The game is beautiful, but I'm confused on how to play. I found this series of youtube vids http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8N1OJcBdvkA that seems to explain the basics, but I can't seem to find any planets. I also found this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSvs7LPsoWY but haven't fund anything that looks like the asteroid fields shown in that video either. Am I doing something wrong? Are there any tips to or ways of finding stars with planets/asteroids?

Update: found a star with an asteroid belt. In the second video the guy has various things in the top of the HUD, and while there are things in the upper-left of the game for me, all of them are grey and it seems I can't interact with anything.

Update 3: I think I figured it out. xD (Had to zoom out to select the field.)

Nvm. In the second vid the guy was able to interact with the things coming in and hitting the newly forming planet, and I don't seem to be able to do that.

Okay, so by dumb luck I was able to make a planet. xD I guess this thread is finished, but is there a way to make a good planet? This one has 90 metal, 1 life and 4 gas, which I'm assuming is really bad.

You should be able to click to destroy asteroids you do not want to impact your planet.

Does this not work?

I am also a new player, who probably watched the same videos on YouTube as you did. I believe the game has been changed since then, and the creation of your planet has to do with the asteroids coming in during Accretion? I'm still trying to get that ''perfect'' planet, but as you destroy asteroids you aren't wanting, it seems that they start to come in faster, which takes in to account gravity, which is a cool feature. I'm still not sure if I'm speculating this correctly, or doing it the right way, but I'm still trying to get that 100/100/100 planet.

Clicking does seem to sometimes work. The problem is probably on my end, I'm working with (very) low fps.

I guess I just can't play the game to it's full potential. I'm on my laptop, which has an nvidia driver, and though it can run most games on low settings, during the Accretion phase it goes down to 2-20 fps, with a bias toward the low side, even on the lowest settings.

I'm noticing that the number of polygons spikes up during accretion. Is the stuff coming in to hit the planet rendered at a high resolution regardless of the other settings? (For instance, I have asteroid quality set to the lowest setting.)

It should respect your settings.

The biggest impact on your FPS will be the Nebula quality, try turning that down if you haven't already.
Also turning off GLSL will help a fair bit.
Turning off VSynch might also give you a few more FPS.

Manually lowering the maximum number of particles can also help:
Open [Folder you installed the game to]\TCLI\settings.ini

Lower the iMax particles number. Don't lower it under 64 or you will run into gameplay issues.

Awesome, thank you. That helped a lot, along with zooming out from the process quite a bit. I got up to where 35 fps was common, with imaxparicles at 300. One thing I noticed that may help with optimization was that when I right clicked (as if I wanted to change the camera angle) my fps would go up a lot (even before changing imaxparticles), though I couldn't then interact with the stuff going toward the planet.

Thanks again.