Factions, Alignment & Standing

Accurate as of v2.0.18 (August 2026).

There are two numbers, they are not the same thing, and confusing them will cost you money.

Alignment is which side you’re on. One score, ranging from −1,000 (Syndicate) to +1,000 (Federation), zero at the start.

Standing is what a side owes you. Three separate scores — Federation, Syndicate and Merchant Guild — earned by service and decaying 1% every day.

You can be a Federation Admiral by standing and a Scourge by alignment. They move independently.

Trader reputation from 1.x is gone. It is now Merchant Guild standing: same ±10% price band, but it is a real faction score with a rank ladder and daily decay.

Alignment

The tiers

The three thresholds that matter

How to actually earn alignment

This is the section the old guide never had, because most of it didn’t work until v2.0.8. It works now.

Lawful (positive)

Criminal (negative)

The realistic paths

To Federation membership (+500): the fastest route is missions. Two faction-gated dailies at +25 apiece, or four lawful dailies at +12–15, plus +2 for every clean customs scan you pass while trading. A trader who runs honest cargo through Federation space and passes scans drifts upward without trying. Claiming a planet in Federation space with ≥+100 alignment is a single +250 jump.

To Syndicate membership (−500): contraband does it fast, but only when you get caught (−25 per detected sale) or bribe your way out (−2). The reliable criminal path is the underworld daily missions and the Syndicate faction missions at −25 to −30, plus attacking lawful targets. Claiming a planet in pirate territory is a single −250 jump.

Note the asymmetry: fence sales are undetectable and therefore pay no alignment at all. A disciplined smuggler who only ever sells to fences can move enormous volume and stay neutral forever.

Getting back: alignment is bidirectional and clamped at ±1,000. Nothing is permanent. But a Scourge who wants to go straight has to earn +1,500 in lawful deeds, and cannot dock at the Stardock to buy Federation missions until they cross −300.

What alignment buys you

The benefit curve

One table, three uses: your combat bonus, your service discount at own-faction ports, and the number on your standing card.

The combat bonus multiplies both your attack and defense power. The service discount takes that percentage off repairs, hulls, upgrades, drives and restock at ports of your own faction.

The price band

At faction-priced ports only — Federation Ports, the Stardock, Pirate Bases and the Pirate Haven — your alignment moves what you pay, linearly:

• Friendly side: buys scale down to −20% at ±1,000.
• Hostile side: buys scale up to +50%, and your sells are penalized by the inverse.

There is no friendly sell bonus. Discounts only ever help what you pay, never what you’re paid — a sell-side bonus would break the market’s round-trip rule. The combined discount is also clamped so it can never invert the spread.

The Merchant Exchange and every neutral archetype never alignment-price. Black Markets are excluded too — their economics belong to the fence spread.

Docking gates

“Docking” means opening the port’s screen at all. Everything else in the galaxy is open to anyone.

This is why the Merchant Exchange matters so much to a committed criminal: it is the one full-service port — shipyard, repair, upgrades, banking, supplies, price board — that a Scourge can walk into.

Hull locks

Tier 1 and 2 faction hulls sell to anyone standing on the right floor. Tier 3, 4 and 5 faction hulls require ±500 alignment on that side.

The neutral spine never locks, at any tier. Refusing to pick a side costs you the Federation +10% shields and the Pirate +0.10 escape — not access to the endgame.

Faction tech modules

Patrol Transponder (Federation) and False Manifest (Pirate) both require ±500 on their side.

Arrest at dock

If a faction holds a bounty on you and you try to do anything at its capital:

• Wallet covers it: seized, warrant cleared, publicly announced, and that action fails. The next one works.
• Wallet short: refused, nothing seized.

Only the wallet. Never the bank. See Bounties.

Standing

Three scores, one ladder, thresholds 0 / 1,000 / 2,500 / 5,000 / 10,000:

Ranks are cosmetic except for the 1,000 member-tier gate on faction missions.

Earning standing

Decay is the point

Standing decays 1% per day. It is a garden, not a ratchet.

Do the arithmetic before you chase a standing number. Holding 2,500 standing costs about 125 points of fresh service every day — that’s roughly two faction missions daily, forever. This is exactly why the epic hulls demand standing floors rather than lifetime totals: you cannot bank it once and walk away.

Merchant Guild standing at +1 a trade leg needs about 133 legs a day to converge on 3,000 by day 30. That is over half of every turn you have, all season, on the trade button.

The guild band

Merchant Guild standing gives a buy-side discount at every port in the galaxy, scaling linearly to −10% as standing approaches 1,000.

It is the only faction benefit that applies universally, it costs nothing but trading honestly, and every trader should have it saturated inside a week.

The war

Faction standing and faction deeds feed a war score: enemy NPC kills count ×1, enemy port captures ×10, faction missions ×3. The winning faction takes the season’s campaign medal at the closing ceremony.

Smuggling: the opposite path

The criminal career is not “the same game with a different sign”. It is structurally different, and worth understanding even if you never run contraband.

The elegant part is the inversion. Honest trade is safest and most profitable in the middle of the map; contraband is most profitable exactly where it’s most likely to get you caught — Federation core pays a ×1.50 premium and catches 22% of sales.

The career is guaranteed to pay: the game’s own configuration validator refuses to load a contraband catalog whose risk-adjusted return per hold doesn’t beat the best honest route.

See Smuggling & Contraband.