IXION Tips & Tricks

IXION has a saving functionality that allows you to save your progress at any point. I recommend using this to your advantage, as you'll make plenty of mistakes on your first playthrough; screw up enough, and a Game Over will send you straight to the beginning of the chapter (which can be several hours of gameplay lost).

IXION is all about learning, and mistakes are natural at any point of the game (even 20 hours in, I was making my fair share of them!). However, I learned that fearing restarting was only making me make more mistakes — I was low on alloy and didn't have enough to open new sectors, create new buildings, and repair the hull. So instead of being afraid to restart, perhaps consider doing it every once in a while! Once you know the basics, it'll be a cakewalk to get back to where you were.

One of the most essential things about IXION is knowing that you always have to be doing something. Try to avoid dawdling and always work towards your main objective, as completing a solar system doesn't necessarily mean you have to leave it. Use your ships actively (Science, Cargo, and Mining), use probes to explore the galaxy, have a plan for the Tiqqun... doing everything at once will severely help you because...

It's easy to want to keep the time running at triple speed to complete a building, finish a science expedition, or get a Tech Lab upgrade, but I'd say that's generally a bad idea in IXION. Every second matters, and I'd recommend you spend most of your time with the game paused whilst you decipher what to do — this will stop the more you go into the game and get into the flow of it, but keeping the time running at triple speed isn't optimising your most valuable resource: time.

I know it's tempting to collect everything and feel like resources aren't scarce — too much alloy's a never lousy idea, why not have 430 cryo pods ready to awaken, and polymer and electronics are all too scarce to ignore anyway! These are all tempting arguments, but the more you try to hoard, the harder your time in IXION will be. The limited stockpiles (meaning you'll need several of every resource), the sheer amount of resources to get, and the ever-looming presence of DES (Dead Earth Sickness) will make this far more difficult than it needs to be. Get what you need, a little more to survive your jump, and then get out of Dodge!

One of the most scarce resources in IXION is actually workers. You are humanity's last ray of hope, so you will need to do your best to gather as many of the remaining humans as possible to ensure their survival and yours. That said, having too many workers, especially in cryo pods, can be extremely detrimental. By having 250 workers in cryo pods, you'll get a negative buff to stability, which will make it easier for your workers' trust to plummet, and by having too many outside, you might not have the housing, energy, and food to keep them well! Be wary of the decisions you make, and try to keep just enough workers, but not too many.

Early on in the game, your workers will give you a request to unlock the second sector in the Tiqqun in order to get more space to build. This might sound like a bad idea (it did to me, considering I barely had the resources to do it), but unlocking the second sector should be one of your early-game priorities. Having more space isn't a bad idea, as you'll be able to build more things, have more space, and get more resources, just be wary of being overzealous and digging yourself into a hole, as opening sectors increases hull degradation by eight points. Prepare some resources before opening, but try not to neglect opening new sectors — specifically the first one.

It's easy to get a favourite sector — for me, usually, it was the one that went on the least amount of strikes (I love you, Sector 3). That said, although a sector might be your favourite, you'll want to give equal treatment to all of your sectors and get them working together. The game itself encourages you to do so by giving you bonuses if you focus on the same buildings, so you'll want to get everyone working on the same thing in each sector. My perfect order was food > factories interchangeably, though one sector was generating sufficient food for three; I just didn't want to take the risk early!

You're going to want to know what situations could quickly sink you into an inevitable Game Over, but you'll also want to know what you need to win at any moment! Figure out what could be your impending doom (mostly alloy reserves for hull and stability for trust) and what you need to do to win (mine more iron, find your next main objective). Knowing what you need to do and what could be problems later down the line will always be useful so you can properly prepare!

This final one is obvious, but perhaps something that isn't so obvious, as I failed to see the importance of iron early. As you delve into every new solar system, the first thing you'll want to do is send out probes looking for iron and get your Mining and Cargo ships working on them. Iron (alongside the Steel Mill) is imperative in pretty much every scenario, so you can never have an excess of iron, and you could always do with looking for more.