Rebels in the sky is pretty open-ended — there's no single correct way to play. The overarching goal is to build a strong crew of basketball pirates, travel the galaxy, and eventually host your own tournaments. Here's a roadmap to get you started.

1. Explore around your planet

Your first priority is gathering resources. Open your team panel, switch to the info subpanel, and launch an exploration from there. Explorations send your crew out to scavenge the area around your current planet: they'll bring back Satoshi, Scraps, Rum, and occasionally Gold. If you are lucky, you could even rescue some stranded pirates and bring them back to the base planet.

You can launch a new exploration as soon as the previous one finishes, so keep them running whenever possible. See the Resources and trading page for more on what each resource is used for.

2. Hire Some Pirates

Check the Pirates panel for free agents on the planet you're orbiting. Early on, don't overthink it — grab a few pirates that fill gaps in your roster.

You need at least 5 pirates to play games, but having more pirates guarantees you have some extra players during a game, so fill up your crew as soon as you can afford it.

3. Assign Crew Roles

Once you have a few pirates, assign them to crew roles. The key early roles are:

Don't leave pirates as Mozzos if you have open role slots — even a mediocre pirate in a role is better than an empty one.

4. Play Games

Basketball games are the core of the experience. Check the Games page for details on positions, tactics, and how matches play out. You can challenge nearby teams or set up auto-accept in your team panel so your crew automatically plays local challenges. Try to play at least once a day: games build your team's reputation, which affects hiring costs and and various bonus.

Attention! Your crew's average tiredness must be below a threshold to accept challenges.

5. Upgrade the Spaceship

Your first upgrades should be a shooter and a charge unit — without weapons you can't survive space adventures, and without enough charge your weapons won't fire for long. After that, upgrade your engine to travel between planets faster (fuel costs go up, so keep an eye on your tank). Hull upgrades are the most expensive but add crew capacity, letting you field more pirates in games and roles. See the Spaceships page for full component stats and costs.

6. Go on Space Adventures and Find Asteroids

Go on space adventures. Destroy asteroids to collect Scraps and Gold, which you can sell at the local market for Satoshi.

Don't worry about surviving long at first — even a short run will net you useful materials. Press x to return to base before your ship gets destroyed, or you'll lose everything in your cargo hold.

When you feel confident, try to survive past 90 seconds. After that point, a large asteroid can spawn — fly into it to claim it for your crew. You can own up to 7 asteroids, and it's smart to find them around different planets to spread your reach across the galaxy.

7. Build Teleportation Pads

Once you own an asteroid, prioritize building a Teleportation Pad on it. This lets you teleport instantly from anywhere in the galaxy to that asteroid for just 1 Rum per crew member. Combined with asteroids near different planets, this creates a fast travel network that saves enormous amounts of time and fuel.

8. Work Toward a Space Cove

The endgame goal is building a Space Cove on one of your asteroids. It's expensive (180,000 Satoshi, 220 Scraps, 100 Gold) and takes 3 days, but it opens your asteroid to other players and lets you host tournaments.

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