Planets

Accurate as of v2.0.18 (August 2026).

Planets are the late-game economy: a slow, compounding, defensible income that runs whether or not you’re logged in — and a fixed target other captains can find.

Claiming

Alignment gates by territory:

• In Federation territory you need alignment ≥ +100.
• In pirate territory you need alignment ≤ −100.
• Unincorporated space has no alignment gate.

Claiming in aligned territory pays ±250 alignment — the single largest alignment swing available from one action.

A fresh planet starts at population 50, population cap 500, storage cap 2,000 and no structures.

Structures

Six of them, each maxing at level 5. Cost of level n is floor(baseCost × multiplier^(n−1)), and building costs 1 turn.

Level gates are the season ladder’s — the build screen shows your season’s numbers. The Citadel additionally requires Factory and Shield Generator at structure level 3.

The ×2.0 multipliers bite. A level-5 Citadel costs 25,000 × 2⁴ = 400,000 on its own, and the full ladder to Citadel 5 is 775,000 cr.

Production

Every 4-hour world tick:

output = floor(baseRate
              × (1 + 0.15 × factoryLevel)
              × (0.2 + 0.8 × population ÷ populationCap)
              × regionMultiplier
              × (1 + 0.10 × citadelLevel))

Base rates: fuel 35, organics 25, equipment 13 per tick. Region multiplier is 1.10 in outer, 1.05 in outer_rim, 1.00 everywhere else.

Read the population term carefully. At zero population you still get 20% of base; at cap you get 100%. Population is a 5× multiplier on everything the planet makes, and it is the cheapest one to buy.

Population grows per tick by:

floor(10 × (1 + 0.10 × habitatLevel)) − floor(population × 1%)

At 1,000 population, attrition is 10 a tick — which exactly cancels base growth. Without Habitat levels, a planet stalls near 1,000. Habitats raise both the cap and the growth rate.

You can also colonize: deploy Mining Workers from your inventory 1:1 into population, 0 turns, clamped at the cap. Workers cost 300 cr each at any recruitment service. Buying the population is dramatically faster than growing it.

Production must be collected — it accrues until you show up.

Storage

Base 2,000, +2,000 per Warehouse level, so a maxed Warehouse holds 12,000. Equipment counts double against the cap, exactly as it does in your holds.

Deposits and withdrawals cost 0 turns and are capped by your holds.

Storage preserves your cost basis (since v2.0.15): cargo you deposit keeps its weighted average cost and hands it back on withdrawal, so your profit readout stays honest through a warehouse trip. The planet’s own production enters storage at cost 0 — it was grown, not bought — and a pile that mixes the two blends them.

Corp-mates’ access is governed by corporation policy: storage.view and storage.deposit default on, storage.withdraw defaults off.

Garrisons

Garrison fighters are the planet’s defense.

• Base cap 500, doubled per Citadel level — a Citadel 5 planet caps at 16,000.
• Staff it with Security Personnel bought at any recruitment service for 100 cr each, deployed in-sector, 0 turns.
• Barracks add 4 fighters per level per tick automatically.

Minelaying

A planet with a Barracks can push its defense out into the approaches: convert garrison fighters into ordinary proximity mines in the planet’s own sector — 6 garrison fighters plus 150 cr per mine, up to 20 per order, 1 turn, behind a level gate. The conversion is one-way; fighters spent on mines are gone from the siege garrison, so fortifying the doorstep measurably weakens the keep. The mines are standard catalog mines in every respect: entry triggers, decay, corp friendly-fire, and attackability. See Ordnance, Limpets & Beacons.

Landing

Landing on your own or your corporation’s planet grants landing protection: attackers get TARGET_PROTECTED. It is the single best place to sit out a hostile window — better than a defense contract, and free.

It lasts until the planet falls.

Raids

Raiding sits behind the same mid-ladder gate as port sieges. 1 turn per attack.

attackerPower = (fighters × 0.8 × combatAI + shields × 1.2 + torpedoes × 2.0)
                × (1 + siegeBonus)
defenderPower = max(10, garrison × 0.8 × (1 + structureDefense) + structuralDefense)

structureDefense   = (1 + 0.15 × shieldLevel) × (1 + 0.10 × citadelLevel) − 1
structuralDefense  = 12 × shieldLevel + 25 × citadelLevel

winChance = attackerPower ÷ (attackerPower + defenderPower) ± 0.02

Structure defense is multiplicative, not additive. At Shield 5 and Citadel 5 that’s 1.75 × 1.5 − 1 = +162.5%, not the +125% you’d get by adding them. Fortifying compounds.

The structuralDefense term is garrison-independent — a Shield 5 / Citadel 5 planet contributes 185 defense power even with an empty garrison. Fortresses defend themselves.

On a win: garrison drops to 50%, you take 25% of each stored commodity (as much as your holds fit) plus 10% of the owner’s wallet capped at 5,000 cr. Raider-line hulls multiply both. One exception: if the owner is under PvP immunity, the wallet skim is skipped — immunity covers the captain’s purse, though never the territory itself.

On a loss: garrison drops to 80%, you lose every fighter, and you take max(shields, 75% of shields + hull) damage through the hull spill. A failed raid on a fortified planet will destroy your ship.

Blocked by: your own corporation’s planet, an active truce, your own PvP immunity, or a galaxy with PvP off.

Capture

Same gate as raiding, 1 turn, and the garrison must be at zero. Raid until it’s empty, then take it.

Capture transfers everything — structures, storage, population, everything. Any of the old owner’s ships parked there are launched. A 24-hour truce protects the new owner.

Corporation-on-corporation capture within the same corp is blocked.

Starbases

The capstone. 1,500,000 cr, a level gate past the midpoint of the season ladder, and it requires every structure at level 5. One starbase per player per galaxy.

What it buys:

Respawn priority. Owning a starbase and having at least one other ship in your garage gives you a choice when you die: Sector 0, or your starbase’s sector. Without it, you’re dropped at Sector 0 and that’s that. For anyone operating in the rim, that is the difference between a 2-turn recovery and a 40-turn crawl back out.

A vault. Owner-only storage for credits and items, accessible in-sector, 0 turns. Corp-mates cannot see it, let alone touch it.

A ship pool. Corp members can donate ships to a corp starbase (cargo is deleted on donation) and claim pooled ships into their own garage — arriving inactive and empty.

A fleet cargo destination.

If the starbase falls before you resolve a pod choice, the choice degrades to Sector 0.

Trading posts

A trading post turns a planet into income: it sells your stored production and accumulates credits in a till you collect.

Since v2.0.17 a post is a real storefront, not just a passive earner. Visiting captains browse its shelf and buy directly — priced roughly 10% under the commodity anchor, floored just above whatever the best port in the same sector would pay, so a post can genuinely undercut the port next door but a same-sector buy-and-flip always loses. The world tick still clears shelf stock on its own on top of player traffic, and since v2.0.14 the post auto-restocks from planet storage every tick, so it runs without you flying out.

Two things to respect:

• The till is robbable. Sale proceeds accrue in the till until you collect, and a robbery is repeatable — each one escalates the robber’s faction bounty, but the money sits at risk until you pick it up.
• Only genuine production earns. Since v2.0.16 the shelf is priced so routing port-bought cargo through a post always loses money; a post is an outlet for what the planet grows, not a laundering machine.

The full economics — build cost, upgrade cost per level, max level, shelf cap, units sold per tick per level, price factor — are season configuration and are shipped to the client on the planet info screen. Read them there rather than trusting a number on this page.

Renaming and transferring

Rename is owner-only, requires being in the sector, costs 0 turns, runs through the profanity gate, and posts nothing publicly. 3 to 30 characters.

Transfer hands the deed to another member of your corporation. That is the only ownership transfer in the game that doesn’t involve a siege.

Is it worth it?

A bare claim is 150,000 cr for roughly 15 credits’ worth of production a tick. That’s a bad deal on its own.

The compounding case: Habitats to raise population toward the cap (5× on everything), a Factory ladder (+75% at level 5), Warehouses so the output has somewhere to go, and a trading post to sell it without you flying there. Fortification (Shield + Citadel) is what stops another corporation taking the whole investment in an afternoon.

Half-built planets are the worst outcome in the game: expensive enough to hurt, productive enough to notice, and defenseless.