Aethus Guide: Essential Tips for Surviving Your Corporate Mining Claim

Surviving a dystopian mining gig is hard enough without suffocating simply because you forgot how an oxygen tank works.

Pawsmonaut Games has crafted a fascinating blend of cozy base building and hardcore underground survival with Aethus. You are tossed into a corporate meat grinder by a solo indie developer from Scotland, tasked with digging through dirt, uncovering conspiracies, and trying to stay alive in the dark. The atmosphere is undeniably thick, the progression mechanics are surprisingly deep, and the game explicitly refuses to hold your hand for very long. The corporate overlords throwing you down this hole absolutely do not care about your well-being, but I do.

I spent dozens of hours bashing my head against alien rocks, managing failing power grids, and accidentally tossing explosives at my own feet. The learning curve can feel like a jagged cliff if you go in completely blind. To save you the headache of completely restarting your save file, I have compiled all the vital information the tutorial glosses over.

Managing Your Corporate Life Support

Staying alive is your primary job requirement, but the mechanics governing your survival are not entirely obvious right out of the gate.

Tweak The Settings Without Guilt

There is a massive difference between a laid-back exploration experience and a punishing survival challenge. Aethus allows you to tweak game modifiers at any time. I highly recommend setting your carry capacity to "forgiving" early on. You are going to be hauling massive amounts of rock, and trudging back and forth across the same dark tunnel just to empty your pockets gets old fast. Adjust the mechanics that bother you so you can actually enjoy the narrative.

Respect The Oxygen Drain

Do not wander far from safety until you have secured multiple suit upgrades. Your oxygen drains far faster than you likely anticipate. It is incredibly easy to get distracted chasing a shiny node of ore down a dark tunnel, only to realize you do not have enough air to make the sprint back to your habitat. Treat your early expeditions as short, calculated surgical strikes rather than sprawling explorations.

Use Your Scanner Constantly

Pressing 'X' highlights nearby resources and points of interest. Make this a muscle memory reflex. The caves are dark and blending into the environment is a common occurrence for vital crafting materials. You will save yourself a massive amount of unnecessary squinting by spamming the scanner key every time you enter a new cavern.

Skip The Tutorial Only On Replays

If you restart your game, you can click the vehicle at the very start and bypass the opening instructions entirely. I strongly advise against doing this on your first playthrough. The opening sequence teaches you the absolute bare minimum required to operate your machinery. Skipping it guarantees you will be completely lost when it comes time to refine your first batch of ore.

The Illusion of Shared Storage

Base logistics can make or break your mining operation. Understanding how items move between your containers and your crafting stations will save you endless frustration.

Your storage and power networks are shared across your entire outpost. This means you do not need to keep all your resource boxes crammed into a tiny room right next to your crafting benches. You can build your generators in a dedicated power room and place your storage containers wherever they look visually pleasing. However, there is a massive catch to this system that trips up almost every new player.

Processors Demand Manual Labor

Items must be manually placed into processors like the crusher, smelter, and printer. You can do this by clicking the items in your inventory, hitting the "deposit all" button in the menu, or simply pressing 'F' to dump the necessary recipe ingredients automatically.

The critical detail is that processors have unlimited internal storage, but any items sitting inside them are entirely cut off from your shared outpost network. If you leave a stack of refined metal inside the smelter, your crafting bench will claim you have zero metal available. You must manually take finished products out of your processors and place them into a standard storage box to make them accessible for base building and advanced crafting.

Tame Your Machines

You will often find that certain raw materials can be refined in multiple different stations. To prevent a processor from blindly consuming resources you need for something else, utilize the checkmark in the machine's menu. Toggling this checkmark activates or deactivates specific recipes, ensuring your automated systems do not eat your entire supply of rare gems. Additionally, utilize the customization station to select specific junk items your suit will automatically ignore when picking things up off the ground.

Market Economy and RAPP Levels

The trade market is your lifeline to advanced technology, but interacting with it requires a bit of strategic financial planning.

Your RAPP level dictates which high-tier blueprints you are allowed to purchase. Many players hit a wall where their level is stuck at 0/2000 despite selling massive amounts of ore. Selling raw materials does not increase your RAPP level. To push that number up, you must actively buy blueprints. Even if you do not immediately need a specific plan, purchasing high-value blueprints is the fastest way to level up. If you happen to find a blueprint you already own while exploring, the game mercifully refunds a portion of the credits you spent.

Item Hoarding Cheat Sheet

Knowing what to pawn off for quick cash and what to hoard in a dark corner of your base is crucial for mid-game progression.

Item Category	My Take on What to Do
Safe To Sell	Always read the bottom line of an item description. If it explicitly states the item "would sell great in the market," dump it immediately for credits.
Hyperion Crystals	Never sell these. The game implies they are valuable trade goods, but you need a massive stockpile for late-game crafting. You will deeply regret pawning them.
Standard Rubies	Keep them. While tempting to sell, standard quality rubies come in incredibly handy as raw crafting materials later down the line.
Empty Injectors	Hoard them. They might look like literal trash, but you need them to manufacture essential medical supplies.

You also need to hit trade market level 2 or 3 before the Electronics Workbench blueprint even appears for purchase. Do not panic if you cannot find it early on, just keep buying lower-tier plans to raise your reputation.

Power Grids and Base Building Nightmares

Designing your underground hub is incredibly satisfying, provided you understand the quirky building mechanics and the fragility of your power grid.

Surviving a Blackout

If you return to your base and find every single machine offline, you likely overloaded your power network. When you enter build mode, look at the power icon on the far right side of the screen. Hovering over it reveals exactly how much energy you are producing versus how much you are consuming. Building a heavy machine like the surface elevator requires a massive chunk of power. If your surplus drops into the negative, everything shuts down. Fix this by slapping down more generators or interacting with unused devices, like the recycler, and manually powering them off.

The Module Snapping Headache

I will be brutally honest here. The building snapping system is currently a massive pain. Modules only seem to connect on one specific side marked by a red circle. I spent nearly thirty minutes trying to force a 90-degree corridor bend to connect properly between two habitats. You often have to manually wiggle pieces into place, and they will likely sit slightly off-center. The developer is actively working on improving this mechanic, but for now, you will need a lot of patience when laying out your hallways.

Smart Hub Investments

Do not rush to build every single available hub room. Outside of the Maintenance Hub and the Relaxation Hub, the other specialized rooms offer very little immediate benefit during the early hours. Hoard your hard-earned credits and funnel them entirely into upgrading your environmental suit. A shiny new lounge area will not save you when you run out of oxygen a mile beneath the surface.

Advanced Rock Punching

Mining starts out simple, but mastering the advanced tools is the only way to conquer the deeper biomes.

Make Your Drills Actually Work

You will eventually unlock automated drills, build them, and quickly realize they are agonizingly slow and seemingly pointless. A drill is completely useless until you slot a Cargo Drone into it. Once equipped with a drone, the drill provides a perpetual, passive income of the specific resources from that biome. This allows you to push forward into dangerous new territories without constantly backtracking to mine basic oxite or meteor fragments.

Embrace The Earthquakes

Earthquakes are a chaotic but necessary part of the ecosystem. Whenever the ground shakes, previously mined nodes inside the tunnels respawn and are slightly shuffled around. Later in the game, you can construct a machine to manually trigger these tremors. Until then, rely on the random quakes to replenish your local ore veins.

Terraforming Demands Precision

Using a Terraforming Charge is surprisingly clunky. You must open your inventory, hover over the explosive, press a number key from 1 to 9 to assign it to your hotbar, select that hotbar slot, and finally press 'R' to deploy it. Be incredibly careful, as the blast radius is not visually displayed before detonation. The charges are powerful enough to hit multiple rock outcrops at once, but they are also powerful enough to ruin your day if you stand too close.

Deploying Underground Infrastructure

When the story tasks you with repairing power relays, you will need to manufacture Buildkits. You cannot just throw these items on the ground or use them directly from your inventory. You must press 'B' to enter the construction menu, select the underground tab, and deploy the kit exactly as if you were placing a wall or a generator in your base.