongooseCalledFred made a very in-depth walkthrough of this mission, so do yourself a favour and have a look at it here:
http://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=735664351
It's not as difficult in my opinion as the mining facility mission, but you should be having much better gear by now as well. It's just a matter of keep moving right while fighting anything that moves and looting any chest you come across. There's not much of a maze here, just keep moving right. Finally you'll have to fight against a boss monster, but you'll have a powerful NPC ally helping you out throughout the fight. As long as you at least keep yourself alive the fight should be one eventually anyway. After beating the big scary boss you'll be rewarded with the Floran relic! yay!

The 2nd relic will be found in Hylotl ruins, wich will prove to be very annoying as the Hylotl are an aquatic race - meaning you're going to have to go to ocean planets and play in the water to scan the required relics. DEEP underwater. You'll need to craft a Breathing EPP (Environment Protection Pack) before taking on this challenge. You'll need some Tungsten, glass (make it from sand) and some living root (commonly dropped from slimes).

Having this equipped also makes it possible to visit moons and explore around there. You can jump real far, mine some Erchius fuel, watch the stars, get chased around by ghosts. It's fun!

Ocean planets also tend to have Titanium ore, which just so happen to be required for your next tier of equipment! It's alsmost too coincidental.

Ocean planets tend to be just that. a huge layer of water on the surface with about 9 to 12 smaller islands floating on top of that. If you plan to explore all the islands you'll want to somehow mark the island you spawn on (so that you know you've fully gone around the planet when you do) and have the liquid ball equipped.

If you just mean to go and find some Titanium all you really need to do is let yourself sink to the bottom of the ocean and start digging from there. Once you're deep inside the earth This planet type is no different than any other you've seen so far.

Moving along on the bottom of the ocean looking for ruins is another option but tends to be slow (though there are some treasures here and there to loot). Although the wallmaster sphere tends to be a bit faster on the ocean floor than anything else, it's still slow going. Regrettably, you'll probably have to in order to find the ruins you're looking for, as I haven't been able to find any hints on the surface telling of location of the ruins - with sole exception of a trader who just happened to give me a quest to inspect the ruins. This quest gave me a marking telling me what direction to go to, but you may not find such an NPC on the planet you land on. I only got that lucky on my 3rd ocean world.

However, once you do find the underwater ruins you'll be sure to know it right away. A few large buildings will surround a tunnelway into the ground so you can go even deeper into the Hylotl ruins. Be careful of the larger fish and inspect anything and everything you find. Be extremely careful not to miss any nook or cranny, both because it's very easy to miss a vital point of interest, but also because there tends to be a lot of useful loot crammed away in boxes everywhere.

You should be able to find everything you need within a single ruin. If you're missing a few pieces be sure to comb through the whole thing again very carefully - it's nearly certain you must've missed a piece hidden away somewhere. If you really can't find it you could always try a different ocean planet and hope you'll have better luck there, but as far as I can tell the ruins are the same on each planet and not randomly generated. Looting multiple ruins however is of course a great way to get some nice stuff, though.

Once you've scanned enough to fill your quest bar fully, Esther will contact you and tell you to come back and see her. When you do, she'll give you a mission to the Grand Pagoda Library. As usual, you can access it from your ship.

MongooseCalledFred created a great guide for this missioni as well, so check it out here:
http://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=736906715
Or read on for the cliff notes.
Once there move to the right into a large building. A Hylotl scientist named Koichi will contact you through a holographic projection and ask you to rescue him/her. She'll open the large entrance hatch. You may not want to be standing on top of it when this happens.

When it's open, look very carefully and you should be able to make out a platform you can stand on just below the hatch. stand on top of it and press the nearby button. You do not want to miss this or fall through the platform, because it's a -long- way down and the metal floor does a poor job cushioning your fall.

What follows is a maze-like (but still quite linear) progression of rooms and tunnels ever deeper into the ancient library. You'll be taunted with a chest below a tunnel, just out of reach in the water, but just keep it in mind for now. Keep going until eventually Koichi mentions you'll have to go through a flooded section. as soon as you enter it, go up and up until you find the chest that you couldn't reach earlier. It should contain a Valorous Chestpiece which is a vanity item that I think looks pretty cool, so you may want to grab it. You'll find the legs part later on by going left and up after the 2nd large elevator section, just before the boss.

You'll meet some cultists who shouldn't pose too much of a threat but their boss is a different story. He'll want to have his villanous exposition the moment you first meet him and he'll proceed to teleport around and attack you. She's invulnerable most of the time and does a good bit of damage so you'll want some bandages handy. You can however dodge most of his attacks easily by transforming into a ball and rolling back and forth on the ground (thanks to UltraEmailMan for this tip). Especially when the boss herself transforms into a ball and flies around wildly attacking you this is the easiest way to survive without issue. After this wild attack she'll take a moment to catch her breath and her invulnerability fades for a short while. You'll want to use this chance unleash as much burst damage as you can - probably using a melee weapon. You may even want to wait with healing yourself until after the boss is invulnerable again and just pound away. When her shield recovers you can proceed to run roll for your life again.

You'll beat her eventually and you'll get your rewards like usual. Next up is the Avian relic!