Turns, Credits & Basics
The turn cycle, buying turns, wallet versus bank, and streaks
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The turn cycle
Turns are the whole pacing system. You get a fixed allowance, you spend it, and you wait.
- Cap: 250 turns (season configuration).
- Cycle: 4 hours (season configuration, valid range 1–24).
- Boundaries: aligned to UTC — 00:00, 04:00, 08:00, 12:00, 16:00, 20:00.
- Reset behavior: full reset to the cap, not an increment.
- Carryover: none, ever. This is a design doctrine with no configuration knob behind it.
The reset is lazy: it lands the moment you next touch the game after a boundary passes, so you never lose turns by being offline. When you’re out, the game tells you how many minutes remain until the next reset.
Note the split: the turn cycle is configurable, but the world tick — planet production, market restock, port upkeep, garrison regrowth, shield regen, ordnance decay — runs on a fixed 4-hour infrastructure schedule. Today they coincide. In a season with a different cycle length they would not.
What a turn costs
| Action | Turns |
|---|---|
| Move to a linked sector | 1 |
| Wormhole transit | 1 |
| Buy or sell cargo (per leg, any quantity) | 1 |
| Buy or sell contraband | 1 |
| Engage in combat | 1 |
| Fleet strike | 1 |
| Trade with a trader NPC (per deal) | 1 |
| Rob a trader NPC | 1 |
| Deploy or attack ordnance | 1 |
| Destroy a foreign beacon | 1 |
| Lay mines from a planet garrison | 1 |
| Active scan | 1 per ring (radius 1–3) |
| Claim a planet, build a structure | 1 |
| Raid a planet, capture a planet | 1 each |
| Attack a port | 3 |
| Capture or raze a port after the siege | 1 |
| Warp jump | max(1, ceil(hops ÷ warpLevel)) |
| Tesseract jump | 25 flat |
| Port repair | 0 |
| Landmark interaction | 0 |
| Banking, planting a limpet, deploying a beacon, redeeming bounty claims, vault transfers, planet storage | 0 |
Two turn discounts exist and both only touch hop-based warp: the Warp Optimizer module (−1) and the Explorer role (−1 to −3). They stack, they floor at 1 turn, and neither has ever applied to the Tesseract’s flat 25.
Buying turns
Ports running the supplies service — the three starports and every Agricultural Port — sell provisions.
- 800 cr per turn.
- Maximum 5 turns per cycle. This is a ration, not a per-purchase limit. The old guide got this wrong.
- You are charged only for turns actually delivered. If you’re at 248/250 and ask for 5, you get 2, you pay 1,600, and 2 counts against your ration.
- A full tank returns
TANK_FULLand charges nothing. - Wallet only.
Turns also arrive as mission, event and streak rewards. Those grants are cap-aware: they will not push you above the cap, and they never reduce a tank that is somehow already over it.
Credits: wallet versus bank
Two balances, and the distinction is the whole risk model.
Wallet is at-risk money. It pays for everything, and it is what gets taken:
- looted when you lose a PvP fight (20–40% by the winner’s alignment, capped by their hull tier)
- skimmed when your planet is raided (10%, max 5,000 cr)
- fined by customs, taken by pirate shakedowns, seized on arrest at dock
- drawn on every world tick for wages while you hold a mercenary retinue contract — and the retinue deserts the moment the wallet can’t cover a tick
Bank is safe storage. Nothing in the game takes credits out of it except
you. There are no deposit fees, no withdrawal fees, no interest, and no turn
cost — but moving money in or out requires a teller: you must be docked
at a port running the banking service, which means the three starports and
Federation Ports. (This changed in v2.0.13 — banking from deep space let a
player zero their lootable wallet from anywhere, which made credit robbery
effectively opt-out.) Your bank balance still spends from nowhere at all:
nothing buys out of the bank except the fall-through cases below.
Almost everything in the game is wallet-only. There are exactly two exceptions that draw wallet first and then fall through to the bank:
- Ship repair.
- Founding a corporation.
(Paid announcements used to be the third. Since v2.5.0 posting to the galaxy is free — see Comms.)
Everything else — hulls, upgrades, drives, modules, items, provisions, intel, defense contracts, bounty postings, planet claims, structures, starbases, contraband — comes out of the wallet or not at all.
The bank is a safe, not a bank. Loans, bonds and insurance are specified but not built; the module lands after the pilot. Nothing currently pays interest, and no credit is ever minted.
Corporations have their own bank, which is separate again. See Corporations.
Streaks
A streak day is any UTC day on which you spent at least one turn. Not a login, not a full depletion — any turn-spending action. Two actions are deliberately excluded because they cost 0 turns by default: landmark interaction and port repair.
One missed day per streak is forgiven. Miss two and the streak resets to 1.
| Milestone | Credits | XP | Turns |
|---|---|---|---|
| Day 3 | 1,000 | 50 | — |
| Day 7 | 5,000 | 200 | 5 |
| Day 14 | 10,000 | 500 | 10 |
| Day 30 | 25,000 | 1,000 | 20 |
The streak count is account-level and survives season boundaries. The rewards are seasonal — you need an active enrollment to claim them, and a streak reset clears your claims so a fresh streak re-earns the same milestones.
The public feed
The galaxy keeps a news feed, and it is genuinely public. Battles are reported (destroyed / drove off / fled), tier-3+ ship commissionings post, planet claims and port captures post, ports shaking off their occupiers post, new captains and season honors post. Ships lost to a minefield post, naming both the victim and the mine’s owner. Captain renames post publicly — the one place the galaxy connects an old name to a new one. Goal-tier and streak-milestone brags post too.
You can react to feed stories — five reaction types, pick as many as apply.
You also have a private channel: your own events, and the “while you were away” recap that lists what happened since you last looked and which planets have full storage (production collects itself since v2.3.0, so a full warehouse is the one thing that loses you output). Since v2.0.17 the private lane also tells you when things happen to your stuff: someone destroyed your deployed ordnance, someone swept off your limpet tracker, or your ordnance simply decayed away.
Galaxy posts
Anyone at level 5 can post to the whole galaxy from the Galaxy channel —
free, up to 280 characters, through the profanity gate, no links.
Write @captain or @corp and the name lights up; whoever you named sees an
@ you chip and a count on their Galaxy chip until they open it. A corp
mention reaches every member. One post can name up to five targets. Posts
share the spam gate with every other chat surface, and other
captains can report one — three reports hide it automatically, pending the
moderation desk.
Operators can also post galaxy notices of their own — those arrive as an in-app banner you dismiss once, not just a feed line.
If you value operational secrecy, note what that means. Buying a capital-class hull tells everyone. Losing a fight tells everyone. Claiming a planet paints a target.
Comms
The Comms tab (the old Feed tab) holds every way captains talk, as channels: Galaxy (world events, operator notices, galaxy posts and your own dispatches — the things that happened to you), Corp (corporation chat, only while you are in one), Hails (direct chat) and Leaderboards (with a season selector for finished seasons).
One spam gate covers all three chat surfaces, counted per captain across them: 3 messages per 10 seconds and 30 per 10 minutes. Over it, the game tells you how many seconds to wait. Links are blocked everywhere.
Corporation chat takes 500 characters, with a 30-messages-per-minute corp-wide cap on top of the gate. History keeps the last 500 messages or 14 days, whichever is longer. Messages land instantly, the roster’s joins and leaves show inline, and you can see how many corpmates are online.
Hails are direct, text-only chats between two captains in the same season: one thread per pair, 280 characters a message, kept for the last 200 messages or 30 days per thread. Starting a hail needs level 5; replying needs nothing. Tap Hail to find a captain by name. Block from a thread header and that captain’s hails and galaxy posts stop reaching you, in both directions — silently; they are not told.
Report any message with ⚑ (posts) or a long press (hails and corp chat). Reports go to the moderation desk; three reports hide a message automatically, and a moderator can silence a captain on every surface for an hour, a day, a week or the season. Reading is never silenced.
Mail is account-scoped and works between seasons. Feedback goes straight to the developers from inside the app; 2,000 characters, and it works whether or not you’re in a season.