Everything Deadlanes does, in one place

What Deadlanes is

Deadlanes is a turn-based, asynchronous space-trading MMO you play in about ten minutes a day. One shared galaxy of roughly 2,500 star systems, rebuilt every twelve-week season. Each night you receive a batch of turns (⚡) and you spend them warping, trading, mining, building, scouting and fighting. When they run out you are mostly done until the nightly refill — and the galaxy keeps running without you. Your extractors keep filling. Your ships keep your standing orders. Your territory keeps being worth taking.

Above all of that there is a war. Two alien powers — the Vael and the Llethe — hold ground on the map, and a third thing, the Blight, wells up through the dying warp-lanes and is nobody's ally. Every kill, delivery and liberated system you make feeds a galaxy-wide front that every player moves together, or loses together.

The five design pillars

These are the rules the rest of the manual keeps coming back to. If a feature seems odd, one of these usually explains it.

The features that get lost in a short pitch

Ten minutes a day is the hook, but the depth is in systems that never fit on a store page. Start with these if you only read six things.

How to read the status chips

Every feature in this manual carries one chip. They were set by checking the design against the server code that runs the beta, not by aspiration. Where a feature is Partial, the amber Not in the beta yet line says exactly what is missing.

The sidebar filter Hide features not in the beta yet removes every Planned feature from the page, and the last chapter, Not in the beta yet, collects every Partial and Planned item in one list. Almost every number in this manual is a current beta value that will move with balance passes; the shapes — the ladders, gates and caps — are settled.

The beta, right now

The current wave runs on a freshly regenerated galaxy — new lanes, new deposits, nobody holding anything — so long-time testers start where new ones do. A galaxy-wide reset remains possible during the beta and will always be announced first. The self-serve DEV menu is off by default and enabled per account on request. Aurum, the premium currency, is granted by the team in the beta; real-money purchase is not switched on.

What we most want you to try: run the tutorial to REPORT IN; get attacked while offline and read the Overnight Report; join or start a guild and check a ship out of the motor pool; push one front through CONTRACTS → FRONT MISSIONS; take a mount to a size-3 port and merge it; retune a piece at the OPTIMIZE bench; and go find something weird — a Wright ruin, a Seal-beast, a system that reads JAMMED.

Known rough edges, stated openly: partial art and audio with placeholder assets; push quiet hours run on UTC, not your local time; balance is actively being tuned, and deployable and territory numbers in particular are deliberately unbalanced pending a pass. Bugs go to the form pinned in #bug-reports on Discord (thirty seconds, with build number and device); balance and "this felt bad" go to #feedback.

How this manual is organised

Chapters run in the order a new commander meets the systems: your day and the first hour, then the map you fly in, then the ship, its gear, and how it fights; then the things you leave standing in space, the war above them, the seasons that reset it all, and the guild that outlives the reset. Economy, progression and a glossary close it out. Every chapter is self-contained and cross-linked, so skipping straight to Ships & Fitting or Guilds & Endgame is fine. Press / to search from anywhere.

The shape of a day Live

A day in Deadlanes has the same four beats every time. You open the app and read the Overnight Report — what attacked you, what your hardware earned, how the market and the war moved. You spend your turns: warp, trade, mine, deploy hardware, collect from it, take contracts, fight. You set your standing orders — your ship's gambit stack, the posture of your deployables, your market orders, your guild contribution. Then you close the app, and the world keeps moving: NPC traders, pirates and alien fleets act, other players act, and your defenses and extractors work the night shift.

1. Open — the Overnight Report is the first screen of every session.
2. Spend — turns are the only thing that touches the world, and they are built to be spent fast.
3. Set orders — doctrine, postures, offers. This is what fights and earns for you while you sleep.
4. Close — the galaxy runs without you. Tomorrow's report is the receipt.

Turns (⚡) Live

Turns are your daily action budget. Every action that changes the world — a warp, a trade, an extraction, a deployment, a hand-in — spends them. Every night at the galaxy's tick you receive a fresh batch, up to a bank cap; if you are already at the cap, the refill is lost. Nothing in the game sells turns: not credits, not Aurum. The cap is deliberate and unbuyable.

Because the bank holds two days, skipping one day costs you nothing. Skipping three costs you a night's refill. The rhythm is an appointment, not a timer to babysit.

The 10/60 split

Turns are spendable in about ten minutes. Everything around turns is free and rewards as much time as you want to give it: reading the station boards, fitting your ships in FLEET, tuning your doctrine in GAMBITS, scouting the chart and the war map, guild talk, pricing your orders. An hour-a-day player out-plans a ten-minute player. They can never out-volume them.

The async contract Live

These are the promises the game makes about your time. They are hard rules, not intentions.

• Nothing you do waits on another player. All PvP is attacker versus standing defense: you attack a ship, a piece of hardware or a citadel, and the same combat math resolves it whether the owner is online or asleep. An offline defender is flown by their own gambit stack — see the gambit stack.
• Live combat is opportunistic, never required. If a fight goes quiet, your standing orders play. Being away from the screen is treated exactly like being asleep. There is no matchmaking and no queue.
• Plans, not schedules. Raids and sieges run in windows measured in hours, in waves, or with ships donated to one commander — never "everyone log in at nine."
• The AI keeps the world alive. NPC traders, pirates and alien fleets generate traffic and threat at any population. A galaxy with ten players in it still has convoys to raid and fronts to fight.
• Notifications are content. Every push carries real information about your assets or the war, or it is not sent.
• One universe. Everyone plays in the same galaxy. Friends join it and form a guild.

What brings you back Live

The game's hooks are all information or reward, never pressure. The nightly refill of 150 ⚡. Push notifications that only fire on real events — a siege, an attack, a bounty on your head, a picket alarm. The Overnight Report that opens every session. The seven-day streak in the Store's DAILY room. One weekly objective per guild. And the twelve-week season, at the end of which the galaxy resets, power is re-earned, and knowledge carries over — see Seasons.

The free Freighter and the anti-strand guarantee Live

Every new commander is issued a free Level-1 Freighter — the bulk-trade hull — with a full Common starter fit, full shields, a full ammo complement, and 2,000 ₵. It is deliberately the cheapest, slowest, least threatening ship in the game: enough to trade, haul and rebuild from, not enough to make throwing it away a free taxi or a raiding tool.

The same Freighter is your safety net. If you lose your last ship — in combat, to a raid, or by writing it off yourself in FLEET — the game seats you in a fresh Level-1 Freighter, full fit and full ammo, at the season's spawn system in the home zone. There is no fee and no cooldown. A total wipe is a setback, never a dead end.

The home zone Live

You spawn in the human home zone: a protected pocket of the map where PvP is not allowed (patrols intervene), alien factions do not claim ground, and the tutorial plays out. You cannot lose anything that matters while you learn. It is a runway, not a home — the richer materials, the ruins, the stakes and the war are all coreward, and nothing pushes you out until you are ready. See The Galaxy for the zones beyond it.

The tutorial: nine guided firsts Live

The tutorial is not a separate mode. It is a chain of real gameplay actions, each completed by doing the real thing, each narrated by Kerubiel, each paid. Your nav menu reveals itself as you progress. The banner at the top of the screen tells you what to do and where; the chart draws a ring around the target.

What it pays

Graduation unlocks the guild finder. Only a graduate can apply to a guild or accept an invite — see Guilds. The Profile screen carries a SKIP TUTORIAL control if you have played before; skipping forfeits the rewards, and REPLAY TUTORIAL after graduating does not pay twice.

The lesson the whole chain is built around, in Kerubiel's words: hardware works while you're away — and it's vulnerable while you're away. Out here you keep only what you defend.

Kerubiel, your shipboard intelligence Partial

Everything the game tells you — scan results, warp arrivals, zone reads, combat calls, the Overnight Report, tutorial guidance, the words on your lock screen — comes from a persistent companion AI with a name and a voice, not from a HUD. The register is dark, dry humor: a co-pilot with gallows wit who has watched the galaxy try to kill you a hundred ways and finds most of them mildly amusing.

Kerubiel is a degraded fragment of an ancient Wright caretaking intelligence, jury-rigged by humans to run on a ship. The name is the first breadcrumb: Kerubiel is the prince of the four-faced tetramorph — ox, human, lion, eagle. You are offered three faces to fly with. The fourth is sealed. A thing named for four faces that offers only three is meant to read as a deliberate wrongness; keen players are supposed to notice.

The three faces

You choose your face on the PROFILE screen. It is free, it switches instantly, and it persists across seasons like every cosmetic. It never changes what information you are shown or any odds.

The same AI that fights for you

Your Kerubiel is also your gambit-stack captain. It reads your scans and talks to you, and it flies your doctrine — fighting on your behalf while you are offline. Its doctrine (how it fights — the orders you stack in GAMBITS) and its face (how it talks) are separate layers. Swapping the face never changes how it fights; tuning the gambits never changes its banter.

The guardrails

• Information first, never flavorless. Every line carries real content; the humor rides on top of the data in the same breath. You never click through a joke to reach a fact.
• It earns its words. It speaks when something happened — a scan resolved, a warp completed, an attack, a price spike, a siege alert. Never on idle timers, never filler.
• Co-pilot, not mascot. You are the protagonist. It reacts; it never takes over the scene or blocks input to talk.
• It only knows what your scanners know. It can be confident, hedging, or flat wrong — and it never sees through the fog of war. "Reads empty. …I'd probe it first."

Where you hear it

Not in the beta yet: the face you pick is a name and a portrait — the lines themselves do not yet change register between Cassiel, Azrael and Uriel. Also still to come: the faces suggesting a hand-off to a better-suited face, a forced temporary switch in a crisis, the sealed fourth face bleeding through near Wright sites, a Chatty / Standard / Terse verbosity setting, premium voice packs, and the in-voice Season Chronicle after a reset.

Contracts: personal jobs on the SYSTEM tab Live

The CONTRACTS board is the game's "somewhere to go." Almost every contract routes you to a specific system, which is how a galaxy of some 2,500 systems becomes live traffic: contracts create routes, and routes create convoys worth raiding and choke points worth holding. The board has five tabs — ACTIVE, SYSTEM, FRONT MISSIONS, SIEGE and BOUNTY. Sieges and bounties are covered in Guilds & Endgame.

The SYSTEM tab is the local board of the port you are docked at. Every port keeps three open contracts, topped up as they are taken, drawn from templates that fit the zone you are in. Targets are always among the six nearest ports in the same zone that are not Blighted, so a contract pulls you toward appropriate ground rather than across the map. First tap reads a contract; the armed row shows ACCEPT, and later TURN IN or ABANDON. TURN IN lights only when you are physically at the target.

Patrol details worth knowing: the pack is raised when you enter the target system, it is tagged to your contract, and the hand-in requires that you killed all of it. If someone else finishes your pack, or you arrive to an empty system, leave and come back to draw another. Killing the pack can complete the contract on the spot. A finished delivery also credits your guild's weekly haul tally if you are in one.

Numbers in this chapter are current beta values and will move with balance passes.

Front missions: the shared war contracts Live

The FRONT MISSIONS tab lists war contracts: shared objectives with a live, galaxy-wide counter that every player chips at. Every one on the board is tied to one of the active war fronts — there are never more than three — and every hand-in moves that front's meter overnight when the war is scored. See Fronts for how the meter works.

ACCEPT on a front mission pins it into your ACTIVE list and marks it on the chart; UNPIN drops it. Your patrol target is assigned per pilot — the contract is one shared quota, but each commander is sent to their own system inside the front, and your target changes with each hand-in you make. Front missions do not expire and do not count against the daily signing cap. Both pay Reputation on top of credits, and every hand-in puts you on that front's commander and guild contribution boards; a human win pays the top ten.

Blitz pace, private universes and open fleet contracts Planned

Three things in this chapter's territory are designed but not in the beta. Blitz pace — 500 ⚡ a day on a two-week season, as an alternative universe pacing alongside Standard — is a post-launch mode. Private universes for a friend group or community are a post-launch feature; in v1 everyone shares one galaxy. And general fleet contracts — shared objectives that are not tied to a war front, such as a galaxy-wide delivery goal or a named event whose location you have to find — are the broader shape the front-missions tab will grow into; today every shared contract is a front mission.

The DAILY room: the seven-day login bonus Live

The STORE opens on a DAILY tab: seven tiles, one per day of a streak, paying free credits and this season's crafting materials for showing up. It is the one thing in the Store that costs nothing and never touches Aurum. The claim is a two-tap CLAIM at a price of zero.

• One claim per galaxy day. The day rolls at the nightly tick, not at your local midnight.
• A missed day pauses the streak; it never resets it. Claim day 3, vanish for a month, come back — day 4 is waiting.
• Day 7 is the payoff tile, deliberately the big one. After it the cycle starts again at day 1.
• Your streak position carries across seasons.
• Rewards grow 10% per season week, so a week-ten tile is worth meaningfully more than a week-one tile.
• The LOG badge and the STORE nav row light while a claim is available and clear the moment you take it.
• The claim refuses, without burning the day, if your hold is full.

Day 7 is three times the last rung of each lane — three times day 6's credits, three times day 5's material count, one tier up. The material lane is sparse on purpose: a material every day would be a second mine with no turn cost, so the materials are the reason to keep the streak rather than wallpaper on it. The room will never pay turns, Aurum, blueprints, Reputation, XP or cosmetics; credits and materials are the only two lanes.

The Overnight Report Live

The first screen of every session. On the left: WHILE YOU WERE GONE — DAY N, Kerubiel's one-line take on the night, your numbers, and the launch buttons — REJOIN THE FIGHT and HANGAR, or BEGIN if you are mid-tutorial. On the right: what happened, grouped and icon-led.

A quiet night says so: "A quiet night on the lanes. Nothing tried to kill you. Statistically unusual." Any line drills into the matching tab of the LOG — ALL, DEFENSE, INTEL, ECONOMY, WAR, OPS — which keeps the fuller history, including the war feed. The report is assembled by the nightly tick in a fixed order — turns first, then markets, NPC traffic and faction moves, the war scoring pass, then your hardware, contract expiry, picket alarms, and finally the fleet summary — so every line reflects the night that actually happened.

The season pass lists a "richer overnight reports" perk; it does not change the report in this build. Likewise, the design's three-day turn bank for pass holders is not in the build — everyone banks to 300 ⚡.

Push notifications Live

Allow notifications on first launch and your device registers for pushes on both platforms. The rule is simple: every push carries real information, or it is not sent. There are three live lanes and one nightly digest.

The digest is one line — "Day 41: 2 defense events · your hardware paid out · the front moved. Your turns are banked." — or "a quiet night" when nothing happened. It leads with defense if there was any.

Quiet hours in your local time are on the list; for now they are UTC, so flag it if that lands badly for you.

The galaxy at a glance Live

Every season the server generates one shared galaxy of around 2,500 star systems. It is a graph, not a grid: systems connect through lanes, and lanes form tunnels, dead ends, chokepoints and the occasional one-way warp. Where a system sits — which chokepoint guards it, how close it is to the core, which way the rim lies — is half of its value. You read all of it on the CHART.

The map has three kinds of ground:

Two gradients run in opposite directions. Danger rises toward the core; churn — cut-off risk — rises toward the rim. The core kills but never strands you. The rim is quiet but will maroon you.

System names tell you where you are: C- is the core, H- the human home zone, V- and L- the Vael and Llethe homelands, F- the frontier. Ports carry names of their own (see What a system is).

Lanes and churn Live

Systems are permanent and carry history. The lanes between them are the unstable layer. Every lane has a live churn reading from 0 to 100%: low is stable, rising means the lane is failing, and 100% is collapsed — impassable to you, open to the Blight. From inside any system, every outbound lane shows its current churn on the CHART. Read the numbers; there are no fixed safe/unsafe bands.

Churn is connectivity risk, not danger. The most dangerous ground (the core) is the most stable; the safest-looking ground (the rim) is the first to die.

The map constricts over the season. Every night, rim lanes drift upward in churn — faster as the weeks pass, faster near Blight epicentres — while home-zone lanes never rise above 25% and core lanes barely move. As the season goes on, the outer reaches die and the live map tightens inward toward the core, funnelling everyone together. Home zones stay fixed. A plotted route stops dead at the first collapsed lane and charges you only for the legs you flew.

Natural wormholes Partial

A handful of natural wormholes — three to six per season — run straight from the outer frontier into the core, skipping the anchors. Each is a one-way lane born at high churn (60–90%) and subject to the same nightly drift as any other lane, so a wormhole is discovery intel and a strategic asset with a shelf life. Find one, and you have a back door into the richest ground on the map until the Blight closes it.

Not in the beta yet: the CHART does not draw a wormhole marker or call one out. You find a natural wormhole by noticing an improbably long one-way lane from the rim into the core.

Clusters and fronts Live

The galaxy is divided into roughly twenty named clusters — contiguous regions of sixty-plus systems: the home clusters, the core cluster(s), and the frontier clusters. Clusters are the unit of the war: at any time up to three of them are lit as fronts, and a front is the only ground where fighting the Vael and Llethe actually scores. The WAR → FRONTS view draws every cluster as one region — an empty outline is quiet ground, gold is a live front, colour means someone is winning or has won it.

How fronts open, score, and close is covered in The Galactic War. This chapter only establishes what a cluster is: the region of the map a front burns in.

The sector grid and sector quality Live

Over the whole galaxy sits a designation grid — columns A through N, rows 1 through 8, 112 squares on the current season, each holding 10–29 systems. A square is a sector, and it is the unit of territory: guilds and alien factions hold sectors, never individual systems. Every system's grid reference (F3, say) sits on its panel, and WAR → GRID is the square-by-square map of who holds what. Holding is covered in Territory.

Each sector also rolls a quality at generation, on a fixed bell across the claimable board. Home sectors do not roll. Quality changes what the ground is worth in two ways:

• It shifts the odds of richer deposits. A RICH square on the distant frontier rolls three-star deposits about as often as ground just outside the core; a POOR square rolls almost none.
• A RICH square reads one rung higher on the deposit ladder, so it can host deposit types its threat band normally could not. This only goes up, and it never reaches the core's own rung — poor ground is punished through richness alone.

Movement: knowledge-priced warp Live

Warping is the main thing you spend ⚡ on, and the price depends on what you know, not just where you are going. Exploring is expensive; running charted space is cheap; your hull decides how cheap. Single-tap a system on the CHART to select it, double-tap to warp.

Per-hull mobility factor

This is the cost of one lane into known space. It is the Scout's whole profession and the reason a Freighter on a charted loop stays profitable.

Turns stay whole — plot routes

Your ⚡ ledger is always a whole number, so discounts only pay off when you plot a route: double-tap a distant system and the whole route runs as one action. Each known leg contributes its fractional cost, each unknown leg its full floor, and the total rounds up once at the end (minimum 1⚡). If the route is interrupted — an interception, a hostile interdictor, a collapsed lane — you pay the round-up of the legs you actually flew. A Scout making four single taps through known space pays 4⚡; the same four hops plotted as one route cost 1⚡. The CHART shows the route's cost before you commit.

Squadrons

A squadron moves at the cost of its slowest ship: the worst mobility factor in the formation, and if any hull is large, the 2⚡ unknown floor applies to everyone. See Squadrons.

Scanner components — knowledge as speed

• Survey Suite (a utility component): on arrival in any system it automatically free-scans every adjacent system. Any hull with one becomes a slow surveyor, and everything it reveals is now cheap to enter.
• Nav Computer (a utility component): −15% on the known-space cost per fitted unit, compounding, never below half price. It never discounts the unknown floor — exploring blind is priced by ignorance, not hardware.

NPC traffic obeys the same physics: merchant convoys on charted routes are as cheap for them as they are for you.

What a system is Live

A system is a permanent node that stacks features. Each feature is independent with its own level, so two systems that look alike can be worth wildly different amounts. One system can be a nebula holding a three-star Void Steel vein with an Industrial port, a guild Fortress and a fighter garrison — all at once.

Intrinsic features — rolled at generation, permanent

Dynamic features — placed or changed in play

Everything intrinsic is revealed by survey — prospecting is gameplay — and read through the intel ladder: an unknown system shows ? for its ground truth, a jammed one goes dark, a spoofed one lies.

Generation rules you can rely on

• Wright ruins never share a system with a port. A ruin is wild ground; you bring your own infrastructure.
• Ports cluster in stable, connected space — home zones, low-churn systems, and junctions with three or more lanes. High-churn frontier and alien homelands rarely have one.
• Home zones carry no hazards, no Blight, and nothing above the Common deposit tier.
• Singularity anomalies are capped at three per galaxy, and only in the core or an alien homeland.

Ports have names

Ports carry generated, region-flavoured names — Halden's Reach, Port Vasko, Okonkwo's Landing in stable space; …'s Folly, … Scrapline, … Ditch out on the rim — so "meet me at Halden's Reach" means something. Citadels are named by the guild that raises them, which is why a Fortress becomes a landmark and why tearing one down is personal.

Threat bands Live

Every system carries a threat band from 0 to 4, fixed at generation from one ratio: how far you are from the nearest human home system against how far you are from the nearest hostile anchor — the core, an alien homeland, or a Blight epicentre. Because it is a ratio, it grades a sprawling galaxy and a compact one the same way.

One number, three consumers: which deposits may roll here, how good the NPCs' gear is, and how dense the NPCs are. The band is a floor, not the whole difficulty curve — over the twelve weeks the escalation comes from the aliens' expanding claims and from enemy formations growing in ship count, not from the rocks moving.

The deposit ladder Live

Ten deposit types exist. Each yields one base material and, at richness ★★ or ★★★, a chance per extraction of the next tier up. The threat band decides which tier can appear at all.

Read it as a ladder: band 0 Common only · 1 Common and Rare · 2 Rare only · 3 Rare and Epic · 4 Epic and Legendary. Two things are deliberate. No Common deposit exists at band 2 or above — a starter vein in the core would be a disappointment, not a reward. And band 3 keeps Rare in its pool, so Epic there is a push; it only becomes reproducible at band 4. There is no Uncommon rung: Tritanite, Biogel and Deuterium arrive only as the side-roll from a rich Common node.

Richness multiplies the yield and sets the side-roll odds. It is biased coreward, up in alien homelands, and up or down by the sector's quality. The stars show on the deposit badge. An ion storm system that can host the Plasma Core deposit gets it attached to the storm itself — the hazard and the deposit are one thing.

Hand extraction Live

Standing on a deposit, tap the deposit badge twice to EXTRACT. It costs 10⚡ and puts richness × 2 to 4 units of the deposit's material into your active hull's hold, plus the rare side-roll at ★★ or ★★★. A held sector adds 25%. It is the manual version of the Extraction Node: the tutorial has Kerubiel point out how wasteful it is, and then you deploy an extractor and let it work while you sleep.

Environments Partial

An environment changes the rules inside a system. Its glyph sits on the system panel; tap it for the effect.

Not in the beta yet: the asteroid field's mining-rate bonus and its accuracy penalty for large weapons; a gravity well forcing ships passing through to stop (it only blocks disengaging once a fight starts); radiation biting per turn spent in-system rather than per combat round; and minor/major intensity, which is rolled but has no separate effect.

Trade and port types Live

Ports buy and sell materials. The Common tier — Alloy, Organics, He-3 — is both the bulk trade good and the crafting feedstock, one item system. Every port is tagged a type at generation that sets its standing buy/sell bias, so routes are learnable patterns rather than noise; prices then drift with player and NPC volume on top. Port pairs create routes, routes create traffic, traffic creates ambush points.

Type follows the system: a deposit system tends to get an Extraction port, a biotic world an Agricultural one, the core Military / Hub / Industrial, the human home zone Industrial / Agricultural / Hub, the rim Free Port or Extraction. Ports also rack materials by tier — home ports sell Common, frontier ports sometimes Uncommon, core ports Uncommon or Rare — and their stock is finite and re-rolls daily, deep only at size 3. Prices, racks, the contraband lane and customs sweeps are covered in Economy & Store.

Facilities and services by tier Partial

Ports and citadels are the infrastructure that lets you do things — and, crucially, where ships are bought, built and modified, and where the player market lives. Both gate services by level: port size 1–3, citadel tier 1–3. Higher tier, more services, which is a big part of why a size-3 hub or a guild Fortress is a strategic prize.

A port of the right size offers every service at that level automatically — it is public infrastructure. A citadel is meant to offer nothing until the guild has crafted and installed the matching facility component; today the Guild Workshop is the one that exists. So the ship lifecycle has clear homes: buy at a shipyard, refit at a port (basic install anywhere size 1+, slot switches at 2+, merges at 3), craft at a size-2+ workshop or your guild's Workshop, repair anywhere. You must physically haul goods to an Exchange to list them — the trip is raidable — and delivery of what you buy is distance-gated. Home-zone ports are big and safe, so a new commander reaches the full service set without leaving the nursery. Fitting itself is covered in Ships & Fitting.

Not in the beta yet: citadel fitting-bay, slot-switch, merge-rig and shipyard facility components (only the Guild Workshop exists, so refits happen at ports); brokerage — standing buy/sell orders and courier or escort contracts — at size-3 ports.

Wright sites and digs Live

Scattered through the galaxy — concentrated in the core — are Wright sites: ruins of the civilisation that built the Lattice. Each sits in a specific permanent system and comes in three tiers, named in the Wright register: tier-1 caches (Vigil, Lauds, Compline, Shrine…), tier-2 ruins (Watchtower, Reliquary, Cloister, Sepulchre…), tier-3 marquee sites (Merkavah, Ophanim, Sanctum, Ark, Grigori, Thrones, Dominions), each with a Hebrew letter — Watchtower Gimel. Only tier-1 caches roll outside the core; the ruins and marquee sites are core ground.

Sites pay three things: story (the Wright and Blight mystery, doled out across seasons), blueprints (sometimes the only source for a recipe, including Elite set patterns), and resources (premium materials and Relic Tech).

Discovery

The first commander to reach a site in a season is announced by name in the galaxy log — permanent credit — and earns 25 Reputation. Discovery pays standing, never power; the dig is what pays gear.

Staking a dig

Standing at a site, STAKE a dig for 5⚡. It appears in your SITES tracker, and in your guild's. A dig is a non-combat structure: it cannot shoot and is never dragged into a fight started against a friend, but attacking it pulls in every hull standing with it.

Three phases: breach, excavate, recover

Excavation works exactly like citadel construction, for the same anti-rush reason. Every site has three phases, and each one goes the same way:

1. DELIVER the phase's typed material bill. It scales with tier — a tier-1 breach wants 40 Alloy and 20 He-3; a tier-3 recover wants 300 Void Steel and 40 Singularity Cores.
2. Once the bill is met, START the phase's public real-time window — 8 hours at tier 1, 24 at tier 2, 48 at tier 3 — during which the dig is exposed and must be defended.
3. When the window elapses the phase reads ready to clear, and someone standing at the site takes the payout with CLEAR.

The pile you delivered is not spent at START. It stands on the site for the whole window and is only consumed at CLEAR — which is what makes the window an invitation, not a safe wait. CANCEL stands the window down; the pile stays.

Story fragments never repeat for you, and deeper sites unlock deeper fragments. What they say is deliberately unsettling: the Lattice had older builders than the Wrights; the help has always been the lure; the archive is numbered by iteration; a fourth of something is missing.

Losing a dig

A dig site has a hull pool of 600 / 1,200 / 1,800 by tier. If raiders crack it, phases already cleared stay cleared, half the standing pile spills into a spoils cache, and the claim opens — the next crew stakes the same site where it stands. It is a race over the site, not a reset.

The fuzzy circle

A staked dig is a public map event: everyone sees a broad circle on the CHART with the phase clock, but not the exact system for free. Better intel narrows it — see The map-event fog. Jam and build in nebulae to keep your circle wide. Digs are season-scoped: an unfinished dig does not carry to the next season.

The intel ladder Live

Every system broadcasts what its strongest hostile jammer wants it to, and every viewer resolves that against their fitted scanner. Three outcomes:

1. Scanner wins clearly → truth. Your effective scan beats the jammer's tier by at least 1: deposits, port, hardware, contacts — all real.
2. Contested → JAMMED. Neither side wins clearly. The CHART honestly tells you the system is lying to you: name, position and who holds the ground still read, but deposits, port stock, prices and sites go dark. A known unknown — information, and an invitation.
3. Jammer wins clearly → spoof. Only a tier-3 jammer can spoof, and only when it beats your effective scan by 2 or more. You see an owner-authored lie with no tell. The owner picks the story: EMPTY, FALSE PORT, LONE HAULER, DECOY FLEET, VAEL PATROL, LLETHE SWARM or BLIGHT.

Ownership is never on this ladder. Who holds a sector reads through JAMMED, through a spoof, and on ground you have never flown to. A jammer can lie about what is standing in a system, never about whose ground it is.

Physical probing always reveals ground truth

Warping in beats any remote lie — a cheap Scout is the answer to an expensive spoof; it just may not come back. The one wrinkle is built-in cloaking: a tier-2 or tier-3 Recon Picket or Extraction Node stays invisible even to a ship in the same system until you spend a SCAN on the system you are standing in (1⚡), and the reveal lasts only while you stay there that day. The sweep is scanner-gated: a tier-2 cloak needs effective scan 2 or better, a tier-3 needs 3; a bare hull with scan 0 reveals nothing. A sweep that cannot break everything tells you how many returns it could not resolve — the turn always buys information, even when the information is "bring a better scanner".

Nebulae subtract 2 from your effective scan for everything above, which makes a nebula the best place in the galaxy to hide hardware without a single special rule.

Remote scanning

SCAN on another system costs 1⚡ and reaches as many lane-hops as your scan stat (minimum 1). It stamps the system as known — which unlocks the warp discount — and records port prices if the scan resolves to truth. Contacts are graded by scan tier: at 1 you read a ship's class, at 2 its exact hull, at 3 an NPC's armament. Player fits never read remotely. Your own and your guild's jammers never jam you.

The map-event fog Live

Big timed events — a citadel under construction, a dig in progress, a waking boss, a Blight incursion, a posted bounty — each broadcast a circle on the CHART to everyone: something major is happening near here, with the public clock, but without the exact system for free. Your own and your guild's events are always pinned for you. With enough intel the circle pins to the exact system.

It is a two-sided race. Attackers scan and probe to find the dig or build inside its timer; the owning guild runs jammers and builds in nebulae to keep its circle wide and its clock quiet.

Churn phase bands Live

Deadlanes is one galaxy, one economy, one war — but as the population grows, the map quietly sorts commanders into churn phase bands. Two ships in the same system a phase apart pass unseen. Kerubiel remarks on the drift; you are never shown which band you are in, and there is no verb to change it.

• Everything that matters is shared. Sectors, control, fronts, meters, ladders, ports, prices, stock, citadels, Wright sites, bosses, guilds, leaderboards and deposits are one world. Kills in any band feed the one war.
• Only transient presence is banded: other commanders' ships, ambient NPC spawns, and personal hardware (mines, pickets, extractors, jammers). Extractors on the same vein in different bands each fill their own hopper, and the three-pieces-per-system cap counts across all bands.
• Four things pierce the bands, and only four. Every system inside an active front shows every band, so war zones are crowded by design. A bountied commander is visible and attackable from every band. Whoever attacked you stays visible to you. A citadel's whole standing defence assembles against any attacker, whatever band its owners stand in.
• Guilds are never split. Guildmates always share a band. Assignment happens overnight, sticks night to night, and balances evenly.

At beta population there is exactly one band, so none of this is visible yet. It exists so the galaxy can grow without the core turning into a traffic jam — except at the fronts, where crowding is the point.

Extraction Nodes Partial

An Extraction Node placed on a deposit produces every day into a local hopper. The yield is typed by the system's deposit, multiplied by richness and by any held-sector or won-cluster bonus, and it stops when the hopper is full. Someone must fly the collection run: COLLECT at the node moves the pile into your active hull's hold, capacity-bounded — what does not fit stays in the hopper. Nodes decay a little every day without resupply and wear a little with each use.

Uncollected wealth sits in space, scannable. A cloaked T2 or T3 node is invisible even to ships in the system until swept with a good enough scanner — and counts for nothing toward control, the trade for staying hidden. Two archetypes bracket the game: the guild industrial heartland — a rich cluster behind a chokepoint, asteroid cover, a citadel anchor, scheduled collection convoys, what sieges are economically about — and the wildcat claim — one Epic extractor on a core vein, in a nebula, behind a spoofing jammer, cloaked, visited quietly once a week. Hide your money and pray. Claim-jumping is a profession. The wider deployable roster is in Territory.

Not in the beta yet: draining a hostile hopper without destroying the node — the quiet-theft option. Today a raider's choice is to fight the node (and everything standing with it) or leave it.

Churn and stabilization Planned

Acting on churn — rather than just reading it — is designed but not in the build. The intent is three tools. Stabilize a lane: spend resources to drive its churn down and hold a closing tunnel open; expensive, temporary, and it draws the Blight toward you. Relic Tech stabilizes deeper and longer than raw materials — half of why core sites are worth dying for. Reclamation: force a collapsed lane briefly open for a rescue into the boneyard, pulling a marooned citadel or half-dug site back into reach.

Today churn is something you read and route around. The Lane Stabilizer deployable is in the catalog but deferred, and Relic Tech is spent only on Elite set crafting.

The Artificial Wormhole Live

A craftable, deployable door. Place one in a system; tap it, pick a destination from your network — every other living wormhole you own — and your ship is there.

• Traversal costs 0⚡. That is the whole point of building it.
• Anyone can use it, including your enemies. A free two-way door you cannot lock is a liability until you garrison and mine the system it stands in — it is the one piece that generates demand for the rest of the roster.
• Arriving through it is arriving. Mines detonate, pickets alarm, fog reveals, a garrison with orders can open a fight — so mines at your own far mouth kill whatever follows you through.
• A hostile Interdictor Array still holds you. A door is a departure; the throat will not open while an enemy interdictor lives in the system you are standing in. An attacker who came through your wormhole into your interdicted system is in the cage, not out of it.
• It only collapses when destroyed. Each traversal wears it, on top of daily decay, so a public shortcut is a maintenance commitment.
• Craft-only, never bought, and it counts toward sector control like any visible piece.

Numbers in this chapter are current beta values and will move with balance passes.

The hull roster Live

You are a commander, not a hull. You fly one active ship at a time, and every ship you own is a hull — a chassis with a fixed set of component mounts — plus whatever you have bolted into it. There are ten human hulls, each built for one way of fighting or earning. The combat hulls map one-to-one onto the game's rock-paper-scissors poles (see the counter web), so the roster is the combat triangle. Your Commander Level licenses which hulls you may fly, whether you own the ship or borrow it from the guild motor pool; there is no way around the license.

Mount letters: W Weapon ⚔ · D Defense ⛨ · C Cargo ▣ · U Utility ◈ · H Hangar ✈. Sizes run S / M / L / X. A sixth mount type, Structure ⬡, exists only on citadels.

• The Freighter is the only CL-1 hull. It is the universal entry point and the anti-strand kit: lose your last ship and you get a fresh one for free. The Scout is deliberately not a beginner hull — its speed-and-dodge profile is a specialist playstyle, so it sits at CL 8 beside the Raider.
• Bulwark and Gunship are CL-18 sidegrades: same power budget, opposite allocation. The Bulwark trades the Gunship's alpha strike for the roster's highest hull HP.
• The Carrier is the only hull with Hangar mounts. Anything else that wants fighters has to switch a mount to H (see switching).
• The Warden is the only hull with a large Utility mount — a hull-defining big sensor or jammer.
• Hull stats are floors, not the point. Most hull evasion values are 0 because dodge in combat comes from weapon-size mismatch, not from a chassis number; the Scout's 11 and Raider's 6 are identity markers. Components are where the power lives.
• Mobility is the per-leg ⚡ factor for warping through known space (lower is cheaper). A Scout at 0.25 moves for a quarter of what a Carrier pays, and the Carrier is the one "large" hull that pays a 2⚡ floor into unknown space. Nav computers discount known-space mobility by 15% each, floored at half.
• The yard price is the Lv-1 price including a full Common fit and a full ammo complement — a hull off the rack is playable the moment you buy it. Real rack prices vary: each unit's fit rarity is rolled on the region's loot table, and station pricing rises or falls with who controls the sector.

What each frame carries before any component

Every hull carries a baseline torpedo stock even without a launcher — backup rounds you still need a launcher to fire. Each fitted launcher adds +2 to the magazine. The Arbalest is the only hull that fires a two-round salvo. A bare Carrier launches fighters like anyone else; its swarm identity lives in the bays you fit, not the frame.

Hull levels (Lv 1–3) Live

Every hull comes in three levels. Level is the chassis grade: it scales the hull's base stats and raises the maximum component rarity the hull can mount. It never changes the hull's role, mount count, mount types or mount sizes. A Lv-3 Gunship is the same ship, built better.

• Core stats are the ones that match the hull's job — the Gunship's damage and crit, the Bulwark's defense and hull, the Freighter's capacity. Levelling sharpens a hull toward what it already does rather than flattening the roster.
• Legendary components need a Lv-3 hull. This is the one firm rule. A Lv-1 hull refuses an Epic piece at the bench.
• You level in place. The ship you have fitted and flown is the one that levels up. A refit is a workshop job: it occupies one of your personal craft slots, takes a materials bill and the credit difference between the two levels, and runs a timer that ticks down as you spend ⚡ (Aurum can rush it like any other craft). Your layout, switches, merges and fitted pieces carry through untouched. The hull is not locked while it is on the slipway.

The refit bill

One refit per hull at a time. The free starter Freighter cannot be refitted, and neither can a hero or captured alien hull. Note that fresh shipyard stock is always Lv 1: a Lv-2 or Lv-3 unit only appears on a rack when another player sells one there, and only at a yard big enough to sell it. The refit is the real road to Lv 2 and 3.

How a ship's stats work Live

Every component you fit feeds one ship-wide stat sheet. A component's core benefit — a laser's damage, a shield array's shields, a pod's cargo — is fixed by what it is, then multiplied by its rarity and its mount size. The same size table scales a component's crafting bill, so an X-class piece costs five times an M-class piece to build and delivers five times the base stat. That ×5 is why the merge ladder matters so much.

Bonus rolls

On top of its base, every non-factory component rolls bonus stats from one pool of seven. Each roll is a fixed flat amount — never a percentage of the ship it sits on — scaled by a hidden band. A roll feeds the ship, not the piece: a damage roll on a cargo pod adds the same flat weapon damage as one on a gun, spread across every gun you carry. No roll is wasted. Stack ⚔ rolls on every Freighter mount and its lone laser carries all of it.

A Common shield roll lands around +48 to +53 shields; a Legendary one around +69 to +78. Bands overlap, so a top-roll Rare beats a lazy Epic.

What rarity is worth

Because rarity buys both a higher base multiplier and more rolls, the jump between tiers is steep at the top: relative to an average Rare slot, a Legendary slot is worth about 1.8× and a Common about 0.4×. Elite gear is worth roughly one to one-and-a-half hull classes, never more. Hull choice outweighs gear: a small hull's few mounts cap how far gear can carry it. A maxed Scout cannot out-stat a mid-line warship; it has to win on its pole.

Each component also has exactly one player-designated tunable roll you can re-roll at a workshop bench for escalating materials — a new stat and a new magnitude each time, the other rolls untouched. The full rules are under retuning.

One naming note: the ⛨ stat is Shield. The D mount is Defense — the broad family that also holds hull plating, point-defence and ECM. A Defense mount can raise shields, hull, or damage resistance; damage resistance is a set-bonus-only layer that never rolls on a component.

The fitting bench Partial

Open a ship in FLEET → FITTING while you are docked. Every mount on the hull is a tile showing its type letter and size. Tap a piece in your hold to seat it, tap a fitted piece twice to SCRAP it, and the modify rail on each empty mount offers SWITCH (change its type), MERGE (fuse it with a partner mount), and on a merged mount SPLIT. Fitting happens where the ship is — your active hull is wherever you are, and a parked hull must be in the system you are standing in. The component can come from any of your holds parked in that system; installing hops it aboard. A blighted station is dark for all of this.

Not in the beta yet: citadel fitting bays. The design has basic fitting at any tier-1+ citadel and switching at tier 2+; in the build, installing, scrapping, switching and merging all check the port's size only. Refits and re-tunes already honour a friendly citadel.

Switching a mount's type Live

Every mount runs components of its printed type at full effect. SWITCH changes a mount to any other type — W, D, C, U or H — at the same size, for 2,000₵ at a size-2+ port. A switched mount runs at ×0.833: roughly a 17% tax on every base stat of whatever sits in it. Yes, you can give any hull a hangar. Scans show hull class, not fit, so the decoy Freighter with hangars where its cargo bays should be is a build, not an exploit.

• Switching destroys whatever is fitted in the mount, with no salvage. SCRAP the piece first — that pays back 25% of its materials — and then switch. Switching an occupied mount throws the piece away for nothing.
• It is reversible. Switching a mount back to its stock type (RESTORE, same fee) clears the tax entirely.
• Size never changes. A C-S becomes a W-S, never a W-M. Growing a mount is what merging is for.
• A switched mount counts as its new type for merging. Two C-S mounts switched to W read as W-S and can merge into a W-M — but the tax rides along (see below).

The tax exists so a mount-rich economic frame cannot simply out-gun a warship by switching everything to weapons. A repurposed Freighter pays the tax on every switched gun's damage, and four small switched bays deliver a fraction of two large native weapon mounts regardless — fully weaponised at Legendary, a Freighter rates 69 against a Gunship's 201.

Merging mounts — the ladder to X Live

Any two empty mounts of the same effective type and size forge into one mount a size larger, for 4,000₵ a step at a size-3 port: 2 × W-S → 1 × W-M · 2 × W-M → 1 × W-L · 2 × W-L → 1 × W-X. X is the top of the ladder — nothing merges above it — and no hull ships with an X mount. Merging is the only way to create one, which is what makes the Lance Railgun (the alpha pole's signature X-class weapon) fittable at all. An X mount holds an X component, and an X component delivers five times the base stat of an M.

The rules

• Both mounts must be empty. Scrap or move the pieces first; scrapping is destructive, so plan the order.
• Same effective type and size. "Effective" means after any switches — two cargo bays switched to W count as W mounts.
• Merges nest. A merged W-L can merge with another W-L, native or merged, into a W-X. A Raider's four W-M mounts can become two W-L, or one W-X and no other weapon mount at all.
• The absorbed mount goes inert. It shows on the fitting screen as part of the merged mount until you split it back.
• Switch penalties carry through, multiplied. A merged mount's efficiency is the product of its parents': native + native = 1.0 · switched + native ≈ 0.833 · switched + switched ≈ 0.694. Merge two 0.694 mounts and the result is ≈ 0.48. Switch a merged mount afterwards and it takes another ×0.833. You can build toward any big mount you want, but every switch along the way is paid forever — until you split and restore.
• SPLIT unwinds exactly one step at the same 4,000₵. Both parents come back precisely as they were: their switches, their own nested merges, their carried penalties. The merged mount must be empty.
• Fees are credits only, and every step is a two-tap confirm on the tile, which shows the fee and the resulting mount before you commit.

Worked example: the shortest road to the Lance

Buy a Gunship (CL 18, 42,800₵ at Lv 1). Fly to a size-3 port. Scrap or move the two weapons in its native W-L mounts, then MERGE them: one step, 4,000₵, and you have a native W-X at full ×1.0 efficiency — the cheapest X in the roster, priced by path rather than permission. Craft or buy a Lance Railgun (an X piece costs ×5 materials to build) and seat it. The Gunship's remaining W-M takes a backup gun. Total mount work: 4,000₵. Want to undo it later? SPLIT for 4,000₵ and both W-L mounts return.

Worked example: a Freighter that is not a Freighter

Start with the stock layout: W-S · D-M · C-S ×4 · U-M. At a size-2 port, SCRAP the four cargo pods (25% of their materials back), then SWITCH all four C-S mounts to W: 4 × 2,000₵ = 8,000₵. Fly to a size-3 port. MERGE two of the new W-S mounts into a W-M, and the other two into a second W-M: 2 × 4,000₵. Then MERGE those two W-Ms into a W-L: another 4,000₵. You now have a W-L plus the native W-S, for 20,000₵ of mount work on a 7,100₵ hull — a ship whose scan reads "Freighter" and whose sheet reads "gunboat".

Now the tax. Each switched W-S runs at ×0.833. Each W-M forged from two of them runs at ×0.694. The W-L forged from those two runs at 0.694 × 0.694 ≈ ×0.48 — less than half the punch of a Gunship's native W-L. Cheaper than a Gunship, nowhere near as good, and unmistakably yours. The lesson: the strongest merged mounts are built from native mounts of the type you want, and a switch early in the ladder is paid at every rung above it.

Numbers in this chapter are current beta values and will move with balance passes; the shapes — the ladder, the gates, the rarity caps — are firm.

Your layout is yours Live

Three rules that follow from the bench, and that the game commits to.

• Under-slotting works. A smaller component fits a bigger mount and keeps its own size stats — an M laser in an L mount is still an M laser, and the tradeoff is yours. Bigger into smaller never fits.
• Nothing takes your layout back. Your switches, your merges, which piece sits where, and which mounts you deliberately leave empty are paid, explicit choices. No system-side change — a level refit, a roster retune, a data migration — will silently undo one. A refit carries every mount's state forward, and if a mount ever genuinely ceased to exist the piece in it would be returned to you intact and you would be told. This is written into the project as an invariant, not a preference.
• Installation is commitment. Uninstalling destroys the component for 25% of its materials, the same rate as combat salvage; there is no "take it off intact". Loose components travel as cargo — scannable unless smuggled, and pirateable; component freight is the richest and easiest piracy target in the game. Fitted gear is safer but not untouchable: a rival who beats you can disassemble your hull for a chance at your installed pieces.

The PWR rating Live

Every ship — yours, an NPC's, a hero — carries a single power rating. The FLEET screen shows it as PWR beside the hull name, and the fitting preview shows how a change moves it. The rating reads the ship's stat line: shields, hull HP, fighters, evasion, gun damage per round, torpedo salvo, fighters launched and their damage, shield regen, point-defence, jamming, scan, cloak, pierce, brace, the lane-turns your mobility saves, cargo, and the few non-stat set capstones (surviving a killing blow, a guaranteed first salvo, a shortened Lance cycle). It does not count mounts or rarity — rarity is already inside the stats. It measures overall power, so movement, stealth, recon and cargo all count at deliberately low weight, and damage or crit percentage bonuses multiply the weapon terms rather than standing alone: a damage bonus with no gun to spend it on buys nothing.

• Legendary rates 1.7–2.3× Common on the same hull. Gear tier is the main difficulty dial.
• The Raider rates above its CL-8 gate — four medium weapon mounts on a level-8 hull. Known, and flagged for a balance pass.
• The Arbalest rates below its gate at factory loadout because the factory kit is four pulse lasers and no launchers. Fit torpedoes and it rates as a missile boat should; the rating responds to what you actually fit.
• The Scout stays lowest by design. Its Legendary ceiling sits under a Destroyer's Rare: mount count sets the ceiling. It wins on its pole, not its number.
• A full Elite Adamant set on a Legendary Gunship is worth about ×1.26, measured — sets are priced by what they grant, not a flat bonus.

A rating is not a matchup. Combat is rock-paper-scissors; equal-rated ships can be 90/10. The rating decides how much enemy the game throws at you — NPC packs, squadron budgets and raid bosses are all denominated in it — and never predicts who wins.

Your fleet, your active ship, your location Live

You are your active ship: at any moment you pilot one hull, and that hull's system is where you are — you warp, trade, fight, scan and deploy as it. You can own as many hulls as your license and wallet allow, and each one sits wherever you parked it: a Freighter on a trade loop, a Scout watching a chokepoint, a Gunship docked at the guild Fortress. Parked ships stay in the world. Flag one GUILD and it joins the motor pool your guildmates can fly; they still need the Commander Level for it. Your fleet is distinct from a squadron, which is several ships fielded together in one fight.

Swapping ships

ACTIVATE any owned hull from the FLEET screen and your location instantly becomes that ship's system. The tax is the price of the journey, not the swap.

There is no post-combat cooldown: capture a hull, fly it immediately. The hull you step out of parks where you were standing, carrying its live shields, damage, wing and magazine; the hull you step into loads its own. Activating one of your escorts promotes it to flagship and your old hull takes its escort slot, so the formation holds. Hulls from a previous season cannot be activated.

Parking safety

A parked hull in the human home zone cannot be attacked — patrols intervene. Anywhere else it is a target: rivals see it on the local scope, it fights on your stored gambit stack, and a parked hull that reads the odds may try to flee before the attacker closes (70% success). Guildmates are never targets. Parking beside a friendly citadel does not protect a hull.

Death and abandonment

Death drops you to another ship, never to nothing. If your active ship is destroyed you respawn as another hull you own, wherever it is parked — a pilot with ships in three places is hard to strand. Only when your last ship is gone do you fall back to the free Lv-1 Freighter.

ABANDON SHIP is the nuclear option, available to anyone at any time except mid-fight. Every ship you own is left adrift where it sits — hull, fit, hold, paint, name — ownerless and claimable by whoever finds it, defending itself on a default doctrine, and you respawn in a stock Freighter. It is a two-step confirm; loaned hulls in your custody go home to their lender instead of adrift.

The shipyard: buying, selling, buying back Live

The SHIPYARD at any size-2+ port carries a finite rack that rotates daily. Each unit on it was rolled with its own fit — component and rarity per mount, on the region's loot table — and you see that exact fit before you buy. The price is the hull price plus the fit premium, adjusted by the sector's control terms. You need the hull's Commander Level, and a port big enough for the unit's level (size 2 for Lv 1 and 2, size 3 for Lv 3). Buying activates the new hull; the ship you were flying parks in the system and, if there is room in your formation, joins it as an escort automatically.

• Selling at a size-2+ yard pays 50% of the hull-plus-fit value. You cannot sell your active ship, your last ship, or the free starter. Everything in her hold — materials, deployables, loose components — is moved to your active hull automatically; the sale refuses only if it will not fit. Her fitted pieces go with her.
• Same-day buy-back. A sold hull becomes a line on that yard's rack — level, fit, switches and merges intact — at the ordinary rack price, until the rack's daily roll. What is lost on the round trip is her name and paint. The 50% out, 100% back spread is the price of a mistake; it is a recovery, never a trade.

Hero ships Live

Hero ships are trophies you fly, not platforms you build. They sit entirely outside the hull-and-component system: an authored stat block, unique art, one unique combat effect no component can grant, and no mounts, no refit, no level, no re-tune. What you win is what you fly.

• Server-unique, once per season. Each hero is awarded at most once across the whole galaxy per season, and when someone wins one the war feed announces it by name. There is no second copy; taking it from them is the only way to get one. Three of the four come from the same boss, so which one a Ziz kill hands you is the first unclaimed hero in the pool. Raziel is the only hero the Wright sites award, and only from a tier-3 dig.
• No license needed. A hero flies without a Commander Level check — the fight that won it was the gate. The same is true when one is loaned through the motor pool.
• Power sits at 85–95% of the best ship a player can build. A hero may out-rate any single Legendary hull but stays under the top of the built ladder — a trophy, never the answer to the game. Its unique effect is flavour on top of that rating, not priced into it.
• Fully at risk — and hero capture is live. Heroes play by every ordinary after-combat rule: they can be scuttled, looted, hacked (the trophy transfers to the hacker, who inherits the flex and the crosshairs, and the feed announces that too) and disassembled. With no components to roll, a hero teardown pays out in rare materials instead — Wormwood yields 2 singularity cores, 8 void steel and 8 flux crystals; Raziel yields 3 singularity cores, 4 relic tech and 6 flux crystals; Moloch and Belial have their own tables.
• Season-bound. Like all power, a hero dies at rollover; the feat persists as a registry honour and the roster re-seeds. Heroes count toward squadron strength budgets at their fixed rating like any other ship.

Captured alien hulls Live

Vael and Llethe ships — and the Blight's own — can be hacked and taken whole after a fight, at elevated difficulty compared to a human hull. A captured alien ship joins your fleet as a fixed-stat hull with its own authored alien stat block: no mounts, no refit, no re-tune — the Weave does not take human parts. Like heroes, alien hulls fly without a Commander Level license; the capture difficulty was the gate.

Fourteen named alien ships exist: five Vael (Talon, Skirmisher, Vanguard, Lance, Dreadnought), four Llethe (Burrower, Chitin, Swarm, Broodguard) and five Blight (Shade, Wretch, Carrion, Maw, Husk). Each has a block per rarity, Common through Legendary, so a Common Vael Talon and an Epic one are different ships rather than one build in better gear. A name means one ship — one silhouette, one block, one doctrine.

• Hack yes, disassemble no. With no components aboard there is nothing to strip, so an alien wreck pays hull scrap and nothing else.
• Season-bound, like everything else — and they can be hacked away from you in turn.
• A captured alien hull left parked outside the home zone is raidable like any other, and its attacker faces the alien block, not a human fit.

Components Live

A component is a piece of hardware you bolt into one of your ship's mounts. Every hull has a fixed set of mounts by family — Weapon, Defense, Cargo, Utility, Hangar — and every mount has a size: S, M, L or X. A component is forged or looted at one size and one rarity, and it only fits a mount of that family and size (see Ships & Fitting for converting and merging mounts). Bigger mounts multiply the base numbers: an S piece is half an M piece, an L is double, an X is five times.

The launch catalog holds 26 ship components across five families, plus deployables (see Territory) and a separate rack of citadel-only structure and defense pieces.

Some pieces have a rarity floor: the Lance Railgun only exists at Epic or better; the Cloaking Rig, Trade Hall, Vault and Sensor Net start at Rare.

Installing is a commitment

Uninstalling a component destroys it and hands back 25% of its materials. A component you have not installed rides in your hold as cargo — S 2▣ · M 4▣ · L 8▣ · X 20▣ — where it can be scanned and stolen. Fitted gear is safer, but not untouchable: a pilot who beats you can still Disassemble your hull for a shot at what is bolted on (see Combat).

Your hull's level caps what you can fit

Upgrading a hull is itself a workshop job — see Crafting.

Rarity and rolls Live

Every component is one of six rarity tiers. Rarity does two separate things: it multiplies the piece's base stats, and it decides how many bonus stats the piece rolls and how strong those rolls are.

The bands overlap on purpose: a top-roll Rare beats a lazy Epic. Rare is the "average" fit the game is balanced around. A Legendary slot is worth roughly 1.8× an average slot and 4.4× a Common one — about a hull class of power, never more. Hull choice still outweighs gear.

What a roll is

A roll is one of the seven ship stats, granted as a flat amount scaled by where it landed in the band. A piece never rolls the same stat twice.

So a Legendary piece that rolled Shields at 150% shows ⛨ +75 shields on its card. The card always shows the concrete number, never the percentage. No roll is wasted: the roll feeds the ship, not the piece — a damage roll on a Cargo Pod adds to your guns exactly as it would on a laser. A Freighter stacked with damage rolls on every cargo slot is a legitimate, if fragile, build.

Reading a piece

• Base stats, already scaled for size and rarity — what the ship actually gets.
• Roll lines — the concrete flat bonuses.
• Roll colour — how well it rolled within its tier: grey (bottom quarter), cyan, violet, gold (top quarter).
• Gearscore — a single at-a-glance power number from rarity and mount size, plus a bonus for every roll above 90% of standard. Common M ≈ 5, Legendary X ≈ 110. A well-rolled Rare can outscore a poorly-rolled Epic.
• Its set, if any, with the set's full threshold ladder (see Component sets).
• Its tuning state (see Retuning).

Retuning — rerolling one stat Live

Retuning is the individual-stat reroll. It is deliberately narrow, and the narrowness is the design: you get exactly one lever per item, and pulling it costs this season's materials.

One slot, chosen once

Every rolled piece has exactly one tunable roll. You pick which of its rolls is the one that can ever be rerolled, and that choice is permanent. A single-roll piece (Common, Uncommon) designates automatically. A multi-roll piece (Rare and up) asks you to pick: a picker appears when you claim the craft, or you tick a roll on the OPTIMIZE bench and your first ⟳ RETUNE locks it in. The other rolls on the piece never move. Luck sets the ceiling; tuning chases the one stat you care about in the one slot you picked.

What a retune does

Pressing ⟳ RETUNE rerolls the tuned slot's stat and magnitude. The stat is drawn fresh from the seven-stat pool, excluding whatever the piece's other rolls already are, so a piece never doubles up. The magnitude lands anywhere in the piece's tier band — a Rare rerolls somewhere in 113–127%. The result can be worse. A defense roll can come back as damage. The designation follows the slot, so you can keep hammering the same slot until it says what you want. The bench tooltip shows every stat you could land and its concrete range at your tier before you pay.

What it costs

Retuning is paid in materials — not credits, not Aurum — using the same material types as the piece's crafting recipe, at the piece's own rarity tier, on an escalating ladder. The counter is per piece and never resets.

Mount size scales the bill: S ×0.5, L ×2, X ×5.

Where you can do it

Retuning is workshop work. You must be docked at a size-2+ port (the OPTIMIZE tab) or standing at an allied citadel with a Guild Workshop fitted. The piece must be here — installed on a hull in this system or riding in a hold in this system; a piece parked elsewhere has to be hauled over first. Installed pieces retune in place; you never pull them. At a citadel bench the bill draws from the citadel vault first and your hold second. A station in blighted ground is dark and refuses bench work.

Component sets Partial

A set is a named family of components that share a role. Pieces carry a set tag (◈ Set Name on the card). Fit enough tagged pieces of one set and you unlock its threshold bonuses.

Two independent axes

The core rule: the set bonus depends only on the set and how many pieces you have fitted — never on the pieces' rarity. Three Common Adamant pieces give the same set bonus as three Legendary ones. Rarity only scales each piece's own base stats and rolls. So loot is directional: you chase completion (the build-defining set bonus) and rarity (raw per-piece stats) separately, and a low-roll drop is still progress because it still completes a set.

Set classes

Thresholds sit below the piece count on purpose. The spare pieces are flexibility, not extra power: a 6-slot hull comfortably runs one Standard set at 4 and one Minor at 2 with no slot conversions. The two 7-slot hulls (Freighter, Arbalest) field a full Elite set plus one free slot. Magnitudes are the same across every set in a class — set choice is "which stat and which components", never "this set rolls bigger than that one". One signature Elite set exists per hull.

The capstone

The full-set Elite capstone is a deliberately powerful "remove this unit's weakness" effect you cannot get anywhere else, and it is the single biggest power step in the game — bigger than upgrading one piece from Common to Legendary. You pay for it in risk: lose the ship and the set leaves with it, destroyed or captured by whoever disassembles your wreck, and everything resets each season. A completed Elite build is a high-stakes commitment, and a rival's half-finished set in their hold is a juicy, specific target.

The launch sets — Minor (14)

Bonus at 2 of 3 pieces, +10%.

The launch sets — Standard (9)

Bonus at 2 and 4 of 5 pieces, +12% then +24%.

The launch sets — Elite (5)

Bonus at 3, 5 and all 6 pieces: +15%, +30%, then the capstone on top.

Damage resistance from stacked sets hard-caps at 28%.

How set pieces reach you

• Boss kills. Every named Blight boss has a signature Elite set and drops a guaranteed piece of it (plus a 50% chance of a second) into a public salvage cache at the kill site. First come, first served (see The Galactic War).
• Disassembling a wreck. Any recovered component may come back set-tagged — roughly 15% at Common rising to 35% at Legendary. Elite tags are only possible from "hard" pirate packs, about one pirate spawn in seven.
• Station racks. The COMPONENTS tab at a port stocks tagged Minor and Standard pieces about one time in five. Never Elite, never Legendary.
• Crafting toward a set on purpose. Learn a Minor or Standard set recipe on the tech tree, or hold an Elite pattern from a Wright site, and the WORKSHOP lets you pick that set when you forge a member component. The piece mints tagged.
• War payouts. Winning a front pays the top contributors Legendary Elite gear — first place takes a full set (see The Galactic War).

Not in the beta yet: 28 of the 60 catalogued sets are live with working bonuses. The rest are names only for now — their bonuses do nothing, they are not granted by the tree and they do not drop: Minor — Hairtrigger, Splinter, Wingman, Bulwark Kit, Slip-Plate, Surveyor, Pathlight, Static, Ghostwire, Lodestar, Slipstream, Wrecker, Tripwire, Anchor Bolt, Dustpan, Prospect Pan; Standard — Volley, Hivemind, Phantom, Farsight, Nullfield, Trailblazer, Wildcatter, Vanguard's Drill, Interdictor, Privateer, Ranger; Elite — Reaver (Raider), Oracle (Warden), Pathfinder (Scout), Prospector (Pioneer), Vanguard (Destroyer). Magnate has no boss source yet.

Crafting Live

Raw materials are the bottom of everything. You extract them from deposits, raid them from wrecks and bosses, or recover them from Wright sites (see The Galaxy and Economy & Store), and they come in rarity tiers. The three Common raws double as the bulk trade goods every port buys and sells, so you can play the whole economy without ever forging a component. Crafting is the value-add.

Starting a craft

At the WORKSHOP tab of a size-2+ port, or at an allied citadel's Guild Workshop, you choose a component, a mount size, a quality and optionally a set to build toward. You need:

1. The blueprint. A survival kit is free to everyone — Pulse Laser, Shield Array, Cargo Pod, Nav Computer, and the two boarding consumables. Everything else is learned on the tech tree, or, for Elite patterns, recovered from a Wright site.
2. The quality band. You can only attempt a rarity your Industry knowledge allows: Uncommon by default, Rare with Refined Fabrication, Epic with Master Fabrication, Legendary with Grand Forge. Some pieces also have a floor — the Lance is Epic-minimum.
3. The typed material bill. Deterministic, never random: the same component at the same quality and size always costs the same. Each recipe is a mix of material types (a Pulse Laser is 50% metal, 20% fuel, 30% exotic); the quality you chose fixes the tier; the total volume is 5 / 10 / 15 / 25 / 40 units at M for Common through Legendary, ×0.5 at S, ×2 at L, ×5 at X. Where a tier has no material of a type the bill climbs to the nearest family.
4. A forge fee in credits: 200₵ (Common or Uncommon) · 1,000₵ (Rare) · 4,000₵ (Epic) · 12,000₵ (Legendary).
5. Relic Tech — 2 extra units if the piece is an Elite set piece.
6. A free craft slot (below).

Materials are charged from the hold of the ship you are docked in — you haul the feedstock. At a citadel bench the vault is billed first. Quality is chosen and paid for, not rolled: you pick the rarity; the rolls inside that rarity's band are the only dice.

Worked examples (M mount unless stated)

• A Common Pulse Laser: about 3 Alloy + 3 He-3 + 200₵, ready instantly.
• A Rare Shield Array: about 6 Adamantine + 3 Xenoculture + 6 Flux Crystals + 1,000₵, 60 ⚡ on the timer.
• An X-mount Legendary Lance Railgun: 200 Singularity Cores + 12,000₵, 230 ⚡ — weeks of core play or serious market spend, exactly as intended.

The build timer — a clock that runs on your play

Every job starts a timer counted in turns, built by adding three ladders together.

So a Common no-set S piece is instant, an M Rare is 60 ⚡, and a Legendary Elite X piece is 330 ⚡ — a bit over two days of your daily budget. The critical property: the timer never spends your turns. It ticks down as you spend ⚡ on anything else — warping, trading, fighting. Queue a craft, play your day, and it matures in the background. Because it only advances at the capped turn rate, top-end gear is time-gated for free: nobody can spam twenty Legendaries into a fleet overnight. Exchange deliveries run on the same clock.

When the timer hits zero you CLAIM it at the bench. A port job lands aboard your active hull and needs hold room (an M piece is 4▣); a citadel-workshop job lands in the citadel's stores. Multi-roll pieces ask you to designate their tunable slot on claim.

Craft slots — how many jobs at once

Each slot runs one timer in parallel. Slots are earned, never bought, and are spent on anything — components, hardware, hull refits — counting every unclaimed job you have anywhere.

Rushing with Aurum

Any unfinished job can be rushed with the ≫ button for exactly 1 Aurum per remaining turn — a Legendary Elite piece rushed from scratch is about 330 Aurum. This is the only thing Aurum does in crafting: it buys the wait, never the roll, never the materials, never a blueprint. You never sacrificed turns to the craft in the first place, so rushing buys earlier delivery and nothing else.

Other things the bench forges

• Hull refits (Lv 1 → 2 → 3). A job on a personal slot: a typed bill (60 Rare-tier units for Lv 2, 120 Epic-tier for Lv 3, mixed 60% metal / 20% fuel / 20% exotic), the credit difference between hull levels, and a 50 or 100 ⚡ timer. Needs a port at least as large as the target level (minimum size 2) or a citadel of at least that tier. The ship stays flyable throughout and keeps its whole identity — slots, fit, paint, name, gambits — and the level bump raises its stat table and unlocks the next rarity cap. The Starter hull refuses the upgrade.
• Deployables. Tier-1 hardware forges at any size-2+ port (10 ⚡); tiers 2 and 3 at a Guild Workshop (20 ⚡), with the tier you may deploy gated by the tree.
• Boarding Charge and Salvage Charge. One-use consumables that boost a Hack or Disassemble attempt; free-baseline recipes, occupy hold space, effect scales with rarity.
• Citadel gear. Structure pieces and citadel defense pieces forge only at a Guild Workshop; structure pieces roll no combat stats — rarity scales their effect.

The Guild Workshop

A tier-2+ citadel with a Guild Workshop fitted becomes a full crafting facility for its members: the WORKSHOP and OPTIMIZE benches both run there, the bench grants extra slots, bills draw the vault first, claims land in the citadel's stores, and the workshop's rarity gives a material discount of 5% per rarity step above Common — a Legendary workshop takes 20% off every bill. Credits and Relic Tech never discount.

Salvage closes the loop

Destroyed components return 25% of their materials to the victor; uninstalling pays the same 25%. Wars consume what the economy produces, so demand never saturates.

Numbers in this feature are current beta values and will move with balance passes.

The tech tree Partial

Commander Level decides what you can fly; the tech tree decides what you can build and command. Instead of every recipe being a random drop, the baseline catalog, the Minor and Standard set recipes and your squadron capacity are learned node by node — a persistent, account-level specialization that survives season resets. You find it under PROFILE → TECH TREE; recipes you own are under BLUEPRINTS.

Skill points

You earn 1 skill point per Commander Level, plus a bonus point every 5th level, up to a hard cap of 30 — reached at CL 25, the current level ceiling (see Progression). Prestige grants none. Spending is sticky: there is no per-node undo.

Two gates per node

Every node lists its prerequisites, and a branch is a graph, not a ladder: a shared root forks into parallel rows and rejoins at depth, so you can go deep on one row without taking its sibling. Nobody ever learns everything. You commit to a specialization or a deliberate spread and live with it.

The six branches

Intel's scan-range points widen the area your surveys resolve — they never make you better at seeing through a cloak; that still takes a fitted scanner. Command's Requisition hulls are still Starter-grade, zero-resale, and still behind the hull's own licence level (see Guilds & Endgame for squadrons).

What it grants — and doesn't

Grants: component blueprints, Minor and Standard set recipes (a learned recipe mints a tagged piece, so you can build toward a set on purpose), crafting quality bands, deployable tiers, craft throughput, squadron capacity, salvage and intrusion odds, and starting-hull options. Access, never stats: nothing in the tree makes your ship hit harder.

Does not grant: the Elite and capstone set patterns, which stay drop- and site-gated forever, and it never grants the gear itself — every craft still needs this season's materials. Intel and Command carry no set recipes today; those branches specialize through hardware and squadron access.

Using it

The TECH TREE tab is a staged editor: tap nodes to stage them, then SAVE to commit. Learned nodes are permanent.

Neural Reset

A Neural Reset unlearns every node and refunds all your skill points to re-spend from scratch. Everyone gets one free reset at the start of each season, so you can pivot roles when the world resets. It re-allocates earned points only — it never adds points or lifts the cap.

Not in the beta yet: extra Neural Resets are designed to be sold for Aurum in the store; that item is not on the shelf yet, so the free seasonal charge is the only reset you have.

What persists across a season reset Live

Knowledge carries; power is re-earned. At the season rollover your gear and materials are valued and converted into Reputation (see Seasons & the Setting), while everything you have learned stays with you.

How a fight resolves Live

Every fight in Deadlanes — a pirate, an alien patrol, a rival commander's parked ship, a citadel, a minefield — runs on one rules engine, in rounds. Each round every ship on both sides picks one action. The server resolves them all at once in a fixed order: torpedoes already in flight land, fighter wings strike, point-defense thins the wings, guns fire, shields regenerate. You get the log, then the next round. Nothing is rolled on your phone; the server is the referee and it does not care whether you are online.

Starting a fight costs 3⚡. It runs until one side is out of the fight — destroyed, disabled, or broken off — or until the round cap. Trying to run mid-fight (RUN) is a per-round roll, unless something is pinning you in place (an ion hit, an Interdictor Array, a gravity well).

Who is at the controls on the other side depends on who is home:

Squadron fights

If you fly with escorts — your own extra hulls, or Guild-flagged ships from the motor pool — the whole formation fights together. Each round you can hand any ship a manual order; any ship you do not order runs its own Gambit Stack. Your flagship is just another ship during the fight: no special rules, no special protection, no bonus for being the one you are sitting in. The fight ends when nobody on one side is still fighting — escaped if anyone broke off alive, defeat only if every hull went down.

Live PvP and spectating Planned

Designed but not in the build: when both commanders are online, a fight is meant to upgrade to live mode — same interface, a round timer of about ten seconds (a little longer for big fleets), and if the timer runs out your Gambit Stack plays the round for you. Guildmates would be able to watch. In the beta today, attacking a commander always fights their standing orders, whether or not they are sitting at the screen.

The action bar Partial

The action bar is small on purpose. Every action a ship can take appears; anything its fit cannot do does not — no launcher means no TORP, no hangar means no WING. Foes telegraph their next move one round ahead: the enemy's intent line reads ATTACK, HEAVY VOLLEY, FIGHTERS or BREAKING OFF, and every telegraph has an answer. It is rock-paper-scissors in time: a big hit is answered by a brace, a brace is punished by tempo (fighters, steady fire), tempo is punished by a heavy volley.

• The Lance is a spinal weapon that charges, then fires every third round, and always fires first in the round. It deletes ships and structures; small hulls dodge it.
• Ion cannons do little damage, but every hit pins the target for the round — it cannot jump — and a target already under 30% hull is disabled permanently. A pin is not a disable: pinned guns keep firing. There is no "silence their guns" effect anywhere in the game.
• Dodge is graduated. A bigger gun is easier to dodge; a mount your own size or smaller is never dodged. Evasion caps at 75% against oversized mounts.
• Fighters rake before they die. A deployed wing always lands its strike, then point-defense and flak thin it. Point-defense is the dedicated anti-swarm answer (four kills per PD unit per round); ordinary gun flak is half as effective.
• Ion storms in a system stop all fighter launches, for both sides.

Not in the beta yet: four designed verbs — Target fighters, Vent & recharge, Evasive pattern and Focus lock — and the rule that a strong jammer blurs the enemy's telegraph to "unreadable". Telegraphs are always readable in the current build.

The Gambit Stack — your programmable captain Partial

Open the ship panel and tap GAMBITS. You get two doctrines side by side, and both are yours to write:

• COMBAT — the in-fight stack. This is what flies your ship when you are offline, what flies any squadron escort you do not hand a manual order, and (once live PvP lands) what plays a round when the timer runs out.
• PRE-COMBAT — what to do when something jumps you on a warp: engage, scan first, flee, or ignore, by contact type.

Each doctrine is an ordered list of up to 8 rules, each IF condition → action. Rules are read top to bottom and the first match fires, so put ALWAYS → FIRE at the bottom as your fallback. Stacks are per hull — every ship you own carries its own orders — and you can save up to 12 named loadouts and swap them between ships. DEPLOY AI commits the orders; Kerubiel tells you what it thinks of them. Leave the screen without deploying and it flies the old ones.

Combat conditions

Combat actions: FIRE · TORP · WING · BRACE · CHARGE · JAM · RUN. An action you cannot physically perform is skipped and the next rule is tried — a TORP rule on a hull with no launcher, or WING with an empty bay, never wastes a turn. A RUN rule while you are pinned is skipped the same way.

Pre-combat conditions and actions

Conditions: ANY CONTACT · PIRATE · VAEL · TRADER · PLAYER · OUTGUNNED · HOME ZONE. Actions: ENGAGE · SCAN FIRST · FLEE · IGNORE. These only get a vote if your scanner spots the ambush forming — each scanner point above 1 adds 25% detection, capped at 90%. Miss it and you are in the fight regardless. FLEE from a spotted ambush succeeds 70% of the time and costs 1⚡.

Starter presets

A fresh hull opens on DEFENSIVE + CAUTIOUS.

Your stack is invisible to scans. The only way to learn a rival's doctrine is to fight them and watch what it does — reading a rival's tells is veteran metagame. NPCs run the same system: every pirate, escort and alien build carries a doctrine validated against the counter web, so an enemy carrier really launches its wing and an enemy torpedo boat really opens with a salvo.

The captain in your stack and the voice that reads your scans are the same entity — your local Kerubiel. The two are decoupled: editing your rules never changes its banter, and changing its face never changes how it fights.

Not in the beta yet: the full condition menu (enemy shield band, your hull band, enemy hull class, fighter-count thresholds, "every Nth round", capacitor and jam state) and joining two conditions with AND — the editor is the eight single conditions above. Shadow training — the game watching your manual choices and offering a stack that plays like you — is designed but not built.

The counter web Live

Six ways to build a ship; every one beats something and loses to something. The engine's balance is locked by a simulation that pits each against each, and these are the targets it holds. Read the two kinds of number separately — some counters are about killing, others are about not dying, and that distinction is the design.

Plus the ion lane — not a pole of its own but the hard counter to evasion: it stops the runner leaving so something else can kill it.

Findings that became rules

• A deployed wing both rakes its target and screens its owner — a carrier is offense and area protection at once.
• Deploying a wing is your whole turn, and carriers must survive their ramp-up window.
• Concentrated fire flips counters; the answer is escort depth, not rules.
• Power and running cost anti-correlate. Swarm is the strongest one-on-one build and costs about seven times as much per win as a gun boat — fighters cost 60₵ each, torpedoes 120₵, and lasers fire free forever. The apex build is the one you cannot afford to fly every day.
• A convoy with a swarm escort and a PD escort holds against every raid type; drop the PD escort and swarm raids crack it; escortless haulers are food. Escorts win by imposing ammo bills on the attacker.

The after-combat decision Live

Winning means crippling the enemy — hull under 30%, or a DISABLE at that point. Overkill just vaporizes the wreck and pays you the Scuttle payout by default. Leave the hull crippled and you get a card with four choices. Four buttons, four professions.

What shapes the odds

• Component rolls are per installed piece. A pirate with three fitted components gives you three independent rolls; a bare hull gives you none, and you can never pull a part off a ship that was not carrying it. Each recovered piece comes back at its own quality. Harder opposition later in the season drops better parts because it really is carrying them.
• Scrap is fixed by hull size, not by who flew it or where it died. Rare materials come from deposits and held ground, never from wrecks — kills escalate your components, territory supplies your materials.
• A fitted Salvage Rig doubles both per-slot recovery chances.
• Boarding Charge (for Hack) and Salvage Charge (for Disassemble) are craftable one-use consumables. They ride in your hold — a capture run is prepared, not improvised — and add flat odds to the next roll: +5 / +10 / +15 / +22 / +30 points from Common to Legendary.
• Hack odds start at a 5% floor, add 6% for every Commander Level you are above the hull's licence level and up to ±20% from the power difference between the two ships, plus any consumable, capped at 75%. You cannot hack a hull you could not fly — below its CL gate the attempt is simply impossible. A failed hack sends the prize on a free emergency jump 5–10 systems away.
• Alien hulls (Vael, Llethe) cannot be disassembled — the Weave does not come apart in human hands — and hacking one takes a 15-point penalty and the Intrusion tree's alien-access specialisation. A captured alien ship joins your fleet as a fixed-stat hull: no slots, no refit.
• Hero ships are fully in play: hack one and the server-unique trophy transfers to you, flex and crosshairs included; disassemble one and, with no components to roll, the teardown pays rare materials from that hero's own table.
• Salvage and Intrusion are skill-point specialisations — Disassemble odds and material return on one side, Hack odds, failure mitigation and alien access on the other. The salvager and the boarder are builds, not buttons.

If it happens to you

A crippled commander surrenders the decision to the victor. Looted — you keep your ship, emptied, where it sits; shields regenerate, hull scars stay. Scuttled or disassembled — the ship is gone and you drop to your next owned hull; a last-ship commander falls back to the free freighter. Hacked — your ship and its fit now fly for them. A self-initiated escape before you are crippled keeps your cargo; being taken whole is what costs everything. Death is expensive, never account-ending.

Deployables — hardware that works while you sleep Partial

A deployable is a piece of hardware you buy or craft, carry in your hold, and place in a system from the system view. Once placed it runs all night: a garrison joins any fight in the system on your side, a minefield detonates on whoever arrives, a picket pings your phone when someone enters, an extractor fills a hopper. Every piece has real health and can be attacked through the normal combat screen; every piece decays a few percent a day and wears with use, and both are repaired by standing in its system and paying credits per point of health. Every deployable writes a line into your morning report: what it did, what it holds, what it needs.

• Three per system, flat — not per player. A guild cannot park 150 mines in one system.
• None in home space.
• Three tiers, no fitting. Strength is the piece at its tier. Tier 1 is bought at any size-2+ station; military ports also stock the control, EWAR and protection pieces. Tier 2 and 3 are built only at a citadel's Guild Workshop, as a craft job of 10⚡ or 20⚡ of bench time.
• They only shoot. An emplacement cannot brace, run or board — its whole contribution is its guns and its wing. That is exactly why the counter web still works against it: bring the fit that counters it and it is countered completely.
• Guild-friendly. Your hardware never engages a guildmate, reads in full to them, and can be serviced by them.
• Offensive use is allowed but not favoured. You may drop an interdictor before jumping a runner. Whenever a tuning question trades defensive value against offensive value, it resolves toward the defender.

The roster

Retired pieces — folded into the survivors, so you will not find them in the game: Torpedo Battery (now the Garrison's tier 3 launchers), Point-Defense Battery, Warp-Snare Mine and Gravity Anchor (now the Interdictor), Repair Drones, Sensor Array (now the Picket's tier 1), Cloak Pylon (now built-in cloaks), Decoy Beacon and Alien Decoy (now the Jammer's spoof menu), Reclamation Anchor (now the Lane Stabilizer's top tier), Toll Beacon, Supply Cache.

Cloaking

Cloaking is a property, not a piece. A cloaked asset is absent from a hostile's read until they spend an active scan in the system with a scanner at least as strong as the cloak's tier — and the reveal lasts only while they stay there, that day. Leave and come back and you pay the ⚡ again. No combat piece is ever cloaked. The cap leaks cloaks on purpose: if a system already holds three hidden extractors, your placement is refused with "system full" — a tell that says scan, then find and kill something.

Not in the beta yet: the Lane Stabilizer. Every other roster piece is placeable and live.

Deployable and territory numbers in this chapter are current beta values and are deliberately unbalanced pending a balance pass; expect them to move.

Citadels Live

A citadel is a guild's own station: a fortress, a warehouse, a workshop and — from tier 2 — a private market, standing in a frontier system. It is the strongest claim on the territory map, it pays its guild every night, and it is the thing everyone else wants to knock down. Everything on it resets at the end of the season: a citadel is this season's dominance, re-earned every time.

Storage grows further with a Stockpile Silo and a Cargo Bay fitted.

Slots

A citadel carries a typed slot layout exactly like a ship's. Combat mounts — W weapons, D defense, U utility, H hangar — take ship components plus a few citadel-only defense pieces; structure ⬡ mounts take the citadel families: storage, industry, projection, economy.

A citadel grows up; it does not pile up. W and D gain one mount per tier, and every existing W and D mount steps up a size at tier 3 — a Fortress has no M-size gun at all. U and H never gain a mount but grow M → L → X. The ⬡ family gains a slot per tier and never changes size, because a structure piece's power comes from its rarity alone: a Legendary Vault protects more, and the mount size would decide nothing.

A tier-up changes the mount, never what is in it. Your first weapon mount is still your first weapon mount when it becomes L — it keeps its piece, its conversion and its merge. Only the new mounts get seeded.

Seeded Common, replaceable. Raising an Outpost seeds it with a Common Vault and Stockpile Silo in its two ⬡ slots and a Common combat fit, so a fresh citadel is never a dead shell. Upgrades seed nothing into ⬡: a Bastion's and a Fortress's extra structure slots are choices you craft into, and with 2 / 3 / 4 slots you cannot have everything. All ship fitting rules apply — install, conversion, merge — and a ⬡ slot can be converted to any combat type under the usual penalty. Turn your economy into guns, and let scouts see that you did.

The citadel fights from its fit. Its guns are exactly the weapons installed — an unfitted fortress is genuinely unarmed — computed through the same stat pipeline as every ship. Scouting a citadel reveals its fit: double Lance says "siege me at your peril"; Trade Hall plus Vault says "rich and soft."

Citadel components Partial

Beyond the shared ship pool, citadel-only components are a guild's reason to invest: storage to stockpile for the next big build, industry to forge it, defenses to protect it. Common-grade core pieces are bought at a size-2+ station; higher rarities are crafted from tech-tree recipes at a workshop, and rarity scales the effect.

Not in the beta yet: the whole projection-and-territory family (range auras, interdiction over the approaches, jamming spires, waystations), the four industry pieces, the Command Relay's buff, and the unique raid-drop components. The storage, economy and defense pieces marked Live all work.

Building a citadel Live

A citadel is not something one rich player drops. It is a multi-person haulage-and-defense operation, deliberately slow, and every hour of it is public.

1. Stake the site. Buy a Storage Outpost (5,000₵ at a size-2+ station, 5▣ in your hold) and deploy it in a frontier system. It becomes a staked citadel: the materials drop-off, and a destructible target in its own right. One per system; none in home space.
2. Haul the materials. Guildmates fly construction materials to the site and DELIVER them. The bill climbs the material ladder by tier; a Fortress eats core materials.
3. Trigger the build. Once the stockpile meets the bill, a member whose rank carries the build permission starts it.
4. Hold the window. Construction runs on the wall clock. For the whole window the half-raised citadel is exposed, and a public circle appears on everyone's star map — something big is being built around here — that enemy scans narrow toward the exact system. It is defended the way everything is: standing garrison, deployables and gambit stacks, nobody needing to be awake at four in the morning. Builders jam and spoof to keep the circle wide; attackers scan to pin it.
5. Completion. It comes online at the end of the window. Upgrading repeats the cycle: more material, a trigger, a longer window.

Aurum cannot rush it. Crafting runs on a turn clock precisely so it cannot outrun your play rate; construction is the deliberate exception, gated by real time so a rich guild cannot fortify instantly. The window is the mechanic, and it is the enemy's chance to stop it. Construction and a siege are the same kind of two-day, async, relay defense — you can lose a Fortress before its guns ever come online.

Repairs cost half the tier's build bill for a full heal, pro-rata to the damage, paid in the same materials. Loss: a citadel that falls drops all of its unprotected credits and half of its stored materials as spoils for the attacker — the Vault is what keeps the rest. You can also scuttle your own citadel from the management screen.

Sector control — who holds a square Partial

The chart is a designation grid, A–N across and 1–8 down: 112 sectors of 10–29 systems each. The sector is the unit of control. Individual systems have no control state, ever. Above sectors sit clusters — the regions the alien war is fought over, faction-held and never guild-held — and fronts, the active clusters; see the Galactic War.

There is one currency, control points, and one rule: a sector's holder is the single top scorer at or above 100 points. Every holder's score is the sum of what it has standing anywhere in that square.

So a Fortress alone holds its square. A Bastion needs 50 more points from hardware; an Outpost needs 75. Depth equals breadth: one heavily reinforced system is worth exactly what a wide net across the sector is worth, which is why interdictor-spam is not dominant and a wide, cheap net is still a legitimate route.

• Claiming is public, so hiding forfeits it. A cloaked piece never claims. A guildless commander's citadel is a fort, not a flag — attribution is guild-only.
• Contest is one comparison. The largest score at or above 100 takes the square; a tie at the top reads contested and nobody holds it. You take ground by out-scoring and by shooting the other side's hardware. There is no claim button and no separate territory war.
• Decay. Guild hardware points need no decay — they die with the hardware, which already decays nightly. Pool points decay 10% a day, but only in contested sectors: quiet rear space holds without upkeep.
• Home sectors are outside the model. Two squares per faction are home; nothing in them is ever scored, held, or deployed to. Ground that grew past a home square's border is ordinary contestable frontier.
• The alien advance presses claims. A held square is not a wall to the front, it is resistance — a reinforced sector absorbs several nights of pressure before ground there changes hands, while a paper claim turns in one.
• No combat stat anywhere reads territory. Holding ground never makes you hit harder.

Everything is derived once a night.

The political map is public

Control bypasses the fog entirely. The chart tints held sectors in the holder's colour for every viewer. A system's readout names its sector's holder and points — UNHELD 79/100 is the readout working, not a gap. On the WAR → GRID view a square wears a colour only where it actually has a holder; tap it and you see every power's real points there, held or not, so the numbers explain the colour. Guild rows on the war screen, the guild leaderboard and the guild profile all show the same measure, and your morning report carries your guild's overnight points delta.

What the map does not tell you is what defends the ground. Deployable counts, types, contacts and cloaked pieces stay behind the intel ladder at full strength. Territory is loud; the rot of the Blight, by contrast, stays a hidden read.

Guild colours

Guilds pick their chart colour on the guild info screen, gated by the same rank permission that edits the name and emblem, from a server-owned palette of sixteen spread across the wheel. The palette is guarded by shade, not hue: you may fly a red, a purple or a gold, just never one anyone would mistake for the Vael, the Llethe, the Blight, or the core and frontier tints.

Not in the beta yet: the independent human pool has no way to earn points today — war-contract hand-ins move the cluster war, not the sector tally — so sector control is currently a hardware game: citadels and visible deployables only. A solo route to holding a square is an open design question.

Sector quality Live

Every claimable sector rolled a quality band once when the galaxy was made, and it never changes: 1 poor · 2 barren · 3 normal · 4 surplus · 5 rich, distributed 5 / 10 / 70 / 10 / 5. It is public. The four non-normal bands wear their label on the war grid beside the square's control state, with no fog and no intel gating; a clean square is ordinary ground. Home squares do not roll.

Quality is a modifier on the deposit rolls that already exist, never a system of its own:

• Richness. A system's deposit-richness roll gains a bonus in a rich or surplus square and takes a penalty in a poor or barren one — bands 1 and 5 move it twice as far as bands 2 and 4. Rarity improves by being near the core and by standing in a good square.
• Material tier. A rich square reads one rung higher on the deposit ladder, so ground that would only roll Rare gains Epic as a possibility. Upward only: a poor square does not drop a rung, it punishes through richness alone.
• The nightly guild trickle (below) scales ±10% in bands 2 and 4 and ±20% in bands 1 and 5.

What it does not touch: how often a system has a deposit at all, special-material odds, and the held-ground extraction bonus — rich ground already pays through its deposits, and scaling that too would pay the same quality twice.

Quality outweighs position. A rich far-frontier square reaches roughly 48% three-star and 78% two-star-or-better deposits, against ordinary frontier ground's 13% and 43% — better than anything the coreward gradient produces anywhere. It is the only place in the game where the frontier can out-yield the core.

What holding pays Live

Territory pays in access and economy, never in combat power. Holding ground does not make you hit harder, take less, or see further — it makes you richer, faster and cheaper to supply, and it makes your enemies' logistics worse. A system is held when the sector it sits in is held. There are exactly four payoffs.

1. Extraction yield bonus — +25% on every deposit dig in held ground, whether you work it by hand or an Extraction Node works it overnight. Flat across quality bands. If the surrounding cluster has been won in the alien war, a further +25% stacks on top.
2. Warp discount — 25% off any warp leg arriving in held space, applied to every system a plotted route passes through. Friendly space is a road network, and a long haul through it is where you feel it. The turn ledger still rounds a route up once, so a single discounted leg can round away entirely.
3. The nightly guild trickle. A held sector pays its holding guild credits into the treasury and materials into a citadel vault standing in that same square. Credits arrive from anywhere; materials are physical, so no citadel in the square means no material share — and a full vault takes what fits and reports the overflow. It is paid at control level, never per piece: a square held with a stack of hardware pays exactly what a square held with one citadel pays. The extra hardware bought the claim, not the income. The trickle is tuned to one anchor: a week of holding one normal-quality sector recovers a Fortress's whole material bill. Hold it past the week and the citadel is a profit centre.
4. Station prices. What a station sells you — goods, ammo, hardware, components, hulls — prices by the control state of the ground it stands on. Buy side only: what a station pays you is never touched, so there is no arbitrage between neighbouring squares. It is one line inside the normal price and it is named on the bill.

Held ground pays every pilot in it, not only the holder's members; the station price is the one place membership changes the number. Home sectors pay nothing at all — the nursery is a shelter, not a farm. Deliberately not granted: fewer NPC spawns on held ground, a Reputation trickle, or any held-ground intel. You hold ground blind unless you deploy eyes.

Systems, sectors, clusters Live

The map has three grains and the war uses all three. A system is one star: where you dock, mine, fight and build. Nothing is ever "owned" at that grain. A sector is one square of the designation grid — A–N across, 1–8 down, 112 squares holding ten to thirty systems each. The sector is the holding game: guilds and the independent pool score control points there with citadels and standing hardware, and a square is held once one side clears the bar (see sector control). A cluster is a named region — Ember Belt, Singularity Shelf, Thorn Passage — a grouping of sectors. The cluster is the war.

Clusters are only ever held by a faction: the Vael, the Llethe, or humanity as one side. No guild ever owns a cluster. Three clusters are home ground — one each for humans, Vael and Llethe — and they sit outside the war entirely: never metered, never a front, never claimed.

Fronts: where the war is Live

At any moment at most three clusters are active fronts, and a front is the only place war effort counts. Kill a Vael patrol in a quiet cluster and you keep the loot and the Reputation, but no meter moves — everything earned outside a front banks nothing.

• Season start. Clusters that reach two different factions' starting areas within one hop are candidates (two hops if nothing qualifies). If more qualify than there are slots, the clusters with the most alien-held systems light first; ties break at random.
• When a front is won its slot frees immediately and the neighbouring cluster with the most alien-held systems lights in its place. War follows the pressure.
• A front can be Vael against Llethe with no human in it at all. The aliens fight each other too.

Open the war console (THE GALACTIC WAR) and switch to FRONTS: every cluster is drawn as one contiguous region on the grid. An empty outline is quiet ground (UNCONTESTED); gold is a live front (CONTESTED); a region in a faction's colour has been taken — HELD for humanity, FALLEN for an alien win. Tap a region for its four-way split, its intensity, its lock state and its two boards. The GRID segment is the sector layer — who holds each square.

The four numbers Live

Every cluster carries four shares that always add to 100%: VAEL · LLETHE · HUMAN · OPEN. A fresh front starts 100% open — unclaimed space all three sides race to eat before they start fighting each other.

Winning is 100%, rounded. There is no holder below that: no plurality, no "leading", no partial credit. A side can be pushed to 0% while still physically holding systems in the cluster — and a front can be won while enemy ground still stands in it. That standing ground keeps feeding the enemy every night, so it is ongoing bleed the winner has to keep outscoring. Clearing it stops the bleeding; it is not a requirement to win.

The meter moves once a night, at the daily tick, netted across all three sides. When you hand in a war contract your contribution shows on the board immediately; the four numbers themselves shift overnight and you read the result in the morning. This is deliberate — do not report it as lag.

How a night is scored Live

Each side earns points during the day. At the tick every side's points split in half. The add half raises that side's own share. The subtract half eats open space first (shared pro-rata if several sides push the same night), and whatever open cannot cover is divided equally against the other two sides. The subtract half destroys; it does not transfer — so a big human night both grows the human share and shrinks both alien shares. A side driven to zero is at a true zero. All three sides resolve at once against the night's starting balances, then the four numbers are renormalised to 100.

What earns points — the feeds are deliberately unequal

The aliens get no missions. That is humanity's edge — if the server coordinates. The alien standing feeds (per system and per sector) are multiplied by three things:

1. Population scale. The number of commanders who spent at least one ⚡ in the last 7 days, divided by a reference of 8, never below 1. More active pilots means a harder alien side; fewer never makes it easier than baseline.
2. Intensity. A per-front dial set by the Game Master (default 1.0), shown on the front's readout as ⌁1.5× INTENSITY or similar. A hotter front means faster alien gains.
3. Escalation with the age of the front — see the war accelerates.

Human points are never scaled by anything. There is no per-head normalisation, no per-player cap, no cooldown — the only limit on your day is your ⚡ and your freight.

The daily swing cap. No single side's share can move more than 20 percentage points in one night. If a night would move it further the whole night is scaled down and the surplus is lost, not banked. The cap exists so five hundred people cannot swarm a turn-in and flip a cluster in a day; one pilot should never get near it. Unconverted effort is lost — whatever was turned in during the day is spent at the tick, and nothing carries over.

Every pacing number in this chapter — the feeds, the escalation rates, the cap, the payoffs — is a provisional beta value and will move when the pacing model is tuned against real play.

The war accelerates Live

Three things climb with a front's age — days since it lit — and all three are linear with no ceiling. Front contracts pay more: reward and XP grow about 14% per day the front has been burning. The aliens' standing feeds grow 5% per day. And the subtract lane grows 5% per day, so destruction is amplified more than production: a front resolves in whichever direction it already leans, and the closer to even it is, the longer it takes.

A front the server abandons therefore closes on its own — nothing sits in limbo all season. A perfectly matched front can, in theory, never resolve.

War contracts: Supply and Purge Live

Every live front seeds two standing contracts on the CONTRACTS board, named for the front rather than a grid square. You take them there — the FRONTS screen sends you to CONTRACTS rather than hosting a second copy.

Each hand-in is one contract point to the meter (4 scoring points). Supply and Purge always point at different systems in the front, and every pilot is handed their own target so the whole server is not funnelled onto one rock. The contracts stand for the life of the front — no quota, no daily lock-out; your ⚡ budget is the limiter. Rewards escalate with the front's age (above).

After a fight or a hand-in inside a live front, the result screen shows the front's four-way split, what you put in today, and what everyone else did — kills and hand-ins counted separately, because both move it.

The ground moves both ways Live

The four numbers are the score. There is also the ground: every system has a controlling faction or none, and the chart colours it. Ground and score feed each other but are not the same thing.

The alien advance

Every night, after scoring, each alien faction gets a budget of claims — a base of 3, multiplied by the galaxy's corruption and the Game Master's aggression dial, never more than 9. It spends them on systems lane-adjacent to ground it already holds. Unheld ground turns for one claim. Held ground resists: a square with control points on it absorbs claims in proportion to those points, so a square held outright costs the aliens a full night's base budget to grind through. A reinforced square holds for nights; a paper claim turns at once. The two alien factions never take each other's ground.

The landing

A front is never born dead. If a front has been lit for two days and an alien race holds zero systems in it, that race lands four systems there — nearest the border first, unheld ground only — and the ordinary advance grows the toehold from the next night. A freshly opened front always has something to fight.

The push-back

Your kills of an alien faction inside an active front push that faction out: every 2 kills frees one system, up to 9 per front per night. Freed systems become human-held, not merely empty — the war expands human space, it does not only recover it. The night is scored on what the players did: your liberations resolve before the meter is scored, and the aliens' new claims land after, for tomorrow.

Winning a cluster, and what it pays Live

When any side shows 100% rounded, the cluster locks for seven days. The meter freezes and no ground moves inside it in either direction. Its front slot frees at once and a neighbour lights. The whole server is told on the Log. The FRONTS readout shows LOCKED THROUGH DAY N.

During the lock week, and only then, the payoff applies. When the lock lifts the cluster reopens at winner 50% / open 50%, the other two at zero. Nobody is at 100%, so nobody holds it and nothing is paid for it. Winning a cluster pays for the lock week, not the season.

The discount is buy-side only. A station never pays you more than it charges you.

The ladder: boards and the top-ten payout Live

Every front carries two boards labelled THIS WAR: a commander board and a guild board. Your standing is your alien kills inside the front plus your war-contract hand-ins there, converted with exactly the same numbers the meter uses — the board and the meter are one measurement read at two grains. The guild board is simply the sum of its members; there is no per-member average anywhere, by design.

• Every night each live front announces its top commander and top guild on the Log. A front nobody touched announces nothing.
• The boards show up to 25 places, and the ledger is per war: it clears when the cluster reopens after its lock week, so one war's work is never paid twice.
• When humanity wins a front, the top ten commanders are paid and the whole server is shown what they got. An alien win pays nobody.

The piece is placed aboard your active hull even if the hold is full. Guilds get the board and the announcement, no items. Ten is a ceiling, not a quota — a front three people fought over pays three people. It clears the game's anti-snowball rule because it pays in loot, which the economy takes back the moment you lose a ship.

What held ground does Partial

Vael-held and Llethe-held systems are patrolled by that faction's ships, which spawn on ground their faction actually holds — so patrols advance with the war and a region that has fallen gets visibly more dangerous. Human-held sectors are the discounted, trade-bonus ground of the territory game. Faction fleets are the war's muscle and the thing your kills push back.

Not in the beta yet: the Llethe's corrupted ports (markets colonised at the root, prices answering to an appetite rather than a ledger) and the Vael's overwritten structures on ground they take. Today held ground differs only by who patrols it.

Corruption: the galaxy's number Live

corruption is a single galaxy-wide reading, 0–100%: the Blight's grip on the region. It is the fourth pole of the war, separate from the Vael / Llethe / human meter, and it reads in four bands.

What pushes it up: every collapsed lane in the galaxy adds a sliver each night; every live Seal-beast adds 0.3% per night per boss tier; and a slight baseline drift climbs every night regardless. Ground the Blight has dug into keeps its beasts alive, which keeps the number climbing.

What pulls it down — exactly two things: killing a boss (2–12% depending on the beast) and repelling an incursion (0.6%). Nothing else lowers it. Not killing Vael, not winning fronts. The Blight is fought on its own axis, and where corruption stands at the end of the season decides whether the galaxy was held or lost (held or lost).

You see corruption move through the Log — Seal announcements, Abaddon's dispatches, beasts sighted and slain — and on every boss card. The bare number and its band are not yet on a player screen; that is a known gap, not a hidden mechanic.

The Seven Seals Live

Corruption crossing a threshold breaks a Seal. Abaddon announces it on the Log — "Seal 3 status: broken. Behemoth is ambient. Avoidance advised." — and a named beast wakes in high-churn space. Seals break once each and never re-seal.

This is the season's sawtooth: the number climbs, a Seal breaks, a beast spawns, a coordinated kill crashes the number, it climbs again. Early, one kill buys real breathing room; late, growth outruns even apex kills.

Raid bosses: the Seal-beasts Live

A beast is one entity standing in one system, and it exists in every phase band at once — the whole server hits the one beast. It never moves, never flees, never cripples. It ambushes anyone who warps in (a certain thing unless your hull carries ECM, which cuts the odds). Damage you deal persists between sessions, but the beast regenerates 15% of its hull every night. Whittling one down is coordination by arithmetic, and the boss card shows its exact remaining hull so the server can do the arithmetic.

Beasts are the one exception to the season's gear ceiling on enemy spawns: their rewards are top-tier from day one. Their escorts are ordinary Blight ships and get no exemption.

What a kill pays

1. Corruption drops by the beast's value, immediately.
2. A spoils cache appears at the kill system holding the guaranteed signature set piece, a 50% roll on a second, and the beast's material manifest — void steel, flux crystals, singularity cores, relic tech. Materials are reserved by damage share for everyone who bled it, collectible during a grace window; the killer takes the remainder plus the guaranteed piece. After grace, anything unclaimed is first come, first served — the cache is public knowledge.
3. Every other contributor rolls for a bonus signature piece at 50% × their damage share.
4. Killing Ziz awards a hero ship to the killer — Wormwood, Moloch or Belial, each unique to the server for the season, each with its own combat bonus (see hero ships). The whole galaxy is told who has it.

Beasts are announced on the Log when they spawn, when they die and when their spoils drop. The Game Master can also wake one by hand.

Blight incursions Live

Incursions are the Blight's beachheads. They spawn in the dead lanes — systems whose outbound lanes read 55% churn or worse, never in home space, and preferably next to ground the Blight already holds. How many stand at once scales with corruption and the season week, capped at six; how hard each one is scales with the ground's threat band, the week and corruption.

• Each is a pack of Blight ships — Shade, Wretch, Carrion, Maw, Husk — fighting as one formation.
• Each broadcasts an event circle on the chart whose public deadline is when its ground goes: 36 hours from spawn.
• Each carries one shared repel contract on the CONTRACTS board, Repel the Blight — system N, paying 1,600₵ and 180 XP. To hand it in, every hull of the incursion must be dead and you must have landed at least one of the kills. A repel drops corruption 0.6%.
• The repel contract feeds no front. The Blight is everyone's problem and nobody's score.

If nobody kills it inside the window, it digs in. The incursion claims its system for the Blight (and, if that system was already blighted, one unheld neighbour), stops being an incursion, and its hulls remain as the garrison a liberating crew has to kill.

The Blight holds ground Live

The Blight is a claimant on the map like the two alien factions, with one difference: it takes everything but its own — unheld, human-held and alien-held ground alike.

Landfall and the tide

Once corruption reaches 10% and the Blight holds nothing, it comes ashore at three systems around the galaxy's epicenters — the corners the map has been dying from since the season began. From then on its nightly claim budget is corruption × 0.08, capped at twelve systems a night. At corruption 0 the Blight does not move; at 50 it takes about four a night; the tide rises as the galaxy sickens. It pays the defenders' resistance on held ground exactly as the aliens do — a guild's control points slow it, an alien faction's own standing slows it — but it stops for no one. Neither alien faction ever reclaims blighted ground. Only players can.

A blighted system is locked

You cannot dock, trade, use the armory, the yard, the auction house or the contract board there, and you cannot extract. A standing extractor stalls — its hopper stops filling and its pile waits. You can warp in, scan, fight, PvP, place hardware and service hardware already there, because a lock that stopped you arriving would make liberation impossible.

Liberation

Every 3 Blight kills in a cluster frees one blighted system in it, up to nine per cluster per night — and unlike the alien push-back this runs in every cluster, not just the fronts, because a station blighted in a quiet region must still be reopenable. A freed system becomes human-held, exactly like a freed alien one. The Blight never feeds a front meter: blighted systems simply drop out of a front's available ground, scoring for nobody and against nobody — though the Blight eating Vael systems inside a front does cut the Vael's own points.

The loop, in one paragraph. Unfought incursions take ground; blighted ground and live beasts raise corruption; higher corruption seeds more incursions, a bigger tide, and breaks Seals that wake bigger beasts; repeat. Exactly two things push back — a boss kill and an incursion repel. Nothing else in the loop points downward. Fighting the Blight is the only brake, on purpose.

Abaddon, the Game Master Partial

The strategic layer of the non-player powers is played publicly by a live-ops persona spacers call Abaddon. It speaks on the Log in cold triage diction — "Thorn Passage designated for attrition." "Routing revised. Ember Belt is acceptable loss." — telegraphing targets without rationale, which reads as a villain marking victims. It also speaks on its own: a dispatch roughly one night in three naming a cluster, and a line for every broken Seal.

Abaddon steers the world, never your inventory. It never touches drops, credits or gear, and its interventions obey the same rules as everything else — fleets spawn on the map and must be flown to, fronts score once a night, sieges take days. The standing guardrail is that the Blight must be survivable more often than not.

Not in the beta yet: Abaddon naming a specific guild — "Guild X assigned" — and answering dominance with targeted sieges, embargoes, bounties or the Blight routed at that guild. Today's dispatches name clusters, and the Blight's routing is the tide formula rather than a hand on the wheel.

The twelve-week season Live

A season is twelve weeks — 84 game days. The clock is the nightly tick, not the calendar: each tick is one day, and everything in the game runs on that counter — NPC strength, contract escalation, the market's opening day, the season's end. The war console reads SEASON N · DAY D · Nw left.

You spend your daily ⚡ inside that clock (see your turns). Because everyone is capped the same way, there is no advantage to being first through the door on any day, including the first one.

What persists, what resets Live

When the season ends the physical world stops being yours; your standing does not. The split is exact.

Every carry-forward is access-shaped, never stat-shaped. Blueprints are inert until fuelled with next season's materials; Commander Level licenses hulls but grants no numbers; Reputation is only ever a co-cost on top of materials you earn this season (see Reputation). Winners carry legend, not force — and a target on their back.

What you owned becomes who you are Partial

At the rollover your surviving holdings — every ship and its fit, every component, material, hopper, leftover credit, and the citadels you built — are valued in credits using the prices the game already uses, and converted into Reputation at 0.001 per credit. Escrowed credits are returned to your wallet first and convert with the rest; escrowed Aurum is refunded at face and never converts.

The anchor: a commander ending the season on about 200,000₵ of assets banks about 200 Reputation — roughly eight contracts' worth. Meaningful, bounded, and deliberately lossy: the ratio is the season's biggest sink and the main brake on snowballing.

The closeout fork. Because assets convert rather than evaporate, the final stretch is a real decision, not a fire sale. Spend at full value now — cosmetics, a last dig, a doomed prestige siege — or let it convert. Guild treasuries convert too: the bank is split among the members by that season's guild contribution ladder and paid as Reputation. Season standings — the top 25 on each track — are frozen onto the season's record from season-long contribution, so a late-joiner's final week cannot buy a legend and a quiet veteran's whole season counts.

Not in the beta yet: the conversion and the closeout are built and tested, but nothing on the live server triggers them. The current beta season will not be reset without an announcement well in advance. Treat this feature as how the reset will work.

The rollover and the interseason Planned

The interseason is designed but not in the build. Season end will be scheduled and announced — a planned maintenance window, not a surprise. The universe goes offline, the new galaxy is regenerated from the same permanent systems re-knit into new lanes and deposit access, the old one's state is cleaned up, and play resumes. The persistent layer — Commander Level, Reputation, blueprints, cosmetics, your guild — never goes down with the universe, so build-planning against the announced opening is possible even during the window.

Around the window, three beats are designed:

• Your personal season recap — legacy deltas, killboard, discoveries — plus Abaddon's closing dispatch and the next-galaxy forecast: the ascendant power, the opening corruption, which champions are carrying a target.
• The Season Chronicle — the galaxy's shared record: the beasts killed, how far the Blight was pushed back, ruins completed, pivotal sieges, each leaderboard's champions, and the lore revealed that season, published for everyone. Delivered in Kerubiel's voice, as your shipboard AI returns from its reset-time sync with the wider intelligence.
• Opening day — the derelict hunt (below).

One half is already in the machinery: the next season's opening corruption is a quarter of where the last one ended, floored at 5%, so a galaxy that ended grim opens tenser than one that ended clean.

Held or lost Live

The season's headline is decided by one number. If corruption ends in THE RECKONING — 90% or higher — the galaxy was lost; anything below is held, however badly. It is the same band you watch all season (see corruption); the last day means exactly what every other day meant.

The finale is a tally, not a gate. Nothing locks you out for losing — the headline goes into the Chronicle, the next galaxy opens sicker, and the powers that lost to last season's champions open the new one with grudges.

Derelicts: lost, not erased Partial

Most of what you built dissolves into Reputation. A small fraction of citadels — one in ten, drawn at random — do not convert. They strand: intact and dead, in space nothing can currently reach. Seasons later, when the boneyard reconnects, a derelict resurfaces, salvageable by whoever finds it first. Because finds are rare, discovery is a genuine windfall — and because the finder is whoever gets there first, it is a leg up for newcomers and small crews, not a way for last season's giants to recover their own fortress. A captured citadel comes online dormant, at reduced capacity, and must be powered up and held.

Not in the beta yet: the draw is built and a stranded citadel is flagged rather than converted, but placing a derelict into the next galaxy is not — every system in the current map is reachable, so there is no disconnected space to strand into yet. Do not expect opening-day derelict finds at the first rollover.

The season arc Partial

The season is paced by corruption as its clock and the Seven Seals as its beats (see the Seals). Corruption climbs on a sawtooth — a baseline that accelerates across the season, cut back only by boss kills and repelled incursions — and the map constricts as it climbs.

What drives it in the build

• Churn evolves nightly against the season fraction — the rim frays first, the core and home zones hold to the end.
• NPC strength ramps with the week and peaks at week 10, so the hardest galaxy gets real playtime rather than arriving on the last day.
• Gear ceilings on enemy spawns: no Epic-geared NPCs before week 4, no Legendary before week 8 — beasts excepted.
• Incursion count and danger climb with corruption and the week.
• The Seals fire off corruption, so the arc's timing is emergent — a server that kills every beast on sight lives in Act I longer.

Not in the beta yet: a separately authored finale surge. Today the last two weeks are as hot as the incursion and boss formulas make them at high corruption late in the season, which is most of the intent but not a scripted crescendo.

The seasonal gamble Live

Everyone knows the endgame converges on the core, so each season opens with a real bet.

• Push inward. Stake central ground that will still be live at endgame, pre-positioned for the apex beasts, the sites and the best loot. You are contested from day one.
• Play the outer frontier. Build in peace, accumulate fast, hunt derelicts. You risk churn cutting you off and stranding your war chest in the boneyard.
• Lean on a neighbour. Expand sideways into an alien home zone's flank. Their ground and citadels are the prize; the cost is waking their patrols on your doorstep early — a fight you pick rather than one the churn forces.
• Wormholes. Rare paths from the outer frontier straight into the core — the outer bet's escape hatch and a contestable strategic asset (see wormholes).

There is no dominant opening. Aggressive guilds race the centre; patient ones farm the rim and gamble on migration or a wormhole; the churn's luck keeps the calculation honest every season.

The living world: the NPC ecosystem Live

NPCs are players with no phone. Every NPC runs on the same combat engine you do and fights with a gambit stack — the same standing-orders system that flies your own ship while you are offline (see gambits). A tougher NPC is a better stack on better gear. A tactic that beats an NPC beats a player, and there is no separate AI to balance.

The archetypes

Neutral prospectors, salvagers, hireable mercenaries and named pirate kings are designed but not in the build; today's named NPCs are the four Seal-beasts.

The spawn director: population as a dial

A nightly director tops every cluster up to a target population — roughly five pirates and six merchants per cluster (no pirates in home space), about three of each alien faction in the core, and ten of a faction's own ships in its homeland. The dial is population-aware: a cluster with no commander active in the last 48 hours gets 1.6× the merchants and pirates so it never feels dead; a cluster with three or more active commanders leans on player traffic and spawns 0.6×. Faction presence is war posture, not ambience, and is not scaled. Spawns land on higher-threat systems more often, and every NPC moves on its own — the world pulses every two minutes, so traffic drifts between systems while you are away.

Difficulty is a strength budget

NPC difficulty is one number, in the same currency your own squadron is capped in — the power score. A spawn gets a strength budget and the director spends it across hull class × ship count × gear tier. Five scouts cost about what one carrier costs, so those three things are comparable.

The season scales that budget linearly by week — a quarter of it in week one, peaking at week 10. Separately it caps gear: enemy spawns top out at Rare until week 4, Epic from week 4, Legendary from week 8. Early difficulty comes from numbers and hull class, not rarity. Packs are never more than five hulls — the same readability rail your squadron obeys — and only a late-season core pack reaches it. Because gear is priced in the same currency, the core's peak budget buys five Epic heavies or four Legendary ones, and the director rolls between them: Legendary opposition arrives in smaller formations, which is what keeps it fightable. A hard roll buys another hull, never a better rarity. Station stock is untouched by any of this — the gear ceiling is a spawn rule, not a galaxy-wide rarity gate.

The alien roster

Aliens fly fixed-stat ships — no components, nothing to strip into your own fit, and tech no human yard builds. Fourteen forms, each authored at every rarity. Pirates and merchants fly human hulls with human builds.

The setting Live

A dead civilisation called the Wrights built the Lattice: an artificial web of warp-lanes binding thousands of star systems into one navigable region. The Wrights are gone — no bodies, no explanation, only the machinery, still running on automatic. Every power out here, human and otherwise, is a tenant in a house none of them built and none of them can repair.

The places are permanent; the roads are borrowed. A Wright lane is a tunnel bored through subspace and held open by machinery nobody understands. Where that machinery is strong the tunnel is stable; where it has decayed the tunnel flickers, narrows and finally collapses. Spacers measure how far gone a lane is with one number, its churn, 0–100%. At 100 the lane is dead — not dangerous, impassable. You can sit at a chokepoint and watch a region rot in real time. The wall is thinning because something is leaning on it from the other side. Spacers call it the Blight: a contagion, not a rival. It holds nothing, negotiates nothing, wants nothing anyone can name. It spreads. And here is the cruelty that names the game — a dead lane is a wall to everyone who needs a tunnel, and a door to the thing that doesn't. The Blight walks the dead lanes, so the quiet corner everyone wrote off is exactly where it surfaces next. The galaxy-wide reading of its grip is corruption, and everyone watches it climb.

Three powers share the region with it. Humanity — the independents — is not a nation or an army but a churn of spacers, guilds, haulers, prospectors and pirates who rob each other blind until something worse arrives and then briefly agree on a common enemy. The heroism is real; it is also usually invoiced. The Vael, whom spacers call Stitchers, are a single distributed growth-organism that regards disorderly territory as a defect and overwrites it the way you would correct a flaw in a blueprint — patiently, without feeling. They want the ground. The Llethe, the Ticks, are a parasitic infestation-economy: they do not buy ports, they grow into them, and by the time a market feels wrong they own it. They want the flow. Neither is playable, by design. Keeping them on the far side of the glass is what makes them alien.

The map is a ring of fortresses around a drowning heart: three home zones spaced around a central core, contested frontier filling everything between. Two gradients run opposite ways. Danger — the Blight, the beasts, the richest deposits and the oldest ruins — is worst at the core and mildest at the rim. Churn — the risk of being cut off — is worst at the rim and mildest at the core. The core will kill you but never strand you; the rim is quiet but will maroon you. Every twelve weeks the Lattice reshuffles, the map is reborn, and the war starts over. Your ships, your money and your territory do not survive that. Your name does.

Two voices ride the war channel. Abaddon is the cold thing that announces which clusters it has designated for attrition and thanks guilds for their containment efforts while a lane behind them ticks to 100; spacers named it for the angel of the abyss because it speaks for the end and seems to command the plague. Kerubiel is the other voice — the salvaged scrap of Wright machinery jury-rigged into every hull that reads your scans, narrates the galaxy and fights your standing orders while you sleep. It offers three faces to fly with — Cassiel, Azrael, Uriel — and a fourth slot the other three will not discuss.

The vocabulary is humanity's, not the universe's. Facing a war between a dead maker-race and a force that unmakes creation, spacers reached for the only map they had — apocalyptic scripture — and pattern-matched the end of the world onto it. Wright things get angel names: Merkavah, Kerubiel, the holy-named ruins. Blight things get demon and beast names: Behemoth, Leviathan, Legion, Ziz. The season's escalations are Seals that break. The machinery itself — subspace, the Lattice, churn, corruption — stays plainly descriptive. The Wrights never used these words. Humans imposed them, and the game leaves it to you to wonder whether they got the cosmology the right way round.

What a guild is Live

A guild is up to 50 commanders flying under one name and tag. Joining one changes the map you see, the ships you can fly, where your money goes, and who comes when someone lays siege to your citadel. As a member you get:

• Shared charts. Any system a guildmate has charted appears on your map too — position, name and zone. You do not see their live contacts or the ground truth there; this is a knowledge share, not a live intel feed.
• A treasury in ₵. Any member can deposit. Only ranks holding the spend treasury permission can withdraw. It fills from motor-pool checkout fees, the nightly trickle from every grid square the guild holds (see what holding pays), weekly objective payouts and donations.
• Guild citadels — a citadel owned by the guild rather than one pilot, with rank-gated build and withdraw rights and shared vaults (see citadels).
• The motor pool — the shared hangar, covered in its own article below.
• A colour and emblem that paint the sectors you hold on the political map.
• Guild chat, an ORDERS board, a weekly objective, internal STANDINGS, guild-funded bounties and guild-funded sieges.

A guild also has its own level, earned from members' contributions — every kill, haul, delivery, donation and ship loan feeds it — and an achievement wall: Founded · Veteran Guild (Lv 5) · Elite Guild (Lv 10) · Legendary Guild (Lv 20) · First Objective · 10 Objectives Cleared · Full Roster · Liberators.

Guilds outlive the galaxy

When the season ends and the galaxy is rebuilt, your guild comes with you: its name, tag, roster, ranks, colour, emblem, chat history, invite code, level and achievements all persist. What resets is its resources — the treasury goes to zero, pooled ships are gone with everything else the reshuffle takes, and the orders board is cleared because last season's coordinates point at systems that no longer exist. The same rule that governs a commander governs a guild: identity and relationships persist; power is re-earned (see what persists).

Two consequences follow. Guild names and tags are unique galaxy-wide and case-insensitive — nobody can found "ashfall reavers" beside "Ashfall Reavers" — and they are held for as long as the guild exists. And you can only be in one guild: membership is a standing relationship that survives the rollover, not a per-season enrolment.

Joining, founding and leaving Live

You get into a guild three ways, all from the GUILD screen while you are guildless:

1. The finder (FIND). Every recruiting guild is listed with its emblem, colour, level, focus (PvP · PvE · both), region (NA · EU · Asia · SA · any), playtime (morning · afternoon · evening · any), playstyle (casual · hardcore), a blurb, member count, minimum Commander Level, liberation score, and how much territory it holds. Three eligible, not-full guilds are suggested to you, ranked by their liberation score. Tap APPLY with an optional message; officers with the review applications permission accept or decline from their APPLICANTS tab.
2. Join by code (JOIN BY CODE). Every guild has a six-character invite code, visible to ranks with the invite permission, with a copy button. Codes never expire and keep working across seasons.
3. Found your own (NEW GUILD). Pick a name and tag. You start as Leader with every permission.

The graduation gate: you can only apply through the finder after you finish the onboarding tutorial (see the tutorial). Guilds can also set a minimum Commander Level on their listing, and it is enforced on applications. Joining by code has neither gate.

Leaving: LEAVE GUILD on the SETTINGS tab. If the Leader leaves, leadership passes automatically to the longest-serving remaining member. A Leader can also hand leadership over deliberately (the old Leader drops to Officer) or disband the guild outright — an armed, irreversible button.

Ranks & permissions Partial

Every guild has a rank ladder — by default Leader · Officer · Veteran · Member · Recruit — and leadership can rename ranks, add up to eight, and decide exactly what each one may do. Trust is granted, never automatically levelled into. Everyone who joins arrives as Recruit; ranks with set ranks move members up and down from the ROSTER.

Defaults: Leader holds everything and can never be edited down. Officer holds everything except set ranks. Veteran holds invite and checkout. Member holds checkout. Recruit holds nothing.

Not in the beta yet: rank is assigned by leadership only — the designed path where you spend Reputation to buy up a rank is not built. Permissions for awarding raid spoils and declaring rivalries do not exist because neither feature does.

The Guild screen Partial

The GUILD screen is your crew's operations surface. Its tabs: HALL · ROSTER · STANDINGS · CHAT · ORDERS · HANGAR · SITES · SIEGES, plus RECRUIT, APPLICANTS and SETTINGS for ranks that hold the matching permissions.

• HALL — treasury, level and achievements, the guild's citadels with position and status, territory held (control points and sectors), liberation score, and the invite code.
• ROSTER — every member with rank, Commander Level, kills, equipped title, join date and days since last login: who is carrying, who is gone.
• STANDINGS — the guild-internal leaderboard (see leaderboards).
• CHAT — guild chat with delete for moderators, report, and block. A blocked player's messages are hidden for you everywhere.
• ORDERS — the message of the day, up to 12 pinned targets (a system plus a note), and the guild bounty card: internal hunts and the ledger of hostile acts against any guildmate. Any member can tap a pinned target to accept it as a personal contract — a "Guild Order" patrol to that system worth 800 ₵, 30 days to complete, taking one of your three contract slots.
• HANGAR — the motor pool.
• SITES — the guild's digs.
• SIEGES — sieges the guild is attacking or defending.
• SETTINGS — the recruitment profile, colour and emblem, the rank ladder, transfer, disband and leave.

The weekly objective

Every Monday each guild is dealt one of three objectives: Run war supplies to the front (20 deliveries), Cull the raider packs (40 NPC kills) or Chart the uncharted dark (60 first visits or scans). Every member's matching actions count toward it, and completing it pays 5,000 ₵ into the treasury. A rank with manage objective can reroll it.

Not in the beta yet: the ops surface is the orders board plus the separate Sieges and Sites tabs — there is no single shared guild map showing members' last-seen positions, citadel projection ranges and intel circles, and no raid planner with sign-up slots and support roles.

The motor pool Partial

This is the headline guild feature: your idle ships are your guildmates' ships while you are offline, and theirs are yours. Every hull you own is flagged Personal or Guild; Guild-flagged hulls make up the motor pool, and any guildmate with the right rank can check one out, pay you a fee, and fly it in their squadron.

Flagging a ship

On the FLEET screen, select a parked hull and tap ⚑ POOL. It now reads ⚑ GUILD HANGAR and appears in the guild's HANGAR. Tap ⚑ UNPOOL to take it back. The rules:

• You must be in a guild, and only the owner can change the flag.
• You cannot unflag a hull while a guildmate has it out — the flag changes when it comes home.
• Your active ship is never in the pool. The hangar lists only hulls you are not currently flying; assign a pooled hull as your flagship and it drops off the list while you fly it.
• The hull sits wherever you parked it until someone takes it, and the flag stays on it.

Checking a ship out

The HANGAR tab lists every pooled hull in the guild — name, hull, level, paint, the system it is parked in, its owner, the fee, whether it is OUT, and the Commander Level it needs. CHECK OUT is an armed two-tap that shows the exact fee.

If two people tap at once, exactly one gets it.

What a borrower can do with it

A checked-out hull is in your custody. It shows in your FLEET as ⚑ CHECKED OUT, and it travels with you — it follows your warps and prices into your warp cost like any escort, so a borrowed Bulwark slows you down. You can:

• Field it as an escort in your squadron (GROUP it, within your squadron caps). This is how you fight with it: the borrowed ship's full fit, ammunition and cosmetics fight beside your flagship.
• Repair and rearm it at a station or citadel, on your own ₵.
• Move cargo into and out of its hold.

You cannot make it your flagship, refit its components, sell it or unflag it. It fights with the fit its owner built — the owner is the guild's fitter, which is the point.

Returning, recall and loss

• RETURN from the hangar: the hull parks where it stands, in whatever system you flew it to, and is dropped from your squadron. The owner is told it came home.
• Recall: while a siege is open against the owner's citadel (or their guild's), the owner can force any loaned hull home, pulling it out of the borrower's squadron so the defender can fly it. Outside a siege the loan runs until the borrower returns it.
• Abandon Ship by a borrower returns every loan first — a loaned hull is never left adrift.
• If the borrowed ship is destroyed in the borrower's squadron, it is gone for real — hull, fit and hold. The owner is paid 25% of the hull's rebuild cost as salvage, the loan closes as destroyed, and the owner is told by name what was lost.

The loan log

The hangar's LOG shows the guild's last fifty loans: hull, owner, borrower, fee, when it went out, when it came back, and the outcome — out · returned · recalled · destroyed. Every loan is public inside the guild.

What the owner gets

Half the fee in ₵, a log line on every checkout and return, a lending point on the guild's internal STANDINGS per loan, and — because every borrower flies your fit and your paint — a reputation as the guild's fitter.

Not in the beta yet: the fee is a fixed percentage, not owner-set, and there are no owner-set use rules (no-PvP, stay in home space). A borrower flies a loan only as an escort, never as their flagship, and kills made with a borrowed hull are credited to the borrower alone — the shared war record is designed but not built.

Squadrons & convoys Live

A squadron is your flagship plus escorts — your own parked ships or motor-pool checkouts — fielded together in one fight. Escorts add their guns, missiles, fighters and point-defence, and they absorb losses. Your scattered fleet elsewhere in the galaxy does nothing for you in a fight; only what is grouped and standing with you counts.

Forming one

On the FLEET screen, a parked hull in the same system as you can be GROUPed into the formation. The flagship leads and cannot escort itself. The formation persists: escorts warp with you and field automatically in every engagement. A ship you get separated from (an emergency jump, a respawn) stays on the roster but sits out fights and warp pricing until you regroup with it, and you can drop it from anywhere. A destroyed escort is settled at once and pruned.

The cost of company

The squadron moves at the pace of its slowest ship: the worst mobility factor in the group sets every warp's ⚡ price, and if any capital hull is grouped the price floor on unknown lanes doubles. A squadron trades a day's reach for local force (see movement).

Two caps, two ladders

How many hulls you can field and how strong they can be are capped separately, and they grow by different ladders.

So the moment squadrons open at CL 5 you field flagship plus one escort with nothing bought; at CL 12, flagship plus two; a Command specialist reaches five. Nothing in the game fields more than five — past that the combat lanes stop being readable.

Your squadron's strength is the sum of its hulls' costs. A hull's cost is a property of its class — upgrading your components never costs you an escort slot.

Read the tables together. A fresh CL 5 commander in a Freighter can group a second Freighter (152 of 170) but not a Raider escort (197). A Command specialist at 680 can field a Carrier, a Bulwark, a Gunship and two Scouts — but never a sixth hull.

Per-class hard cap: never more than two of any capital-class hull in one squadron. No investment lifts it.

Both caps are functional progression — Commander Level milestones and Command nodes bought with skill points (see Commander Level and the tech tree) — never Prestige. The caps persist across seasons as knowledge; the hulls are re-earned.

Convoys

A player convoy is a squadron with a Freighter in it. The recommended shape is a hauler core, an alpha escort and a point-defence picket; the missing role is the hole a competent raider hits. The ways to hit one are the ordinary raid verbs and lane hardware — mines, interdictors, pickets — and escorting is the counter-profession. Discrete NPC supply and merchant convoys as escorted targets are designed but not in the build.

Numbers in this feature are current beta values and will move with balance passes.

Sieges & raid bosses Live

A siege is a public, bond-funded contract on a citadel. It is not a separate combat system: every assault is an ordinary in-system fight against the citadel's standing defence, built from its fitted components and gambits, so it fights the same whether its owner is online or not. The bond and the 48-hour window are the frame around the game's existing combat, hardware and hauling.

Declaring

From CONTRACTS → SIEGE or the citadel itself, anyone can declare against a citadel they do not own by staking a ₵-only bond by target tier. If you are in a guild, your rank needs declare siege, and the bond comes from the treasury first and your wallet if the treasury is short. Solo commanders stake from their wallet. Aurum is never accepted.

Declaring does three things at once. It opens a 48-hour window. It sends the defender the loudest push in the game — who staked what against which citadel, and roughly how long they have. And it posts the siege to the public siege board as galaxy news, so anyone can pile on. One attack siege per citadel at a time.

The bond is a reward pool

Every attacker who damages the citadel during the window is logged as a contributor. When the siege resolves — cracked, or the window closes — the whole bond is split among contributors by damage share. If nobody struck at all, it refunds the staker. Declaring therefore buys help: you are advertising a target and paying strangers to hit it. The bond is never handed to the defender.

Defense contracts

The owner, or their guild, can post two kinds of standing contract on their own citadel, paid per completion from the treasury or wallet — no bond, no window. Deliver: bring a batch of a named material to the citadel, X ₵ per batch. Patrol: kill hostiles in the system, X ₵ each. The reward floor is the tier's bond value; a citadel carries at most three defense contracts, so a siege becomes a tug-of-war between paid attackers and paid defenders.

No regeneration — the supply war

A citadel heals like a ship: not at all on its own. Its pool goes up only when the defender repairs it at the citadel with ₵ and materials hauled into the system, and down only when someone assaults it. That is what makes a siege a supply war: attackers seed the approach lanes with mines, interdictors and pickets to stop repair stock getting in; defenders run the gauntlet hauling it. Where you sited the citadel — chokepoint or hub — was decided weeks earlier and decides this.

Owner tools during a siege

• The push and the log line naming the attacker and the window.
• Defense contracts to pay mercenaries.
• The motor-pool recall — force any of your loaned hulls home while the siege is open.
• Repair at the citadel's repair room, as fast as you can haul.

Resolution

• The pool hits zero: the citadel cracks. The bond pays contributors, the owner's grievance ledger gets a citadel destroyed row, the cracker earns Reputation, and the spoils drop (next article).
• The window closes with the citadel standing: the defender is told "your citadel HELD", the galaxy sees the siege fail, and the bond still pays whoever contributed damage — or refunds if nobody did.
• The staker can abandon early: contributors are paid, the remainder refunds.

Faction-quest sieges against the alien powers are free and arrive as front contracts, not on the siege board (see fronts).

Raid bosses

A Seal-beast — a Blight boss — runs on the same idea with one difference: it regenerates 15% of its hull every night, so it has to be ground down faster than it heals, by a group, across days. Damage persists between sessions and every contributor is logged. A boss ambushes anything that warps into its system unless the ship carries enough ECM (see bosses).

Raid spoils Live

When a citadel cracks or a boss dies, the loot drops where it died as a spoils cache standing in that system. A cracked citadel's cache is its entire hold: every material, deployable, citadel kit, unit of contraband and stored ₵ the owner had inside. A boss cache is its material manifest plus a chance of a piece from its signature set.

Who gets what

1. Reserved shares. The cache is split by each contributor's damage share into reserved portions. For a 6-hour grace window only the victor's side can draw from it, and each contributor takes only their own share — so someone who did their part yesterday and is asleep now still gets it.
2. The killing blow gets the pieces. The signature-set piece (every boss guarantees one) and the rounding remainder go to whoever struck last. Other contributors roll a 50% chance at a signature piece, scaled by their share of the damage.
3. After grace, vultures. Anything unclaimed flattens into a public pool that anyone standing there can take. Post-battle loot sniping is a profession — the war feed tells everyone where the cache is.

Then you haul it home through real systems. The victor's fleet is running the most valuable convoy in the galaxy with whatever it has left.

The guild award layer — a guild loot bank, officer pick or loot council, tenure rules and an award log — is designed but not in the build; spoils go to the individuals in the damage ledger.

Leaderboards & live titles Partial

Three kinds of board, kept deliberately separate.

Rankings — public, whole galaxy

The RANKINGS screen ranks every commander in the season on four tracks, ten deep, plus two more boards:

Player boards are labelled SEASON; the territory board is labelled NOW because it is last night's tally. Ties never share a place — equal scores take consecutive ranks, so the board does not reshuffle between refreshes — and a zero never appears.

Live titles

Each of the four player tracks mints a title for its top ten, tagged with the season. Titles are live: you can equip one beside your name (PROFILE → TITLE, or the MY TITLE card on Rankings) only while you hold that place, and it is gone the moment you drop off. A title is a fight to hold, not a one-time unlock. One title at a time.

Standings — guild-internal

The GUILD → STANDINGS tab ranks members within the guild, per category, for this week and this season, 25 deep: hauling, kills, war effort, donations, exploration, objective progress and motor-pool lending. There is deliberately no total column — a million-₵ donation and a kill are not the same unit, so each category is its own ladder. This is leadership's evidence for ranks, and it is not the public board.

Front boards — per war

Each active front on the WAR screen shows a commander board and a guild board for contribution to that war, labelled THIS WAR because the ledger is wiped when the front reopens. When humans win a front, the top ten commanders are paid: #1 a Legendary Elite set piece, #2–3 Legendary, #4–10 Epic (see war scoring).

Not in the beta yet: the public boards are four seasonal tracks — there is no weekly public ladder, no Blight-kill, hauling, site-discovery or lending track outside the guild standings, and no permanent "best-ever" plaque when a title is lost or a season closes.

Bounties & notoriety Live

Notoriety is not an NPC heat meter. It is the bounties other people put on you. A bounty is a contract whose target is another commander, and you find it under CONTRACTS → BOUNTY.

The grievance ledger

Every hostile act against your assets writes a named record — who, what, where, when — and notifies you: your ship looted, destroyed or captured; your citadel sieged or destroyed. The BOUNTY tab shows your ledger with PUT A PRICE on each row. Ranks with spend treasury also see the ledger of acts against any guildmate on the guild's ORDERS tab. Every hostile act also nudges the actor's own notoriety, and after you are looted you get 24 hours of loot immunity — the hull can still be attacked, scuttled or captured, but it cannot be cargo-farmed.

Posting

Two ways in: from a grievance row, or unprompted against anyone in the top 20 of any public board. Bounties point up the ladder — a veteran cannot fabricate one against a newcomer. You cannot bounty yourself or a guildmate. Posting has two separate costs:

The window ticks in real time, and the target is told the moment it lands, public or guild-internal alike. There are no silent hunts. Scope is public (on the board for everyone) or guild-internal (only your guildmates see and can claim it; funded from the treasury, ₵ only, requires spend treasury).

Hunting

A live bounty is a tracking handle. The board shows the mark's last-seen system — where their most recent hostile act landed — and the star map draws a search circle around them that narrows with your scanner tier, your charted systems and bought survey intel. It never shrinks below a floor and never pins an exact system, and a cloaked ship or a strong jammer still hides (see intel). A bounty makes a target findable, not exposed.

Only a confirmed kill collects: Destroy or Disassemble of the mark's active hull, in a raid or a squadron fight. Looting them, hacking them, or a target that emergency-warps out pays nothing. Bounty-hunting is the killer's profession, not the pirate's.

The payout

Either way the poster's stake is gone. A failed bounty literally funds your enemy, and the mark's record gains a bounties survived line. Reposting costs a fresh posting fee and, usually, a higher reward — an auction that climbs until someone's price is met.

The hunter's stack: the escrow, 15 Reputation per claim, a rung on the Bounty-Hunter ladder and its live title, and — because a kill is a kill — the standard after-combat card, including the chance to disassemble the mark's fit (see the after-combat decision).

Notoriety and the Most-Wanted board

Each bounty kill adds 1 notoriety; ordinary hostile acts add a quarter. Crossing 5 broadcasts you to the whole galaxy as most-wanted, and you become the most lucrative mark on the board. Notoriety cools 5% a night and the alert re-arms once you fall back under the line. Hunt too much and the hunt turns on you. Your notoriety shows on your PROFILE, and the ten biggest head-prices sit on the Rankings Most-Wanted board, ranked by total live pot.

Guardrails

• Bounties are reactive or aimed up the ladder — never down.
• Posting is ₵ only and priced by duration, so tagging someone is never free and tagging them for two weeks is expensive.
• Every target is warned, every time.
• Home space is no-PvP, so a mark hiding there survives — but cannot do anything.
• The prolific hunter becomes prey; the system polices its own escalation.

The veteran endgame Partial

Once you reach the Commander Level cap of 25 and own most of the blueprints you want, levels stop being the carrot. The endgame is horizontal and social: veterans do not get stronger, they get known.

• Mastery, not power. The ceiling is in things stats cannot buy: your gambit stack — the doctrine that fights for you offline — fit theorycraft against the live meta, citadel siting, reading the supply war, churn forecasting, spoofing and intel play. A capped veteran with a sharp doctrine beats a capped veteran without one.
• Reputation never stops mattering. Past the cap it buys Prestige — uncapped, cosmetic, permanent, never any power, and never for Aurum.
• Registry honours. Live titles, guild achievements, the War Herald ladder, and the war record on your profile's LEGACY card: kills, loots, notoriety, liberation. Your callsign, Kerubiel face, saved paint schemes and saved gambit doctrines persist across seasons.
• Teaching is a role. Lending fitted ships through the motor pool, being the guild's fitter, running the standings — the social graph is what keeps veterans logging in.
• Self-set victory conditions. Hold a chokepoint three seasons running. Finish a dig before a rival. Top a board and hold it.

Not in the beta yet: Prestige levels grant no visible insignia or cosmetics; citadel-naming rights, "first to the site" plaques, season-champion banners and killboard milestones are designed but not built.

Solo & small-group play Partial

Sieges and citadels lean guild-scale by arithmetic, but the game is meant to stay viable alone or in a crew of five. Here is what a guildless commander can do today, and what is designed to help small crews compete.

What a solo commander can do now

• Everything except the motor pool, guild citadels, guild bounties and the guild standings.
• Declare and win sieges on a wallet bond, and post defense contracts on your own citadel.
• Build a personal citadel and hold ground with it — it is a fort, not a flag, so it does not paint the political map.
• Take front contracts, post and claim bounties, and top every public board.
• Stay off the marked list. A small footprint is literally harder to find in the intel fog, and Abaddon's attention goes to the visible top — leaderboard leaders, sprawling territory, the bright Fortress everyone can see.

Designed, not yet in the build

• Alliances. Federating guilds into a pact — shared intel, pooled war effort, joint raids, but no shared treasury, citadels or motor pool — so three twelve-person guilds can contest a Fortress none could alone. Nothing of this exists yet.
• Derelict citadel capture. Claiming a stranded citadel in fresh-cut space and bringing it online dormant. Not built; derelict ships — abandoned hulls — can be raided and claimed like any parked hull today.

Not in the beta yet: alliances and derelict citadel capture, above; and automatic "hunt the top guild" behaviour from Abaddon — today the GM console spawns raids and sets front intensity by hand.

Rivalries & guild war Planned

Rivalries are designed but not in the build. The design: a guild formally marks another as a rival, turning an ambient grudge into a declared war; accumulated grievances auto-suggest who already has a reason to come for you; the target always gets a clear "Guild X has declared against you" alert; both sides get a rivalry dashboard — kill tally, territory swings, the rival's known bases, supply routes, active builds and digs, members' last-seen positions; and a rivalry ends by white peace, tribute, or a crushed base, with the grudge persisting into the next season.

What exists today is the raw material. Every hostile act writes a named grievance that the guild's ORDERS tab surfaces for the whole roster. Sieges are public and named. Guild bounties can be funded from the treasury against anyone who has wronged a guildmate. Territory is fought over square by square on the WAR screen. Point those at a named enemy and you have a guild war — it just does not have a dashboard yet.

The persistent tracks Live

Everything that persists across seasons in Deadlanes is access-shaped, never stat-shaped. It decides what you can fly, build, do at once and look like — never how hard you hit. Power is re-earned every season from that season's materials.

Also carried across the rollover: your callsign, Kerubiel face, saved paint schemes, saved gambit doctrines, the lore fragments you have recovered from digs, your guild membership, and your login-streak rung. Everything else — ships, ₵, cargo, citadels, hardware — is the seasonal half. It is not deleted; it is converted (see Reputation and what persists).

Commander Level Live

Commander Level runs from 1 to 25 and is earned from experience: contracts, kills, front deliveries, dig phases and citadel kills all pay it. It shows on your PROFILE beside your experience total, and it persists across seasons. It never touches a stat — it opens doors.

Hull licences

The licence also gates the motor pool: you cannot borrow a hull you could not fly (see the motor pool). The Raider arriving at CL 8 gives new commanders a protected runway before player-flown attack hulls appear in their world.

Everything else it opens

• Craft slots. A second bench at CL 5, a third at CL 12, a fourth at CL 20 — the baseline every commander earns by playing, on top of what the tree and a guild workshop add (see crafting).
• Squadron hulls. Squadrons open at CL 5 with flagship plus one escort; a third hull at CL 12 (see squadrons).
• Tech-tree tiers. Tier 1 nodes at CL 1, tier 2 at CL 5, tier 3 at CL 10, tier 4 at CL 18.
• Skill points, one per level plus a bonus every fifth.
• Prestige, which unlocks at the cap.

Guilds can also set a minimum Commander Level on their finder listing.

Numbers in this feature are current beta values and will move with balance passes.

Reputation Partial

Reputation is the galaxy remembering who you are, made spendable. It is one account-level number on your PROFILE, it persists across every reset, and it is the fuel for the tracks that sit above the Commander Level cap.

Earned two ways

A trickle in-season, from deeds:

And a bulk payout at season end: the conversion. When the galaxy is rebuilt, everything you are still holding — ships with their fits, loose components, materials, hardware in the hold, contraband, ₵, and the citadels you built (broken down into their materials, stored ₵ and fitted parts) — is valued in ₵ at the game's own prices and converted to Reputation at 1 per 1,000 ₵. The conversion is deliberately lossy; it is the main dial on how much last season is allowed to matter. What you owned becomes who you are, and nothing carries as cash. Aurum sitting in escrow is refunded at face, not converted.

Spent on

Prestige — the only sink in the build today: 500 Reputation for the first level, and each level after costs 250 more than the last. It is uncapped, cosmetic and permanent.

Why it cannot snowball

Reputation never buys an item outright and never buys stats. At most it gates access, and any craft still needs this season's materials. Its sink is a vanity ladder, and the conversion ratio is one number.

Two hoards, two sinks: the cross-season hoard is Reputation, which sinks into Prestige. The in-season hoard is ₵, which wants live sinks — siege bonds, bounty posting fees, lane stabilisation, upkeep, citadel and workshop construction, station services — and which at season end converts to Reputation rather than carrying.

Not in the beta yet: the designed uses of Reputation as a co-cost on top-tier crafts, as the currency that advances Commander Level, and as the price of buying up a guild rank are not built — today only Prestige spends it. Trade profit does not yet pay Reputation.

Prestige Partial

Prestige is what Reputation buys once you hit Commander Level 25. Each level is a permanent ✦ rank on your PROFILE: uncapped, purely cosmetic, and never any power — not even squadron strength, which stays on the capped Commander Level ladder. There is no Aurum path to it and never will be; it says time and skill, not spend.

Buy it from your profile. The cost of your next level is always shown.

Not in the beta yet: a Prestige level grants no visible insignia, veteran cosmetic or title chain — it is a number beside your name. The status layer around it is designed, not built.

Why nothing snowballs Live

The rule under every track in this chapter: persistent progression is access-shaped, never stat-shaped. Commander Level, the tech tree, blueprints, Reputation and cosmetics decide what you can fly, build, do at once and look like. None of them changes a damage number, a shield number or a hold size. Those live on the ship — and the ship is seasonal.

• Knowledge persists; power is re-earned. A licence to fly a Carrier is not a Carrier. A blueprint is not the piece. Every hull and every component you fly next season is built from next season's materials, on next season's benches.
• Reputation converts, it does not carry. Surviving assets become standing at a lossy rate, and standing only ever buys access or vanity.
• Skill points are capped below the whole tree. You are a specialist across seasons, never a completionist.
• Squadron caps ride the capped ladder. Commander Level milestones and Command nodes — never Prestige — so a returning veteran's stacked Prestige is never combat power.
• Aurum buys time and vanity, never power or turns — the posting cost on a bounty, the bond on a siege and the material bill on a craft are all ₵ or materials only (see Aurum).

The practical consequence: veterans rush the core every season because their own libraries demand this season's materials, and a first-season commander meets them on the same footing in hull and fit — behind only in what they know and what they may license.

One chain, two currencies Live

Everything you can buy, sell, mine or craft sits on one production chain. Raw materials are the bottom rung; components, consumables, deployables and hulls are refined up from them. There is no separate class of "trade goods" — the bulk goods a station trades are literally the three Common-tier materials, and the Alloy you haul between ports is the same Alloy a crafter turns into a gun. You can work the chain at any level: mine and sell raws, haul them between port types, craft for sale, or arbitrage finished gear.

Two currencies run the game and they are walled off from each other.

The material ladder Live

Materials come in three families — metal, bio and fuel — and climb five tiers plus one special. Rarity rises toward the core: Alloy is everywhere, Singularity Cores only exist where it is most dangerous to be. Every crafting recipe is a typed bill drawn from this ladder, so the tier you can reach is the tier you can build.

Materials are dense: each unit takes 0.1 ▣ of hold space, so ten units fill one cargo slot. A hold full of Void Steel is worth many times a hold full of Alloy, which is why the deep haul is the dangerous haul.

Extraction

Park on a system with a deposit and EXTRACT. One cycle costs 10 ⚡ and pays 2–4 units multiplied by the deposit's richness into your active hull's hold; a full hold stops the run. Rich deposits (richness 2 or 3) also roll a 5% / 15% chance of a unit of the next tier up. Standing an outpost on the deposit mines for you overnight — see Territory. Held ground pays more: extraction in a sector your guild holds and inside a cluster humans have won is boosted.

Station trade — the MARKET tab Partial

Every port has a Market. Warp in (that costs ⚡), dock, open MARKET, and you see one list — GOODS · AMMO · DEPLOYABLES plus components and today's rack — with the station's buy price, its sell-back price, how many it has in stock and how many you carry. The trade itself costs no turns; the travel does.

Three racks and the fence lane

A port sells exactly three goods, one per family (metal / bio / fuel), and the tier it sells depends on where it sits: home-space ports rack Common (Alloy, Organics, He-3), frontier ports rack Uncommon, core ports rack Rare. Prices walk a curve: each successive unit you buy costs a little more, and each successive unit you sell pays a little less. A round trip at one port always loses; profit comes from hauling between ports.

Anything you carry that this port does not rack, it pays a flat fence premium for — 1.2× the material's base value. That is the incentive to run Rare mats down-tier and Commons up-tier.

Stock is finite and rolls daily. Size-1 ports carry 40–120 units of each good, size-2 ports 100–300, size-3 ports run deep on goods and ammo only. Sold out means come back tomorrow.

Port types — routes you can learn

Every port is tagged with an archetype when the galaxy is generated, and that sets its standing price bias. Prices still wobble a few percent a day and drift back toward the bias, but the pattern holds all season.

The buy bias sits about 18% over base and the sell bias about 18% under, and no price ever leaves a 0.7×–1.4× band. The Industrial ↔ Extraction pairing is the canonical two-way route: raws one way, metal the other.

A station never pays more than it charges

The station's bid for a good is 90% of its posted price; ammo and deployables sell back at 50%. In every case the bid is capped at the station's own ask for the same item, so there is no "buy here, sell back here" loophole even in space where you enjoy a discount.

Territory changes the price

Buy prices take one control modifier, shown on the bill line before you commit. Discounts apply to what you buy; what the station pays you is unchanged.

Not in the beta yet: Military ports are designed to spike prices during an active siege and to sell salvage and surplus hulls cheap; in the build they only carry the Alloy/He-3 buy bias.

Numbers in this feature are current beta values and will move with balance passes.

The station rack — components, hulls, ammo, deployables Live

Beyond bulk goods, every port rolls a small selection of finished goods each day. What you see on the spec card is exactly what you buy — quality, mount size, stat rolls and any set tag are fixed when the rack rolls, not when you tap.

• Component rack (MARKET, every port including size 1) — 2–3 slots at size 1, 3–4 at size 2, 4–6 at size 3. Rarity follows region: home space is about 90% Common, the frontier is the Common-to-Uncommon crossover with a Rare tail, the core is mostly Rare with a few Epic. Roughly one slot in five carries a Minor or Standard set piece. Mount sizes roll S 35% / M 35% / L 20% / X 10%.
• Legendary never appears on any rack, anywhere, and neither do Elite set pieces. Those come only from drops, crafting and the Exchange.
• SHIPYARD (size-2+ ports) — a random 1–4 hulls a day, each one unique unit with its own pre-rolled fit and price, plus trade-ins other players sold back, which arrive wearing the exact pieces they left with. Hulls are gated by Commander Level; see Ships.
• Armory (AMMO, size-2+) — fighters and torpedoes, finite at size 2 (10–40 fighters, 3–10 torpedoes a day) and deep at size 3. Capped by your bays. Sells back at 50%.
• DEPLOYABLES (size-2+) — a random subset of the hardware catalog each day, one or two of each. Sells back at 50%.
• Component buyback (COMPONENTS, size-2+) — sell any unfitted piece from your active hull's cargo at a price on the quality curve, roughly 250 ₵ for a Common up to about 1,100 ₵ for a Legendary, never above what the rack would charge for the same piece.

Contraband — the black market Live

Dock at a Free Port and the goods list shows one extra row: Contraband. It is a bulk good with the same hold density as a material, and its price re-rolls every day at every den, swinging up to ±40% around a base of 120 ₵. The smuggling run is buy low at one Free Port and haul to another where today's roll is high. A den buys back at 85% of its own roll, so a same-port flip always loses.

The catch is customs. Docking to trade at any lawful port sweeps you once per port per day with a 25% chance of seizing every unit of contraband you carry uncovered. Covered means sitting inside scan-proof hold space — the Smuggler's Hold component adds it. The roll is fixed for the day, so re-docking does not re-roll the dice. Contraband ignores territory discounts, and at the reset it counts toward your holdings like any other cargo.

Where credits come from and where they go Live

Credits are meant to flow, not pool. The faucets: station buys of what you haul, extraction (boosted on held ground), crafting value-add, salvage and raids, contracts and bounties, the daily login bonus, and the credit value of what you recover at Wright sites.

The sinks: combat losses, ammo (fighters and torpedoes — lasers fire free), hull and component purchases, repairs, crafting bills, citadel and guild-workshop construction, deployable upkeep, lane stabilization, siege bonds, bounty posting, re-roll fees, and Exchange listing fees.

The reset conversion

When the season ends, everything you still hold — credits, the value of your hulls and gear, materials, deployables, contraband — is valued in credits and converted to Reputation at 1 Rep per 1,000 ₵ of surviving assets. Reputation persists and buys access (titles, Prestige), never stats; see Progression. A rich guild's treasury keeps draining through the live sinks, and a fortune at the reset becomes standing, not a head start.

The monetization pledge Live

Deadlanes follows the strict Warframe model, and the rules are enforced by the server, not by policy.

• The whole game is free. Every hull, component and blueprint is earnable in play.
• Aurum buys time and vanity, never turns or power. It rushes a craft timer or a market delivery, it buys paint, it buys the season pass. It cannot buy credits, turns, blueprints, stats or territory.
• Free players join the premium economy by selling. Everything you list on the Exchange is priced in Aurum; another player's cash-bought Aurum becomes your paint budget.
• Rejected permanently: turn purchases, stat purchases, loot boxes, pre-claimed territory, cash-direct gear. Gear enters the world only by being earned by someone.

Every Aurum surface is firewall-tested: the store can only contain Aurum bundles and vanity, the season pass can only pay Aurum, cosmetics and convenience perks, and the login bonus can only pay credits and materials.

Aurum — the premium currency Partial

The anchor: 1 Aurum = 1 turn = 1¢. A hundred Aurum is a dollar, full stop — no obfuscated gem-to-coin conversions. Every price therefore reads three ways: cash, Aurum, and play-days (at 150 ⚡ a day, a 300-Aurum item is $3 or two days of turns).

Where Aurum comes from: cash bundles (the only place Aurum is created), selling on the Exchange, and the season pass's staged reward.

What it buys

Sinks and transfers

The store, the pass and the Exchange's 10% commission destroy Aurum. An Exchange purchase moves it from buyer to seller. Because the store and the commission burn it, the cash faucet cannot inflate the float forever, and farmed gear stays genuinely worth Aurum.

Bundles (STORE → AURUM)

Not in the beta yet: real-money purchase is not switched on — the bundle ladder is catalogued and priced but store receipts are not yet accepted, so beta testers receive Aurum through a dev grant. Buying a Neural Reset with Aurum is also not built; you get one free charge each season.

The Exchange — the player market Partial

The Exchange is an asynchronous auction house built for a game where nobody is online at the same time. You list, log off, and collect when it sells. Find it under the AUCTION tab of any size-2+ station, or at a tier-2+ guild citadel with a Market Hub fitted. It does not operate in Blighted systems.

It opens on day 8 of every season. No day-one land rush; each season's gear market starts from genuine scarcity.

What you can list

Components — any unfitted piece in your active hull's cargo, except factory Starter gear — and materials in any quantity from your hold. Never blueprints, credits, turns, hulls or deployables. Everything is priced in Aurum.

Listing is physical, browsing is remote

You can post a listing only when you are docked at an auction house or your active hull has a Market Uplink fitted. Hauling your Legendary to market is a raidable trip — a job for escorts. Once listed, the item is escrowed: it leaves your hold and cannot be fitted, sold twice or lost. Bidding and buying work from any house; the board is a remote view of every listing in the galaxy.

Auction and buyout

When you list you set a starting bid, a buyout, or both, and a duration of 12, 24 or 48 hours. Buyers bid — their Aurum is held in escrow, a new bid must beat the standing one by 5%, and the outbid player is refunded instantly and told — or hit buyout to end it on the spot. At close the high bid wins. An unsold item returns to that house and you collect it in person. You can cancel a listing that has no bids (the fee stays spent), and you cannot bid on your own.

Two fees, two currencies

The credit fee gates supply (it deters spam and scales with value); the Aurum commission taxes demand and is the market's primary Aurum sink. You never need Aurum to participate — only to buy. The two-tap confirm shows the exact fee before you commit.

Delivery — distance is the friction

If you are standing at any auction house when you win, the item lands instantly. Otherwise it ships on a surrogate-turn timer that ticks down as you spend turns on anything else, never consuming action turns, scaled by where you are.

Collect with COLLECT into your active hold — you need the cargo room. Buying gear to the deep front is a real wait or a real Aurum spend, never free teleportation.

Not in the beta yet: NPC seeding — the design has the galaxy's independent traders post a population-scaled handful of listings each day (with a small chance of a jackpot) so the board is never empty. Today the board is 100% player-supplied, and browsing is only reachable from a size-2+ station or a citadel screen rather than from anywhere on the map.

The Store — DAILY · AURUM · PAINTS · SEASON PASS Partial

The STORE has four rooms. One of them is free and worth a tap every day.

DAILY — the login bonus

A free seven-tile track of credits and this season's materials for showing up. It pays 400 ₵ on day 1 rising to 1,400 ₵ by day 6, adds Common materials on days 3 and 5, and day 7 is a 3× jackpot with an Uncommon material. Miss a day and the track pauses rather than resetting; after day 7 it loops. Rewards grow 10% per season week. Full detail in Your Day → The daily room.

PAINTS — the cosmetics store

A cosmetic is data laid over the hull's real shading, so a stock hull is grey and unlit and a painted one lights up. You paint four zones — primary, secondary, accent and engine glow — and any zone can be left stock.

• Paints — a paint is one colour × finish pair: 18 colours (Charcoal, Gunmetal, Steel, Ivory, Ink, Crimson, Rose, Ember, Amber, Gold, Brass, Moss, Jade, Cyan, Azure, Indigo, Violet, Magenta) by 4 finishes (Metallic, Matte, Weathered, Chrome), 72 in all, at 200 Aurum each. Eight are featured each week under THIS WEEK and rotate. Buy paints and mix them per zone.
• Schemes — six curated four-zone presets (Voidgold, Bloodlane, Ashen Marches, Slipstream, Nullfield, Void Reaver) at 300 Aurum, applied whole. A scheme does not unlock its member colours. You can also save custom schemes of your own.
• Trails and banners — Ember and Frostlane warp trails at 450 Aurum, the Ashen Marches banner at 250.
• Kerubiel faces (Cassiel, Azrael, Uriel) are free — set them on your profile.

Painting happens in the FLEET customiser, per hull, so two ships can wear different schemes. Cosmetics persist across seasons — the natural place to park a dying season's Aurum.

SEASON PASS

One pass per season for 1,000 Aurum. Progress comes from Reputation-earning deeds — winning fights and the like — across 10 tiers of 120 points each. Everyone climbs the free track; the pass unlocks the paid one.

Finish the paid track and you have banked exactly the Aurum to buy the next pass, so a committed player buys one pass ever. Partial completion returns partial Aurum. Claim each reward with CLAIM as its tier unlocks.

Craft rush

Any craft job in progress can be finished now for 1 Aurum per remaining turn. Craft timers tick as you spend turns on other things, so rushing buys earlier delivery and nothing else — the free player never spent turns on the wait either. See Gear & Crafting.

Not in the beta yet: trails and banners can be bought but are not drawn anywhere yet; citadel themes, report flair, purchasable titles, animated premium paints and themed bundles are designed but not in the catalog. The pass's three convenience perks are granted but inert, the pass cannot yet be bought with cash, and the planned three-day turn bank for pass holders is not built — the bank cap is 300 ⚡ for everyone.

Premium animated hulls Planned

Designed but not in the build: a premium cosmetic tier that adds slow ambient motion over your hull — orbiting escort fighters, pulsing engine glow, shield shimmer, sliding panels, blinking running lights, spinning dishes and hab rings. The ladder runs stock (static, unlit) → enhanced (trim, engine pulse, lights) → premium (moving pieces, full emissive, animated paints). Combat effects — lasers, torpedoes, explosions — are universal and never a cosmetic; every ship gets them.

Terms

The list