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Before you go on a multiple-year trip accessible only by hyperspace relay, you download every out-of-copyright-work of art, literature or science your civilization has ever produced and stick it on your ship's computer. You do this even if you are, frankly, kind of dumb; it is just the obvious thing to do. You are not going to think of everything you need, and no matter HOW confident you are that five-dimensional math is beyond you or that you have no interest in the works of Falazon-2114, some conceivable emergency might mean that you need to repair a damaged hyperdrive or persuade a colony founded on his works that they desperately need to join the League, and when it is essentially costless to take everything, that is what you do.
This, at any rate, is common knowledge known even to the pilot of the Finite But Extremely Large Bounty, whose true name is a thirty-six digit hexadecimal string and whose usename incorporates sounds found not only not in English, but not in any language spoken by dogs, chimpanzees, mosquitoes, or any other entity that does not prefer to communicate exclusively via signal broadcast. We can call him Nau, or Fodion, or GODDAMN IT, since these are all noises he is going to make very, very soon.
Not that any emergency has hit. No, he's had a peaceful trip; no need to exercise self-control, no need to make decisions calling for twice his intelligence, just regular drop-offs of signal beacons to mark his progress and slightly less regular placement of mining replicators on the occasional unusually valuable asteroid; when the pickup ship comes in his wake, it will find the asteroids neatly sorted into their component materials, all carefully packaged and floating by the beacons for immediate delivery to the nearest orbital factory. He's been being choosier than most miners would, with his beacons, but the whole point of taking a job mining asteroids is so you can generate positive value for the world without ever having to interact with any part of it that is not best primarily understood with reference to Newtonian motion, and the longer his trip, the more he can stay in his cabin, reading books written when the League's average IQ was three standard deviations lower than it is today and even mostly following them.
And as long as no emergency hits, that's exactly what he's going to be able to keep doing. He sets his hyperdrive going and -
His ship is not, technically, exploding. Only very small parts of it exploded, as he came out of warp, really quite tiny pieces. But they were very important, small parts, and now the hyperdrive isn't working and the Finite But Extremely Large Bounty has a hell of a lot more momentum than it ought to.
(The ship sends a brief note to his brain what the constellations look like, because they do not look like they are supposed to look like, and he logs that for when there is not an emergency and he is not on fire.)
He does his best with his maneuvering thrusters, but it is not what they are designed for, and using things for the purposes they are not designed for is not what he is designed for, to the extent he is designed. He appears to be headed for a planet! The planet is sending out radio waves! If he crashes into the planet sending out radio waves, it is going to stop doing that! This is very very bad!
(They are not in any standard format, and the ship cheerfully alerts him that he has made first contact with an alien species, THANK YOU VERY MUCH, SHIP.)
Okay is there any way he can crash without -
Yes! The ship is very sure there is! It involves MORE EXPLOSIONS. Of important bits, even! And also deceleration, caused in large part by explosions!
He does it.
In the sky above Amenta, astronomers who happen to have their telescopes pointed the right way can see some very pretty fireworks.
Nau's ship breaks. Some parts of it overshoot Amenta; some parts of it undershoot Amenta. The largest bits - including the very-heavily-shielded capsule with the ship's pilot, the computer storing backups of all of his data, and four of his irreplaceably precious replicator-factories - do not.
But they're not going to make a crater when they hit, either.
Or at least only a very small one.
The aliens he has made first contact with are going to do their level best to get him patched up without making anything worse. In case it helps they can be in full body hazmat suits! Convenient for interacting with the wreckage too!
At the bottom of the new crater, there appears to be a large, approximately round object (the improvised heat-shields burned off; there are a number of rare metals now in slightly higher concentration in the Amentan atmosphere, as well as the usual carbon). It is... twitching.
(Ceasing to be conscious when you are in pain is a design defect. So is not being able to electronically control your spaceship while you're improvising a new body.)
He sees nothing. For a while.
Then the very helpful aliens see a large metal hatch swing open, and a very approximately Amentoid head peeks out of it.
They are prepared for this! The radio's been going the whole time but one green has a flashlight and can try prime numbers with it!
Right. Communication. He forgot about communication. That was dumb of him, why did he forget about communication. Possibly because of the STARSHIP CRASH.
He's going to start by sending out the default distress signal, which hopefully should have been playing the whole time but apparently wasn't, because he has NO IDEA what went wrong inside the ship's computer but something apparently did, and then to tell the ship's computer, which is broken but probably less so than his brain, to see about decrypting the aliens' communications and playing the Official First Contact communications himself, he's sure they've got that on a chip somewhere. They are probably helpful communications, because these aliens look like hu-
Actually, wait, these aliens look like the Union of Man, only with lower-tech decontamination suits. Shit. They've even got funny-colored hair! Okay cancel the standard data dump, then reboot it except without anything added since recontact and hope like mad they don't share their development-based concerns, because if they do then he doesn't care how low-tech they are, if they've invented radio he's going to lose. Just send out the friendly stuff.
And then, uh... if the ship's sending all that stuff out, well, nice to have a backup? He may as well try to start sending prime numbers himself, since that looks like what they're doing. Right. Sounds good. Let's do it.
The green with the flashlight will carry on flashlighting along, but the other greens, who aren't close enough to be in hazmat suits, are figuring out everything else as fast as they can. How hard is that, exactly?
Not tremendously! They're going to have problems with the weird blip where it paused and then started over from the beginning, and there's a few very important pauses where the ship either pauses, or switches to unintelligible static and those are going to throw them of, but the Standard First-Communication Broadcast was engineered by very intelligent people who spent a very long time thinking about how to do it efficiently, and it has a lot of redundancy.
And he... may as well start... tapping prime numbers on the hull, just for the sake of this one poor green-suited guy and his flashlight?
(His fingers also look somewhat like Amentan fingers, or at least like the fingers of a very artistically cast steel statue of an Amentan.)
Oh good! Data! Presently the flashlight green can put down the flashlight and pick up a whiteboard and their pocket everything and copy out an image of the alien's language for WELCOME! CAN WE HELP YOU?
Oh blast that's a good idea.
He drops back into the ship. (He stares at his replicator-factories. Does he want to use them for this? Desperately, desperately yes; on the other hand, he will probably need them more later, and he has no idea if they even WORK, or if he can use one of them that works to fix the others that don't.)
He finds a particularly melted plastic-ish thing that is still hot, climbs out of his ship very slowly and carefully, and uses it to draw, on melted plastic on the ship's (also very hot) hull, YES.
Then he is just going to say, the very plain and low-context way you use words to very small children still too young for their first implant, "Yes."
(And, at the same time, send the key radio message himself, just in case the ship's wasn't working: "I am a shipwrecked miner requesting assistance and sanctuary under the laws of all nations," add that on loop until someone responds.)
And then say it with words, why not.)
He will take the spare whiteboard! And write, while he says it, again, "I am a shipwrecked miner requesting assistance and sanctuary!" (He does not actually know if the laws of all nations cover this. New Planet may not know them, depending on just when their branch diverged from the tree of humanity.)
(His computer assumed they were not humans based on their communications patterns and then he SAW them and his computer was clearly broken even before he KNEW it was broken.)
"We will be happy to help you! Would you come this way?" They wave him away from the wreckage.
Okay, the actual answer to that is NO, because when that happens they will steal all his replicator-factories. How does he say NO reasonably -
"I cannot safely be separated from my ship."
That's... not quite bullshit? He is, in fact, doing a lot of double-checking that nothing on his ship is going to EXPLODE, and also supervising its computer running diagnostics on itself, which might be worse than exploding.
"Oh! Are there things we can bring you? Are there ways we can help the ship work again?"
"Yes. [I recognize myself as owing you a large favor]*!"
He is going to give them a Shopping List! The fact that it is (a) theoretically possible to make, and (b) for some purposes worth making, some of the chemical compounds and metallic alloys on his Shopping List is information that will advance Amenta's science greatly, over the long term! It is a very, very, very long shopping list, with occasional markings for 'speculative/unsure' (for instance, he does not actually know how to make a hyperdrive), and he is delivering it by open radio broadcast. If they actually CAN just fix his ship and he can GO HOME, then this would only be the seventeenth-worst thing that ever happened to him.
(*:Trans: "Thank you.")
"We can try to get those things! It may take some time. Which things do you need soonest? Do you need food? Are you injured in a way we might be able to help with?"
Soonest? Oh, probably more matter for his replicator-factories. That should be fairly easy, all they need is elements in one of these handy-to-break-down-and-recompose forms. After that? "I require some method of getting on to your internet, so I can coordinate more precisely with your people." (Is "internet" translating?)
And he is not injured in any way they can help with. ("Having your body wrecked and needing to build another one using electronic communication with the computer and Sarengha steel" is almost certainly not something they can help with.) Food would technically be good but he has somewhat odd dietary needs, and he won't be able to eat for another day or two. (Don't worry, he doesn't need to eat every day or two.)
(His somewhat odd dietary needs amount to 'sugar-water'.)
They have an Internet! They can get him a spare pocket everything. And have sugar-water on standby whenever he is ready for it. "Can your machine translation let you read our languages?"