Always have been a fan of city building sim games since SimCity. Most recent ones I've played would be City Skylines and Surviving Mars. Then I came across this, Ixion, a cross between a survival and city building sim where you must keep a space station maintained as you travel through space with your large crew.

It's a tough game where you'll find any changes you make can easily lead to a game over so be sure to save regularly so you don't have to restart from scratch or, load a save files from hours ago.

Here are some tips on how I played through the game.

For "stockpile failed to transfer issues" verify you have a stockpile in the sector with the correct material assigned to it and then in resource management, increase what it desired while lowering the amount in another sector that does have the resources. You can also click on the buildings to find out if they're connected to a road or not.

Chapter 1

Unlocking Sector 2 in the first galaxy is possible. Even the tutorial hints suggest it after you've filled up the initial sector after all but remember to watch your hull integrity. You may have to build a second EVA there to help maintain it. I never noticed mine until it was almost too late.

Research all tech inside a single tier ring to unlock the next and also upgrades for the previous tier.

You'll want to unlock the tech lab upgrade so it can generate research points faster. Next chapter expects you to have access to tier 3 tech so you'll want all the points you can get.

You won't need any stability structures yet at this point. Just be careful of overworking your crew and turn off any factories such as the steel mill when it's lacking materials.

You can stick around and use probes to explore the galaxy before using the engine to jump. At a certain number of turns (240 I think) you will get a stability penalty but these are only linked to the current galaxy. Once you jump the penalties will be gone so if it's not affecting your crew's trust too much you can just ignore it until you've unlocked all of tier 2.

Chapter 2

Turning on auto-construct for probes will be useful because resource is scarce and there will always be a need for iron to expand and maintain the hull. Have enough batteries per sector so you can move the Tiqqun closer to resources to have them transported faster.

Be sure to have the DLS Centre in tier 3 prioritised in this second galaxy before the monuments because it gives the most stability control during this part of the game. One is required per sector and I found I had to enable intense propaganda to keep the crew positive while I was trying to fix the Protagoras.

The science ship will probably require some upgrades too for some planets such as exoskeleton and deep dive apparatus.

The severe weather upgrades for the ships aren't worth it so just click on the resources near the storm cloud and toggle avoid to keep your ships from flying through them and getting destroyed. If you want to collect research points, you can fly your science ship between goals to work around the storm.

I left after grabbing all the abandoned workers and never bothered with the cryopods.

Chapter 3

Tough chapter this one.

At some point you'll have to fly the Tiqqun pass the big patch of hazardous green cloud unless you want your ships destroyed and lose access to raw materials. Focus on Preparing for the Piranesi and have enough batteries with upgrades built for the 5 cycles (or whatever your sectors need). New bigger batteries are expensive so you'll most likely want to stick with Tier 1 batteries and use up alloy instead then spend research on upgrading the EKP Engine so you don't need as much battery power to travel.

It's also very likely you'll need multiple stability structures to keep your crew happy because there's so many hazards in this galaxy. Having space for a Legislation Centre for each sector will help. Domotic Quarters "upgrade" should help if you're struggling for space but you'll need the electronics to build these bigger high quality Crew Quarters.

Once you investigate the nearby POIs, one of the objectives will be to awaken 2000 pods but ensure you have an adequate supply of food first. Also note that once you have over 250 pods stock piled you'll end up with a stability penalty which is why the Legislation Centres will help. There will be a dog you can adopt from the Industrial Zone which will also give you +1 stability if you decide to keep it against regulations.

If you haven't already done so, you can actually assign where your newly awakened crew members go. I was moving them between sectors manually for a while...

Anyway, if you're planning on doing the side mission don't bother colonising CRUC-P-42 at this point because you'll most likely have to move the Tiqqun away before that happens. After you've flown to the southern side to avoid the shifting green cloud you can colonise. Don't forget to mark the resource points to be avoided.

At this point I found many planet investigations resulted in getting my science vessels destroyed so be prepared to have enough polymer to build new ones.

Chapter 4

This chapter is kind of an odd one since you're no longer "city building" and end up in a boss fight or run rather... In any case, best save at the start of the chapter.

If you've been doing the colonising side missions, you might want to finish that first or after the fight works too.

Either way, here are the preparations you should make before visiting Piranesi:

• Have your batteries charged more than enough to cover travelling between each planet you discover.
• Lots of alloy and polymer stocked up because you'll be moving the Tiqqun around a lot and repairing! You'll need 480 polymer at least to create the final weapon.
• Either have EVA Airlock construction speed upgrades researched to have time to build it and repair your hull or, or have enough airlocks to keep the hull repaired while on the run. Hull upgrades such as "Reinforced Steel Cladding" that minimise deterioation while on the move will also help while running away.
• Your Tech Lab should be fully upgraded so it can research as fast as possible, you'll need to research the weapon to fight against this boss while you're on the run.

For the first attack, I didn't know you had to build the missile countermeasure in the probe launcher before you can launch it via the map. That said, I still managed to survive it at full hull integrity.

The second attack is a swarm of drones and without the jammer built, you'll suffer even more damage apparently. You can actually just fly to another area to avoid them too which is a better choice as the swarm will continue damaging the Tiqqun while you're within range.

Keep moving, have intercept missiles ready and you'll be fine. When you get hacked, be sure to turn the Mess Halls back on. Eventually you'll be able to fight back and you'll probably have fled to the last swarm-free planet before it happens.

Afterwards you can do the side mission for colonising PSR B1257+12E. The cloud isn't too bad to fly through compared to the last green one.

Was a strange but interesting "fight". You'd think that'll be the end of the game considering how intense the run and fight part was but nope, there's more so don't think you can neglect your ship yet!

Chapter 5 - Two Endings

We're back to build survival this chapter but there's actually two routes you can take and both will be a race against time.

Promised Land

This is the slightly easier route as you have a bit more time.

You can choose to stay human by building the Edden on the exterior of the Tiqqun so that you can colonise the phantom planet Romulus. You're going to need train everyone on your space station into colonists for this which means a training centre in each sector.

You'll have to build a number of different sites on the planet too so it'll be fastest to move the Tiqqun there while doing so.

The Great Transformation

You can choose to transcend with the help of the Ashtangites when you meet and study their technology. Then you need to help them destroy Piranesi before his ship crashes into their planet by doing the following:

• Build and charge up 1000 tiles worth of battery. An event at your lab after Piranesi appears will tell you.
• Find and collect 3 temple fragments.
• Build a Bioengineering Centre.
• Transcend everyone which takes 10 turns.

To achieve this, I had to unlock Sector 5 and start building batteries right at the start of the chapter. I had to restart because there wasn't enough time. The Tiqqun must be next to the planet Remus before the transcending can happen so you might as well move it into place early.

Have fun building that giant grid of batteries and don't bother trying to explore the temples unless you've got enough materials to rebuild your science ships. You probably won't have the cycles to waste anyway.

Cheats

If you're really stuck and don't want to spend hours replaying or, just want to have fun exploring without the management there are some hidden cheats. They're not something you can type in-game but you can edit the JSON values inside the save files located in:

Users/Username/AppData/LocalLow/BulwarkStudios/Ixion/Saves

The saves are in numbered folders, negatives are autosaves (which aren't in editable plain text) so the easiest way to find the file you want is to sort by descending last modified date.

Before editing your saved files, I recommend you create a backup first.

If you have a program like Notepad++ you could use Find In Files to find the folder you're looking for by the name you used to save. SaveState.sav contains the save name.

Once you've found the folder you need, open the Player.sav file in Notepad. Inside you can find a cheats section such as being able to freeze hull and stability values by setting it to "true". Enabling the stockpile resources cheat will reveal a plus button when you select those structures and allow you to add more resources on demand.

Note that by freezing, the values won't increase either so if you're just using the cheats to recover remember to set it back to "false".

You can also edit the number of research points in the same file.

Lastly, the cheats will stay enabled if you create a save file while they are on so if you don't want that to happen, save, disable cheats, load the save that has the cheats disabled and then create a new save.

This was done in v1.0.2.3 of the game so they may become non-editable in the future.

Have fun.