New Player Guide - Boppy Games, LLC

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Updated for 0.2.2

Guide updated: April 14th, 2021

Welcome back to Boppio! This guide has been updated for the release that was launched on April 1st, 2021. There have been many updates to the game since the last release, so I’ve taken the time to thoroughly update this new user guide. Thanks for playing!

Note: If you’re playing on a laptop (especially a Mac) you should use a mouse instead of your trackpad for the best experience.

Objective

The current objective in Boppio is to just get to the end of the research tree. The research tree can be viewed by pressing the T key. You can start researching new modules after you build your Habitat.

1. Starting Location

The new terrain generator guarantees that you start with one patch of each required resource: Iron Ore, Copper Ore, Stone and Coal. You should know that the game is slightly easier if your starting patches are close to each other (but not overlapping). If your patches are mostly overlapping, then the game will be substantially harder.

This is an example of a starting area I would NOT recommend:

Here you can see the copper and coal patches are overlapping, and there is hardly any coal. This generation would be a substantial challenge to a new player.

If the patches are slightly overlapping, that is pretty much fine. Here is an example of a great starting location, even though the copper and coal patches are slightly overlapping:

This would be a substantially easier starting location

You also start near a pond of water, this will be useful later.

1. Coal Miner

Build a miner on top of a coal patch by pressing E and selecting the miner:

Build a miner on top of coal, the building will not start mining automatically, we will start it using wood.

When you go to place the miner it should be green. If the building is red you are either not placing it on top of coal or you don’t have enough resources to place another miner. You start with enough resources to place 2 miners.

Lets start the miner by placing some wood in the miner:

Adding wood to the fuel slot of the miner will start it.

Once you have a coal miner started, let’s place our second miner on the iron patch.

2. Iron Miner

Just below the copper patch is the iron patch (slightly blue colored patch). We want to place a miner directly on top of this patch to start mining iron ore.

I repeated the process for placing the miner onto this iron patch.

The miner is not running yet however because it has no fuel. We want to use the coal that we just started mining to get our iron miner started. First let’s take the coal out of the coal miner.

Take the coal out of the coal miner so that we can place it into the iron miner

Now take this stack of coal that we just took from the coal miner and place it into the iron miner:

Placing coal into the fuel slot of the iron miner will start the iron miner.

We will need iron ingots for research and building more miners, so let’s make a furnace next.

3. Furnace

You start with enough resources to build 2 Furnaces. Build at least one furnace near your iron miner:

Now we want to take the iron ore from the iron miner and insert it into the furnace:

Insert your iron ore into your furnace to start converting it to iron ingots.

4. Copper Miner

If you’ve gotten to this point you’ve probably realized that you cannot build 3 miners, so you will need to either move your coal miner to a copper patch or move your iron miner to the copper patch. Either way, you should try to mine at least ~10 copper ore so that you can make some more copper ingots.

I moved my miner from the coal patch to the copper patch and started smelting some copper ingots.

Once you’re making both copper ingots and iron ingots, you’ll be able to place more miners. Once you have at least 2 iron miners and 2 copper miners, you’re probably ready to build your habitat.

5. Habitat

Your habitat is your home base and you are only allowed to build one. This building also provides a very small amount of power. This building has changed substantially since the last patch because now research is managed in the habitat instead of the research lab, which has been removed.

The habitat can really be placed anywhere as long as its not blocking any of the ore patches.

6. Tech Tree

Press T to open the Technology Menu. Blue technologies are technologies that are available for research, red technologies are technologies that you aren’t able to research yet because you have to research a dependency first. Start with researching one of the technologies on the left (item transport 1 is particularly useful in the early game).

Once you have selected a tech to research, you will have to place the items into your Habitat in order to start researching the tech.

You’ll also see that your research is progressing in the research overview panel:

The research overview panel in the upper left will show you the progress of your current research

7. Transport Tubes

You’ll want to get transport tubes as early as possible because it allows you to start some basic automation. You can start building a transport tube by selecting the transport tube entry in the construction menu or by hitting the “C” key on the keyboard. Then click on the two buildings you would like to connect:

Construct transport tubes to automatically move items between buildings.

Advanced Automation

Once you have unlocked the Hub, you will be able to automate item construction. Place hubs to create connections between buildings. Items will automatically flow towards the buildings that require them. You can select specific recipes for buildings if you want them to make a specific item.

Inventory Shortcuts

Using shift-left click on a building item slot will automatically take all items in that slot
Using shift-left click on an inventory slot will automatically give that item to the building, if the building can accept that item.
Right click + drag will take half of a stack
Using shift-right click will either give or take half of a stack of items from a building.

Conclusion

There is a lot more content in the game that I couldn’t fit in this guide so you’ll have to explore on your own to figure out what to do next. If you haven’t already, please consider joining the discord to give feedback on the game and report bugs.

Thanks for trying out Boppio!

– John