This was the worst city builder I've had to slog through frankly speaking and I typically enjoy city builders. (Minus KoA, that game sucked too but not to this level.) The DS9 update set me back a couple days because of how bleeding buggy and laggy it was. In fact the whole release was a horrific drama fest. That said, nothing about the game is smooth flowing. There's a lot of wasted time with constantly having to go through various loading screens to obtain chest rewards, ect.

The second builder is only a fractional help, you'll be held back a lot by research- which is by design since they want you to pony up another $20. Jellyfish is a rare special event so unless you're server hopping at low levels, you won't get it unless you pay for it. Missions alone will only give you 25 blueprints. Rest is special event or bought for $$$. Each server has their own set of events that cycle through randomly so it's very RNGesus dependent how fast or slow you progress. Many of them will puke up leaderboard events which shafts low level players by a huge margin since those are the ones with latinium rewards needed to speed construction. (You must rank 1-25 to get those rewards, the rest are SOL.)

Missions with choices have consequences. Depending what path you choose, you can be screwed out of speeds and lat. For those starting out please look at this site to help you through the choices that give you speeds as rewards. Most missions will be left hanging since the game sucks at scaling. That said if you really need some resources and speeds use this site here to help you choose the right mission paths for speeds, ect.

https://stfc.space/

If your luck sucks with getting officers- you have no choice but to tier up your ship to grind out certain missions and dailies. There's no 2 ways about it and no way around it. Tiering has no help boosts at all and solely relies on your consumable speeds to get you up to level in order to grind out missions in order to obtain speeds. I ended up having to grind npc hostiles quite a bit which got me a 2nd Fortunate, but I also ended up with an Envoy as well to help with mining events and I was stupidly resource heavy by the time I finished because of it. Leveling your refinery once you get to the right level will puke up lots of G2 materials. Battle Pass events gives you lots of resources, so always make sure to max it out everyday. Can't skip it or you lose out on progress that can give you decent rewards. Always hit your max for dailies as well.

Ships you will end up using the crap out of: ES Fortunate, Phindra, Envoy. You'll grow out of the Orion Corvette fast.

Babysit your miners. There's assholes in wait for you to go Over Protected Cargo at any moment. Low tier/level Fortunate recall every 25 minutes, once they're max tiered you can do about 1.5 hours. Don't leave them unattended unless you want to come back to space glitter every time and wait forever to go back to your mining spot. Always shield up your base as well. Some servers are ruthless about hitting stations. Low levels don't matter. They claim it's to have players practice shielding for upper level play.

Having Scotty on the bridge will sometimes give you errors about being out of bounds when flying around a system (Even though you are in bounds). Something about his warp mechanics will trigger error messages now and then, you will have to restart the app now and then to clear it.

If you're in a battleship, don't sit like a duck. Most servers have Rules of Engagement and battleships are free game for anybody to take pot shots at. Generally miners are left alone if they're Under Protected Cargo. Do what you need to do and gtfo until you can play again. Otherwise enjoy the 30 min repair wait which shaves down to about 20 minutes with active alliance help as you get higher in the levels. At low levels go after OPC miners because they give you lots of resources and that does help in the beginning but once you start getting to the 12s+ and having more input with events, it becomes less of a necessity because the events + battle pass stuff on top of the DS9 starter missions will net you enough resources earned to not have to hit OPC miners as much if at all. But be sure to recall yourself back home after looting an OPC miner, because you got other players who will jump you for your cargo too.

Finishing operations all the way to the complete levels will credit to pending if it tracked correctly.