Seasons & Leaderboard
Accurate as of v1.22.0 (July 2026).
Big Bang Smugglers is played in seasons. Each season is a time-limited campaign in a fresh galaxy where players compete on the leaderboards. When a season ends, standings are recorded permanently, everyone is removed from the galaxy, and your seasonal progress is wiped clean for the next one.
What a Season Is
A season is a newly generated galaxy plus a time limit. The default season length is 30 days (individual seasons can be configured anywhere from 7 to 90), and each season holds up to 25 players by default.
Everything in the galaxy starts fresh — sectors, ports, planets, NPCs. You carry nothing in from a previous season, and you take nothing out except your place in the record books.
Joining a Season
Open the Settings tab → Season Management card → Browse Seasons, pick a season, and tap Join.
- Joining is free — no credit cost, no level requirement.
- You can be in exactly one season at a time. To join another, you must leave your current one first.
- You can never rejoin a season you have left or finished. The game warns you about this before you leave — take it seriously. Leaving mid-season also wipes everything seasonal immediately.
On joining you receive:
- 5,000 credits (wallet)
- 250 turns
- A tier-1 starter ship in sector 0
- Neutral standing (alignment 0, Trader Reputation 50)
What Resets vs What Persists
When you leave a season — voluntarily or because it ended — everything seasonal is wiped:
| Wiped | Persists |
|---|---|
| All ships and cargo | Turn streak |
| Credits — wallet AND bank | Account identity and settings |
| XP and level | Your season-recap history (permanent) |
| Reputation and alignment | |
| Missions, goals, and inventory | |
| Corporation membership |
Two things players get burned by:
- Bank credits do not survive. The bank protects you from combat looting during a season, not from the season ending.
- Corp banks are deleted at season end. Corporations are galaxy-scoped, and the corp treasury is destroyed with the galaxy. Withdraw your share before the countdown hits zero. See Corporations & Fleets.
Scoring and Leaderboards
Leaderboards live in the Feed tab → Leaderboards in-screen tab. There are six categories, all scoped to the current season:
| Category | Ranks by |
|---|---|
| Overall | XP (credits earned breaks ties) |
| Combat | Kills |
| Missions | Missions completed |
| Corps | Combined member score |
| Most Wanted | Active bounty value on the player |
| Bounty Hunters | Bounty credits collected |
Boards refresh roughly every 5 minutes — they are not real-time. Your own rank is always shown even if you’re outside the visible top of the list, and tapping a row opens that player’s (or corp’s) profile.
How to Earn XP
| Action | XP |
|---|---|
| Trading | 1 XP per 500 credits traded, on both buys and sells |
| Exploring a sector (first visit) | 10 base, +25 if it has a port, +50 a planet, +100 a landmark |
| Combat | Both sides earn some; scales with your opponent’s tier and how even the fight was |
| Completing missions | Per-mission XP reward |
| Turn-streak milestones | 50 / 200 / 500 / 1,000 XP at day 3 / 7 / 14 / 30 |
Note that claiming and developing planets pays credits, not XP — the only planet-related XP is the first-visit exploration bonus for the sector.
Season End
Do not rely on advance warnings — watch the countdown. It’s displayed in the header bar, the Leaderboards header, and the Settings → Season Management card. Treat the end date as final: wrap up trades, empty the corp bank, and spend what you want to spend before the timer runs out.
When the end date passes:
- Final stats are frozen and winners are recorded.
- A ~1-hour grace period begins. The app switches to a “Season has ended — Read-only mode” banner; this hour is a wind-down window for viewing the recap, not extra playtime.
- The galaxy is archived — all players are removed, and season data is exported to permanent storage.
The Recap Screen
After the season closes, the recap screen shows the season’s category award winners — including Richest Captain, Most Experienced, Most Kills, Planet Baron, Mission Master, Explorer, Bounty Hunter, and Longest Streak — plus the final top-10 leaderboard and your own final stats and rank. If you were offline when the season ended, the recap appears on your next login.
Past Seasons
Every season you’ve played is preserved forever. Open the Feed tab → Past Seasons in-screen tab to see cards for each of your past seasons, with duration, player count, top winners, and a View Full Results modal showing the complete final leaderboard. Over time this builds your permanent career record.
New Season Strategy
Since every season is a fresh start, early decisions matter.
- Explore fast. Sectors you have not visited cannot be warped to, so cover ground early to build your warp network. (Tavern intel can reveal warp-eligible sectors without visiting — see Scanners & Intel.)
- Learn the routes once. Price bands are fixed per port type and identical in every galaxy — a route that worked last season works this season. What changes is live stock and trade pressure, so scout conditions, not prices.
- Work toward a planet. Claiming a planet costs 150,000 credits, so it’s an early-to-mid-season goal, not a day-one move from your 5,000-credit seed. Planets compound once you have one, so build toward it deliberately.
- Keep a mission running. You can hold only one active mission at a time, so keep one going that aligns with the route you’re already flying.