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Approximately Up Tutorial: How to Build Your First Ship

New to Approximately Up? The tutorial in one page: how to build a ship, enter Fly Mode with R, and fix first-ship problems (checked Aug 13, 2026).

8/13/2026 Last updated: 8/13/2026

Your first flying ship in Approximately Up comes out of the tutorial: repair the broken tutorial ship, make sure it is powered and every cable is anchored, then hold R to switch into Fly Mode. That is the whole beginner loop — fix or build a ship, wire it, fly it — and the tutorial walks you through exactly those steps. The game launched on Steam on August 6, 2026 as a full release (no Early Access) from solo developer Approximately Games. The full release also keeps your repaired tutorial ship in the blueprint menu so you can reuse it, and if the ship ever fails to appear after loading, there is a known workaround — see the section below.

Version note: keybindings, patch numbers and mechanics on this page were verified on August 13, 2026 against patch 1.0.010, the latest release note we could confirm.

The 30-Second Overview

Approximately Up is a modular ship-building game played in first person: you start from a frame piece, assemble a ship from parts, then stand on the deck and fly it. The core loop is build a ship, take a mission, fly to another planet, and unlock new parts and new stations along the way. The store page lists 15 unique planets, each with its own size, gravity, atmosphere, temperature and challenges, and most have a Planet Station that doubles as a checkpoint and a garage — land there once and it is permanently unlocked as a new departure point (see planets-and-locations).

Missions in the official description include hauling experimental power sources that lose power mid-flight, energy crystals with charging countdowns, and a submarine that is far too heavy; completing them unlocks new parts. You can play solo or in online co-op with up to 4 players (more in multiplayer-and-coop). The store page pitches co-op as a friendly blame game over wires nobody connected, thrusters mounted backwards and solar panels left on the ground — the kind of failure you will re-enact in the first hour. Save Anytime, Steam Cloud and Steam Workshop are all supported features.

The Tutorial: Repair, Wire, and Fly Your First Ship

New players mostly ask two questions: how to control the ship in the tutorial, and how to make it move up. Both start the same way: after repairing the ship, hold R to enter Fly Mode. A quick tap is not enough, and if the ship is unpowered or a cable is unanchored, the game simply refuses to let you enter flight — the most common cause of “can’t enter fly mode” reports.

Going up is a layout question, not a key: players point to lift thrusters and fan placement for vertical thrust, and the repaired tutorial ship already has a working layout. In build mode, press H to highlight unsupported wires in red and fix them before takeoff — more on wiring in circuits-and-logic. Some players reported problems with the demo-era tutorial ship, but the release version reworked onboarding, and a demo-period review thread confirms the tutorial now teaches the basics much better.

The shortest community answer to “how do I go up” is Fozzie28’s Steam guide “How to go up” (August 7, 2026, release): build everything correctly and push the lift throttle — take-off failure is almost always a wiring or connection problem, not a missing control key.

Welding, from the same demo-era tutorial: the welder tool welds armor panels, and welded surfaces raise structural integrity and shear strength — mounted parts shear off less on hard landings — but add weight. H opens a debug mode showing missing connections, the center of mass and ship weight. Keep welding symmetrical, or the center of mass shifts and thrusters unbalance.

Flipsie’s demo-era first-ship stream adds tutorial specifics from the game text: welded plates also stop suction from pulling you out of the hull and block thruster noise; the repair task is one damaged data cable to the door and one power cable to the thrusters; and crashing into headquarters still counts as completing the tutorial. (demo-era)

Approximately Up - official Steam screenshot

Controls You’ll Use in the First Hour

  • Hotbar (1-0): drag a part into a numbered slot to equip it. Patch 1.0.005 added customizable hotbar keybinds. (Last checked: August 13, 2026.)
  • Clear hand (~): press ~ to empty whatever you are holding.
  • Pick up (middle mouse): press and hold middle mouse to take the part you are looking at. Patch 1.0.007 fixed a default keybinding typo in this binding.
  • Rotate (left mouse): hold left mouse and drag to rotate a part.

When controls seem to “change”, it is usually the hotbar: parts only do anything after you drag them into the numbered slots, which is where the “why do controls change?” confusion comes from. Since patch 1.0.008 you can also open the built-in manual while sitting in a seat; it includes wiring diagrams and is the fastest reference for basic setups. Individual parts and how to mount them are covered in parts-and-instruments.

Diggrok’s demo-era build tutorial (demo-era, so the release may differ) fills in the rest of the build controls: Ctrl+G selects everything and X deletes; O opens the objectives, the first being “Lost in Transit” — pick up a 1.2x1.2x1.2 package that must fit through a small gate. Inventory numbers are per-category budgets that grow with missions. Space jumps and double-tap Shift uses the jetpack; G opens selection mode (right-click sets corners, C duplicates, mouse wheel moves vertically, E confirms); T toggles the flashlight between wide and direct; M opens the in-game manual, which includes an RCS wiring diagram. Ctrl+1 through Ctrl+0 open extra hotbar windows.

Flipsie’s demo stream lists a few more binds from the game text: press I for inventory, double-tap Space for the jetpack, double-tap Left Shift to toggle hover mode, hold Alt to delete components, and Ctrl+Alt to delete a whole cable run; Alt+left-click while seated opens key-binding mode. (demo-era)

Tutorial Ship Gone After Loading? Do This

The tutorial ship is saved in the blueprint menu by default in the full release — older threads asking for this feature are outdated. If you load it from blueprints and nothing appears, the community workaround is: exit build mode, enter it again, remove one panel, then add the panel back. Re-adding a panel triggers the ship to appear. The underlying cause is not yet confirmed — the developer has not documented it as of August 13, 2026. Everything else about saving, labels and blueprint quirks lives in saves-and-blueprints.

When the First Flight Goes Wrong

There is no field repair in Approximately Up: once your ship breaks mid-flight, you cannot fix it on the spot. The safety net is time — press P to rewind and undo the accident, a mechanic players confirm works for exactly these situations. To avoid crashes in the first place, the community consensus is to slow down with reverse thrust before touchdown rather than flying at the ground at full speed (landing tips: planets-and-locations). If you want your first ship to hover instead of bouncing, treat hovering as a wiring-and-logic problem rather than a simple thruster setup: the community tutorial “How to Build Hover Logic” by SaNT xc is the reference, and circuits-and-logic covers the building blocks. Thruster choice and mounting details are in parts-and-instruments.

Approximately Up - official Steam screenshot

After the Tutorial: What’s Next

Since patch 1.0.006 the objective log shows your overall completion as “Objectives Completion: XX%”, so you can track total progress from the start. Verified early mission names include Trial By Thrust, Drop The Depth Diver and To The Moon; patch 1.0.007 added extra hints for Trial By Thrust and Drop The Depth Diver. Missions are how new parts unlock, according to the store description.

A Nanoframe mission exists in the release, but the discussion thread asking how to complete it still has no answers — its solution is not yet confirmed here. The complete mission order of the release version is also not yet confirmed; this page lists only the fragments that have been verified. Demo-era limited events like Fred’s Quest and Fred’s Star are not part of the release tutorial, so old guides mentioning them are about the demo. Once you can fly, land on a Planet Station to unlock it as a new departure point — the full directory is in planets-and-locations.

Community Guides Worth Watching

  • Diggrok — “How to build ships tutorial” (Mar 2, 2026, ~69k views): demo-era, so some details may differ from 1.0.x.
  • Pixel DRIFT — starter ship build (Aug 1, 2026): recorded close to the release version.
  • SEVIIN — “First Missions + Learn The Basic” (Apr 8, 2026): demo-era missions.
  • SaNT xc — “How to Build Hover Logic without any mission” (May 24, 2026): hover circuits.
  • Juniper Actias — “Building a Space Ship Correctly” (Aug 12, 2026): recorded on the release version.

Check the date on any guide: the game changed a lot between the demo and the August 6, 2026 release, and near-daily hotfixes keep adjusting numbers and part geometry (latest verified patch: 1.0.010, August 12, 2026).

Sources

Verified August 13, 2026.

Fan-made guide. This site is not affiliated with Approximately Games, Steam, or Valve; all game content and media belong to their respective owners. Factual details were last checked on August 13, 2026.

beginner tutorial first-ship fly-mode