Unnamed Space Idle Tasks and How to Beat Them

Originally written by@chebeck

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In this USI Text Guide we will cover how to complete the Task List which Unlocks at sector 71 and break through the wall that players hit there. Be careful, the Guide is full of Spoilers, so proceed at your own risk.

So you wandered into sector 71, finished that Prestige bar, and then went: “Oh, crap”. No worries, friend, you, too can delve deeper into Unnamed Space with just these few simple tricks!

First, our lovely friend the AI Coordinator has given us some great advice: Get your research and bases up!

For example, if you try to run in with e80 research and base2 at 7e9x with reactor ~770 levels at e67, the compute task alone will take you well over 54 hours!

Before starting anything else, I would *strongly* recommend you work on bases and research. Between these 2, you get a sizable speed increase or difficulty reduction for everything on the list, bar none.

Crew skill note:
You want to get crew skill to 1.75+, ideally as high as you can for a lot of this stuff. It’s a multiplier to every bonus on the crew screen, and it has a huge impact on your skill’s performance!

(1.9 is kind of the limit of feasibility though, so maybe don’t go forever, eh?)

There aren’t a whole lot of ways to increase void matter, so here’s a rundown of things to focus:

Tasks Preparation Phase

Before moving on to tasks its essential to get your multipliers up and ready for the oncoming Task challenges.

We will do series of runs just to upgrade our essential systems to match the tasks requirements and make them easier/possible to complete.

Bases preparation

The first infinite scaling bonus is your Bases. If you haven’t kept up on them, now is absolutely the time, and even if you have been good about leveling, there may be good reason to pump them up a bit higher!

Before you start, make sure base challenges are complete through 5! This is a huge, huge bonus that can’t be skipped!

Base numbers loose targets

(Not hard requirements, just makes your life a bit easier to get in the ballpark or above!) For Bases, we will have to do two setups. The first will be to level the non-components, then the components. We’ll be looking at most of the same things in both setups, the primary things that change are the crew node selections. Since you’re not able to get the maximum points on all abilities, it pays significantly to focus each of the Crew to the max to get the biggest base gain.

Before we get to crew, here are some other things to have set up:

Obviously the base module, Crew module helps with levels

Base Module, if you do Xeno you can link to all the bases at once. Move the shard to any of them and link to the rest. If no Xeno, you’ll need to manually move the connection at some point to get some bonus on all of them.

Viable shards below the setup, but no real requirements.

Make sure your warp is filled out, too.

Non-component Crew

Logistics Manager - All Eng stat, Right side, 10 / 40 / Max

Industrial Engineer - All Eng stat, Left side, 10 / 40 / Max

Technically that’s all we need, but to boost it, let’s use:

Energy Tech - All Eng Stat, Left side, 25 / 25 / max **DO NOT TAKE THE CENTER T3 NODE!**

Suggest 4th crew - Xeno Phenomenologist - All Ingenuity stat, suggest 50 / 0 / Max Take the capstone, this will let our shard level all 3 bases at once faster

Alt ENG focus - Materials Engineer - All Eng stat, right side, 10 / 40 / max

Component Crew

Very nearly the same setup, we’ll just need to reprint 2 Crew:

Logistics Manager - All Eng stat, 10 / 50 right side

Industrial Engineer - All Eng stat, 50 / 0 / Max middle

Energy Tech - All Eng stat, 25 / 25 / max left side **STILL DON’T TAKE THE CAPSTONE**

None of the bonuses to base are affected by other crew’s stats now, so if you had Material Engineer up, you can replace him with a Xeno for the 3rd link

Xeno Phenomenologist - All Ing Stat, suggest 50 / 0 / max left side Take the capstone!

Research Prep

As some milestones to shoot for, I would target a minimum of e103 in all researches, with a “better” value of e106+: If you need a setup for research, here’s a few things to have going:

Crew: Make sure no Ingenuity is active, it kills the Researcher bonus.

Energy Tech - All Acumen stat, 10 / 40 / max with capstone

Xeno Phenomenologist - All Acumen stat, your choice of stats on the right (warp or XP), take the capstone for link

Materials Engineer - All Eng stat, 10 / 40 / Max right side

Alt - Recon Spec - I have found him to be MUCH weaker (even with the higher acumen total) in this range since most people don’t have high reactor and we’re using ET for research, not power. If you want, though, just take him into acumen XP skills.

Researcher - All Acumen stat, 30 / 20 left, then T3:

You have options with the researcher: Use 3 sleeves and move the T3 points to what you’re currently working on, or leave the points split relatively evenly across the nodes and save a sleeve or two but spend 3x as long on each. (Per Aureon: Do 2 sleeves, 1st with all in “O”, then the 2nd with them split evenly between “M” and “E”) Shards (Orange is free, if you took the XP 3rd link you can put that wherever, perhaps linking red/green for the warp gen from flex):

Modules suggestion, but really only need to have the research, VP gen, & VP max up, the wave spawn decrease is a bonus through more research due to more kills & the VE autocollect is a good bonus while it’s up but won’t do anything offline:

Other things to check off:

Authors’ note
I am doing this with a T6 research module in sector 69, you could craft up synth & push sectors above this to gain a bonus, but as this is a prep for the bigger stuff, it seemed a bit backwards. You can certainly do this exact thing in sector 74 with a Tier 7 module and more reactor to gain quite a few more levels! The same goes for the base stuff above: underranked stuff from max was used to allow for some growth!

The Tasks

Your Prestige menu should now have this banner across the top. If you forget how far along you are at any point, you can open that menu up to check.

The tasks themselves are broken up into the major things we’ll need to prepare with in the coming sectors for what’s coming the sectors afterwards. They are:

• Sector 74 - Complete Sector 74
  • Pretty straightforward!
• Challenges - Complete all Challenges
  • Again, pretty clear
• Reactor - Run the Reactor with all levels maxed out for 5 minutes
  • This means all have to be on at 999 for 5 straight minutes. If even 1 dips to 998, we’ll fail
• V.Device - Get a full resonance Manifest Shard
  • Shard begins dropping in sector 70
• Synth - Infinite all available Synth materials
  • This means all the yellow mats need to be fully completed
• Compute - Reach the max damage and shield bonus of 1e22 in Compute
  • This means run your computer a lot!
• Warp - Purchase all warp upgrades
  • Pretty straightforward, gotta buy em all

While you can technically do them in any order, some are more beneficial to complete first, as they provide bonuses for the rest of the items. Some also don’t need to be completed in one shot, so you could absolutely go do, say, Synth until it’s too slow, then go do warp for more nodes, then come back to it with more power. You do you, basically! That said, here’s my recommendation:

1. Challenges!
2. Synth
3. Compute
4. Shard
5. Warp
6. Reactor
7. Clear 74!

Challenges

You’re obviously done with these already, right? This was a freebie!

Seriously, they’re a huge bonus. Compute will take a ridiculous amount more time, synth will be years, and your bases (that you definitely farmed before coming this far) won’t be at level.

There’s already a bunch of good resources in the USI Beginner Tips and Challenge Builds, so I won’t recap specifically here, but suffice to say they’re worth the investment.

Synth

Synth is a large task, and completing it in one shot may not be feasible. Luckily, there is nothing stopping us from entering and leaving a synth setup in little bits and pieces, and the additional crew levels and other bonuses we pick up during later tasks will help with the end of the task. You are free to finish it one go, too, though, especially if you play significantly AFK, since synth with smart craft can be set and forgotten for a long time at the higher mats.

*Note: Initial pass includes a fully leveled compute module - don’t prestige right away after doing this setup, unless you infinite Nano fluid!

I started this challenge with 0 progress on T9, the base and research values shown in the setup section, which put me at 8.55e41 synth speed initially. If you’re not around there already, you may want to double check your setup against the below, and run your base and research a bit higher. After the first few crafts were done, which were nearly instant through the stabilizer mat, I was able to upgrade quite a few things, and continued on through.

From this push, you can upgrade weapons, shields, salvage, void matter, compute speed, VP max, VP gen, research, shard drop rate, warp stabilizer,and start on base, combat enhancer, crew XP and compute levels.

Craft enough nano fluid to get compute levels module to max, at least!

You can continue on and complete it in one shot if you like; it should take around 18~24 hours if you’ve got similar speed. Or you can go do some other things, and come back later with more power.

Synth Crew:

Materials Engineer - All Ingenuity stat, 25 / 25 / max left side **Take the capstone!**

Cyber Specialist - All Ingenuity stat, 10 / 40 / max right side

Xeno Phenomenologist - All stats, this one is up to you, warp (Skip Acumen if you do this and go 50 / 0 / max left), start on your shard, or XP, just **DO NOT TAKE THE CAPSTONE!**

Energy Tech - All Acumen stat, 50 / X / X right side, ~even split on the two XP nodes **Take the capstone!** Again, reactor is significantly more powerful than a 4th Ingenuity crew

Equip the following:

Reactor and synth station core utilities

Make sure your warp synth is capped

Power modules and void autocollect are the only ones that help directly.

Before leveling power modules

After leveling power modules for comparison

Lots of shards for this - Synth shard in red, Flex in orange and linked to blue (or reverse), power shard in pink, battle shard is technically optional, but suggest blue for range, then green is open, with 1 link remaining. Based on what you focus with Xeno, pick a matching shard. If you want to use warp shard, move your battle to green, your flex to blue, and the warp shard into orange.

Compute

In a counterpoint to synth, there’s really no reason to split up Compute. Since it resets on prestige until you max it, but afterwards stays maxed, it’s a huge QoL improvement on future prestiges to always have the e22 combat stats bonus!

Compute works off a bit of a weird system, where speed and power only take you to filling bars. After all the bars are full, though, the only way to increase output is to increase the cap (capstone on CS - required skill for this) or get skills that increase level gained per bar fill, also known as “levels per level”.

If you look at the advanced tab, the last bar should be totally full green:

If not, add more speed or power from a below source.

The other large bonus you can get besides crew and such is the Void Energy pickups, these give 3.5x levels per level, which adds up very quickly. Unfortunately the auto-collection mod only works online, so you may have a longer wait if you’re not logged in.

All told, with ideal setup, this task will take as little as 6 hours of online time, but offline will take up to 18 hours.

Crew:

Cyber Specialist - All Prof stat, 25 / 25 / max left side **Take the capstone!**

Industrial Engineer - All Prof stat, 10 / 40 / max right side (Don’t worry if you can’t get to t3 yet, but it helps if you can)

Logistics Manager - Either even split down left or 10 / 40 / max down left, 2nd option is for VM **DO NOT TAKE CAPSTONE**

Recon Specialist - All stats, suggest split Prof XP / all xp, but you can also take salvage/VM node for leveling crew skill mod

Compute shard MUST be in or linked to blue! This is a HUGE bonus

Shard

Shards are Pretty straightforward, kill some ships and steal their shards. As you move up sectors, the drop rate gets better, and at 74 the drop quantity is increased 5x.

*High enough research is imperative here! If you’re below e103, go do a research run, better to take it to e106!*

The shard itself helps with lots of things, including its own farm! As a new feature for shards, this one has a single allowed slot (blue) and can link only to other slots. The actual shard:

So if you’re still missing some of synth, and especially before we go to warp, you want this shard to be as high as you can get it.

For shard, there are two separate effects that will increase how many we get per hour: Shard drop rate (percentage of time it drops) and shard drop amount (how many drop if you find any). You want to max both of them, obviously, but be aware if you put the shard on, for example, that the % chance to drop won’t increase.

Crew:

All that’s really important here is Xeno’s t2 skill and capstone. The t2 skill should be max, and capstone selected. All other points are optional, but he does get an increase from other active ingenuity.I did a bit of warp farming while I did my shard, so feel free to do that with Xeno and Researcher.

Energy Tech is included since you want to be in 74, but if you can farm there without the combat bonus from reactor, feel free to swap him to Cyber Specialist You want the shard drop rate obviously, but feel free to turn off the void beacon if it would force you back a sector

There’s only 1 shard that helps, and then itself.

Resource Refinery doubles your drop amount and gives ~10x drop rate, very strong.

Warp

Warp is currently the one that takes the longest. Since we want to be efficient, let’s maximize our earnings!

First, let’s check to make sure you’re complete on warps up to cap, you should have 10 warps and all should say (CAP):

By this point, you’ve probably worked up naturally to something like these being your only remaining upgrades, but if you have more missing, no sweat, it just takes a bit more time.

Warp cost for the last upgrades:

Void Power Max MK 7 (all 10): 1.97e28

Void Power Generation MK 6 (all 10): 2.53e28

Void Power Max MK 6 (24 & 25): 7e26 & 2.17e27

Void Power Generation MK 5 (24 & 25): 9.01e26 & 2.79e27

Xeno Phenomenologist Rank Points 20: 6.09e27

Industrial Engineer Rank Points (19 & 20): 3.12e27 & 1.03e28

Reconstitution Specialist Rank Points (18 & 19 & 20): 1.69e27 & 5.41e27 & 1.73e28

Total: 9.55e28 essence required. (Note that this is the majority of the cost required to open the entire board [1.06e29], so if you’re missing a few more than these, don’t worry; your time won’t change significantly)

There are again 2 stats to help us here, so we want to maximize warp charge speed and warp essence gain.

Crew:

Xeno Phenomenologist - All Ingenuity stat, 50 / 0 / max left, capstone optional (take it if you need to link damage shard)

Researcher - All Ingenuity stat, 10 / 50 left, rest optional

Since none of those scale with max active Ingenuity stat, we can take whatever we want, reactor is good so we can get max sector for more crew XP

Energy Tech - All Eng stat, 25 / 25 / max left side, take capstone

Materials Engineer - All Eng stat, 10 / 40 / max right side

Alt - replace MatEng with Recon Specialist, all Proficiency stat, for more Ingenuity XP

Flex can be moved and just linked to green; suggest linking crew shard to orange for bonus to Ingenuity XP.

Crew XP is optional, but as you get more essence and speed per Ingenuity, it’s recommended.

The following calculator can be used to determine how long it will take to finish the remaining upgrades in any individual save: USI Warp Upgrades Calculator | Google Sheets

Reactor

Another straightforward one. Just power on your Reactor with everything at 999 for 5 straight minutes. Max VP doesn’t matter here.

Glitch Note:

You may need to turn off void energy auto-collect and/or AI Auto Power Manage to get the completion, sometimes those make it glitch

We’ll take all our power bonuses for this one:

Crew:

Energy Tech - All Eng stat - 25 / 25 / max left side, take the capstone

Materials Engineer - All Eng stat - 10 / 40 / max right side

Logistics Manager & Industrial Engineer - Free use of points, really just there for the Eng stat. You can take them full Eng stat and base building mode if you want, just make sure to disable the ET’s capstone after you finish the task

The only modules that matter™

In or linked to this

You can technically get this before max warp nodes, but easier to just max all.

Sector 74

The only thing that’s left is to beat the boss of 74! You may have been able to do this *well* beforehand, but since the warp, power and compute all contribute directly to your combat power it’s at the bottom of the guide 😅

The Target:

Note he has barrier and phasing, so we’ll need a disruptor and something fast, and he’s armored, so kinetic will be most effective.

You may as well do this while you’re doing your power challenge, so crew will remain the same:

(See above for skill descriptions)

Shards for combat (Laser Auto if laser setup)

Shard setup - No need for shield or hull links on damage. Orange is free

Power!

Ship Setup

Suggested weapon setup - can change the 2nd missile to a 3rd bomb if preferred

Finished!

Congratulations, you beat the game!

Wait, what? There’s more sectors?

Best get in there and knock those aliens back where they came from, then!