PILOT GUIDE
A persistent universe where every pilot, ship, and credit belongs to a real person. Trade, fight, mine, explore. Form Armadas, anchor holdings in the frontier, besiege your rivals, and carve out your corner of the fractured galaxy.
Getting Started
After enlisting, your pilot is assigned a callsign and a doctrine. a lifetime specialization that shapes your combat style and bonuses. You start with a basic ship and enough credits to buy cargo or fuel at any friendly station.
- Callsign: your public name. shown to other pilots in chat, kill feeds, and leaderboards.
- Doctrine: choose once, keep forever. see the Doctrines section below.
- First undock: from your starter station's hangar, click Undock. you'll spawn in space with 15 seconds of undock invulnerability during which no damage can reach you (and you can't deal damage).
- Chat channels: LOCAL (sector), GLOBAL, ARMADA (once you join one), PARTY, and SYS for system notifications.
Flying Your Ship
Every ship consumes fuel while flying. Idle in space still burns a trickle for life support. Running dry leaves you adrift and a target for pirates unless a Tanker pilot finds you. Moving at cruise burns roughly 40x the idle rate; afterburner cruise is around 240x idle.
HUD & Customization
Your cockpit HUD is fully draggable and resizable. Move the pieces to match your monitor, your ship, and your playstyle. Layouts save to your account automatically.
- Drag from anywhere: click and drag any panel body to reposition. Click-through targets (buttons, inputs, chat tabs) still work.
- Resize to scale: each panel has a small diagonal grip in its bottom-right corner. Drag it to scale the entire panel (and its contents, including fonts) between 60% and 220%.
- Chat resize: the chat panel's grip adjusts width and message-area height separately from the scale grip.
- Radar: slip gates outside the radar's 2 km range show as edge chevrons pointing toward the gate with a distance readout. Colored blips track stations, NPCs, resource nodes, and party-mates.
- Damage alarms: screen-edge vignette pulses red on low hull or low fuel. Audio chirps match the visual.
Stations & Travel
Stations are safe harbors. dock to trade, repair, refit, store cargo, and manage your fleet. Between stations, you travel through sectors linked by slip gates.
- Docking: fly within range and press F. Some stations charge a small docking fee; armada-owned stations can restrict docking (see below).
- Slip gates: fixed jump points between sectors. Press F within 300m of a gate. Each jump costs fuel. Gates cannot be used while in combat cooldown.
- Fuel: refill at stations using fuel cells from your stash, or buy at a markup.
- Repairs: station repair bays restore hull using hull plating + credits. Engineering skill lowers the cost.
- Universe map: press M anywhere (in-flight or docked) to see every sector, its zone color, slip gate connections, and which armada holds which station.
Zones of Space
Every sector is tagged with one of four zone types. Know which one you're in before picking a fight or hauling cargo.
PvP weapon fire is blocked server-side. Trade and refit without fear of other pilots. Ideal for new arrivals and logistics.
PvP permitted with a softer landing. 3% credit penalty on death here. Good loot, some risk, still mostly peaceful.
Open war. 10% credit penalty on death. Killers claim a share of lost credits plus looted cargo and hull salvage. Most rival Armada skirmishes happen here.
Lawless claimable space beyond the PvP ring. Rich resource fields, aggressive NPCs, hostile armadas, and the only places you can anchor your own station. Sieges live here.
Economy & Salvage Exchange
Credits are the universal currency, earned through trade, missions, salvage, and PvP kills. Every transaction is logged; every credit that exists was either earned or dropped by another pilot.
- Station stash: per-pilot storage at each station. Resources deposited here stay put until you withdraw or sell them.
- Salvage Exchange: the market is universe-wide. Browse every active buy/sell order at every station from any market-enabled dock. You can fill an order at a distant station without traveling to it; the resources deliver to whichever side should receive them.
- Order tax: trades at armada stations pay the station's set tax rate. NPC stations have a fixed cut.
- Obsidian Trust: galactic vault account. Store credits safely; a small storage fee applies.
- Audit ledger: every mission reward, PvP credit share, vault deposit, and tax is logged. Nothing quietly disappears.
Mining & Refining
Resource nodes spread through every sector, thickest in frontier space. Mine them, sell the raw ore, or refine into higher-tier materials.
- Finding nodes: resource nodes appear as colored asteroids, belts, gas clouds, dead planets, or debris fields on the radar. Types include crystal, iron ore, titanium, rare earth, ice, plasma gas, neon fluid, and dark matter.
- Mining: approach within range and hold F. Yield per cycle scales with your mining equipment, doctrine, and skill level.
- Node pools: each node has a pool that regenerates over time. Frontier nodes are deeper and regen faster than interior ones.
- Refining: raw ore becomes refined alloy, fuel cells, hull plating, crystal optics, coolant, neon cells, and other crafted materials at station refineries.
- Factories (armada stations): armada holdings can install factory modules that auto-convert inputs to outputs over time. Recipes include alloy, plating, optics, coolant, neon cells, fuel, rare components, and dark matter core.
Ships & Fittings
Your hangar can hold multiple ships. only your active ship is flown. Buy new hulls at shipyards, fit them with equipment, and swap between them when docked.
A mid-tonnage warship that predates half the treaties in this sector. The Bulwark was the hull everyone standardized on because no one could agree on anything else. Stable, well-armed, heavy enough to take the first salvo and still answer.
Capital iron. A Sovereign does not go anywhere quickly, does not dock quietly, and is not talked back to. Four hardpoints, an armored command bridge, and enough shield capacitors to outlast a small station. You will know when one enters the sector.
Every pilot gets a Spark. Stellar Arms welds them up faster than the yards can paint numbers on the hulls, and the first fifty jobs a pilot takes will be flown from a cockpit that still smells of primer. Unglamorous, forgiving, and everywhere.
A predator's silhouette. Forward-swept wings, forked tail, and chin-mounted cannons loud enough to carry through a depressurized hull. Anything about the Wraith that isn't aggressive is probably broken; its pilots are rarely hired for subtle work.
Built to move goods between colonies before anyone cared who won the war. The Drifter's cavernous holds and stubborn old fusion plant have outlived three empires and most of their accountants. Ugly, slow, honest. A working hull.
A tender hull welded to twin pressurized cells, first fielded by the old colonial relief fleet to keep long-range patrols alive between drops. Now any pilot with a docking clamp and a decent reputation can make a living off one. so long as the distress calls keep coming in.
Three engines, a cockpit, and almost no radar cross-section. The Needle was built to refuse fights rather than win them, and its pilots learn to run from the shot before the muzzle even flashes. Fastest airframe on the civilian register, and it shows.
Elite front-line interceptor. Raked spine, swept delta wings, and twin underslung thrust pods give it the highest cruise and turn rate in the player lineup. A thin hull demands the pilot trade on speed and firepower rather than stand-up fights.
Not a pretty ship. Bolted together in a pitside slipyard where nobody pays for paint, the Bore exists for exactly one thing: pulling ore out of rock while everyone else runs for cover. Its pilots tend to die rich or very old.
Equipment slots vary per ship: weapon, shield, engine, utility, mining. Fitted gear adds its bonuses to the base stats. Unfit a piece to move it between ships. Fitting two of the same weapon is fully supported. slots auto-pick the next free index.
Combat, Death & Wrecks
Combat is real-time and server-validated. Every shot is verified by the server so client cheats do nothing.
- Weapons: pulse, plasma, railgun, gatling, cluster torpedo. Each has unique damage, cooldown, and range profiles.
- Shields: take hits first, then hull. After 5 seconds out of combat they regenerate slowly (~1.5 shield per second, scaled by your shield regen stats). Dock at a station repair bay for an instant full top-up when you need your shields back now.
- Undock invulnerability: 15 seconds of full damage immunity after leaving a station. You also can't deal damage during the window.
- Combat cooldown: taking damage locks slip gate jumps and station docking for 15 seconds. Plan your escape.
- Death: hull to zero spawns a lootable wreck where you fell. 40% of your cargo drops into it, plus hull salvage materials (iron ore, titanium).
- Respawn: ship restored at your home station (or nearest safe one). Credit penalty depends on zone (3% neutral, 10% PvP).
- Looting: approach a wreck within 150m and interact. First pilot to claim wins. Wrecks persist for 5 minutes in Redis; late joiners and respawners still see them when re-entering the sector.
- Self-loot: no server rule prevents you from salvaging your own corpse if you get back in time.
- Bounties: players can place bounties through the Red Ledger. Killing a bountied target pays out on kill.
Missions
Every station with a Mission Board issues contracts. Accept them at the board, deliver per the contract, return to collect.
- Delivery: haul a resource from the origin station's stash to a specific destination station.
- Mining: extract a quantity of a specific resource from a node in the mission's sector.
- Combat: kill a set number of a target NPC faction or template.
- Difficulty tiers: T1 Trivial through T5 Extreme, color-coded on the board. Higher tier means bigger reward and harder content.
- Armada-issued missions: armada stations with an active Mission Board module generate their own contracts funded by the armada's treasury. Each is single-claim. Once a pilot accepts, it disappears from the listing. Ages out after 2 hours if unclaimed (treasury refunded).
- Limits: each pilot can hold a cap on concurrent active missions at once. Complete or abandon to free a slot.
Armadas & Alliances
Armadas are player-run clans. Found one, recruit pilots, build a treasury, and field operations at a scale no solo pilot can match.
- Ranks: Cadet, Pilot, Commander, Admiral. Each with escalating permissions (invite, kick, withdraw, declare war).
- Treasury: shared credit pool. Members deposit; rank-gated withdraw.
- Resource Vault: shared stockpile for every mineable and refined resource. Vault contents count toward station build costs automatically. Debit path pulls from station stash first, then vault.
- Equipment Vault: shared gear locker.
- Chat: private Armada-only channel.
- Tag: a 3-5 letter callsign tag displayed next to every member's name.
- Alliances: multiple armadas can form an alliance for shared diplomacy. Alliance members are treated as friendly at armada stations and during siege conflicts.
Holdings & Station Building
An armada can anchor its own Station Core in any frontier sector. Once anchored, the station is yours to build out with modules, defend, and profit from.
- Station Core: buy from a shipyard for 500,000 credits + 200 rare components + 50 dark matter core. Haul it in cargo to a frontier sector.
- Deployment: in-flight, press the deploy-core prompt. The anchor takes 30 minutes. Any pilot can shoot the anchoring claim during that window; destruction refunds 30% of the cost.
- Min distance: 1500m from any existing station, slip gate, or pending claim.
- Command Core tiers: installed command core sets weapon slot count and max module tier. T1 = 2 weapons + T1 modules; T2 = 4 weapons + T2 modules; T3 = 6 weapons + T3 modules. Build a higher-tier core to upgrade (old is replaced).
- Modules: Shield Array (I/II/III), weapon batteries (pulse, plasma, railgun, gatling), Mission Board, Market Terminal, Repair Bay, Shipyard, factories, Defense Garrison, Slip Anchor Beacon.
- Visual tiers: T2 adds an armored battlement ring around the hull (turrets mount on the deck). T3 adds a defense halo, command spire, wing plates, and an underhull hangar pod.
- Fuel upkeep: active armada stations consume fuel cells. Run dry and they power down (shields off, turrets off, services offline) until refueled.
- Docking policy: leaders can set who may dock: Open, Alliance only, Armada only, or Open except blacklist (specific armada tags denied). Non-allowed pilots bounce off the shield bubble on approach. Allowed pilots fly through.
- Taxes: set a market tax rate that generates treasury income from every trade filled at your station.
Sieges
Other armadas can declare a siege on your holdings to try to take them. Sieges are time-boxed and multi-phase so defenders get fair warning and a real chance to rally.
- Declaration: an enemy armada pays a siege declaration fee and names a target station. A window opens at a scheduled time (defenders can set a prime time range for their station).
- Phase 1. Shield down: during the first window, attackers must drop the station's shield pool. Defense Garrison NPCs and installed turrets fire back automatically.
- Phase 2. Hull down: with shields depleted, the siege is Reinforced. A second window opens; attackers must take the station's core hull to zero.
- Phase 3. Capture point: on hull zero, a capture beacon spawns 5km off the station. Whichever armada controls it at the contest timer wins the siege.
- Destructible anchoring cores: during the initial 30 minute anchor, the claim is a physical destructible object. Attackers can shoot it down; destruction refunds 30% to the defender.
- Warnings: attackers and defenders both see live siege state on the HUD when near the target station.
Slip Anchor Beacons
A premium module that lets armada members fast-jump straight to a beacon station from anywhere in the galaxy.
- Installation: purchase and install a Slip Anchor Beacon module at any armada station. One beacon per station.
- Who can jump: armada members only. Not alliance-wide.
- Cost: free of credits and fuel.
- Cooldown: 4 hours per pilot between successful jumps. Shared across every beacon, so having multiple beacons doesn't stack uses.
- Destination: pilot arrives docked at the target station, regardless of where the jump was initiated.
- Restrictions: cannot initiate during combat cooldown. Cannot be used to escape an in-progress siege while taking fire.
Doctrines
A lifetime specialization chosen during pilot setup. Each doctrine tilts your stats toward a role.
| Netrunner | Hacking & E-Warfare. +10% Science, -5% Hull. |
| Enforcer | Heavy Combat. +10% Damage, -5% Speed. |
| Corsair | Speed & Piracy. +10% Speed, -5% Cargo. |
| Broker | Trade & Economics. +10% Profit, -5% Damage. |
| Artificer | Engineering & Craft. +10% Crafting, -5% Evasion. |
| Signal | Recon & Intel. +10% Scan Range, -5% Damage. |
Skills
Skills level up through gameplay XP. Unlike doctrines, any pilot can train any skill.
| Skill | Gains from | Benefits |
|---|---|---|
| Combat | PvP/PvE damage dealt, kills | Weapon damage multiplier |
| Navigation | Slip gate jumps, distance flown, beacon jumps | Reduced fuel burn, cruise speed bonus |
| Engineering | Repairs, fitting equipment | Cheaper repairs, faster fits |
| Mining | Resource node cycles | Yield multiplier per cycle |
| Trading | Completed delivery missions, market fills | Market margin, cargo capacity |
| Piracy | PvP kills, wreck salvage | Larger credit shares and salvage yields |
Factions & Reputation
Every NPC belongs to a faction. Kill their ships and your standing drops; complete missions for them and it rises. Reputation unlocks benefits.
| Tier | Standing | Benefit |
|---|---|---|
| Hostile | ≤ -200 | No faction missions. NPCs aggro further. |
| Neutral | -199 to +199 | Standard missions and rewards. |
| Friendly | +200 to +499 | +15% mission rewards. Access to advanced missions. |
| Allied | ≥ +500 | +30% mission rewards. Access to elite missions. |
Current known factions: dronemilitiapirateswarm
Space Encounters
Events spawn periodically throughout the universe. Some reward the curious, some punish the overconfident.
- Distress signals: a broadcast pings the galaxy-wide chat when a distress event spawns. Respond fast and you can rescue a pilot (and their cargo), or ambush whoever else shows up.
- Cargo pods: floating in the void. Approach and loot. Sometimes booby-trapped.
- Elite encounters: named mini-boss NPCs with beefed hull and damage. Bigger payouts, bigger risk.
- Wrecks: every death leaves a salvageable wreck for 5 minutes.
Specialist Roles
Not every pilot fights. These paths let you carve out a niche.
Miner
Fit mining lasers, harvest asteroid fields and gas clouds. Sell raw ore or refine for higher margins. Artificers get +10% refine yield for downstream crafting.
Trader
Buy low, sell high. The Salvage Exchange is universe-wide. Spot price differences between stations and arbitrage. Brokers sell for +10% and buy for -5%. High cargo means slow ships. Hire an escort.
Pirate
Hunt traders and miners in PvP zones. The Piracy skill grows bounties and salvage. Corsairs' speed lets them catch and flee at will.
Tanker Pilot
Fly the Bellows, a fuel-cells-only freighter. Hold R near an adrift pilot to transfer fuel. Essential for Armada logistics and rescue missions.
Armada Industrialist
Run the factory floor. Stock the vault, install a Plating Mill or Component Assembler, and supply the war effort from your own holding. Every module your armada builds draws from your stockpile.
Armada Officer
Climb the ranks, manage treasury and vault, coordinate sieges and alliance diplomacy. Leadership is a role unto itself.
Galactic Threats
Periodically the galaxy faces something bigger than any one Armada. Cooperative events where the whole server either wins together or loses together. The first known threat is The Swarm, an invasive xeno force with its own cruisers, warriors, and dreadnoughts. Deep in frontier space an even larger predator has been sighted. The Leviathan answers to no faction and targets anything nearby.
Watch for threat broadcasts in the SYS channel. GM-run events appear on the Threat Board when active.
Desktop App
Prefer a standalone window over a browser tab? A native desktop shell is available (built with Tauri) that loads the live game client in a system WebView. Feature parity with the browser is automatic. Every update ships through the same server, no app rebuild required.
- Windows, macOS, Linux installers generated from the same codebase.
- Same auth, same world, same data. The desktop app is just a fast wrapper.
- Web still works. Browser remains the canonical client. Pick whichever you prefer.