I tried this game during the free trial event a while back and ended up frustrated and quit. Later, a bunch of guys from my EvE corp were playing it in the main TeamSpeak channel and the game was on sale, so I decided to give it a try again. Now, I am pretty much addicted. I guess a key point is to mess around in creative mode and learn how to play before trying survival mode. Also, when you start a survival mode game, you need to be power concious; the map I started on originally had only enough Uranium for one hour with everything turned on, so I was quite frustrated when I finally found more and there was no power to run the refinery that I needed to change it into a form that I could use to power the refinery... a scenario with solar panels can help out here, too.

Eventually, I decided to try a the crashed red ship scenario on realistic setting with meteor showers on normal. Essentially, you have to scavenge or repair the ship to make your start while meteor strikes threaten to take out what remains/what you are building. I failed/gave up about three times; meteors hit the cargo container I was using to accumulate salvage; the meteors kept taking out thrusters until I couldn't keep a full set operating and I spun off into space...

Currently, I've salvaged to ship into a small, heavily armored egg of a ship and shoved it into a huge asteroid. I've built a docking structure hidden in the mouth of the asteroid and built a supply conduit to a place to build a base deep in the twisting tunnels. My ship is my factory for construction, which I can control remotely through the conduit, as I build my asteroid station. Later, I'll either stow it in some other asteroid (as a backup plan), or take it apart for parts then try to cammoflage my dock.