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There is a lot to know about Starmade, and it is hard for a new player to know what they need to learn. This is (believe it or not) a short compilation of my own personal advice for new players about what to start learning about, and how to handle their getting started in a new world of Starmade. This advice is not necessarily the only way to do things. It is the best way "in my own personal opinion".
Power
Learn how to make effective power systems. It is not that hard. Read the Wiki page. Look at how stealth ships are made to understand how they have pushed those power lines to generate the most power for the least amount of mass. When building a ship, build or otherwise plan your power system first. Everything else depends upon the power. For larger ships, learn about Auxiliary Reactors. Add them only after you have maxed the potential of your regular power modules to two million power.
Weapons
For weapons, the most effective weapon combos are; cannon/cannon/punch for rapid fire, close range (is also the easiest for energy management); Missile/beam/explosive for longest range engagement (will also require 'lots' of power capacitors to store power); and also Cannon/beam/punch for fairly long range, very heavy hitting but relatively slow firing guns (also requires power capacitors, but nowhere near as much as the missiles). Cannon/cannon weapons should be 'at least' 2000 modules in size, preferably 4000 so they can crack advanced armor with every shot. Cannon/beam weapons can be much smaller as they already hit fairly hard, but try not to make them smaller than 100-150 modules. Lots of such cannon/beam weapons in turrets can be quite effective. Missile/beam should be at least 500-1000 modules in size to make them strong enough to put holes through advanced armor, however you also want for each such large missile to have several tiny missiles as well to serve as bait for the enemy's point defense turrets. Beams are currently broken and have been for a while. Do not use beams as a primary weapon (except for pure ion effect weapons).
Shields
Try to have roughly the same amount of total shield capacitor blocks as you do total weapon blocks if not more. How many shield regenerators to have in addition to that is more ambiguous. Some go for as low as 20% of their shield blocks, opting to use the space for more shield capacitors. Others will go for as much as a one for one ratio. If you are expecting battles to last a long time, like PvE taking down pirate stations, having regenerators is useful. For short brutal encounters like PvP, heavy on the shield capacitors is probably better.
For any serious warship, always get full defensive ion effect, all the way to 60%. Do NOT consider this optional!
Thrust
It is relatively easy to have a one to one thrust to mass ratio. Aim for at least that. For ships that I intend to fly around a lot, I usually try for a two to one thrust to mass ratio. It makes flying much more pleasant. It is also useful in combat to be able to control the range. If your ship uses short ranged weapons, you want to close fast. If it is built around long range missiles, you want to maintain the range so your enemy can't hit you with his closer ranged weapons while you bombard him with impunity. If your thrust to mass ratio is higher than your opponent, you will be able to control the range. If it is lower than your opponent, your opponent will be controlling the range. High thrust is combat useful. (It can also help you outrun swarm missiles.)
Armor
Do not go crazy with heavy advanced armor, until you know better what you are doing. In fact you may well be better off just using basic hull and adding extra shields and shield regenerators, especially if you've got full defensive ion effect going. If you do use advanced armor, put it on the front/nose of your ship where you will get hit the most. If you do decide to go armor heavy, absolutely get full defensive punch and pierce effect working to the maximum 25%.
Turrets
Learn how to build turrets. Especially for larger ships, turrets are nearly essential. Until you figure them out well, consider downloading turrets from Community Content and using those. Especially important is point defense, anti-missile turrets. Those shoot down enemy missiles. If you don't have any point defense turrets on your ship, you will likely die very quickly to an enemy using long range missile fire. If you have really good point defense, good thrust and cannon armament, you are exactly the nightmare missile armed ships fear.
Salvage
Learn to build big, efficient salvage arrays. When starting a new game such as in survival on a multiplayer server, getting a large salvage array going is your absolute top priority. You can slave secondary weapon effects to salvage arrays to give them some nice features. My favorite is to slave cannon to them, as it gives me a single constant beam, making it a fairly simple task to just hold down the fire button and eat asteroids. However adding the huge quantity of weapon modules to a salvage array is a very expensive task, that is much easier to accomplish 'after' you've already got an effective salvage array going. Build a salvage array with 25,000 to 100,000 salvage modules first (check your multiplayer server rules, as they may have limits on how big salvage arrays are allowed to get). Start harvesting resources with that. You can add the cannon modules later.
(The maximum strength for a salvage beam comes from 100 salvage modules, more salvage modules than that does nothing. However adding an equal number of weapon module slaves such as cannon 'does' increase the effectiveness, but they affect the array differently depending on the weapon module.)
Crafting
Learn how the crafting system works. In multiplayer, the nearby shops will likely already have been bought out of anything you would need in quantity; best to know how to make it yourself. Learn how to add factory enhancers to your factories. Remember to add power module lines to your station and likely soon enough power capacitors too. If your factories get big enough (with factory enhancers), your station may need auxiliary reactors as well. You'll need to add cargo space to your capsule refinery and factories, probably a lot of it. Add a micro-assembler too, also with extra cargo space. I always find myself with a surplus of some capsules that I have no use for, but which can be transformed by the micro-assembler into crystal composite, which I would otherwise likely have a shortage of. Slave your capsule refinery to each of your factories so they can draw their raw materials straight from it. With enough cargo space slaved to the capsule refinery, you can store all your materials there just fine.
Making Money
When you are mining, you will wind up with a lot of various asteroid minerals in addition to the much more useful shards you most want. Those minerals are largely useless for anything other than making paint to color basic hull. You can sell these minerals to shops to gain cash. Better however if you've got a decent factory going is to process these in your station's capsule refinery and turn them into their 'carved' variants with a much enhanced basic factory. You can easily get to the point where you clean out any shop you find of everything they have that you want, as well as their cash, simply by carrying around and selling these carved versions of those minerals. This of course might change drastically with the new faction updates coming, and the changes to the trade system, so this might be short lived advice. (This last trick is the reason my current basic factory has over 20,000 factory enhancers on it.)
Building a Home Base
When starting out on a new server, one of your first priorities is to get your own home base built. (Unless you join someone else's faction, whereupon you could use their home base, but that is a whole different story.) This will require some cash (50,000 in vanilla, 500,000 or more on some multiplayer servers), so at the very least you will have had to use your starting resources to make the tiniest of mining ships and spent a bit of time at a nearby asteroid gaining some stuff you can sell to a shop to make that cash.
What to Buy for Your Home Base
Buy a build block, a faction block and an undeathenator. You can also buy things like a micro-assembler, capsule refinery, factory, standard factory, advanced factory, some factory enhancers, some extra cargo space and at least one storage block, and have a surplus of power modules as well to use on your new station. Having this in your inventory will give you a slightly quicker start with your station. Make darn sure you've also got at least one basic rail with you and that your ship has a rail docker on it. Half the point of creating such a home base is so that you can dock your ship to it when you log off. Anything docked to your home base is invulnerable and is certain to still be there when you log back on. It's also useful to have some light blocks with you, 'at least' 500 basic hull of whatever color you prefer for the interior of your station (consider bringing 10,000), and some plex doors.
Getting There
You will want to fly to an unclaimed sector. This may require a bit more time spent with your starting miner to come up with extra thrusters, maybe jump modules, etc., so as to fly to such an unclaimed sector. If you have learned well how to make power structures, one thing to seriously consider is to make a cloaked ship for when flying to that sector, so as to avoid incidents with pirates, etc.. (If you are going to cloak for that journey, consider removing your salvage array for the trip, as the lower mass will make it much easier to cloak.) At the very least add a jammer to your ship before venturing off into unexplored space. Make sure you've added a scanner and a scanner module to your ship so you can scan systems you enter. For maximum security, do not scan systems other people have claimed. They can see your scan, they may scan you back themselves, which will nullify your cloak and jammer, and they might decide to go hunting while you are recharging your jump drive.
Where to Settle
You want to find a system with several asteroid belts (yellow orbits). Planets are at this time largely useless. You'll want to pick a spot for your station that is reasonably far from any 'undiscovered stations', which may very possibly be pirate stations. If you are too near such stations, they may harass you with pirates, which is a pain. I have found it useful to create a station directly adjacent to a shop, so I can just buy incidental items I might want without having to make it. Doing this however may limit the future growth of your station. Avoid putting down your station within draw distance of a planet or some other large station, as this will create serious lag for you all the time that you are doing stuff at your station, like building ships.
Faction Claim!
Before building your station, if you have not already done this, create a faction for yourself. When you build your station (press P), immediately stack on that first block a faction module, a build block and an undeathenator. The very first thing you do is R on the faction block and make it your home base. That done, while still in your faction block, claim the system for your faction. (You get a significant mining bonus from mining in a system your faction has claimed. From this point forth, never mine in a system you haven't claimed, the bonus is that worth while.) Then hit R on the undeathenator to make your home base your respawn location.
Dock Your Ship
R on the build block to go into build mode for your station. Build a platform from the base of that small stack. Extend a runway a few blocks wide a good thirty blocks or so from your stack of essential blocks. Stick a basic rail on the end of that and dock your ship to it (you need a rail docker on your ship, add it like a weapon to your hotbar and fire it at the basic rail to dock your ship).
Make Your Station Home
Go back to your stack of essentials and build a room for yourself. You will be back to this room a lot, so make it a room you'll be comfortable in. You'll want to put your factory blocks here, and have space for things like a transporter, storage blocks, etc.. Give yourself some room so you can decorate later if you so choose and don't feel too claustrophobic. Light the place well, this is home. Add plex doors so you can close them when you don't want uninvited guests coming in.
Make Your Station Secure
That done, if you have the blocks for it (you can use mineral blocks you've got from mining), create a set of walls around your interior room a full 22 blocks away from it. This will wind up being a giant cube, easily fifty blocks in dimensions. Don't worry about how it looks for now, you will be able to clean it up, change it out for different structures later. This is temporary and there for security. You see, missile explosions penetrate walls. Someone can kill you through the walls of your invulnerable station simply by firing missiles at it. By having this second set of walls at least 22 blocks from the walls of your secure room, you will be 100% secure while inside that room. No explosion can reach you.
("No explosion can reach you." Actually this may not always be true. There exists a type of missile, missile/pulse/explosive that most refer to as 'nukes'. They are slow and therefor easy for point defense, anti-missile turrets to shoot down. However they have a HUGE explosion radius of 60 blocks! If you have the blocks and are willing to live with the big cube, you might want to consider making that secondary wall set a full 60 blocks distant from your interior walls. If you've figured out how to use the advanced build tools, you could instead maybe make it a giant sphere.)
Fill Your Station Up
After putting down your factories, etc, you will want to add power lines to your station. Give a little bit of thought as to how you will want your station to ultimately look, as you probably won't want to redo too much beyond this point. Go ahead and add power modules to give your station power for it's factories, etc.. Once you've got enough factory enhancers added, you'll probably want to add power capacitors too, at least enough for a half second's worth of power, so as to handle spikes in usage. As your station grows, ultimately you'll need even more power, for which you can use aux reactors. They do not need to be activated to power your station, auxiliary reactors power stations automatically.
Arm Your Station Up
At some point, soon, you will want to add weapon turrets to your station as well. This is not so much to defend the station itself, as your home base is invulnerable. It is rather to control the space 'around' your station to prevent someone from parking a hostile drone fleet at your station to make it impossible for you to undock from it without being engaged. I usually arm my stations well enough that they can destroy any ship I am currently flying. By the time I get to building battleships, my station can destroy titans. Long range missiles are best for stations.
*
If anyone has any comments about things I have said, please feel free to post them. I may edit this post in response. If I have left out anything crucial for a new player to know, by all means please post. If anything was unclear, please let me know so I can clarify it.
Power
Learn how to make effective power systems. It is not that hard. Read the Wiki page. Look at how stealth ships are made to understand how they have pushed those power lines to generate the most power for the least amount of mass. When building a ship, build or otherwise plan your power system first. Everything else depends upon the power. For larger ships, learn about Auxiliary Reactors. Add them only after you have maxed the potential of your regular power modules to two million power.
Weapons
For weapons, the most effective weapon combos are; cannon/cannon/punch for rapid fire, close range (is also the easiest for energy management); Missile/beam/explosive for longest range engagement (will also require 'lots' of power capacitors to store power); and also Cannon/beam/punch for fairly long range, very heavy hitting but relatively slow firing guns (also requires power capacitors, but nowhere near as much as the missiles). Cannon/cannon weapons should be 'at least' 2000 modules in size, preferably 4000 so they can crack advanced armor with every shot. Cannon/beam weapons can be much smaller as they already hit fairly hard, but try not to make them smaller than 100-150 modules. Lots of such cannon/beam weapons in turrets can be quite effective. Missile/beam should be at least 500-1000 modules in size to make them strong enough to put holes through advanced armor, however you also want for each such large missile to have several tiny missiles as well to serve as bait for the enemy's point defense turrets. Beams are currently broken and have been for a while. Do not use beams as a primary weapon (except for pure ion effect weapons).
Shields
Try to have roughly the same amount of total shield capacitor blocks as you do total weapon blocks if not more. How many shield regenerators to have in addition to that is more ambiguous. Some go for as low as 20% of their shield blocks, opting to use the space for more shield capacitors. Others will go for as much as a one for one ratio. If you are expecting battles to last a long time, like PvE taking down pirate stations, having regenerators is useful. For short brutal encounters like PvP, heavy on the shield capacitors is probably better.
For any serious warship, always get full defensive ion effect, all the way to 60%. Do NOT consider this optional!
Thrust
It is relatively easy to have a one to one thrust to mass ratio. Aim for at least that. For ships that I intend to fly around a lot, I usually try for a two to one thrust to mass ratio. It makes flying much more pleasant. It is also useful in combat to be able to control the range. If your ship uses short ranged weapons, you want to close fast. If it is built around long range missiles, you want to maintain the range so your enemy can't hit you with his closer ranged weapons while you bombard him with impunity. If your thrust to mass ratio is higher than your opponent, you will be able to control the range. If it is lower than your opponent, your opponent will be controlling the range. High thrust is combat useful. (It can also help you outrun swarm missiles.)
Armor
Do not go crazy with heavy advanced armor, until you know better what you are doing. In fact you may well be better off just using basic hull and adding extra shields and shield regenerators, especially if you've got full defensive ion effect going. If you do use advanced armor, put it on the front/nose of your ship where you will get hit the most. If you do decide to go armor heavy, absolutely get full defensive punch and pierce effect working to the maximum 25%.
Turrets
Learn how to build turrets. Especially for larger ships, turrets are nearly essential. Until you figure them out well, consider downloading turrets from Community Content and using those. Especially important is point defense, anti-missile turrets. Those shoot down enemy missiles. If you don't have any point defense turrets on your ship, you will likely die very quickly to an enemy using long range missile fire. If you have really good point defense, good thrust and cannon armament, you are exactly the nightmare missile armed ships fear.
Salvage
Learn to build big, efficient salvage arrays. When starting a new game such as in survival on a multiplayer server, getting a large salvage array going is your absolute top priority. You can slave secondary weapon effects to salvage arrays to give them some nice features. My favorite is to slave cannon to them, as it gives me a single constant beam, making it a fairly simple task to just hold down the fire button and eat asteroids. However adding the huge quantity of weapon modules to a salvage array is a very expensive task, that is much easier to accomplish 'after' you've already got an effective salvage array going. Build a salvage array with 25,000 to 100,000 salvage modules first (check your multiplayer server rules, as they may have limits on how big salvage arrays are allowed to get). Start harvesting resources with that. You can add the cannon modules later.
(The maximum strength for a salvage beam comes from 100 salvage modules, more salvage modules than that does nothing. However adding an equal number of weapon module slaves such as cannon 'does' increase the effectiveness, but they affect the array differently depending on the weapon module.)
Crafting
Learn how the crafting system works. In multiplayer, the nearby shops will likely already have been bought out of anything you would need in quantity; best to know how to make it yourself. Learn how to add factory enhancers to your factories. Remember to add power module lines to your station and likely soon enough power capacitors too. If your factories get big enough (with factory enhancers), your station may need auxiliary reactors as well. You'll need to add cargo space to your capsule refinery and factories, probably a lot of it. Add a micro-assembler too, also with extra cargo space. I always find myself with a surplus of some capsules that I have no use for, but which can be transformed by the micro-assembler into crystal composite, which I would otherwise likely have a shortage of. Slave your capsule refinery to each of your factories so they can draw their raw materials straight from it. With enough cargo space slaved to the capsule refinery, you can store all your materials there just fine.
Making Money
When you are mining, you will wind up with a lot of various asteroid minerals in addition to the much more useful shards you most want. Those minerals are largely useless for anything other than making paint to color basic hull. You can sell these minerals to shops to gain cash. Better however if you've got a decent factory going is to process these in your station's capsule refinery and turn them into their 'carved' variants with a much enhanced basic factory. You can easily get to the point where you clean out any shop you find of everything they have that you want, as well as their cash, simply by carrying around and selling these carved versions of those minerals. This of course might change drastically with the new faction updates coming, and the changes to the trade system, so this might be short lived advice. (This last trick is the reason my current basic factory has over 20,000 factory enhancers on it.)
Building a Home Base
When starting out on a new server, one of your first priorities is to get your own home base built. (Unless you join someone else's faction, whereupon you could use their home base, but that is a whole different story.) This will require some cash (50,000 in vanilla, 500,000 or more on some multiplayer servers), so at the very least you will have had to use your starting resources to make the tiniest of mining ships and spent a bit of time at a nearby asteroid gaining some stuff you can sell to a shop to make that cash.
What to Buy for Your Home Base
Buy a build block, a faction block and an undeathenator. You can also buy things like a micro-assembler, capsule refinery, factory, standard factory, advanced factory, some factory enhancers, some extra cargo space and at least one storage block, and have a surplus of power modules as well to use on your new station. Having this in your inventory will give you a slightly quicker start with your station. Make darn sure you've also got at least one basic rail with you and that your ship has a rail docker on it. Half the point of creating such a home base is so that you can dock your ship to it when you log off. Anything docked to your home base is invulnerable and is certain to still be there when you log back on. It's also useful to have some light blocks with you, 'at least' 500 basic hull of whatever color you prefer for the interior of your station (consider bringing 10,000), and some plex doors.
Getting There
You will want to fly to an unclaimed sector. This may require a bit more time spent with your starting miner to come up with extra thrusters, maybe jump modules, etc., so as to fly to such an unclaimed sector. If you have learned well how to make power structures, one thing to seriously consider is to make a cloaked ship for when flying to that sector, so as to avoid incidents with pirates, etc.. (If you are going to cloak for that journey, consider removing your salvage array for the trip, as the lower mass will make it much easier to cloak.) At the very least add a jammer to your ship before venturing off into unexplored space. Make sure you've added a scanner and a scanner module to your ship so you can scan systems you enter. For maximum security, do not scan systems other people have claimed. They can see your scan, they may scan you back themselves, which will nullify your cloak and jammer, and they might decide to go hunting while you are recharging your jump drive.
Where to Settle
You want to find a system with several asteroid belts (yellow orbits). Planets are at this time largely useless. You'll want to pick a spot for your station that is reasonably far from any 'undiscovered stations', which may very possibly be pirate stations. If you are too near such stations, they may harass you with pirates, which is a pain. I have found it useful to create a station directly adjacent to a shop, so I can just buy incidental items I might want without having to make it. Doing this however may limit the future growth of your station. Avoid putting down your station within draw distance of a planet or some other large station, as this will create serious lag for you all the time that you are doing stuff at your station, like building ships.
Faction Claim!
Before building your station, if you have not already done this, create a faction for yourself. When you build your station (press P), immediately stack on that first block a faction module, a build block and an undeathenator. The very first thing you do is R on the faction block and make it your home base. That done, while still in your faction block, claim the system for your faction. (You get a significant mining bonus from mining in a system your faction has claimed. From this point forth, never mine in a system you haven't claimed, the bonus is that worth while.) Then hit R on the undeathenator to make your home base your respawn location.
Dock Your Ship
R on the build block to go into build mode for your station. Build a platform from the base of that small stack. Extend a runway a few blocks wide a good thirty blocks or so from your stack of essential blocks. Stick a basic rail on the end of that and dock your ship to it (you need a rail docker on your ship, add it like a weapon to your hotbar and fire it at the basic rail to dock your ship).
Make Your Station Home
Go back to your stack of essentials and build a room for yourself. You will be back to this room a lot, so make it a room you'll be comfortable in. You'll want to put your factory blocks here, and have space for things like a transporter, storage blocks, etc.. Give yourself some room so you can decorate later if you so choose and don't feel too claustrophobic. Light the place well, this is home. Add plex doors so you can close them when you don't want uninvited guests coming in.
Make Your Station Secure
That done, if you have the blocks for it (you can use mineral blocks you've got from mining), create a set of walls around your interior room a full 22 blocks away from it. This will wind up being a giant cube, easily fifty blocks in dimensions. Don't worry about how it looks for now, you will be able to clean it up, change it out for different structures later. This is temporary and there for security. You see, missile explosions penetrate walls. Someone can kill you through the walls of your invulnerable station simply by firing missiles at it. By having this second set of walls at least 22 blocks from the walls of your secure room, you will be 100% secure while inside that room. No explosion can reach you.
("No explosion can reach you." Actually this may not always be true. There exists a type of missile, missile/pulse/explosive that most refer to as 'nukes'. They are slow and therefor easy for point defense, anti-missile turrets to shoot down. However they have a HUGE explosion radius of 60 blocks! If you have the blocks and are willing to live with the big cube, you might want to consider making that secondary wall set a full 60 blocks distant from your interior walls. If you've figured out how to use the advanced build tools, you could instead maybe make it a giant sphere.)
Fill Your Station Up
After putting down your factories, etc, you will want to add power lines to your station. Give a little bit of thought as to how you will want your station to ultimately look, as you probably won't want to redo too much beyond this point. Go ahead and add power modules to give your station power for it's factories, etc.. Once you've got enough factory enhancers added, you'll probably want to add power capacitors too, at least enough for a half second's worth of power, so as to handle spikes in usage. As your station grows, ultimately you'll need even more power, for which you can use aux reactors. They do not need to be activated to power your station, auxiliary reactors power stations automatically.
Arm Your Station Up
At some point, soon, you will want to add weapon turrets to your station as well. This is not so much to defend the station itself, as your home base is invulnerable. It is rather to control the space 'around' your station to prevent someone from parking a hostile drone fleet at your station to make it impossible for you to undock from it without being engaged. I usually arm my stations well enough that they can destroy any ship I am currently flying. By the time I get to building battleships, my station can destroy titans. Long range missiles are best for stations.
*
If anyone has any comments about things I have said, please feel free to post them. I may edit this post in response. If I have left out anything crucial for a new player to know, by all means please post. If anything was unclear, please let me know so I can clarify it.
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