Character creation

In the main menu, you first get to choose between the Persistent Universe – the main game – and Arena Commander, where you can test ships and controls alone or with others without having to worry about your health or your ship. I recommend doing a few test flights in Free Flight mode there first, since you start right in the ship and can take off immediately.

To start the actual game, choose Persistent Universe.

Three things up front

Before you lose yourself in the editor, here are three things you should know:

• You only have one character. Whether you’ll be able to create several characters later hasn’t been decided yet.
• You have to recreate it after every patch. That happens a lot.
• So: save. The save/load function lets you back up your look once and simply load it again after the next update. Otherwise you’ll be sitting at the sliders all over again every time.

By the way, you can also customize your character again at any time later.

Appearance

First you choose your character’s body type, and then you decide on their appearance. The Sculpt menu is pretty self-explanatory. Change your look there with the mouse and the markers on the face, or try your luck with the randomizer in the bottom right.

Hair

Once you’ve picked your hairstyle, eyebrows and facial hair, you choose the hair color.

The Dye Roots setting in the top right colors all of your hair, but you can also dye just the tips. To do that, turn up Dye Amount and Dye Variation and then use Dye Gradient to even set how much of the length gets dyed.

Happy with the result? Then Apply To All applies these colors to your eyebrows and facial hair too, or you can set all of these colors individually.

Saving and loading your appearance

Since you have to go through this procedure again after every update, you can save your character’s appearance. Next time you simply load it again and can get going right away.