How to start

Welcome to Pioneer

You have found pioneer space sim? Great!
Pioneer is a space adventure game. And the best is: It is completely free!
Alpha releases are made occasionally to showcase recent development and to get feedback and ideas.
We'd love for you to take Pioneer for a spin, but you should be aware that this game is not finished,
has very few missions and other gameplay aspects and will crash and exhibit other weirdness.

Installing

If you want to play the game you can download it on the pioneer download site.
Microsoft Windows

If you use Microsoft Windows, just download the file from the "Windows" section.
Then the file can be unzipped with the free archiver 7zip.
Simply execute "pioneer.exe" to start the game. That's it!

Mac OS X

If you use Mac OS X you have to download the file from the "Mac OS X" section.
Download the .dmg Apple Disk Image and install it.

Linux

If you use Linux and you want to use the binaries, just download them from the "Linux" section.
To find out if you need the linux-32 or the linux-64 version, open your commandline and enter
uname -m
If the output is "x86_64", take the linux-64 version, else take the linux-32 version.
If you are not sure what to take, take the linux-32 version.

Source

You can also compile the game from source code.
The code can be downloaded from here:
https://github.com/pioneerspacesim/pioneer/archive/master.zip
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For a guide how to compile the source code on Linux, take a look here: 
http://pioneerwiki.com/wiki/Compiling

Playing Pioneer

After successfully installing pioneer and starting it you see the start screen.
On the left hand side you can see a spinning ship model, on the right hand side there are a few buttons:

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• Start at Earth
  • Take off from Los Angeles on the earth
• Start at New Hope
  • Take off from New Hope, an Ice planet in the Epsilon Erdiani system
• Start at Lave
  • Take off from a spaceport in the orbit of the planet Lave which orbits the sun Eshe
• Load Game
  • If you have saved a game you can load your savegame here
• Quit
  • Exit Pioneer

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In order to follow the basic flying tutorials you have to start at Lave.
Click here to read the Basic Flying tutorials.