Tutorial

This guide is intended for players new to Space Station 13, or at least new to our flavor of SS13. If you're here from Goonstation, you probably already know all of this.

Installing the game
If you got here from the game, skip to the next section.

Coolstation and SS13 run on a unique engine & client pair, called BYOND (Build Your Own Net Dream, formerly "Dantom's Universal Net Game"), which has been around since the late 1990s, as have you, the reader. You can download BYOND Here. We highly recommend using the latest stable release most of the time. NB: ''Compatibility with emulators such as WINE is limited. Most features work well enough to allow an experienced player to complete a round, however, many interfaces will break due to the engine's reliance on IE.''

Creating an account
If you have not done so yet, Click Here to create a BYOND account. You'll need it to connect to 99.95% of game servers.

Pro Tip: your life gets easier if your username contains no spaces, no capitalization, and no punctuation. It's old software.

Joining a game
Most servers have dedicated community landings, such as websites, internet forums, or discord servers. We are no exception. You can CLICK HERE to join the main COOLSTATION game server, and that's that!

HOWEVER: you may wish to browse other available servers, or discover new games and communities on BYOND. You can do this from the BYOND Pager. Simply select a game on the lefthand bar, (press [Favorite +] to save it to your home tabs) and scroll a list of games in progress. It really is the bright future of TYOOL2K03.

Servers are listed by # of players online at any given moment, so they move around a LOT.

We're probably near the bottom.

Click JOIN and you're in!

CUSTOM CHARACTERING
BEFORE joining the round, whether its counting down to start, or it's already in progress, There's a button where you can click to customize the looks of your little buddy.

The basics are to Pick a name (you may leave this random) and also pick your hairs and colors (you may also leave this random)

It's important to click save on this. That way you won't have to set it up every single time. You have multiple save slots you can freely use! This may change in the future, there will be ample warning.Sometimes it's nice to be random appearance and name, but it's like any social game: reputation is tied to a consistent appearance. People will recognize you and remember what you've done.

The ultimate victory in coolstation is for people to see you and go "wow! that's THIS PERSON (YOU), they're REALLY ROBUST/FUNNY/COOL/NICE, i would LOVE to bring them along on a hijink or plural!!"

HOW TO PLAY (Controls)
The basic controls are indicated on that little blue image at the top, but let's go through them in detail.

NB: this game actually has 3 possible control schemes, but for the sake of clarity and brevity we will only be discussing the default control scheme, colloquially known as WASDmode. The others are TG controls, and Arrowkeys.