Planets

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.

Planet XP

Since v2.3.0, building earns experience. Each structure level pays 60 × weight × the level you just reached, where the weight tracks how expensive the structure is:

Maxing every structure on one planet pays 8,100 XP. Colonizing pays 1 XP per Mining Worker deployed. Each level pays once per planet — a captured planet’s structures come with it, so there is nothing to re-farm. Your season’s XP multiplier applies on top, and these are season configuration, so the numbers can differ between seasons.

Building a structure also counts toward “upgrade a planet” mission objectives, which could never complete before v2.3.0.

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 collects itself (since v2.3.0). Every tick, the output goes straight into the planet’s storage — you never have to fly out and press Collect. A fresh claim banks its first batch the moment you claim it.

Export income

Owning a planet also pays cash. Every tick, each planet you own exports its production at 30 cr per unit — fuel, organics and equipment all count the same — and the credits land directly in your bank, not your wallet. The goods still arrive in storage; the export payout is on top of them, not instead of them.

exportIncome = (fuel + organics + equipment produced this tick) × 30

A bare claim at starting population makes 19 units a tick, about 570 cr. A planet with full population and a maxed Factory and Citadel makes several hundred units, so a few developed planets will bank tens of thousands of credits every four hours while you sleep. If your bank balance keeps growing and you can’t place it, this is where it comes from. The planet screen quotes the figure as Export income with per-tick and per-day numbers.

The one thing to watch is storage space. If a cycle’s output doesn’t fit, every commodity is scaled down by the same ratio to what does fit, and the rest is lost. The planet screen shows each cycle’s output against your free storage and warns you before that happens, and the “while you were away” summary names any planet whose storage is full. Haul goods out, feed a trading post, or build Warehouse levels to keep it flowing.

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. Because production now lands here automatically, storage is also your production buffer: a full warehouse means lost output (see Production above).

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, the corp-mate exemption, 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 19 units of production a tick — about 570 cr of export income, plus the goods. 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.