Last time for singleplayer I was writing about your crew management. Today I would like to write something about managing your ship systems. There are three main ship systems. Fuel, energy and life support.
Most of the fuel is used on engines and jets, but some of the fuel is also necessary for secondary modules to work. Main producer of fuel is the refinery. This module is responsible for producing fuel from oil resource that you can gather mining asteroids.
If you run out of fuel your engines and jets stop working and you may find yourself stranded in space waiting to run out of resources.
The next main system is energy. Most of the modules are using energy either continually or on trigger. If the energy levels are depleted, modules dependent on energy will stop working. Some of the modules that use energy continually are responsible to keep your life support levels up so make sure your reactor has always enough uranium.
Third one is a life support. If this one goes down, your crew will start dying. Make sure to always keep your life support levels as high as possible.
As you could figure crew members are depleting your life support. The less crew members you have awake, less life support you consume, but also your crew will age without any offspring. You need to find balance.
To keep your life support system up, there are two modules. Botanics that use carbon resources and filtration that use fuel system. Both of these modules are also dependent on energy system.
There is a safe guard for every system. It is called system transfer. In three main modules responsible for your systems, you may activate system transfer. It will consume three times more of another system to help stabilize system you are losing.
In a refinery you can transfer three units of life support to produce one unit of fuel. In a reactor you may produce energy from fuel and in botanics you may produce life support from energy.
As you can see it is quite a wasteful way to preserve your systems, but in an emergency situation it may buy you some time and save your crew.