Bounties

Accurate as of v2.0.18 (August 2026).

There are two kinds of bounty and they pay out completely differently.

Player-posted bounties

Anyone past an early level gate can put a price on a rival’s head at a bounty office. Offices exist at exactly two docks — the faction capitals: the Stardock and the Pirate Haven. (They used to be keyed to the tavern; since v2.0.15 the office and the registry are the same two sectors.)

Posting 50,000 costs you 55,000.

A player bounty pays cash immediately to whoever beats the target in PvP. No paperwork, no travel, no registry. Win the fight, the money lands.

Faction bounties

Faction bounties are generated automatically. Kill enough of a faction’s people and that faction posts a warrant on you. Robbing trader NPCs in the shipping lanes — Federation space and the inner belt — feeds the same Federation counter; robbing a merchant prince counts double. The deep rim is lawless: robberies out there draw no warrant.

amount = min(500 × tierMultiplier × sqrt(kills), 500,000)
tierMultiplier = 1, 2, 4, 8, 16    by your hull tier

The square root matters: heat grows fast at first and then flattens. Your tenth kill roughly triples the price of your first; your hundredth is only just over three times your tenth. A tier-5 hull multiplies the whole thing by 16.

Faction bounties never expire.

The two-step claim

Beating a captain who carries a faction bounty does not hand you cash. It mints a bounty claim — a redeemable ticket that never expires.

To turn claims into credits you go in person to the issuing registry:

Redemption costs 0 turns and cashes every claim of that faction at once.

The obvious problem is also the design: a captain who spends their time hunting Federation-wanted pirates has to sail into pirate space to earn claims and back to the Stardock to cash them. And a Federation registry denies docking to anyone below −300 alignment.

In a fleet strike, the leader personally earns the claims.

Being wanted

Your standing card shows a wanted entry for each faction that holds a warrant on you. That warrant does three things:

1. Every player in the galaxy can see the price and collect it.
2. Patrols and pirates shoot on sight, overriding their normal aggression rules.
3. The issuing faction’s capital arrests you at the door.

Arrest at dock

Try to do anything at a faction capital that holds a warrant on you:

• If your wallet covers the bounty: it is seized up to the bounty amount, the warrant clears, the arrest posts to the public feed, and that action fails with ARRESTED_AT_DOCK. Retry and it works — you’re clean now.
• If your wallet is short: you’re refused with DOCKING_DENIED_BOUNTY and nothing is seized.

Only the wallet is ever seized. Your bank is untouched. Which means the cheapest way to survive an arrest is to have nothing in the wallet — and the cheapest way to clear a warrant on your own terms is to walk in carrying exactly the bounty amount.

Looking at prices is a query and only checks alignment. Buying anything is a mutation and runs the arrest check. You can window-shop while wanted.

One deliberate exception: you can withdraw from your bank while wanted. A wanted captain whose wallet couldn’t cover the warrant used to be frozen — unable to reach their own money to settle it. Withdrawal now passes the docking gate, precisely because it moves credits into the one pot the arrest can take.

Paying it off

You can also settle directly with payoff, naming the faction (federation or pirate_syndicate). Your wallet must cover the full amount. No fee, no discount, no negotiation.

The board

The bounty board shows:

• every active bounty in the galaxy
• your own unredeemed faction claims
• the total head money currently on you

The Most Wanted leaderboard ranks players by the sum of active bounties on their heads. The Bounty Hunter leaderboard ranks by bounty credits earned — player payouts at the kill plus faction claims at redemption — with heads collected as the tiebreak.

Making a living at it

Bounty hunting is a real career with real numbers behind it:

• The Bounty Hunter goal ladder pays out at 3 / 12 / 40 heads.
• The daily Bounty Board and Bounty Spree missions pay 7,000–8,000 cr plus lawful alignment.
• The epic Warrant hull demands 100 heads and 1,000,000 cr in bounty money, and grants limpet trackers that never expire.
• The epic Writ of the Council demands 50 redeemed Federation claims and 2,500 held Federation standing.

The counters that matter are bountiesCollected (heads) and totalBountyCreditsEarned (money). They are tracked separately and the epic ladders want both.