So this guide should take you from beginner to advanced intermediate (more or less).
It is a summary of OldBigLion's and my own experience, and of some select comments in OldBigLion's Thread "Basic Tips for Beginners". Feel free to read that for more detailed info.

EDIT: You will find some more very informative entries among other things about "good gem spending practice" by C92643, "how far to upgrade parts" by Lisimba and other players in OldBigLion's Thread "Basic Tips for Beginners", which i didn't include here to get to some kind of ending.  About how to make gems fast, here is your answer.

A big THANK YOU OldBigLion btw. =D


PLEASE DO NOT ask basic beginner questions here. There is a pinned Thread named "Help for Beginners" to ask all your questions.
FEEL FREE to leave additional above-average-relevance knowledge and correct anything i might have wrong. Did i forget/leave out any important aspect of this game?

((EDIT: If you feel, or read past and know you are, well past beginner, and want to know about crew and whats next after you get your 50 tile-ship, try this, my first video guide.))



--------------------------------------------- BEGINNER: --------------------------------------------- 
You prefer to watch a video over reading - you can skip beginners section by watching these 20 Tips for Beginners. Please, don't forget to keep reading at Intermediate section further down.
 --------------------------------------------- BEGINNER: --------------------------------------------- 
a) At the beginning you will mostly kill only Shipwrecks. A little further out you will encounter Mines with Guardians. Your drones and the guardians of mines have elements.
- Fire is STRONG (high damage dealt, low damage received) against Spark, accordingly its WEAK to water (high damage received, low damage dealt)
- Spark is strong against Water (and weak to Fire).
- Water is strong against Fire (and weak to Spark). (daaaahhhh!)


so never use a fire drone against a water guardian, or you run the risk of loosing it faster than you can pull it back.
on the other hand, using a Spark drone against a water guardian will be very efficient. (high damage dealt, low damage received)


aa) You will be way faster sending 1-2 drones to each guardian of a mine instead of all your drones to a single guardian, since they will die about the same time and won't be able to heal each other (that much or at all depending on your attack damage).


b) Smoking parts are badly damaged. Repair them asap or you run the risk of them being destroyed. Destroyed parts can be repaired too by using gems. But those are valuable, so try to avoid that.


c) You can force the drone(s) to return to your ship by pressing "R" or clicking your ship (or run out of range on purpose).


d) Don't build single line ships. If you loose a part close to the pilot pod, everything beyond it is destroyed as well, since there is nothing holding it to your ship any more.


e) Guardians prefer to attack the parts with the lowest hitpoints. So using double-tile parts or upgrading parts may be useful to loose less parts, and thus loose less gems for restoring them.
EDIT: Buying a new part and upgrading it to level 2 is equally efficient. So you may want to do this with every part when or shortly after you buy it.
f) You can activate auto-sell crystals near markets and auto repair drones upon return to your ship. This can be done by pressing "C" or clicking the lower left corner level and cargo display, then go to settings. This will save you some time and grief.
Without auto-repair on you have to click the according drone tab while the damaged drones are inside to repair them.


g) You can use the map to fast travel between the 2 towns, any beacon you set or any of your online friends, or even the Leviathan, if it happens to be marked there. (would like input on when that is the case.). This is free once every 10 min. Otherwise it costs 1 gem per 5 min on the reset timer. (so 2 gems if you use them back to back). There is also a buff you can get from crates, that lets you use fast travel for free for some time.


h) Open crates for some nice buffs or immediate rewards like gems, crystals and cores.


i) Don't leave your ship unattended anywhere you or somebody else did or might have killed a mine earlier. They will respawn, with guardians, after some time, which may kill parts of your ship if you don't run away. Generally in or close to towns can be considered as safe.


j) You can and should evolve every drone you get (this and fusing them are the only use for cores). There is always a chance it will turn out a really great legendary, ultra rare or rare drone. But most of the time they will just be common. Even so they will have different stats! Drones can be evolved once they hit 4 stars. Otherwise they will not increase any further.


k) Do NOT fuse drones or Train crew just yet. Not even when you got more than you need. We will get to this later.


l) Don't waste gems on (re)colouring parts. They are way too important/sparse for that.


m) Crew, drones and parts can be sold in the crew building and scrap yard respectively. To get the most out of this, repair the parts and train the drones/crew as high as possible. This is a highly lucrative way to get Gems from parts that you get from killing mines. (you can break even on crew. you will always make a loss on scrapping parts or drones you bought)


n) ANYTHING you get dropped as a result of attacking something with your drone(s) is Instanced for you alone. Nobody can take those things.
Meaning if you open a crate or kill a mine/shipwreck and it pops a ton of crystals and some gems or even a part or core you CAN fly away, EVEN log off. It will still be there when you come back!
EDIT:
Crystals, Gems and Parts will be deleted after 14 days, if not collected before then.Your loot might temporally disappear when the map shrinks in a dust storm (explained below), but it will reappear once the map regains its previous size. So you might not be able to collect it anytime you like, but eventually it will be back there.This includes that you only see your own items and other people only their own items.The only things you might be concerned someone might take away from you are:- Mostly stuff that you or somebody else ACTIVELY dropped out of your/their respective cargo holds. (this mainly concerns huge round or oval shaped heaps of crystals that big players drop for you little guys. (the radius of these circles is a bit bigger than gems from mines. you will learn to see the difference sooner or later) Grab as many as you can and run them to the market as fast as you can! Before someone else does!)- Things that randomly spawn or appear on the map. (f.e.: a gem or a crystal might drop onto the map by a shooting star animation; a core or a crate might just randomly spawn. etc.)o) What are Dust Storms?The game expands the map if at peaks more players are online. Accordingly, the game has to shrink the map back when less people play. To explain the refreshing of the map, the developers made dust storms, which will have you fast travel to the same or a close-by location, depending weather you were not or were on a part of the map that got removed.
p) Any part (except Pilot pods) does not only have hitpoints but also has an overall durability (as shown in hangar in % ). Opposed to HP, this durability cannot be restored again. Thus any part (except Pilot pods) will ultimately be lost at some point.


q) After Level 10 you need to verify your account to be able to place more tiles/parts. After that every few levels (10 me thinks) you will get 10 more slots till you hit 50. That’s the maximum. But you can still build more than one ship.


r) If you restore a drone but it doesn’t show, or all of your drones won't attack or if your get stuck in general: Try Refreshing/relaunching the game! This usually solves the problem.


s) Everyday before you log off, check your drone shop and press the revive tab! If any of your drones died you can revive it there for 24 hours. This will cost gems. If you don't, it is gone forever. You wouldn't want to loose your best drone(s). (Myself, i see that i must have had an Illume (rare water drone) at some point, but since i would never have sold that, especially in the beginning, it must have died at some point back then, and i didn't check revive..! )


t) Do the Daily Bounty. You'll get some gems, parts and a little chance at legendary crew and drones (even pilot pods are possible, but very rare).

EDIT:
u) If you mine a part and you are not sure if you want it or you would prefer another one, do NOT take it out of your cargo hold on your ship. As long as you don't put it into your storage or equip it on your ship you can trade it with other players for a part that you actually want. Of course some parts cost more than others so you may need 2-3 or more parts to get what you want. Continue reading here if you are interested.Here are some more tips from OldBigLions Thread (Basic Tips for Beginners):

On how to build your ship:
27 drone bays with 9 Lava, 9 Aqua and 9 Spark
20 crew cabins
The rest leave for cargo Hold
5 Captains - (sum of the crew in 30%)
3 Engineers - (sum of the crew in 50%)
3 Gunners - (sum of the crew in 50%)
3 Cargo Hand - (sum of the crew in 50%)
1 Mechanical - 4 to 6%
5 Prospectors - (sum of the crew in 30%)


- Of course you will not get this crew quickly, this suggestion is a minimum goal to be followed with the time and resources you have.
- Accessories are not necessary in this configuration. Sell them all and use the gems to upgrade your ship.
- In the hangar, upgrade at least level 3 on ALL parts of your ship, including the Pilot Pod.
-The Pilot Pod is more expensive to upgrade, but remember that it has a drone bay, a Crew cabin and a Cargo Hold.
- It is possible to place up to 11 Pilot Pods on your ship, and it is a great deal to have more items than the 50 allowed. But as this is very expensive, go slow with this option.


-- How does speed work in this game?
LISIMBA: Everyone moves the same speed. (Except Fast Travel aka. Teleport)



--------------------------------------------- INTERMEDIATE: ---------------------------------------------


About crew:
EDIT:
Crew is where this game gets interesting and a bit tricky. Crew members will boost some attributes of your ship. But they come at a cost.Besides the obvious cost to hire them, crew members will take 2-5% of the Credits you get for selling your crystals. And each crew member needs a crew pod on your ship. So it becomes a balancing act.
Use too many high rarity crew (like ultra rare and legendary) and you won't earn enough or anything from selling your crystals. Use only lower rarity crew and you waste tile spots on your ship, or don't use too many crew pods and you miss out on their potential benefits.
In my opinion this gets easier once u can afford a second 50 tile ship. You could easily place 20 or more legendary (over time) crew on your main damage ship (removing any cargo pods) and building a second ship to haul crystals to market later. This way, it doesn't matter your main ship will have higher crew cost than earnings from your crystal, since you will not use it to make market hauls anyways.- There are some crew that can only be received from either supply drops (including daily quest) or leviathan or offerings. (fewer on lower rarities, more than 5 of the legendary ones) .As of now my statistic on rolling says:EDIT:- 73% common
- 8.6% rare
- 6.7% ultra rare
and 1.6 % legendary crew on roll. (work in progress)- This means on average you should be able to obtain 2 Legendary crew member every 3 days (25 rolls with 3 crew daily)- Before that you can freely choose to buy any crew you like SINCE you can sell them back for full gem refund and even more credits IF you level them to 5 star first.- Crew of the same rarity can appear with different prices (values thx to OBL (gem cost below reflect only prices of crew obtainable by regular crew hire)):Legendary: 170-250 gemsUltra Rare: 130-160 gemsRare: 90-120 gemsCommon: 50-80 gemsHigher prices mean higher starting stats as well. so i would recommend, same as with drones, only train(/fuse) crew in the higher/highest stat(/price) range. In the long run its cheaper to buy a 235 credit crew member, since buying a 175 credit crew member and training him up to be as good as the 235 credit one will take you more than 5 legendary crew as mentors ( which will be lost )(Same goes for fusing drones)(i have seen 170-235 gems for legendary so far, and started training at 200 gem crews; higher ones were too rare for me to wait for them too)

EDIT: Crews are capped at:
115.2 to 115.3 % for captains
125% for gunners and engineers
120 % for cargo hands
The rest seem to be uncapped.
If you want to get further into crew this thread might be of interest. You can also check out my first video guide on a subject touching crew.On Drones:

- There are some drones that can only be received from either supply drops (incl. daily quest) or leviathan or offerings. (seems to me to be 4 drones of every element).
(This is true for some crew as well)
- Any a drone is generated with a certain variety of stats. Most of the time these will not be too great. (250 hp 25 damage for common drones for example.) I would recommend keeping all these low drones and only fuse them into a really good one once you get one. ( i would recommend over 380 hp for common drones here). This may take a while.
- You might also just want to sell really crappy common drones for a refund of 20 gems. If you have plenty of Cores you could always buy a fresh one for 25 gems, make it 4 star, evolve it and hope for a rare or better one. (It is an option; i personally am not doing that, because parts and thus gems seem quite easy to farm after a certain point. I simply feed all my common drones into my best common one. Might start fusing them into my second best at some point as well, depending on how many rare+ drones i will get and how good they will turn out)

- OLDBIGLION:
a) Legendary drones generally have more than double in life and attack than common drones and although they are better and make the game much easier, they are not essential to achieve good results.
b) Drones do get experience/stars by being used. So having a drone only sit in your ship will not level it at all. You can also level a drone by experience gained from supply drops or offerings.






On Leviathans.:


- They can be spawned by sacrificing at the offering well (usually close to the 2 towns) (or by Party Drops according to OBL). They cannot spawn at random.
- Be aware, the leviathan itself does not do any damage. But Guardians beneath/around it and the floating elemental orbs it will send out, may very well attack you and destroy parts of your ship, given time.
- BEWARE of lag! You may loose parts if you can't see that you are being attacked.
- The first few people to get to the leviathan should try kill any guardians below the Leviathan. Leaving the mines alive will guarantee that no mines WITH guardians can respawn.
- killing the floating orbs the Leviathan spawns will change the element of a (possibly the connected) part. (They also give decent exp i am given to understand)
- thus, if a part has an element, it can be focused with drones strong against that element and thus destroyed faster.
- the element of that part can be, and often is, changed again. So look out for that and switch the drones attacking it if need be.
- Rewards depend on damage dealt to the leviathan (and luck) and can include gems and even leviathan exclusive parts up to pilot pods or 4-tile parts. (I don't think damage done to the floating orbs counts) (C92643 adds: Also can give generic rewards like elemental cores, gems, credits, and experience.)
EDIT:- After the Leviathan is destroyed, and you did damage it (don't know if there is a minimum amount of damage you need to do), it will drop a blue-green ball. Attack it with one of your drones for your reward. (it works similar to a supply drop). IF you don't see it, simply refresh your game. It will never despawn.- My best so far was 1 crew, 2 parts, 1 of which was leviathan exclusive, plus 30 gems.
- The decent thing to do is to attack only outer parts on the Leviathan.
- Killing parts that are closer to the Pilot pod will take way longer (depending on how many parts are connected). This should only be done if the leviathan is otherwise close to escaping (2-3 min left) as it will take away the chances for other players to have their go at it.
- There are groups that report the spawning of leviathans. Try to get invited. EDIT: Of course it won't hurt if you report one when you find one.




On building your craft:


Pilot pods are very expensive to buy or to upgrade compared to any other part. But note that they have 2 giant advantages:
- Pilot pods are ultimately indestructible. They do not have an overall durability, thus they never have to be replaced.
- Pilot pods do also increase your effective part count, since a pilot pod contains 1 crew compartment, 1 cargo bay and 1 drone bay per Part tile.
At 50 tiles your ship can hold up to 11 tiles of Pilot pods.
Upgrading parts usually includes an increase in HP, Total life expectancy and most parts have specific boni as well (damage up, defense up, more cargo space etc.).
Note that parts with lowest hp or lowest hp per tile are preferred targets of guardians. This can be exploited to make guardians focus crappy parts, to save hitpoints/durability on your more valuable parts.
Misc/Armor/Decorative parts add hitpoints and defense to your ship. Other than that they are only decorative.


Upgrades:
- Drone Bays: More Hp, More damage for the drones inside this bay.
- Cargo Bay: More Hp, More Cargo Space.
- Misc Part: More Hp, More Def.
- Pilot Pods: More damage to Drones inside, More cargo space.


This is mainly personal taste; but i do spread my ships as far as i can, without going single line.
Advantages:
- Game zooms out further, thus giving you way better overview and possibly range for your drones.
- Collect gems faster.
Disadvantages:
- More lag when zoomed out further
- May be trickier to avoid damage
- May not (or badly) fit through some harbor tight-spots


Pick and choose as you wish ;)




On TEAM RACES:

OldBigLion says:
- Open crates as many as you can till you get double Points buff. This is the most important one.
- Take care if you have the Frozen points debuff, replace it asap.


MY personal tips for beginners:


- For Gems and Crystals:
Try to find a nice big player (me f.e.), follow behind him so you don't get hit by any guardians, and shoot the mines once he killed all the guardians. This way you will earn a nice part of the mines crystal and gem yield, without taking any or too much damage.
DO NOT collect those crystals or even gems right away. Do not leave when you are full. Just follow and kill mines. NOBODY can take them away from you! Rather keep following the big player and kill as many mines as fast as you can. You can always collect the stuff later. Also you need the protection of the player, so stick close. Because mines can respawn with all their guardians, which can get painful really fast for a small dude.
Here's what will happen, when you collect crystals or bring them to market:
The big guy will be annoyed that nobody kills the mines, which means he isn't getting any drops from them. Which also means they cant respawn and he cant kill them again. So he will kill them himself and you will see no loot! At the very least you will slow him down if he has to constantly wait for you, and he will let you fall behind, stuff will respawn and you will be in pain....


- For Crystals alone:
Sometimes a big player will be nice enough to drop a cargo load of crystals for you and other starting players real close to the market. Asking nicely might work for you too.
Enable auto-sell crystals at market in settings and collect/sell real fast as much as you can get before anyone else does. Good Hunting!




Perceived but unconfirmed:


- Using my 50 tile cargo ship with only 4 drones seems to get me a lot more gems from shipwrecks or mines than my regular 33 drone ship ever manages. This may be due to longer run times of drones.
- Drones seem to accumulate more experience the longer they run (continuously attack a mine/guardian). I have not personally tested this, since i think it's ok to level my drones in 1-2 hours of regular grinding, but according to this the kill is not as important as how long you attack. Thus, a valid way to level your drones might be, to send them against guardians of the same element, so that they don’t kill them too fast or at all, but instead attack them for as long as possible, without taking too much damage. Also valid: Send them against a mine, without killing any guardians first. Repair before they die and repeat. If you use only Water drones on a mine with only Fire Guardians f.e. would also drastically reduce damage taken.


On Offering well:
I have 1144 large offering since i started to put them in my statistic. These values are by far not representative in many regards. I do expect them to get representative once i get about 10 legendary drones and crew. so far 1 leg. crew and 0 leg. drones.
So far, 25 Large offerings will cost me 10 gems and 75k credits. This includes the sell-back values of the drones and crew and parts that i get in gems. (for credits i only counted spent vs. directly obtained credits.) i will also obtain 3500 experience and 0.8 cores per 25 large offerings.
It also includes 41 parts at a total value of 640 gems. No pilot pods so far.
I am still continuing of course, since some drones/crew can only be obtained this way, so counting them at only ~200 gems for a legendary may not reflect the true value.
There have been 4 Leviathans spawned directly by me.
This will be updated. (i hope =D )






You will find some more very informative entries among other things about "good gem spending practice" by C92643, "how far to upgrade parts" by Lisimba and other players in OldBigLion's Thread "Basic Tips for Beginners", which i didn't include here to get to some kind of ending. EDIT: About how to make gems fast, here is your answer.

A big THANK YOU OldBigLion btw. =D

PLEASE DO NOT ask basic beginner questions here. There is a pinned Thread named "Help for Beginners" to ask all your questions.
FEEL FREE to leave additional above average relevance knowledge and correct anything i might have wrong. Did i forget/leave out any important aspect of this game?

Please vote for this "Repair All Parts Button" proposal for the salvage yard.
EDIT: Try this, my first video-guide, raw and unedited, about how to progress past 50 tiles and crew.

@Fulmen Very good your guide, I hope players know how to take advantage of your tips and can collaborate with more information. It is actions like yours that the community needs.

Congratulations!

This is a good collection of info. I'd like to add/correct a couple things. The cap for cargo hands is 120%, not 125% like engineers and gunners. Upgrading parts, including drone bays, affects the stats of the entire ship, not just the drones within the part. The idea to get more gems by using fewer drones is often observed. You will get more gems per mine or shipwreck, but you'll get the same gems per hour. Don't count on the offering well for legendary crew or especially legendary drones. You'd be lucky to get more than 2 legendary drones in a year from the offering well, if you offer all waking hours. Legendary crew are a lot more common but you won't progress much without using the "hire crew" building. You can get a pilot pod or 2 a month, sometimes doubles. Speaking of legendary crew, the main difference between "noob" and "pro" in this game is the "pros" have 20-30 legendary crew at least, and the "noobs" don't make much effort to search crew. Rare and ultra rare crew won't help a ton. You need legendaries. Fulmen's crew stats are pretty representative I think. You get on average 1-2 legendary crew each day from searching the maximum 25 times. It takes about 6 weeks of searching each day to reach most of the caps. Captain and prospector take the longest so always hire legendaries of those. I have lots of doubts about the theory that party drops can spawn a leviathan. I assumed that god_electro did party drops right before or after offering and there was correlation but no causation, but I could be wrong. I haven't heard a first hand account of spawning leviathans with party drops.

It's a common statement that you can't make your ship go faster. You actually can. While technically all ships go the same "speed", but not the same "velocity". Some players can't keep up with me when I'm mining, because they pick a target, then get distracted by something on the side, then see a big ship and orbit it 5 times. Then I'm way ahead of them. There's a lesson in this. To achieve your goals, in life or in exocraft generally, you must pick your target and go for it. Not get distracted by some bland ship or some famous person's instagram. A major goal for intermediate players who want to get stronger is to hire crew 25 times a day for 40 days total. If you get distracted, it could take 80 days or 120 days to achieve this. Be fast by being focused.

Don't be discouraged by increasing evolve times. It's determined by the number of evolved and evolving drones, so if you fuse or sell drones, it will go back down. I'd like to update some things that I mentioned in my post that you linked. I said to never sell drones, which is good advice for new players, but when you have excess drones it could be a good strategy. Be careful if you sell drones to unassign all drones you want to keep, since you can't see their stats in the salvage yard and also you might misclick. I also said that I planned to move to large offerings in the future. I did not and I still don't recommend it. Too expensive for a very small improvement. I also feel like I downplayed the gem shop too much. Buying gems isn't bad or cheating. It's a clear part of the game. To compete with the strongest in exocraft you need a lot of dedication and effort, which could also be applied IRL to earn IRL money just as easily. Think of "real life" as a minigame within exocraft, and gem shop is just a way to convert the fake money printed by your government into real money (exocraft gems). I probably sound crazy saying this. (It's a joke, government, don't take it in a legal sense.) In most ways this game isn't pay to win, and you can achieve anything without paying if you can't afford to, though it will take more effort. And for some inherently grindy things buying gems helps very little.

Anyways, I probably forgot to mention something but I wanted to mention a few things to add to this nice thread.

@OldBigLion tip for dupe drone if you have 2 of the same drone you can fuse drone to get better drone stat but i am not recommend grind a lot of shipwreck bc of the slow star up the drone

thanks 4 the advice

@Fulmen this guide is very nice thank you for telling about leviathan

Eveyone keeps taking the leviathan rewards how many spawn when leviathan destroyed?

@Stopthat Theres one for everyone that breaks off at least one piece.

@Riptides oh that makes sense

@Riptides you don't have to break off one piece there is a set amount of damage you have to do

BUMP for the new people. also i updated the guide. Some (not too much) new stuff in it.

Fulmen said:

- There are groups that report the spawning of leviathans. Try to get invited. Of course they will expect you to report when you find one.

Who do you mean by they? Chat owners? General players? Or just people who like to complain a lot? I haven't seen a chat owner state this requirement, though I'm not in every group chat of course. I've seen many players who don't expect others to report, myself included. My group chat doesn't require reporting leviathans and many are reported anyway, because a lot of people see value in sharing without getting anything in return. Remember folks, you agree to Goldfire's rules when you play exocraft, you agree to your squad's rules when you join a squad, and you agree to a chat's rules when you join a chat. Likewise, you don't have to follow any other rules besides the law unless you agree to them. And history has shown that a lot of "common sense" rules and beliefs have been proven false or unjust by science and increased awareness, so keep that in mind.

@C92643 if thats the biggest wrong in my whole guide i am a very good and proud guide writer =D

and i edit it out in a sec =P
(Also, i liked your first post in this thread )

Lies lies

Added 2 all new videos. Watch 20 Tips for Beginners instead of reading it, or this new segment on "50 Tiles what now?", and "Starting out with crew". Leave a Like if you like. 

Bump

@Fulmen Bump

@Fulmen I like the guide, thanks!