Lightyear Frontier Guide | Tips & Tricks for Beginners

Our Lightyear Frontier Guide will teach you the basics of the game, explain the HUD, and give you a walkthrough of the Early Access launch content!

Lightyear Frontier is a cozy farming and exploration game where you can travel across a big map and explore ancient ruins. This guide will tell you what you need to know to get started, but first, let's go over an explanation of the HUD!

Lightyear Frontier HUD Explanation

1. Compass: The Compass shows you which direction you're facing.
2. Current Region: The text at the top of the Compass shows you which Region you're currently in.
3. Waypoint: If you have a Waypoint set on the map, it will be shown on the Compass. If you're facing it, you'll also see it on your screen.
4. Homestead: Any Homesteads you have will be indicated on the Compass with a house icon.
5. Time: The current time of day. You can only go to sleep once it's Noon.
6. Hotkeys: The bottom left of the screen shows hotkeys for turning on your flashlight, activating building mode, and changing your Mech's walking mode once you've unlocked certain Mech Upgrades.
7. Current Tool: Your currently equipped Tool and its status are shown here.
8. Homestead Buffs: If you have any buffs from recently sleeping at a Homestead, they will be shown here.

Lightyear Frontier Guide | Starter Guide Walkthrough

Now that we've explained the HUD, it's time to get into the Starter Guide portion of this Lightyear Frontier Guide. Start a new game and you'll quickly crash land on a strange alien world.

Fixing Your Busted Mech

Your first objective upon landing is to repair your broken Mech. Take out your Pickaxe and use right-click to pick up the pieces that fell off. Reattach them to your Mech. Once it's put back together, you can press the Interact button (E) to flip it upright.

Hold down E while facing your Mech to enter it. You'll get some systems started up and then you can start heading out into the world!

Recovering Your Tools

Your next objective is to follow the orange smoke trails to boxes containing the five Tools you need to survive and thrive on the planet.

Here are the Tools and what they do:

• Spike Saw: Breaks mineral and chops down trees with two fire modes. Left-click drives the spike and is ideal for minerals, and right-click swipes the Spike Saw like a chainsaw for trees and brush.
• Vacuum Harvester: Sucks up loose items, farming seeds, or water for collection. 
• Irrigation Hose: Shoots water out to water crops.
• Seed Shooter: Shoots seeds into farming plots.
• Sprout Cannon: Shoots trees, flowers, and other similar plants directly into the ground.

Collect all of them as soon as you can. Don't worry if it gets too late — there are no serious consequences to staying up all night like there are in other similar games. You'll only lose out on Coziness Effects from your Homestead, but that's not a factor just yet.

Building a Homestead

Once you've retrieved all of your Tools, your next step will be to build a Homestead. It's time to pick a place for your home base!

I strongly recommend building in this location:

This area has a large, flat area that makes it easy to build your Homestead and farm crops. It also has a convenient source of water nearby.

Place a Small Tent down. You can go to sleep if you wish, but it isn't strictly necessary.

Starting a Farm

Our next step is to establish a farm. Gather a fair amount of Wood and Plant Fiber. Next, you'll want to build 2 Small Plots.

Run around the area and focus on collecting Polyberries. These are blue spheres that you'll find lying on the ground in The Meadows. You'll need at least 18 in total — 9 per Small Plot. If you find more, you can always build additional Small Plots.

When you have enough Polyberries, return to your Homestead. Hold Q and highlight the Seed Shooter; you can cycle between different seeds with E and R. Shoot the Polyberries into each of the nine spaces in the Small Plot.

Next, take your Vacuum Harvester and head down to the pond in the center of the map. Use the Vacuum Harvester to suck up water. Then, equip the Irrigation Hose and water all of your plants.

Restoring Pine Heights and the Edge Cliffs

It will take two days for the Polyberries to fully grow. In the meantime, we're going to restore our first two Regions: Pine Heights and Edge Cliffs.

To Restore a Region, you'll need to clean up most (but not all) of the Noxious Weeds and Noxious Sludge. Noxious Weeds can be destroyed with the Vacuum Harvester and Noxious Sludge can be removed with the Irrigation Hose.

Cleaning a Region is important: no resources of any significance will spawn until you've properly Restored a Region. Once you have, you'll be able to find a new farming crop and a wide variety of new crafting materials.

Exploring the Rest of the World | Lightyear Frontier Walkthrough

That's the basics of the game covered. As for your next steps, it comes down to a pretty straightforward plan. Here's what you need to do to progress through the Early Access launch content of Lightyear Frontier:

A note: the first few steps will be very precise, but later steps will omit which resources you'll need to collect — mainly so this list isn't overly long. By the time you've unlocked a few Regions, it should be pretty easy to figure out what you need!

1. Complete the Tutorial.
2. Restore Edge Cliffs and Pine Heights.
3. Build an Oil Presser and make Plant Oil.
4. Collect Aluminum Rods.
5. Build an Assembler.
6. Make 4 Aluminum Frames.
7. Build an Upgrade Depot.
8. Harvest Polyberries and make Polyberry Oil.
9. Make 5 Aluminum Parts.
10. Get the Spike Saw Power I Upgrade at the Upgrade Depot.
11. Harvest Red Crystal from Pine Heights.
12. Harvest Copper from Edge Cliffs.
13. Make Copper Wire.
14. Build a Grinder.
15. Make Stone Dust at the Grinder.
16. Make Clay at the Assembler.
17. Make a Furnace using Clay.
18. Make Red Crystal Dust.
19. Plant and Harvest Rabbages from Pine Heights.
20. Make Rabbage Oil.
21. Get the Irrigation Hose Power I Mech Upgrade.
22. Restore Stepstone Peak.
23. Collect new resources in Stepstone Peak.
24. Get the Vacuum Harvester Power I Mech Upgrade.
25. Restore Yellow Forest.
26. Collect Coal and Iron to make Iron Bars.
27. Get the Irrigation Hose Power II Upgrade.
28. Restore Mountainside Coast.
29. Get the Vacuum Harvester Power II Upgrade.
30. Restore Lowland Plains.
31. Explore the Vault and unlock Water Walking.
32. Travel to Tornado Rock Isle.

Once you've reached Tornado Rock Isle and fully upgraded your Mech, you'll have reached the end of content in the Early Access launch version of the game. You can learn more about this game by checking out our other guides below!

Lightyear Frontier Multiplayer Functionality

Lightyear Frontier supports online co-up for a total of four players.

Lightyear Frontier Save File Location

You can find the Lightyear Frontier Save File in:

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\FarMech\Saved\SaveGames

Where "USERNAME" is your Windows username.

Lightyear Frontier Death Consequences

You cannot die in Lightyear Frontier. However, it is possible for your mech to fall over if you trip over an obstacle. In those cases, you'll have to exit the mech, flip it over, and get back in.

The Mech is also incapable of wading through deep water. If you fall in deep water, you will be automatically teleported to a nearby safe location.

Thanks for reading our Lightyear Frontier Guide. Make sure to check out our other guides below!