You begin the game on a space station in the star system of Eridanus. Move the cursor left and right to select a planet to visit, or you can select the magenta X in the top-left corner to exit the star system and find another star with more planets. Press fire to select. Later on in the game you may wish to revisit the space station to get your ship repaired. Once you have selected a planet, you will find yourself in a lander craft. Move around the planet and select a place to land. You may thrust left, right or up, gravity will automatically move your ship down. Try to avoid hitting the surface of the planet too hard or this may damage your craft. When you have landed and the craft is perfectly still, you may exit the ship by holding the fire button down. At this point you will be able to wander around the screen and pick up and flora and fauna and perhaps some other artefacts before returning it to the ship to research. Press fire to re-enter the ship. If you get stuck and are unable to return to the ship, press the teleport button. This tames some of your ship's energy, so should not be undertaken lightly. Three separate specimens of each organism must be researched in order to fully understand it, and thus write an article for the encyclopaedia for which you are then paid. Some animals - and even the odd plant - may be hostile. These need to be sedated with a tranquiliser dart before they can be collected. While on foot, you may press fire to launch a dart. Be careful, as you only have a limited supply. Extra darts can be obtained from the shop. The first specimen of each species collected initiates the DNA decoding sequence. This is a minigame where you must attempt to re-arrange the letters which make up part of the organism's DNA sequence to match the sequence at the top of the screen. Select the highlighted tiles you wish to swap using left and right, then press fire to exchange them. Match the sequence before the time expires for a $50 bonus. Travelling between planets can be a risky business. There are asteroid belts to circumnavigate, and you may encounter other characters on your travels. Occasionally, your former colleague Dr Wolff may send you a helpful message, but other than that you are on your own. At any point while you are in your craft, you may press down to bring up the shop screen. This is your character's personal shopping list, and includes items which may be of use in your mission. These are fuel, Zaphod's Old Dirigible, cages, stasis traps, a plankton filter, a chemical scanner, an hydrogen engine and tranquiliser darts. Fuel is needed to power your ship. Cages enable you to store more specimens on board simultaneously. When you first begin the game, you start with two cages so you can only research two specimens at any one time. Extra cages increase this capacity and enable you to conduct research faster. A stasis trap can be left on a planet's surface to collect awkward creatures. You may deploy a stasis trap by pressing down while on foot. You may then fly off to a different planet should you desire, to carry on collecting specimens elsewhere. When the trap is deployed a message appears in the window in the bottom-right corner of the screen. The organism is kept in stasis until you arrive to collect it. The plankton filter enables you to filter tiny lifeforms out of any seawater you travel through. These tiny, simple lifeforms do not require cages and are relatively quick to research. A chemical scanner scans for lifeforms on the selected planet, looking for organic compounds. A positive result gives a good indication that lifeforms may be present, although it may occasionally return a false positive. Likewise, a negative result does not necessarily mean that there isn't some form of life somewhere on that planet. A hydrogen engine gives your thruster rockets more power. You may upgrade your engines twice. Tranquiliser darts come in packs of 6, and are used to sedate deadly lifeforms.