Accurate as of v2.0.18 (August 2026).
Moving
Sectors are connected by links. Most links are bidirectional grid adjacency; about one sector in five also carries a diagonal link, and a fraction of those diagonals are one-way. A galaxy also gets a handful of long-range Federation highways connecting the core to distant regions, and a handful of one-way smuggling routes running out of pirate and rim space toward distant sectors.
A move to a linked sector costs 1 turn and runs the full arrival stack:
- Sector hazards roll.
- Mines in the sector roll.
- Limpet trackers waiting in the sector latch onto you, silently.
- An NPC encounter may roll.
- If a patrol turns up, a customs scan may follow.
Arriving in a sector for the first time pays exploration XP: 10 base, +25 if it has a port, +50 for a planet, +100 for a landmark.
Moving breaks a ship cloak.
Warp drive
The Warp Drive turns hops into jumps.
- Install: 15,000 cr, requires a tier-2+ hull and a few levels on the season ladder — an early gate you’ll clear in your first sessions.
- Upgrade: 15,000 cr × the new level, to level 5.
- Cost:
max(1, ceil(hops ÷ warpLevel))turns.
At level 1 warp saves you nothing but the clicking. At level 5, a 20-hop journey costs 4 turns instead of 20.
Three hard rules:
- You can only warp to a sector you have already visited. The route finder refuses unvisited destinations outright. Buy intel or fly there once.
- A route has to exist. One-way links mean the way back is not always the way you came.
- The Warp Optimizer module removes 1 turn, and the Explorer role removes 1 to 3 more. Both floor the total at 1.
Interruption
A warp can be interrupted mid-flight by an NPC. The journey truncates where you were stopped and turns are refunded proportionally for the hops you did not fly.
The per-hop interruption chance is bounded so that no journey exceeds a 30% total chance of being stopped, no matter how long it is. Players under PvP immunity skip the roll entirely.
Warping through a hazard sector rolls that hazard at 25% of the normal chance. Arriving at a hazard destination rolls the full chance.
Warping breaks a cloak and clears landed status.
The Tesseract
An instant jump to any visited sector, any distance, for a flat 25 turns.
- Install: 10,000,000 cr, tier-5 hull, and a level gate sitting at the very top of the season’s ladder.
- No hop discovery, no interruption roll, no hazard pass-through.
- Exempt from every turn discount in the game.
The last unlock in the game. The Tesseract is gated deeper in the ladder than anything else — deliberately. Whether a given season’s ladder actually reaches it depends on that season’s tuning: some running seasons cap out below the gate, in which case nobody installs one there, ever. Check the in-game unlock list for your season’s numbers before you plan around it.
Wormholes
Each galaxy generates a couple of core–rim bridges plus a few random wormholes. Roughly 30% of them are unstable.
- Transit costs 1 turn and you must be in the wormhole’s origin sector.
- Some are bidirectional; some are not.
- A stable transit bypasses mines and hazards entirely. Wormholes are the one clean way through a mined sector.
- An unstable wormhole has a 20% chance of scattering you to a random sector instead of its exit. A scattered arrival is a forced jump and it does roll arrival hazards.
- Limpets latch either way.
Hazards
Hazards are sector properties, not events. About 6% of sectors carry one.
| Hazard | Chance on arrival | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Asteroid field | 20% | 10–20 shield damage; in a fight, +10pp escape and −10% torpedo penetration |
| Radiation zone | 100% | 25 shield damage; in a fight, −10% shield defense |
| Minefield | 40% | 40–60 damage |
| Ion storm | 100% | No damage; in a fight, −20% to every tech module bonus |
| Nebula | 100% | No damage; in a fight, −15% fighter effectiveness |
Hazard damage lands on shields first and spills to hull at ×1.5 like all damage. A hazard can kill you if your shields are down and your hull is thin.
Arrivals by move, warp destination and tesseract destination all roll the full chance. Warp pass-through rolls at 25%. Wormhole transit is exempt.
Scanning
Two different things share the word “scan”.
Active scan costs turns and reveals a radius around you: 1 turn per ring, radius 1 to 3. It reports sectors and hazards, and — at StarNav 2 or better — deployed ordnance by kind and quantity, though never who owns it.
The StarNav passive sweep is free and always available if you have the drive. See Scanners & Intel.
Beacons
A Navigation Beacon is a public message you leave in a sector. Buy them at any supply shop for 2,500 cr, deploy one for 0 turns, up to 140 characters, one beacon per player per sector. Everyone who passes through sees your handle on it — and the glyph of any beacon-mark insignia you hold. You can remove your own at any time.
Private sector notes (280 characters) and a favorite flag cost nothing and are yours alone.
Landmarks
Three unique named landmarks generate per galaxy, always out past the inner ring: The Silent Armada, Precursor Ruins, The Crystal Garden, The Cinder, The Wanderer’s Monolith.
Interacting costs 0 turns but carries a 24-hour per-player cooldown for each landmark. Each landmark has a shared loot budget of 50,000 cr that depletes across the whole galaxy — when it’s gone, it’s gone, and whoever got there first got it. Jump-gate landmark exits roll arrival hazards.
Landmarks are worth 100 exploration XP on first arrival, the richest first-visit bonus in the game.
Naming a sector
Sector names are a flex, not a mechanic. Naming one requires an unspent Cartographer’s Mark insignia, which is granted by the GM events desk and consumed on use.
You must have visited the sector and be standing in it. Names are 3–24 characters, letters, numbers, spaces, apostrophes and hyphens, run through a profanity gate, and one per sector forever. Operators can revoke a name.