Smuggling & Contraband

Accurate as of v2.0.18 (August 2026).

The catalog

Three contraband rows, each riding on a real commodity’s price and volume.

Contraband lives in a separate cargo namespace from honest goods. The regular sell action can never touch it — but it still consumes your holds at the mapped commodity’s volume.

Buying

Requires clearing an early ladder gate and a port running the blackmarket service: Pirate Bases, Black Markets and the Pirate Haven.

• 1 turn per purchase, wallet only.
• Capped per transaction by the row.
• Buying is never detected. Nobody scans you at a fence.

Rim-going trader NPCs sometimes carry an off-market lot too — the same level gate applies, priced at ×1.25 of the fence shelf. See NPCs.

Selling: two completely different actions

Selling sits behind its own gate, a bit deeper in the ladder than buying. Both actions cost 1 turn.

At a fence — safe and flat

Sell at a blackmarket port and you get the honest local price × 1.20, with zero detection risk. No roll, no fine, no alignment change.

That last part is worth reading twice. Fence sales pay no alignment. A smuggler who only ever sells to fences can move enormous volume and remain perfectly neutral all season.

Anywhere else — the premium sale

Sell contraband at any other port and you get:

price = localSellPrice × rowMultiplier × regionHeat

…and you roll for detection.

The inversion is the whole design: the best prices are where you are most likely to get caught. Black Tech in the Federation core sells at 3.5 × 1.5 = 5.25× the local equipment price, and 22% of those sales go wrong.

The detection roll is not counterable. Cloaking devices, stealth plating, hidden compartments, the smuggler role — none of them touch it. Those counter customs scans, which is a different system entirely.

Getting caught on a sale

• All the cargo is confiscated.
• Proceeds are zero.
• A fine of 50% of what the sale would have been, minimum 500 cr, capped at your wallet.
• −25 alignment.
• The turn is still spent. There is no retry.

Customs scans

Different system, different counters. A customs scan happens inside a patrol NPC encounter during a move or a warp arrival. It is not something you invoke.

The chance

chance = 0.75
       − 0.50  Goods Cloaking Device
       − 0.30  Stealth Plating module
       − up to 0.08  smuggler role tier
floored at 5%

There is a 30-minute per-player cooldown on scans. That cooldown is the anti-farm mechanism, and it applies to clean scans too.

If you’re clean

The scan registers, you’re waved through, and you earn +2 alignment with an on-screen confirmation. This works now; it silently did nothing before v2.0.8.

If you run honest cargo through patrolled space, patrols are your alignment income, not a nuisance.

If you’re dirty

• Auto-bribe (a flag you can set on movement): pays 25% of street value, clamped 500–25,000 cr, and costs −2 alignment.
• Otherwise: all contraband seized, a 10% fine, and −5 alignment.

Counters

Stack a Marauder’s Fortune (25% line + 25% signature = 50% of holds hidden) with stealth plating and a max smuggler role and you are running at the 5% scan floor with half your hold volume invisible.

Hidden holds, precisely

“Hidden” volume is subtracted before the scan is considered at all. If your contraband volume sits under the hidden threshold, the scan does not happen — there is nothing for it to find.

hidden = floor(holds × 0.25)             pirate-line hull
       + floor(holds × abilityValue)     hidden_compartments signature

A 320-hold Pirate Leviathan hides 80 volume. A Marauder’s Fortune at 210 holds hides 52 + 52 = 104 volume — 52 units of Black Tech, which is five times the per-purchase cap.

The career pays — provably

The game’s configuration loader refuses to start with a contraband catalog whose risk-adjusted expected value per hold-volume doesn’t beat the best honest route in every region. Detected sales lose the cargo and pay the fine, and that’s priced into the check.

You cannot ship a season where smuggling is a trap. That’s an invariant, not a promise.

Playing it

The disciplined fence run. Buy at a Black Market, sell at another fence at ×1.2. Safe, flat, zero alignment movement, no scan exposure from the sale itself. Modest but completely reliable, and it’s the only way to run the Phantom Manifest epic ladder — which demands 7,500 units sold with zero sale-time busts all season.

The core run. Black Tech bought at 150 in the rim, sold in fed_core at 5.25× the local equipment price. Enormous margins, a 22% chance per sale of losing everything and −25 alignment, and you have to get through Federation space — the most heavily patrolled region in the galaxy — to do it.

The middle path. inner and middle at ×1.25 and ×1.15 heat with 12% and 8% detection. Better than the fence, survivable variance, and the regions are more accessible than the core.

Note that repeated busts drive your alignment down fast (−25 each), which eventually locks you out of the Stardock at −300 and takes the fed_core market with it. The premium run erodes its own best market.

Counters and statistics

Three counters track your career:

• contrabandSold — units. Drives the Smuggler role and the smuggler leaderboard, and only clean sales count.
• contrabandBusts — sale-time detections. Must be exactly zero at claim time for the Phantom Manifest.
• The Shadow Trader goal ladder pays at 10 / 50 / 180 units, and the Gold tier mints the Shadow Broker epithet insignia.