Accurate as of v2.0.18 (August 2026).
The three types
| Type | Base rate per move | Never appears in | Max per sector | Drops |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pirate | 3.0% | Federation territory | 3 | 500–2,000 cr |
| Trader | 2.0% | — | 2 | 100–500 cr |
| Patrol | 1.5% | Pirate territory | 2 | nothing |
Region multiplies the base rate:
| Region | Pirate | Trader | Patrol |
|---|---|---|---|
fed_core | — | — | ×4.0 |
fed_space | — | ×0.5 | ×2.5 |
inner | ×0.5 | ×1.0 | ×1.5 |
middle | ×1.0 | ×1.2 | ×1.0 |
outer | ×1.5 | ×0.8 | ×0.5 |
outer_rim | ×2.0 | ×0.5 | — |
Pirates take priority over patrols, which take priority over traders. One NPC maximum per roll.
Loot scales by tier: ×0.75 / ×1.00 / ×1.25 / ×1.50 / ×1.75 at tiers 1–5.
Patrols drop nothing. Killing one buys you a Federation warrant and nothing else. That is deliberate.
Aggression
Patrols never ambush. Traders never ambush. Only pirates start fights, and only against people they consider fair game:
| Your alignment | In pirate territory | Elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| ≥ +300 (Federation) | 100% | 66% |
| Between | 66% | 33% |
| ≤ −300 (Pirate) | never | never |
Pirates never ambush a Pirate-aligned captain. Being deeply criminal is, in the most literal sense, safe.
Two overrides:
- A faction warrant on your head makes patrols and pirates shoot on sight, regardless of the table above.
- The Patrol Transponder module (Federation-only) means patrols never materialize at all. The epic FSS Writ of the Council does the same and doesn’t care about your current alignment.
Encounters that aren’t fights
An NPC that doesn’t ambush becomes a pending encounter. The negotiation options cost 0 turns; engaging, trading and robbing cost 1.
| Option | What happens |
|---|---|
| Engage | 1 turn, resolves as combat, no retreat roll |
| Surrender (pirate) | They take 30% of your cargo units. If your holds are empty, 10% of your wallet instead, capped at 5,000 cr. Never both. No fight, no alignment change. |
| Jettison | Dump 25% of cargo as a distraction. Guaranteed escape from a pirate. |
| Jettison contraband | Dump all contraband. The free alternative to submitting to a scan when you’re dirty. |
| Bribe a pirate | 500 / 1,500 / 4,000 / 10,000 / 25,000 cr by tier. 65% success, +15pp if you’re pirate-aligned below −300. −1 alignment on success, −2 on failure. |
| Bribe a patrol | 60% success. Failure costs a 2,000 cr fine. |
| Submit to a scan | Clean holds: +2 alignment. Dirty: seizure. |
| Trade | A real roadside deal off the trader’s manifest — see below. 1 turn per deal. |
| Rob a trader | Yield-or-resist, priced off your actual win probability — see below. 1 turn. |
Fleeing a pending encounter means simply letting it expire — pending contacts time out on their own. Every negotiation requires you to still be in the NPC’s sector — you cannot bribe, scan-submit, trade or rob a contact you walked away from.
Confirming a fight re-rolls it under the stored seed, so the result is deterministic. Reloading the screen does not reroll the dice.
Trading with a trader
The v2.0.9 rework made trader contacts a real market stop. Each trader carries a rolled manifest — actual units of each commodity, deeper holds at higher tiers — and quotes real prices derived from the standard catalog anchors:
- You buy at ×1.35 of the anchor; you sell at ×0.65. Always worse than a real port — you are paying for the convenience of not flying there. Your Merchant Guild band applies, same as at a port.
- Three deals per trader, 1 turn each. A trader is a stop, not a port.
- Contraband rides deeper holds. Traders in the core carry none; toward the rim, an off-market lot turns up more and more often (up to about a third of rim traders), priced at ×1.25 of the fence’s shelf price. Buying it needs the same early level gate as any black-market buy — and traders never buy contraband back; fences keep the sell-side monopoly.
Trading with an NPC is legal while PvP-immune. Parley is not combat.
Robbing a trader
Robbery is yield-or-resist, and the odds are honest: the yield chance is computed from the same win probability the combat resolver would use for the fight — roughly your win probability minus 15 points, clamped between 5% and 90%.
- They yield: you take a purse and a tier-scaled lot of one commodity (sometimes contraband) with no fight, and the trader despawns.
- They resist: a real fight, no retreat roll for you. Your ship takes real damage and can be destroyed. Winning kills the trader and pays the loot.
Either way the ledger is written in one stroke: −10 alignment, Syndicate
standing (+5 × tier), −25 Merchant Guild standing, and — if you did it
in the shipping lanes (fed_core, fed_space, inner) — a bump to the
Federation’s √-stacking bounty counter, until patrols shoot you on sight.
The deep rim draws no warrant. You cannot rob while PvP-immune; drawing a
gun is an aggressive act.
The tavern retinue
Since v2.0.9 the tavern hires out mercenary retinues — a PvE escort on contract.
| Tier | Bonus | Hire fee | Wage per world tick |
|---|---|---|---|
| Escort Wing | +4% combat power | 2,000 cr | 250 cr |
| Veteran Wing | +8% | 8,000 cr | 750 cr |
| Elite Wing | +12% | 25,000 cr | 2,000 cr |
Each tier sits behind its own season-ladder level gate, climbing with the bonus.
The rules that matter:
- PvE only, structurally. The bonus applies against NPC opponents and nowhere else — PvP fights and both siege paths are bit-identical with and without a retinue. This is built into where the bonus attaches, not a flag.
- One contract at a time. Hiring a new retinue replaces the old one.
- Wages come out of your wallet every world tick. A tick your wallet can’t cover means immediate desertion — mercenaries don’t take IOUs.
- Losing a PvE fight they were in ends the contract. So does the hard cap: 48 hours (12 ticks), then they walk. You can dismiss them early; no refund.
- Two companies, faction-flavored. The Stardock hires the Federation Auxiliary (Marine Escort → Marine Veterans → Fleet Irregulars); Pirate Bases and the Pirate Haven hire the Cutthroat Company (Hired Guns → Reaver Wing → Warlord’s Chosen). Same stats, different drinking songs. Each company refuses captains in the hostile alignment bucket (±300); neutrals can hire either.
Customs scans
Patrol encounters can trigger a customs scan. This is not a menu option you pick; it happens inside a patrol contact during a move or a warp arrival. See Smuggling for the full mechanics.
The part everyone needs to know: passing a customs scan with clean holds pays +2 alignment, with a 30-minute cooldown that stops you farming it. If you fly lawfully, patrols are not a nuisance — they are your standing income.
Warp interruption
An NPC can stop you mid-warp. The journey truncates where you were intercepted and turns are refunded proportionally for the hops you didn’t fly.
The per-hop rate is bounded so no journey exceeds a 30% total chance of being interrupted, however long it is. Immune players skip the roll.
An interrupted warp used to treat everybody as neutral. It doesn’t anymore — real alignment and real warrants apply mid-flight.
The living world
Transient NPCs are not furniture:
- Untouched NPCs despawn after 2 hours.
- Survivors wander to a linked sector with 20% chance per world tick.
- Trader NPCs actually travel port to port, picking destinations 3 to 10 hops out.
Named NPCs
Twelve named characters generate per galaxy — five pirates, five Federation, two merchant princes — and they roam their assigned regions permanently.
| Name | Title | Type | Tier | Roams | Bounty |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Redmaw Vex | the Warlord | Pirate | 5 | outer_rim | 150,000 |
| Grim Tally | the Butcher | Pirate | 4 | outer_rim | 75,000 — always ambushes |
| Iron Hessa | the Corsair Queen | Pirate | 4 | outer, outer_rim | 60,000 — escape 0.60 |
| Blackline Kord | the Smuggler King | Pirate | 4 | middle, outer | 60,000 — drops contraband |
| Saber Quill | the Phantom | Pirate | 3 | outer | 30,000 — escape 0.50, rarely sighted |
| Adm. Aster Vale | Fleet Admiral | Patrol | 5 | fed_core | — |
| Cmdr. Silva Trask | Border Commodore | Patrol | 4 | inner | — |
| Cmdr. Ren Okafor | Customs Marshal | Patrol | 4 | fed_space, inner | — |
| Capt. Odessa Rhee | Bounty Warden | Patrol | 4 | inner, middle | — |
| Maj. Callum Dray | the Inquisitor | Patrol | 3 | fed_space | — |
| Ondrea Vask | the Cargo Baroness | Trader | 4 | inner, middle | — carries black tech |
| Halloran Tsu | the Freeport Magnate | Trader | 5 | outer, outer_rim | — |
The two merchant princes (added in v2.0.9) run rich, not hard: heavy shields and deep holds, a ×5 manifest for trading and ×5 loot if robbed — but each can be robbed or killed exactly once per season, and robbing one in the shipping lanes counts double against the Federation heat counter. Shaking one down makes galaxy news.
When a named NPC moves, it usually posts a sighting rumor to the feed — about 75% of the time by default, and Saber Quill only 25%. Rumors are deliberately fuzzed: they report a sector within a couple of hops of the real one, never the exact position.
Grinding a boss down
Damage you deal a named NPC sticks to its row between fights. It regenerates 25% of its spawn strength per world tick — roughly sixteen hours from wreck to full.
So Redmaw Vex is not a wall you either clear or don’t. Four good runs inside one day will grind him down. Come back a week later and he’s fresh.
Losing pays nothing. Defeat awards no XP, which closed the old loop of pulling an unbeatable boss for a turn a time as an XP faucet.
The Bane
The first player to kill a named NPC in a season earns a unique ship prefix insignia: "«Name»’s Bane". One per named NPC per season. Nobody else can ever have it that season.