Mayhem 4 - Friend or Foe Player's Guide

1. Welcome to Mayhem 4 - "Friend or Foe"

This mod fundamentally alters the gameplay loop of X3, transforming it into a high-stakes, dynamic 4X strategy game. Money is no longer king — physical resource logistics and territorial control dictate your survival. Many things, including the invasion AI, have been heavily modified to give a different experience from the previous iterations.

What's new in Mayhem 4

• Invasion Fleet A.I. Rework — invasions are campaigns now: they pick border targets, actually launch, keep going system after system, and can be won, lost or bought off.
• Radiation — battles contaminate sectors, blocking construction for you and the AI.
• Espionage — hire spies, steal research, credits and ships, and sabotage your rivals.
• Diplomatic Envoys — buy reputation, intelligence, claim withdrawals and outright peace.
• Pirate Base Missions — eight contract types paid in Corsair Credits, spent on hulls, safe passage and raids.
• Contraband Traders — buy illegal wares cheap at pirate bases and sell them to hidden factory buyers, with the police between you and the profit.
• Food rework — population is fed from a real supply chain rather than a bookkeeping entry.
• Ultra Hard difficulty — a fourth setting above Hard, chosen at game creation.
• Weapons Research — advanced guns must be researched before your ships can carry them, and the AI’s arsenal improves over the campaign.
• Administrative Burdens — the bigger your industry grows, the more your ships cost to build.
• Race-colorized screens — the interface takes on the colour of the race you play.
• This user guide.

Throughout this guide a Mayhem 4 tag marks a feature that is new here, rather than one inherited from the mods listed below. Everything without a tag came with the lineage and works as it always has.

The lineage

Each of these is built on top of the one before it:

1. Litcube's Universe — by Litcube
2. Mayhem 3 — by Joubarbe
3. Zero Hour v2.2 — by Hector0x
4. Renegades v5.4 — by Mr Mordan
5. Mayhem 4 - Friend or Foe — by Mr Mordan

A note about Renegades "Add-Ons"

2. 🛠️ First-Time Keybindings

Before starting your campaign, map the essential mod hotkeys. Open Options > Controls > Interface, scroll down to Extensions. These are the actual hotkey names as registered by the mod:

• Personal console — your primary empire interface: outpost/research/hacking station lists, journal, bounties, black market, ship registration, and more. Bind this first.
• Outposts — jumps straight to the outpost (Sanctuaries) overview.
• Ministry of war — faction wars, claims on bailed ships, and diplomacy.
• Satellite monitoring — universe overview via your satellite network.
• Data scanner — targeted-ship blueprint scanning (see Blueprints & Research).
• Fleet settings and Station settings — military and station management.
• Personal journal — running log of signals (e.g. Remnant ship signals) and events.
• Quick access configuration + Quick access 1–5 — bind five one-key ship commands (attack my target, dock, flee, etc.) you can fire at your current target without opening menus.
• Save to next slot — rotating manual save. (Mayhem 4 also has a built-in autosave — see Automation.)

Also useful: Turret: Attack All Enemies, Turret: Missile Defence, Target nearest incoming missile, Move to position using jump beacons, and Experimental Transporter Device (requires the device in cargo).

3. Friend or Foe Automation & Quality of Life

Mayhem 4 runs a background housekeeping monitor that quietly handles chores base Mayhem made you do manually:

• Autosave: automatic saves cycling through slots 11–13. Interval is configurable in the 9973 file; on/off toggle lives in the Cheat menu. Note: any save interrupts your SETA.
• Tug auto-recycling: optionally, ships captured by your Tugs are automatically fed to Recycling when they reach the tug's homebase. OFF by default — enable in the Cheat menu.
• Maintenance fund pulls: as covered in Core Pillars — outpost treasuries automatically cover your maintenance shortfalls before any hull damage is applied.
• Housekeeping: the monitor periodically fixes trader relations, updates cargo-level displays, manages Renegade "loaner" ships, and watches player beacons — silent maintenance that keeps long campaigns from decaying.
• Experimental Transporter Device: a bindable hotkey teleport, gated behind carrying the Experimental Transporter Device ware in your ship's cargo (added in 3.15).
• Population Transfer: from an outpost's Hangar screen, pick a destination outpost and it automatically ships 5 population every consumption cycle — 10 minutes by default, the same clock population growth runs on — until stopped or the destination is full (a third of the time one of the five does not survive the trip) — use "feeder" outposts to pump a critical outpost's workforce.
• "Deploy all Stations to": a Transport-ship command that unloads and deploys every station aboard at a destination — bulk sector development in one order.
• "Deconstruct Station"Mayhem 4: the reverse, and also a TL order. Pick a sector, then one of your own factories in it, and the TL flies over, undocks anything sitting at the station, dismantles it and stows it in its own hold. Whatever the station was holding follows it aboard in cargo-bay order as far as the remaining room allows, and anything that will not fit is left floating at the site to be collected. Outposts and shipyards cannot be dismantled, and the order is refused before the ship moves if the hold has no room for the station — there would be nowhere to put it. When it finishes it stops where it is rather than flying home, so you can send it straight on to another pickup or to drop what it is carrying somewhere else.
• Asteroid scanning, near and far: two commands in a ship's Special menu, both restricted to M5 scouts. Scan Local Asteroids works only the sector the ship is already in. Scan Nearby AsteroidsMayhem 4 sweeps every known sector within four jumps of wherever the ship was standing when you gave the order — the radius is fixed at that point, so the scout works an area rather than wandering ever outward. It clears your own sectors first and only opens up to the rest of the radius once they hold nothing left to scan; the orders string tells you which phase it is in. It never enters a sector owned by a race hostile to you, or one you have blacklisted, and if it comes under attack it abandons that sector immediately and moves to the next instead of dying for it. A sector it was driven out of is not retried until you reissue the order.
• Recon Sector Mayhem 4: a Navigation order, also M5 only, and it needs Patrol Command Software aboard. Pick a sector and the scout flies there and stays, circling the perimeter of a square box centred on the sector, whose corners sit at the distance of the nearest jump gate. It runs the edges rather than the diagonals, so it never crosses the busy middle of the system, and it never stops moving — which, on a hull that fast, is most of why it survives sitting in someone else’s territory. If the scout is carrying an Advanced Satellite and you have no satellite of your own in that sector, it drops one somewhere along its patrol; once that satellite exists it will not drop another. A permanent eye on a border sector, and a moving one.
• Fleet: Patrol Sectors needs the same Patrol Command Software, fitted to the fleet leader — the ship you give the order to. One useful wrinkle: the software is checked when the order is given, never again afterwards, so a fleet that is already patrolling keeps patrolling even if the leader that started it dies. You just cannot issue the order again until whichever ship is leading has software of its own.
• Interorbital storage: a shared "magical chest" you access manually from anywhere, with transfer fees per deposit/withdrawal. Convenient, not free.
• Player traders only perform exchanges that are actually profitable — no more watching your traders lose money on bad runs.

4. 🎚️ Choosing a Difficulty

The opening questionnaire asks you to pick one of four settings — Easy, Normal, Hard, or Ultra Hard. The choice is made once, at game creation, and can never be changed afterwards. It is stored with the save, so there is no way to move an existing campaign up or down; a different setting means a different game.

The ladder is cumulative. Everything Hard turns on, Ultra Hard also turns on, and anything that already scaled with difficulty takes one further step. The Hard-only rules are described where they belong throughout this guide — upkeep on sectors and beacons, restricted beacon placement, Renegades flying M6s, war declarations against you, and OCV fleets ranging further from Xenon space. Across every setting, the strength of the Xenon (their starting stations, gate guards and invasion fleets), the size of OCV invasion fleets, and the pirate population and the size of each pirate spawn all scale with difficulty level.

What Ultra Hard adds on topMayhem 4

Ultra Hard is aimed at players who already find Hard comfortable. It does not simply multiply enemy numbers; most of what it changes is about reach — how far you can move, how fast you can learn, and how reliably your fleet stays in one piece.

• No jump beacons. At all. None are scattered across the galaxy at game start, none can be captured, none can be crafted at an Outpost or in a mobile factory, and your starting TL does not carry the two it normally holds. The Jump Station perk is unavailable to match. Factions keep their own beacon networks — you simply cannot use or take them, and their routing is what keeps the AI economy moving. Plan your logistics around real distance from the first minute.
• The Phanon storyline still works. Normally you must drop a jump beacon in the first sector you give the Phanon to complete their Close Bonds mission. On Ultra Hard the game places that beacon for you. It belongs to the Phanon, and you cannot jump through it.
• Research runs slower (9973 id 189). The Research Manager shows the reduced rate, so what it displays is what you get.
• The Pirate Contract perk is unavailable.
• Factions are more likely to declare war on you — the war chance scales with difficulty level (9973 id 187).
• Being strong protects you less. A faction stops considering war outright once your military reaches a set share of its strength; on Ultra Hard that share is higher (9973 id 193, replacing id 62). This is the change that matters most in a long campaign: on lower settings a large fleet buys near-total safety, and here it does not.
• Rival factions spy on you more often — the chance each faction runs an operation against you scales with difficulty level (9973 id 188). Your standing with them and their temperament still move it from there. Consider leaving more agents idle at home for counter-espionage; see Espionage.
• Warships suffer sudden failures. Once you reach Nation status, each of your M6 or larger warships rolls a one in 25 chance every hour of playing time to drop to a fraction of its hull (9973 id 190). Bigger hulls fare better — a corvette can be left at 5–25% hull, a carrier or destroyer at up to 70% — but no class ever loses less than 30%. Freighters and transports are never affected. It can and will happen in the middle of a fight, which is the point.
• Missions can roll a fourth tier, Brutal — more escorts and heavier opposition, for a larger reward. Trade missions call the equivalent tier Extreme.
• OCV invasion fleets are larger, with more escorts assembling before each wave sets out.
• Kha’ak raids come more often. The time between raids scales with difficulty level. A raid lands on the faction with the most stations, so this is pressure on the AI empires around you rather than on you directly.
• Police fines for contraband are higher — the fine scales with difficulty level.
• Pirate bases launch bigger batches than on Hard.
• Pirate bases come back sooner — the wait between new bases scales with difficulty level. See Pirates.
• The Pirate Warlord is a destroyer. A pirate base that rolls a Warlord releases a pirate M2 instead of the usual M7. It still bails out if you damage its hull in its first ten minutes. See Pirates.

Living with breakdowns

Two things take the edge off the failure rule. The Insurance Policy perk covers it the same way it covers Outpost misfortune, absorbing about 85% of incidents — on Ultra Hard it stops being a minor convenience and becomes a serious pick. And a crippled ship is damaged, not lost — it can be repaired like any other damaged ship. A fleet led by an M1 repairs it in place, without leaving formation.

The rate scales with fleet size, because every eligible ship rolls independently — a hundred capitals means roughly four failures an hour, not one. A smaller, well-maintained fleet is genuinely easier to run here than a sprawling one.

The tunables are 9973 ids 190 (one ship in N per hour; 0 switches breakdowns off, and any other value is clamped between 25 and 100), 191 and 192 (the hull range a breakdown leaves behind).

5. Game Initialization & the "Ascension" Quest

When you first start a new game, give the scripts time to finish the massive background initialization that generates your unique galaxy — wait for the intro sequence and starting questionnaire to fully complete before flying off.

• The Questionnaire: A prompt asks setup questions whose answers are stored for the whole campaign — including difficulty (one of four settings; Hard and Ultra Hard both count as "hard" for the many rules that test for it, and Ultra Hard adds more of its own — see Choosing a Difficulty) and mission difficulty (which feeds directly into generated-mission rewards and danger). Hard difficulty also brings strategic resource scarcity, jump-beacon placement restrictions, and stronger/more frequent Renegade incursions — it changes how you expand, not just how hard enemies hit.
• Your race choice inherits enemies, but not friends. The race you pick sets your ships, your starting sector and your research affinity. It also carries one thing that is easy to miss: at galaxy creation, any faction the map generator placed in Total War with your chosen race immediately declares a permanent war on you, before you have done anything. The reverse does not happen — a faction allied to your race is not allied to you, because you are a faction of your own and are not on the galaxy's relations chart at all. If a start feels unaccountably hostile, check the Ministry of War. See Galactic Diplomacy.
• The Ascension: You choose an Ascension quest — a set of milestone goals tracked in a dedicated section of your Personal console — and completing it is your gateway to founding an empire. The Quickstart option skips the very early game and lets you claim a sector right away; it ends the questionnaire on the spot, hands you credits, a starting squadron and a reputation boost with every Commonwealth race, and reveals the entire galaxy map regardless of how you answered the earlier "knowledge of the galaxy" question. Completion is automatic — once all three goals are met the Ascension closes out within a minute, pays its 500,000-credit reward and starts the TL plot.
• The galaxy is frozen until you get moving — and it takes TWO steps to thaw it. On a normal start, no AI faction can claim a sector anywhere in the galaxy — not from you, and not from each other. The map holds still in your favour, and it stays that way until both of these are true:
  1. Your Ascension is complete. While it is unfinished, every claim by every faction is refused outright.
  2. You own at least 3 sectors (9973 id 130 — set it to 0 if you would rather the factions start expanding immediately, or raise it for a longer peace).
  Meeting only the first changes nothing: finishing your Ascension does not, on its own, release the other factions. Worth knowing before you rush the last goal — the quiet early game is not a grace period the galaxy grants you, it is one your own slow start enforces. Two exceptions: a young galaxy start lifts the freeze entirely (the factions expand from the outset, as its briefing warns), and Quickstart counts as an already-completed Ascension.
• Once the freeze lifts, wars do not need declaring. A faction can mount a full invasion of a neighbour it is nominally at peace with — only a signed truce, a coalition or a formal alliance holds it back. Do not read "we are not at war" as "we are not a target".
• Tip (from the mod itself): genuinely empty sectors carry an extra protection of their own — nobody else can claim one until you have placed your first station — so you can scout without racing.

6. 🎯 Critical Early-Game Roadmap

When launching a fresh save, prioritize these goals (several of these come straight from the mod's own tutorial notes):

1. Explore, but don't over-satellite. Find a safe candidate sector for your first claim. Blanketing the map with satellites is not useful this early. When you do want one somewhere specific, load a ship with Advanced Satellites and use Cmd > Special > Drop Satellite at: it asks for a sector and then a position inside it, exactly like Move to Position, flies the ship there and leaves a single satellite behind. The command only lights up while that ship is actually carrying one.
2. Collect ~10 ships during your Ascension. The mod's own guidance: chase Remnant signals (they appear in your Personal journal), claim bailed ships (see faction claims in the Ministry of War), and check the black market in your Personal console — a 10,000-credit scout or a 35,000-credit freighter, bought outright, is the cheapest fleet you will ever assemble. Just know that the market has a hard budget and a shelf life; read The Black Market before you spend.
3. Unlock key blueprints early. Use the Data Scanner on passing ships to bank research toward an M6, a fighter, a TS, and a TS miner variant before you settle down.
4. Gain reputation with your future neighbors. Do missions or kill pirates in their space. Bounties (Personal console) are profitable — and if you kill a pirate commander, the rest of his group flees from you.
5. Earn while you wait. Register your ship in the Personal console for Cargo Hauling or Taxi jobs. Classic station trading is generally not viable in Mayhem until you know the economy — production and selling your own output is the real money-maker. Scanning passing traders for contraband is another legitimate (if rude) income stream — exposing a smuggler turns them into a pirate you can legally shoot, and pays a bounty for it (see Infamy, Scanning & Legality). The Stock Exchanges are another early money option — six of them, one per Commonwealth race, each unlocked by reaching notoriety rank 5 with its owner. Open them from the game's own sidebar: Personal > Stock Exchanges > View Local Stocked Exchanges.
6. Build an Energy loop first. Energy Cells are the lifeforce of Mayhem. Do not expand heavily until an airtight Energy Cell pipeline feeds your first Outpost.

Early-Game Tips

These are the things the game does not tell you, and that most new empires learn the expensive way.

• Nobody will declare war on you unprovoked yet — use the grace period. AI war declarations against the player are gated twice over: you must have completed your Nation goals and be playing on hard difficulty. On normal or easy with default settings, no faction will ever declare war on you out of the blue (9973 id 60 turns this on if you want the pressure — default 0). Reaching Nation status takes a good while, so your opening hours are genuinely quiet. Expand, build, and bank reputation now.
• But that protects you from their aggression, not from your own. Taking inhabited sectors will turn factions hostile on any difficulty, with no declaration involved. Each conquest costs standing with the previous owner and with every neighbouring faction, the penalty grows with the size of your empire, and once your standing falls far enough their fleets will start treating your sectors as targets — none of which is gated by difficulty. Grow into empty and Xenon space and the Commonwealth ignores you; grow into theirs and you will be at war on Easy just as surely as on Hard. The full numbers are in Diplomacy.
• Everything you build now decides how dangerous that later is. Once you are a Nation on hard, war risk is driven by military power measured per sector rather than in total, by whether you hold anyone's dejure territory (that alone triples it), by your notoriety with them, and by their Ethos. A wide, thinly garrisoned empire sitting on someone's ancestral space is the worst possible shape to be in when the timer expires. See Diplomacy.
• Infamy fades on its own — slowly. Breaking a pact is not a permanent brand. Infamy decays every AI cycle — 5% plus 2 flat points every 8 hours (9973 ids 47 and 48) — and the amnesty at the end of a Xenon Crisis wipes 90% of it at a stroke (id 49). But the important threshold is zero: factions only resume offering you truces once it has fully cleared, so a big infamy hit can lock you out of diplomacy for a long stretch. See Infamy, Scanning & Legality.
• Count the gates before you claim a sector. Every gate is another front to watch. A two-gate sector is dramatically easier to hold than a five-gate one, and defensibility matters more in your first hours than asteroid yield does.
• Fly with a Mobile Maintenance Kit aboard. Any undocked ship without one is quietly accumulating wear, and fighters wear at double rate. You will not see it until something underperforms in a fight you needed to win.
• Keep credits in the outpost, not just in your wallet. Outpost treasuries pay maintenance shortfalls automatically, before any hull damage is applied. A well-funded outpost absorbs problems you would otherwise discover as a damaged fleet.
• Kill the commander first. Break a pirate group's leader and the survivors flee rather than fight — a small fighter wing can clear packs well above its weight by focusing the right target.
• Scan every new hull you meet, not the same one twice. Carry a Data Scanner, target a ship, close to range, and trigger it. Each scan adds research points to that hull's project, and 5% of a research goal to every different weapon it carries — but any individual ship can only be scanned once, so progress comes from meeting a steady stream of different ships of the same class, which is what makes early exploration pay twice. One quirk: Yaki hulls scan at half rate unless you have some infamy, in which case they scan at double. See The Data Scanner.
• Recycle the hulls you cannot fly. The Ascension leaves most players with a pile of bailed and salvaged ships they will never crew. Recycling breaks them back down into building materials, which is far more useful early than a parking lot of mismatched fighters — and materials are the bottleneck on your first Outpost, not credits.
• Do not let a relationship collapse into war if you can avoid it. The moment a faction turns hostile you lose all Loyalty and Favor points with them, and Loyalty is slow to earn back. Everything those points could have bought — including ordering a faction into a war on your behalf — goes with it.

Remnant signals — the derelict trail

The galaxy is seeded at game start with a scattering of abandoned ships, roughly one for every ten sectors, never more than one in any single sector. They are TS and M3 hulls, with the last one in the trail an M6, and every one of them spawns already damaged — between 30% and 70% hull, so plan to repair whatever you take.

They are not scattered at random: they form a chain, and the journal only ever shows you one link at a time. About two minutes into a new game you receive a remnant signal for the derelict nearest your start — a news item, a spoken sector name, and a Personal Journal entry reading Abandoned ship (Remnant signal). That is the only one you are given. Every entry after it appears only when you personally claim the previous ship. Claim one and you complete its entry, reveal an unknown sector as a bonus, and only then does the signal for the next ship in the chain arrive.

• Your Tugs will never collect them, and that is deliberate. Every game-start derelict is flagged off-limits to salvage so the trail cannot be farmed out from under you. If you have found a quiet sector holding an abandoned ship and your Tug keeps ignoring it, this is why — nothing is broken. Tugs are for ships bailed in combat.
• You can claim them by hand at any time, in any order. The trail is driven by the change of ownership, not by the journal, so a derelict you stumbled across with a satellite is claimable right now even though nothing in your journal mentions it. Taking one out of order costs you only that link's free sector reveal; the chain carries on from the ship you took.
• Claiming anything M7 or larger costs you standing with whoever owns the sector. The cost grows with the size of the ship and scales with difficulty level. Nothing in the remnant trail is big enough to trigger it — the largest is an M6 — but the same rule catches any large derelict you find elsewhere, and at −1000 standing a race turns hostile and starts shooting.
• Explore first, and the trail comes to you faster. Because each signal names a sector and reveals another, a well-satellited map turns the chain from a series of long blind flights into a short list of places you already know.

7. 🏛️ The Core Pillars of a Mayhem 4 Empire

1. Outposts Are Your Empire's Anchors

Placing a station in a sector claims that sector — any station type will do, it doesn't have to be an Outpost. But the Outpost is the heart of a developed sector: it houses your population and is where finished products get built.

• Workforce & Tax: Outposts house a dynamic population. Higher populations provide more tax income and faster production, but they consume constant food resources. Feeding your population a variety of foods matters — the outpost menu tracks Workers and food supply separately. Tax scales superlinearly: per-capita income rises with population, from standard at ≤50 pop up to +100% at 126+. Big outposts pay disproportionately well.
• Factories feed the Outpost: Factories are separate stations that produce raw materials and components. Those goods must be imported into the Outpost's inventory (that's what your logistics ships are for) — the Outpost then consumes them to build finished products: Ships, Stations, Lasers, and Missiles. Ship and Station construction is the Outpost's primary role.
• Perks: Each outpost can unlock Perks — special abilities chosen in the outpost menu (under the Food/Workers section). The number of perk slots is limited per outpost — configurable with 9972 id 70, and it scales with difficulty level — and perk choices are permanent — there is no refund; they're only recovered when the outpost is destroyed or upgraded to a Capital Shipyard. Choose deliberately.

2. The Maintenance Crisis

Every ship and station you own incurs a periodic Maintenance Cost, charged on a repeating cycle. Verified mechanics:

• Wear factor: Each ship carries a hidden maintenance factor (starts at 100%). While flying undocked without a Mobile Maintenance Kit aboard, the factor climbs — and fighters deteriorate twice as fast. Ships parked inside a carrier slowly recover down to a floor of 50% ("passive inspections") and a ship being carrier-repaired is reset to a clean 100%.
• Mobile Maintenance Kits freeze deterioration entirely for the ship carrying one — but the kit only fits on capital-class ships (carriers and the like). Fit your capitals with kits; smaller ships manage wear by docking — at a carrier, or home for inspections.
• Friend or Foe safety net: If your personal account can't cover a ship's maintenance, Mayhem 4 automatically pulls credits from your Outposts' accounts, one at a time, before any penalty applies.
• The Penalty: If you're still short after draining outpost funds, each unpaid ship loses one third of its maximum hull per cycle (it will never be destroyed outright — hull floors at 1) and you get a red "Maintenance: insufficient funds, some ships have been damaged" warning.
• Design matters: maintenance is 35% higher for ships whose design isn't your race — foreign cars cost more to keep running. Advanced variants cost a further 35% more to maintain than their standard versions, and Yaki ships get a 25% maintenance discount if you carry infamy.
• Outpost workers look after themselves: Traders, Agents, Miners, Looters, Tugs, Services and Explorers all break off to fly home for repair and inspection once their wear crosses the automatic threshold, then go straight back to work — Traders check between jobs, so a busy one no longer wears out unnoticed. You do not need to order it, though ordering an inspection by hand is still available.
• The Rule: Never build ships or claim sectors faster than your tax income can support — and fit Maintenance Kits on your capitals.

3. Traders & Agents (The Logistics Engine)

Because automated global trading networks do not exist, your empire's logistics are carried by two distinct worker roles — Traders and Agents. Both are home-based at the outpost or station they work for, but they do different jobs:

• Traders trade for resources: they generally buy from and sell to other races, though they can also trade with your own stations if you allow it. They're your interface to the NPC economy, and only take profitable NPC trades.
• Agents move materials between your own stations and outposts to complete production chains — hauling factory output to the outpost that consumes it, and shuttling stock wherever your thresholds demand.
• Couriers handle the off-nominal cases. Any hauler can be configured as a courier via its Trade > Courier menu. They can do much of what an Agent does but are far harder to use for that purpose — their real niche is collecting goods that aren't part of a production chain: e.g. sweeping up the colored crystals your miners collect and delivering them to your ship-building outposts for ship upgrades. (The courier menu even has a "Get all Food" option for sweeping surplus food to one place.)
• Both work from lists you write: a Trader trades only the wares on its outpost's Trade list, and an Agent hauls only the ware named in a job on its Agents list. Both lists live under Logistics in the Outpost Manager, and both start empty — an outpost you have not configured has workers with nothing to do. Each entry carries the stock level that turns it on: buy while below it, ship out once at or above it. See Setting Up Your First Logistics Loop for how to fill them in.
• Jump beacons extend reach: logistics ships can use your jump beacon network to bypass normal range restrictions — a well-placed beacon network is a logistics upgrade, not just a military one. But beacons are scarce: the total number you can deploy is capped (default 6), and on Hard, placement is restricted too — while on Ultra Hard you cannot have any at all (see Choosing a Difficulty) — you can no longer drop one in the middle of enemy territory. Spend them deliberately (see Jump Beacons & Travel).

8. 🏗️ Production & the Outpost Menu

The division of labor: factories (separate stations) produce raw materials and components; those goods are imported into the Outpost, and the Outpost builds the finished products. The outpost menu organizes this into production queues:

Re-arming ships from Outpost stock

An automatic build fits the best weapon you have researched, but a ship built last month keeps the guns it was born with, and a captured hull keeps whatever its previous owner bolted on. The Customize section of the Outpost menu closes that gap without touching a turret by hand.

Upgrade ship re-arms one docked ship — it is also the screen that installs equipment, so the guns are one line inside it. Upgrade Fleet Lasers lists the fleet leaders docked at the Outpost; pick one and every ship of that fleet docked there is re-armed together. In both cases, anything carried by a ship being upgraded is done as well — upgrade a carrier and its fighters are re-armed with it.

The same screen is where equipment gets fitted, and it explains itself: highlight any item in the list — including one you cannot yet afford, or one this hull cannot take — press Enter, and its description appears in a panel below the list. Fitting it is a separate Install line under that description, so reading about something never costs you crystals.

It works purely from what the Outpost is holding: you have to build the weapons first, the upgrade swaps in what is already in the cargo bay, and the gun it displaces goes back into stock for the next ship. Each turret is judged on its own, so a ship can come out carrying several different weapons. Repair Lasers and Mobile Drilling Systems are never touched in either direction — a mining or repair ship keeps its tool, and no warship has a real gun swapped out for one.

Nothing is charged and nothing is researched — a weapon sitting in your Outpost was already paid for when it was crafted.

Alongside production, the menu covers Food (Workers, the Architect, and Perks), Hangar, and Logistics (Jobs, Stock, and Thresholds).

Orbital Weapons Platforms. The bottom of the Stations queue sells immobile gun batteries that you place anywhere in the sector by hand. They cannot move, so put them where you actually want the fight: over an outpost, on a jumpgate, across a trade lane. Two sizes are offered:

Both draw on the same global limit — one slot each, counted across your whole empire rather than per sector — and that is the entire case for the Large. It costs three times the Medium for half again the guns, so you are buying slot efficiency, not value: worth it only once the limit rather than your stockpile is the constraint. With slots to spare, two Mediums give 32 guns for two-thirds of what one Large costs for 24. The base limit is set by 9973 id 105 and scales with difficulty level, and every Outpost with the Fortress perk adds one. Platforms can be switched off with id 104.

Two things to know before you buy. An OWP cannot be built in a sector where a hostile capital ship is present — the menu tells you which faction is blocking it, and you must clear them out first. And an OWP engages only within 5 km, far shorter than your mobile ships reach, so placement is everything: a platform parked in empty space is wasted material.

9. ⚙️ The Production Chain

Mayhem's streamlined economy gives every product exactly one primary resource (verified from the mod's own resource map). Two base inputs start everything: Energy Cells (Solar Power Plants — no inputs, output scales with the sector's sun) and Waste (a byproduct of your outposts' population). Outposts also grow the four foods (Vegetables, Meat, Fish, Fruit) that feed their own population, and can produce Energy Cells via the Solar Panels perk.

Before you plan any of this: factories only run in a sector where you have an outpost. They consume food, the outpost is what feeds them, and without one they are switched off within a minute of being built. See No outpost in the sector, no production.

ENERGY BRANCH                                WASTE BRANCH
=============                                ============
Solar Power Plant                            Outpost population
  └─ Energy Cells                              └─ Waste
       ├─ Crystals            (Crystal Fab)         ├─ Chemicals       (Chemical Lab)
       │    ├─ Jumpdrive Cores (JD Core Fac.)       │    └─ Teladianium ──→ Stations
       │    │    └─ Jump Beacons                    │         └─ Hull Plating (HP Prod. Facility)
       │    └─ Lasers          (Outpost)            └─ Protein Paste   (PP Blending Facility)
       ├─ Microchips          (Chip Plant)               └─ C-Ration    (Food Prep. Facility)
       │    ├─ Computer Components (Computer Plant)           └─ feeds the Ore Mines ↓
       │    └─ Hackerchips     (Cyberware perk)
       ├─ Silicon Wafers      (Silicon Mine)    MINING
       │    └─ Missiles        (Missile prod.)  ======
       ├─ Chelts Meat                           Ore Mine (consumes C-Ration)
       │    └─ Rastar Oil ──→ Stations             └─ Ore ──→ Stations
       └─ Advanced Satellites (Adv. Sat. Fac.)         └─ Quantum Tubes (Quantum Tube Fab)

Where it all ends up:

• Ship construction consumes Hull Plating, Crystals, Computer Components, and Quantum Tubes — plus a certain amount of crew (population) drawn from the outpost building the ship. Both base branches (Energy and Waste) feed shipbuilding, so neither can be neglected — and neither can your population.
• Station construction consumes Teladianium, Rastar Oil, and Ore — so the Chelts Meat → Rastar Oil line and your Ore Mines matter for expansion, not just for ships.
• Missiles come from Silicon Wafers — your one perpetually consumed ammunition line.
• Lasers come from Crystals (for templates and for fitting a weapon other than the default — they can no longer be sold).
• Jump Beacons need Jumpdrive Cores, which need Crystals.
• Each sector also has a fixed consumption ware (visible in the sector's stats) that its outpost steadily drains — factor it into your thresholds.

Practical reading of the tree: an early empire needs Energy → Crystals/Microchips and Waste → Chemicals → Teladianium → Hull Plating running before serious shipbuilding, plus an Ore Mine (fed with C-Rations) for Quantum Tubes, and the Rastar Oil line before major station expansion. The C-Ration sub-chain (Waste → Protein Paste → C-Ration) exists mostly to keep your mines fed.

Waste is the one input no factory makes

Every other resource in the tree comes out of a factory. Waste does not — your outposts produce it, from the people living in them. The rate is population multiplied by the factor at 9972 id 143 (default 18) per cycle, a cycle being 600 seconds by default (9972 id 8) — so an outpost of 100 people yields roughly 1,800 Waste an hour. Terraforming stacks on top: each planet carrying the increased Waste effect doubles the figure and each industry planet adds half again.

So Waste supply is a population problem, not a construction problem. If your Chemicals and Protein Paste factories are starving, no new factory will help — you need more people, more outposts, or Waste shipped in from a sector with a surplus. The Production Capacity table on the Logistics screen counts outpost output in the Waste row, so you can read the balance there like any other ware.

10. 🍲 Food, Population & Factory CapacityMayhem 4

Food is the quiet limit on how much industry a sector can hold. Your outpost feeds its own population and every factory you own in that sector, and when it cannot cover both, factories start going dark. Understanding this one system tells you how many factories a sector will actually sustain — which is not the same as how many it will let you build.

No outpost in the sector, no production — at all

Factories eat. Every factory consumes food alongside your population. You are never asked to haul it — the outpost handles it by accounting, invisibly, with nothing to set up and nothing to manage — but it does make the outpost a requirement rather than a convenience.

Plant factories in a sector with no outpost of yours and nothing feeds them. There is no food production there and no outpost keeping the books, so within about a minute they are switched off and their names gain a (no food) marker so you can spot them in the property list. They will sit there indefinitely, complete and idle, having cost you full price. Nothing warns you at the moment you build.

Plant an outpost in that sector and the shutdown lifts: the food system picks the stopped factories up and restarts them on its own. The rule when expanding is outpost first, factories second — and if a sector's factories have all gone quiet, check its outpost is still standing before looking for anything cleverer.

All four foods are one pool

Vegetables, Meat, Fish and Fruit are interchangeable for eating. Your outpost still grows whichever type its sector was assigned, but it will eat whatever is in stock, drawing from the largest pile first. You never need to match a sector's production to its consumption — any food feeds anyone. If a sector is short, ship in any of the four.

Production is fixed — population does not change it

A player outpost produces a flat amount every cycle, derived from its sector's manpower rating, at full output from the moment it is planted. Population is irrelevant to production; a brand-new outpost with nobody living in it produces exactly as much as a mature one. The rate is the manpower rating multiplied by the factor at 9972 id 144 (default 2), so a manpower-125 sector yields 250 per cycle. A cycle is 600 seconds by default (9972 id 8).

Two multipliers stack on top. Terraforming a planet for +100% Outpost Food production doubles the figure, and the broader +50% Outpost E-Cells, Tax, Waste, and Food production effect adds half again; the Triple food production perk then triples whatever that comes to. Terraforming also raises the sector's manpower rating itself, so a terraformed sector gains food twice over — once through the higher rating and again through the effect.

How your population grows

A new outpost fills up fast and then abruptly slows. Below 30 people it gains a flat +20 per cycle no matter what, to get you past the useless early numbers quickly. Once it crosses 30 that bonus ends and the ordinary rate takes over: the base figure at 9972 id 76 (default 9), divided by three — or by four once you are above 75% of capacity. So a normal outpost settles into +3 per cycle, dropping to +2 as it nears full.

The Triple Population Growth perk removes that division entirely, leaving the full base rate at every population level — +9 per cycle. That is a true tripling below 75% capacity and rather better than tripling above it. Expect the apparent slowdown at 30 people even with the perk running: you drop from +20 to +9 the moment you cross the threshold, which looks like the perk failing when it is simply the head-start bonus ending.

Three things modify it further. Terraforming a planet for growth adds to the rate on top of everything above. The Tax perk crushes growth to +1 once you are past half capacity — the price of the income. And growth stops dead at zero during a Deadly Disease event, or in any cycle where the outpost could not pay its full food bill; a starving outpost loses people instead of gaining them.

Who eats

• Your population eats 1 food per person per cycle (9972 id 9). The Triple Population Growth perk triples that bill.
• Each factory you own in the sector draws a tenth of the sector's output. This is pure accounting — nothing physically hauls food to a factory, so you never need agents for it.
• Research stations and trading stations eat nothing.
• Population is fed first, every cycle. Factories live on what is left.

How many factories a sector really supports

Because a factory costs a tenth of output and a full population costs half of it, the capacity works out the same in every sector regardless of how rich it is — a high-manpower sector produces more, but its larger population eats more too.

This is why "Maximum people allowed in this Outpost" (the slider in the outpost's Perks section) is really your factory dial. Capping population is not a punishment — it directly buys you factory slots. A sector you intend to industrialize heavily wants its population held down; a sector building ships wants the people, because ship construction consumes population as crew. Decide which job a sector has, then set the slider to match.

The outpost menu shows the live arithmetic — what was produced, what the population ate, what the factories drew, and either your remaining headroom or how far short you fell — so you never have to work this out by hand.

When food runs short

A shortage does not slow factories down; it switches some of them off. Each cycle, one in every N factories is shut down, chosen at random and re-rolled every single cycle, so the outage wanders around the sector rather than settling on the same buildings. N is set at 9973 id 142 (default 3); a smaller number shuts more, and 0 disables shutdown entirely and simply lets factories run unfed.

• Because the choice is random and re-rolled, production chains will break unpredictably while a sector is short. This is deliberate — food is meant to be a real constraint, not a gentle one.
• A dark factory is renamed with a (no food) marker so you can spot it at a glance.
• Only factories that the shortage stopped are ever restarted. One you switched off by hand stays off.
• You get one message when a sector falls into shortage and one when it recovers — not a stream of them.
• Factories in a sector with no outpost at all are permanently throttled, since there is nothing there to feed them. Industry belongs in sectors you have actually settled.

Buying and moving food

Two workers cover food, and picking the wrong one is a common mistake. Traders buy food from other races for credits — the outpost's trade thresholds have a Buy Food quick-entry that sets this up in one click. It checks the nearest trade station, takes whichever of the four foods it is best stocked with, and creates a single buy order for 10,000 of that one; if the station has no food it tells you and changes nothing. One order is all you need, because buying stops once the outpost holds 10,000 units of food in total — all four types count toward that one ceiling, not 10,000 each. Agents only move goods you already own, so they can redistribute a surplus to a hungry sector but can never buy. A ready-made Food job preset sets up the four import jobs at top priority in one click.

The Architect will over-build you into famine

This is the one trap in the system. The Architect builds up to the sector's support rating — typically 8 to 15 stations — and that number has nothing to do with the food budget. Since a fully-populated sector only feeds about five factories, an Architect left to fill a sector to its support limit will reliably build it into permanent shortage, with factories cycling dark forever.

The Extra support perk makes this worse rather than better: it raises the station limit by two while producing no extra food at all.

Your options, in rough order of usefulness: hold the population down to buy factory slots; keep a food-exporting sector and run Agents into the industrial one; buy food from the AI with Traders (their outposts run the older, surplus-producing system, so there is usually plenty on the market); take the Triple food production perk in sectors you intend to pack with industry; or simply build fewer factories per sector and spread them across more sectors. The support rating tells you what will fit — this section tells you what will eat.

11. 🔄 Operational Guide: Setting Up Your First Logistics Loop

Traders and Agents are the automated lifeblood of your empire. They don't need manual trading commands — they dynamically react to the inventory thresholds you set.

Step 1 — Home-base, then Assign

• Set the TS (Transport) ship's homebase to the outpost or station it will work for. No need to dock it yourself — the transport docks on its own as needed. Assignment options only appear for ships home-based there; a ship without the right homebase simply won't show the roles.
• Then assign it a role via the Assignment menu (or the ship's command console): Traders for buying/selling with the NPC economy, Agents for moving materials between your own stations and outposts. The ship then sits in standby, waiting for work generated by its home.

Step 2 — Build the Trade list

Open the Outpost Manager and go to Logistics > Trade. This is the list your Traders work from, and an outpost can only buy or sell what is on it — an empty list means a Trader with nothing to do, not a Trader trading everything. Use Add a ware to put something on the list, then give it thresholds.

• The import threshold is a ceiling to buy up to. Stock below the number is importable, so set it to the level you want maintained — 5,000 Energy Cells means "keep buying until there are 5,000". At or above it, nothing more is bought.
• The export threshold is a floor to sell above — not a cap. Stock at or above the number is exportable, so it is the reserve you refuse to go below, not the level that triggers a sale. Set it to 500 and everything past the first 500 is for sale; set it to zero and the ware is sold down to nothing.
• Each ware is edited in one mode at a time. The line at the top of the screen switches between editing import values, editing export values, and deleting a ware, and it applies to every row below it — so set all your imports, then switch modes and set your exports.

Do not fill the list in by hand the first time. The same screen carries a Quick-Trade block, collapsed behind a show/hide toggle, holding around a dozen one-click presets that write whole sets of thresholds for you: SELL ALL (everything except Hackerchips, Jumpcores and Food — worth giving to every outpost you own), paired keep/buy presets for intermediate factory resources, station crafting parts and ship parts, one for missiles, and the Auto Cash Transfer entries below. Click a preset, then adjust the handful of numbers you actually care about. Remove all wares reverts the lot and disallows trading again.

Agents do not use this list at all. The Trade list governs Traders — yours, and any foreign trader you have allowed to dock, since other factions' ships respect it too. Agents carry their own threshold on every job, set when you add the job under Logistics > Agents. A job is one ware and one task — Import or Export, never both — with a single number: an Import job's is labelled Maximum Wares and hauls in while stock is below it, an Export job's is labelled Minimum Wares and ships out once stock reaches it. Setting a ware's Trade thresholds does nothing for the Agent hauling it between your own stations.

Thresholds alone will not buy you anything — the outpost needs its own money. An outpost has a credit balance separate from your personal account, and a Trader spends that. Leave it at zero and your Traders sit there having correctly worked out what to buy and being unable to pay for it, with nothing on screen to say why. Transfer credits by hand, or — far better — set one of the Auto Cash Transfer presets in the same Quick-Trade list, which tops the outpost up whenever it drops below the level you pick and sweeps the surplus back above it: 1 credit (keeps the account empty so you collect the taxes), 250k (enough for factory resources), 500k and 1M. Agents are unaffected — they never buy.

Step 3 — Match the ship to the role

• Haulers (TS class) are the workhorse. This is the class the whole logistics system is built around — a TS is what you home-base and assign.
• Traders want speed. They spend their lives in transit around the NPC economy, buying and selling at other races' stations, so a faster hull simply completes more runs in the same time.
• Agents only move what you already own. They shuttle materials between your own stations and outposts and can never buy anything. What they want depends on the route — see below.

Scaling up: specialise your sectors, then split your Agents

Once you are past a couple of outposts, the biggest gain available is not more haulers. It is arranging things so each hauler travels full.

• Give each sector a single product type. Impossible in a small empire — but the more you sprawl, the easier it gets. Dedicate each outpost to one kind of factory and its traffic becomes predictable.
• Local Agents feed the sector. Dedicate some Agents to the short hop between the outpost and the factories around it: supplying the stations, collecting the finished goods. These never leave the sector, so cheap, slow transports are perfectly good here.
• Long-haul Agents move outpost to outpost. Dedicate different ships to the runs between outposts. These are the ones worth spending on — fast, and better shielded, because they cross sectors you may not control.

Why split them at all? It is what keeps the long-haul ships loaded. An Agent told to export to all available factories will make jump after jump with a part-empty hold, and the travel time is spent whether the bay is full or not; letting local Agents pool everything at the outpost first means the long run departs full. If that is more micromanagement than you want, spam the logistics screen with load/haul-to-all available factories orders instead — just expect to need noticeably more haulers to shift the same goods.

12. Outpost Workers: Every Role

Everything your empire does without you is done by a worker. A worker is any ship you have home-based at an outpost and then given an assignment. Home-basing comes first: until a ship is home-based at a station, that station's assignment options do not appear for it at all. The Assignment menu is the one place to see and set them.

Each role has a fixed number of slots per outpost and a fixed list of hull classes it will accept. You cannot add slots, so the slot count is the real ceiling on how much of a job one outpost can do.

The roles at a glance

Factories get workers too, but far fewer. Any factory takes 2 Agents. An Advanced Satellite Factory additionally takes 4 Explorers, and a Quantum Tube Fab additionally takes 2 Miners. Everything else is outpost-only.

Traders and Agents

These two carry your economy, and are covered in depth under The Core Pillars and Setting Up Your Logistics. In short: Traders face outward and deal with other races, taking only profitable trades; Agents face inward and shuttle what you already own between your own stations to complete production chains. Both act on the thresholds you set in a station's Logistics screen.

There is a third kind of trader that is not a worker and costs no slot: the Universe Trader, a freighter sent out to trade the wider economy for profit rather than to serve your own stations. It is an order given to the ship, not an assignment given by an outpost — see Universe Traders.

Miners

Miners are TS only and work the asteroids for Ore and Silicon Wafers, and bring back coloured Crystals and Minerals alongside them. A miner that reports it cannot mine is almost always missing equipment rather than targets.

Your miners bring back Ore and Silicon at three times the original game's rate (9973 id 239, a percentage — 100 is the untouched rate). The AI races mine at the old rate whatever you set, so this is a straight advantage to you rather than a change to the galaxy's economy. Crystals and Minerals are rolled separately and are not affected, so turning the dial does not change how often the rare finds turn up.

Miners can work off a TL instead of an OutpostMayhem 4, and there is a reason to do it. Set a miner's home base to a TL you own and the Worker: Miner command becomes available — but the miner must carry a Transporter Device, since it never docks with the TL and beams its load across instead. Without one the order is refused with a Transporter Device Required message. In exchange, everything it delivers is increased by 50% (9973 id 238, 0 to switch it off). The bonus is for TL-based miners only; Outpost miners are unaffected. Because the extra is rounded down, small hauls of Crystals and Minerals often see none of it while bulk Ore and Silicon get the full rate. A TL is used because a single mining TS can carry more than most smaller hulls hold in total.

Move the TL and its working miners come with it. Each one checks where its TL is on every pass, so it breaks off, flies to the new sector and starts on the rocks there — and if it is full it delivers to the TL in the new sector first. The only lag is the asteroid it is already chewing on, which it finishes before it notices. They travel by gate unless they carry a jumpdrive, so a long move leaves them strung out and unescorted for a while.

A TL-based miner works the sector its TL is sitting in and never goes looking for another one of its own accord. Four things stop it — the rocks running out, losing the Transporter Device, the TL running out of cargo room, and being unable to get within transporter range of a TL on the move — and in every case it tells you why and then switches to following the TL, so it comes along wherever you take the TL instead of being left behind. Move the TL, then order each miner to mine again by hand. Return Home does the same for any ship based on a ship it cannot dock at: it follows that ship. Keep an eye on the TL's hold: a full TL idles every miner based on it. Taking the TL away to unload it pulls its miners along after it. If the TL is destroyed its miners have nothing left to follow — each one tells you which sector it is stranded in and stops, holding whatever it had aboard.

Leave the TL in space while its miners work. Taking it off to dock and unload pulls every miner after it and stops them all. Instead, set up a Courier to collect the mined wares from the TL and carry them back to an Outpost, so the TL's hold keeps emptying while it stays parked beside the rocks.

There is no limit on how many miners one TL can run, and a TL-based mining group can work any sector, including ones you do not own — wherever you park the TL, its miners go to work, unless you have blacklisted that sector.

To see what they have actually brought in, open the Logistics Overview screen and pick the Production Capacity filter: a Mining SummaryMayhem 4 table at the bottom gives the running total and credit value of Ore, Silicon, coloured Crystals and Minerals, with a Total row carrying the combined value. It counts at the offload, so it is a record of what reached your stock rather than of what was chipped off a rock — and it counts either way a miner hands its load over, docking at an Outpost or beaming it across to a carrier homebase.

Looters

A Looter sweeps for floating containers within its range — 9973 id 126, 8 jumps by default, or -1 to follow the outpost's own trade range. It works outward from wherever it currently is rather than from the outpost, so it does not cross its own territory between two equally distant sectors. Before entering a sector it checks who is there, using your real diplomatic standing — so the Yaki and any faction you are at war with count, and a single hostile capital calls it off where three fighters would not. If attacked while working it abandons the sector immediately and flies home with whatever it has, and tells you so: a Looter is unarmed, and the cargo is worth more than the crate it was reaching for. It also will not begin work in a new sector while more than a quarter full — it banks the load at the outpost first, so a Looter that fills up in one rich sector comes home instead of dragging a nearly-full hold around the map.

What a kill actually leaves behind. Not much, by design — but more than nothing. Freighters spill their bulk cargo, and any ship spills its Space Fuel and Space Weed in full. Ships carrying ten or more of a missile type have a 2% chance per type to eject the whole batch of it. Pirate M6s and larger shed about half their mounted guns every time (see Weapons Research). Xenon, OCV and Kha'ak leave nothing at all — do not send a Looter after them expecting a payday.

Tugs

A Tug checks every sector it can reach in one quick pass — the same way the Satellite Monitoring screen does — and goes straight to the nearest bailed ship it finds. It then takes every abandoned ship in that sector before heading home, and rests about three minutes before sweeping again, so a wreck it did not see immediately is usually collected on the next cycle.

• A Tug only sees sectors you are watching. It needs a satellite there, or a ship of yours, or the sector must be yours. No coverage, no salvage — which makes your Explorers the thing that decides how far your salvage reaches.
• A TM is the ideal Tug. It is the only eligible hull with a dock bay, so it docks what it captures and carries it home inside itself — fast, and safe from anything that would otherwise pick off a freshly captured hull limping across open space. Every other tug hull has to send each capture home under its own command, alone and undefended. If you can spare a TM, this is a good use for one.
• Fit Remote System Control Software. It lifts capture reach from 6 km to 24 km, which is the difference between one pass and several.
• Rival Tugs race you for wrecks, and difficulty sets the odds. NPC tugs run the same sweep, but how long they rest between runs scales with difficulty level — the easier the game, the bigger your head start.
• Abandoned capitals are deliberately excluded — see Capital Ships. Your Tugs will not touch them, and neither will anything flagged from a black-market purchase or an Oxygen hack.
• The derelicts seeded at game start are excluded too, so a sector holding one will be swept past and left alone no matter how long you wait. Those are yours to claim in person — see Remnant signals.

Explorers

An Explorer picks its whole list of sectors in one pass at the outpost, while it loads satellites, then visits them back to back. It drops each satellite the moment it arrives, beside the gate it flew in through: a satellite watches the whole sector from wherever it sits, so crossing to the middle bought nothing — and dropping first means a scout that has to run still leaves the sector mapped behind it.

Either way it leaves at once and tells you so, and will not choose that sector again for about half an hour — but where it goes depends on whether anyone actually shot at it. If something opened fire it flies home and is repaired before going back out. If the sector merely holds something fast enough to run it down — anything reaching about two thirds of its own top speed — nothing has hit it, so it skips that sector and carries on down its list, satellites still aboard. A scout that turned for home every time it saw a fast hull would deliver one satellite a trip. Slower hulls it ignores entirely.

It also watches its own hull. Between one satellite and the next, an Explorer that has been worn below 70% hull breaks off the rest of its list and flies home to be repaired — the satellites stay in its bay, so it picks the run back up as soon as it is patched. Damage taken slipping past something on the way no longer rides along for the whole trip.

Give the job the fastest M5 you can. An Explorer is unarmed and speed is its only defence, and how much it has decides how much of the map it can safely reach: a Split Jaguar outruns everything the Kha’ak and the Xenon field, while a Boron Octopus is slower than a Kha’ak Scout and will find most of the map too fast for it, skipping sector after sector.

They all look after themselves

Every role breaks off to fly home for repair and inspection once its wear crosses the automatic threshold, then goes straight back to work. You do not need to order it, though ordering an inspection by hand is still available if you want it sooner.

13. 🛠️ Operational Guide: Blueprints, Research & Shipbuilding

You cannot simply buy military ships from NPC shipyards. You acquire blueprints, then build hulls yourself at your Outposts. There are two blueprint paths:

You do not start empty-handed. Every new game grants blueprints for your own starting hull, a low-end carrier and a scout-class M5 of your own race — so there is always one fighter you can build on day one without researching anything. Your answers at the gamestart questionnaire can add one more: the ship your character's father left you in his will — an M3, a TS or a TP, depending on the job you say he had — comes with its blueprint.

Path A — The Data Scanner (research by scanning)

The Data Scanner is a ware you carry in your own ship's hold, and it is not consumed — buy one and it lasts the rest of the game. Bind the Data scanner hotkey, target a ship, and trigger it; a completed scan banks research points toward that hull's blueprint.

A scan is a commitment, not a button press. The target must be in your sector and within 9 km, and it has to stay there. After a few seconds of handshake the scanner runs a progress readout whose length depends on the hull:

Add roughly eight seconds of preamble to each. If the target leaves your sector, opens the range past 9 km, docks, or is destroyed, the scan aborts and you bank nothing. Scanning a capital means a solid minute of flying alongside something that is quite possibly shooting at you — and it will dock and vanish if you dawdle near a station.

An aborted scan does not burn the target. The once-only lock is applied when the scan completes, not when it starts, so a run that gets interrupted can be chased down and retried on the same ship. Only a finished scan uses a hull up.

A scan teaches you the guns as well as the hull.Mayhem 4 A completed scan advances every different weapon fitted to that ship by 5% of that weapon's own research goal — a gun at 80% comes out at 85%, whatever it costs. It counts weapon types, not mounts, so a capital bristling with twelve of the same cannon teaches exactly as much as a fighter carrying one. Weapons you have finished gain nothing, and neither do the few permanently available to everyone. Since only a completed scan pays and an already-researched hull refuses the scan outright, this rewards the scans you were making anyway. The rate is 9972 id 296; set it to 0 to switch it off. See Weapons Research.

What you cannot scan:

• Any individual ship, twice. Once each, permanently — which is why progress comes from meeting a stream of different ships of a class rather than one obliging freighter.
• Advanced variants, Nomad ships and Phanon-built ships. All three answer "Exotic Coating. Scanner got reflected." The Advanced rule catches more than you would expect, so a hull you cannot seem to scan is often simply the Advanced model of it.
• Kha'ak ships, whoever owns them. OCV ships can be scanned.
• Stations, for research purposes — they return "invalid target". The scanner is still the right tool to point at a station for a pirate scan contract, and at the right wreck to open the Renegades plot; those run before the ship-only check.
• Anything whose blueprint you already hold.

What a scan is worth. A scan banks 35 research points by default (9972 id 158), against project costs you can read in the Research Manager. Two things change that figure:

• Yaki: half, or double with infamy. Their hulls scan at half rate while you are clean, and at double once you carry any infamy — a 4× swing, matching how the Yaki treat you everywhere else.
• OCV: better where the machines are thickest. Scanning an OCV design earns a bonus scaled by the OCV signal level of the sector you are standing in, so the deeper into infested space you scan, the more each one is worth.

Research projects and their progress/cost are managed at your Research Stations — open the Research Manager (via the Personal console's Research stations list, or the station console) to see the current project and its progress (e.g. 420 / 1200). The Research Manager has a cycle button to step through all your research stations without leaving the screen; idle research stations blink in the Property menu. A scan that pushes a project over its cost completes the blueprint on the spot.

Research Rate Bonuses & Rules

• The Faster research Outpost perk is the single biggest lever — +50% of the station's base rate, and double that on a weapon project.Mayhem 4 Weapons earn none of the race bonuses below, so on a gun the perk is the only thing adding to the base rate, and it takes that rate from 168 to 336 points an hour in a typical sector. Buy it in whichever sector does your research, and buy it early: it also shortens the Hacking station and Cyberwar cycles by a third.
• Stack stations on one project: multiple research stations can work on the same hull simultaneously — their progress combines. Spin up several stations to rush a blueprint you need.
• Terran Memory requirement: Terran ships can only be researched in sectors that have the Terran Memory attribute — a research station elsewhere can't work on Terran hulls at all. (Terrans get a small base-rate boost to compensate for this restriction.)
• Research your own race's ships — significantly more points per cycle, with a further bonus if the research station borders an NPC sector of your race.
• Dock a ship of the exact type being researched at the research station — worth +35% of the station's base rate. Captured one? Park it there while you research it.
• Researching foreign designs works but is slower and gets none of the bonuses above.
• Diplomacy is a research bonus. Three of them, all keyed to the race that designed the hull, and all shown itemised on the Research Manager screen so you can see them land. Standing above notoriety rank 5 adds +1 point per rank; a research Favor with that race adds +20 for its duration; and being in a coalition alongside them adds +50 as a permanent technology transfer. That last one is large enough to be worth planning around — a coalition partner's designs are the cheapest foreign hulls in the game to learn.
• Every cycle is a roll. The points a station actually banks vary by up to 50% either way — a cycle can deliver anywhere from half to one and a half times the listed rate. The figure the Research Manager shows is therefore the average, and the completion estimate beside it is approximate. Over a long project the swings even out; over two or three cycles they very much do not.

Path B — Recycling as Reverse-Engineering

• Capture an NPC ship (boarding, bailing, or the black market), dock it at your Outpost, and feed it to the Recycling queue.
• Reverse-engineering is a tiered system with diminishing returns: recycling a ship adds +40% blueprint progress while progress is 0–25%, +25% at 26–50%, and +10% at 51–85%. The R.E. cap is 85% — the last stretch must be finished by standard research. (Rounding can shave a little off for small hulls like M3–M5.)
• The ship is destroyed in the process — but you also get resources back, so surplus captures are never wasted.

Advanced Ships

• "Advanced" variants cost ~33% more to build and take 2× the research time, but have significantly better hull, shields, and often speed. They are dearer to keep as well as to buy: maintenance runs 35% above the standard version, on top of every other modifier.
• They cannot be data-scanned (exotic hull coating), and reverse-engineering them caps at just 50% progress — the rest is pure research. Plan accordingly before chasing one.

Building

• Stock the required components in the Outpost's inventory (hull parts, computer components, etc. — the queue shows the exact recipe per hull).
• Open the outpost menu's Production > Ships queue, select the blueprint, and let your workforce assemble it. Fresh hulls arrive combat-ready: shields are fitted automatically, big/huge hulls get a free starter missile loadout, and every turret receives the best weapon you have researched for it. Only missiles need ongoing production for resupply. (Newly produced miners head straight to work in current Mayhem 4 builds.)
• Custom laser templates: the template system lets you save a ship design with a custom laser configuration — template weapons must be built at your outpost and come from its stock, and a weapon you have not researched is skipped when the template is applied. Weapons can no longer be sold to NPC trading stations, so crafting is about fitting the weapon you want rather than about income. Shields can never be changed on a ship, which is why shield production was removed.
• Capital Shipyard upgrade: an upgraded Capital Shipyard tier supports up to 8 capital ships in build, with additional perks — the path to serious M1/M2 fleet production.

Administrative Burden (large-empire ship cost scaling)Mayhem 4

Once your empire achieves Nation status, bureaucracy catches up with you: ship material costs scale up with the ratio of factories you own to all Commonwealth and Phanon factories combined (the six Commonwealth races plus Phanon, counted together). The penalty rises linearly from 0% and is capped at its maximum — which scales with difficulty level — reached when your factory count matches theirs. Before Nation status there is no penalty at all. It applies only to your ship production (all four build materials; the AI is unaffected), never to recycling refunds, and the ratio refreshes every 5 minutes.

• Check the Logistics Overview screen — a new Administrative Burden section at the top shows your factory count vs. the Commonwealth + Phanon total and the current penalty (or a reminder that it hasn't kicked in yet, pre-Nation).
• A lean factory footprint builds ships cheaper, so favour efficiency over sprawl — and remember the galaxy's factory count is the denominator: as the races lose ground, your relative burden grows.
• Tunable via entry 133 in t/9973-L044.xml (the maximum penalty percent; never negative; 0 disables it entirely; it scales with difficulty level in-game).

14. Weapons Research & How Ships Are ArmedMayhem 4

Ships no longer arrive carrying the best gun in the game. An automatic build fits the best weapon you have researched that each turret accepts. Research weapons at a Research Station using the new Category: Weapons selector.

You begin already knowing six basic guns — the Gamma Ray Cannon, Impulse Ray Emitter, Alpha Particle Cannon, Particle Accelerator Cannon, Mass Driver and Phased Repeater Gun. Between them they cover the bottom rung of every turret on every hull you can hold a blueprint for, so a ship you are entitled to build is a ship you are entitled to arm. Nothing you build can mount a weapon you have not earned, and nothing you build turns up unarmed either.

Those six are the floor, not a gift: each is the weakest gun its turret accepts, and together they are worth well under a single percentage point of your fleet’s eventual firepower. Everything above them is still yours to research.

The ladder is per turret, not a shared pool, which is what keeps every race level at the start — nobody gains from their hulls happening to accept a better "free" gun. A hull you were never meant to build, something captured or handed to you by a storyline, still falls back to its own weakest compatible weapon, so an exotic prize sometimes arrives better armed than anything on your production line.

Where you start

The weapons tree is a lot of station time, and there is one discount on it. Every gun is roughly 42 hours of a single station's work, and the handful carrying you to about nine tenths of your fleet's eventual firepower are around 14 — both figures assuming the Outpost holds the Faster research perk, which pays double on weapons. Without it the same work takes half again as long. Weapons earn none of the heritage, border, rank, coalition or Favor bonuses a hull project collects — a laser has no race to credit — so the perk and more stations on the same project are the only two ways to go faster.

What to research first is yours to judge. A weapon is only worth having if something you can actually build will carry it, so early on the useful projects are the ones your fighters and corvettes mount — the heavy capital guns can wait until you have a hull to hang them on.

Every laser, ranked

DPS is what the gun actually does once it is on a turret, and it is the game’s own figure rather than one worked out on paper. It is an average of the two columns beside it, and that average hides the most important thing about a weapon: vs Shields and vs Hull are what it does to each, and the larger of the two is highlighted. Two guns with the same DPS can be opposite tools. Click any column heading to sort by it, and click again to reverse.

A coloured star means that race has a hull that can mount the weapon — useful in both directions: it tells you whether your own ships can use a gun at all, and it tells you what you are likely to be shot with. A weapon no playable race can fit is left out of these tables entirely.

Heavy

Capital batteries. The heaviest guns in the game, and the costliest projects.

Medium

Corvette and frigate mounts, plus the flak that keeps fighters off a capital.

Light

Fighter guns — cheap enough that value stays high even where damage is low.

Read the two damage columns before you read DPS. Almost every gun in the game leans toward shields — often by two or three to one — so a fleet armed by raw DPS alone is a fleet that strips shields well and then takes a long time to finish anything. Only four weapons hit hull harder than shields: the Pulsed Beam Emitter, Alpha Particle Cannon, Mass Driver and Particle Accelerator Cannon — all of them light guns. That is worth knowing in both directions: it is why a fighter wing can finish a crippled capital that your heavy batteries are grinding at, and why a mixed loadout beats a uniform one.

Damage figures are read from a running galaxy, so they already include every rebalance this mod makes — do not expect them to match a vanilla X3 weapon chart.

Research Stations are not the only route. Every completed Data Scanner scan pushes each distinct weapon on the target 5% of the way to finished, so hunting unfamiliar hulls quietly builds an arsenal alongside the blueprints. If a weapon finishes that way, any Research Station working on it completes at once and is free to take something else — worth a glance at your stations after a good run of scanning.

Cost scales with the weapon: a project costs its relative value multiplied by 9972 id 295, so the hardest-hitting guns in the game cost roughly twenty times the cheapest — though still less than the capital ship that carries them. Weapon projects are race-neutral, so unlike a ship project they earn none of the heritage, border, rank, coalition or favour bonuses; expect a weapon to take rather longer than a hull of similar price.

Keeping pace

You are not the only one doing research. As the campaign goes on the AI factions arm their new ships better too, so the gap you feel in the opening hours will not stay where it is — a design that comfortably beat a patrol early on will meet a noticeably tougher version of that same patrol later.

Their progress is permanent. Once the AI has moved up to better guns it never moves back down, however the war goes for you. Losing a fleet costs you the fleet — it does not make the enemy easier, and there is no point hoping a bad defeat will buy you a gentler galaxy afterwards.

So keep researching weapons as you grow rather than treating it as an opening task. Note the trap: a ship's value counts its hull, not its guns, so a large fleet of badly-armed ships looks like a match for an AI power on paper and can lose the fight badly.

If you would rather the galaxy came at you hard from the first hour, 9973 id 216 controls how far behind the AI starts — lower it for a tougher opening, or set it to 0 to have the AI always field its best.

Where weapons come from now

Two things this does not change. Ships you already own are never retrofitted — only new builds are affected, on both sides. And six items sit outside the system altogether and are always available: the Repair Laser, the Mobile Drilling System, the three Kyon Emitters and the Plasma Beam Cannon. The first two are tools your repair and mining ships need; the last four belong to the OCV and the Kha'ak, who have no research of their own. These six need no research, and any turret that takes one can be fitted with it — which is what lets you keep a captured alien hull armed. Building them is a narrower question: only the Plasma Beam Cannon can be crafted at an Outpost. The two tools and the three Kyon Emitters are fitted and never manufactured, so they will not appear in your Lasers queue.

15. Missiles: Fox Classes, Chaff & the CCDS

A missile is the one weapon you buy by the unit and lose by the unit. A gun draws on a generator that refills itself; every missile you fire is gone, was paid for, and took up hold space getting there. Everything below follows from that.

The three Fox classes, and Artillery

Missiles are sorted by how they find you, and the class decides everything else about them — price, speed, range, payload, and whether they can be shot out of the sky by a countermeasure.

• Fox 1 — semi-active radar homing. Needs a target lock, and needs you to hold it: the missile rides your sensors all the way in, so losing the lock throws the missile away. Long-legged (40–60 km), unhurried (1,000–1,400 m/s), slow to reload, and startlingly cheap — under 700 credits apiece, a tenth of what Artillery costs. Suppression ordnance for something big enough that it cannot dodge and slow enough that you can keep the lock.
• Fox 2 — infrared homing. No lock required; fire and forget. Fast (2,000–3,000 m/s), short-legged (30–39 km, the shortest reach in the game), mid-priced at 1,500–2,100. This is the anti-fighter class — the speed is what lets it catch something actively trying not to be caught.
• Fox 3 — active radar homing. No lock required, and it hunts on its own once away. The heaviest guided warheads in the game (up to 220,000), reaching 60–89 km, but no faster than a Fox 1 — a Fox 3 loiters in at around 1,200–1,650 m/s. The anti-capital choice among guided missiles.
• Artillery — unguided. Carried only by missile frigates (M7M). Fastest (up to 3,600 m/s), longest-ranged by a wide margin (78–147 km), hardest-hitting and most expensive ordnance in the game, and the only kind no countermeasure can stop. It also eats your hold: one Artillery round takes the space of five Fox 1s.

Chaff and the CCDS

Chaff is a universal countermeasure you carry in the hold like any other missile, and you never fire it by hand. The CCDS — Chaff Countermeasure Defence System — is the equipment that spots an incoming missile and throws chaff at it for you, automatically.

There are three marks, and each one only sees its own Fox class. A CCDS MK1 will never notice a Fox 2 coming. Carrying all three is the only way to be covered, and the detection ranges run backwards from what you would hope — the deadliest missiles give you the least warning:

Detection range is not coverage — it is warning. Every missile out-flies the system that stops it, and by a lot: a Fox 1 crosses 40–60 km but a MK1 only picks it up at 20, and a Fox 3 reaching 89 km is invisible to a MK3 until the last 10. The countermeasure is not deciding whether it can reach you, only how much of the flight it gets to work on.

Four things worth knowing before you rely on it. Artillery cannot be intercepted at all — there is no homing sensor to seduce, so no CCDS mark helps and no amount of chaff matters. You must actually have chaff aboard; the CCDS is the sensor, the chaff is the ammunition, and a ship carrying one without the other is defenceless. The system occasionally fails, roughly one launch in twenty-five, so a full loadout is protection and not immunity. And M8 bombers ignore the range limits entirely — a bomber will chaff a missile at any distance, and will also throw chaff to protect another of your ships nearby, which makes one in a fleet worth more than its own hull suggests.

A CCDS also has a rate of fire: one ship throws chaff every few seconds, not continuously (id 233). Against a single missile you will never notice. Against a salvo arriving together, you will — some of it gets through, and that is what makes a missile frigate worth fearing. Lower the id if you would rather shrug off whole salvos.

Every missile can also simply be shot down by gunfire. Do not count on it: missiles in Mayhem are far tougher than their vanilla counterparts, which is the whole reason the CCDS exists.

Where they come from, and where you buy them

Every missile is designed by one race — that is the Origin column below, and it is flavour with teeth, because the races build to different philosophies. But where you buy one does not follow from who made it. A race's Trading Station stocks a deliberately mixed spread rather than its own catalogue, so the Argon sell you Boron and Teladi designs alongside their own. Shop around; do not assume a missile is unavailable because you are in the wrong space. Chaff is sold everywhere.

What you can actually load is decided by the hull, not by your reputation — every ship is built for a particular set of classes, and Artillery in particular is M7M-only.

Cost against performance

Damage per credit falls steadily as you climb the classes, and it falls off a cliff at the top. Averaged across each class you get roughly 103 damage per credit from Fox 1, 67 from Fox 2, 56 from Fox 3, and 26 from Artillery — so Artillery costs about four times as much per point of damage as the cheapest ordnance in the game. It is not good value. It is simply the only thing that does its job.

Hold space cuts the other way and is the constraint people forget. A Fox 1 takes 8–12 units, a Fox 2 or Fox 3 around 20, and Artillery 56–70. A frigate that looks well stocked on paper carries far fewer rounds than you expect, and resupplying it is a genuine logistics problem rather than a shopping trip.

The practical shape of it is to spend Fox 1 freely as suppression on anything that cannot dodge, spend Fox 2 on fighters, spend Fox 3 deliberately on targets worth the money, and treat Artillery as ammunition for a specific plan rather than a standing loadout. And price the salvo, not the missile — against anything carrying the matching CCDS, a proportion of what you fire will be chaffed away before it arrives. That is also the argument for mixing classes: a target set up to stop one Fox class is wide open to the other two.

The table

Sorted by damage within each class; click any header to re-sort. Speed is metres per second, Range is how far the missile flies before it expires, Reload is the delay before that launcher can fire again, Vol is the cargo space one round occupies, and Price is the typical asking price in credits. All of it read straight from the game's own tables.

Fox 1

Semi-active radar homing — you must hold a lock for the whole flight, and letting the target slip off your sights throws the missile away. The cheapest ordnance there is, the smallest in the hold, and the slowest to reload: 4 to 7.5 seconds between launches, against 2 seconds for a good Fox 2. Intercepted by CCDS MK1, which sees them coming from 20 km — the longest warning of any class.

Fox 2

Infrared homing — no lock needed, fire and forget. Fast, short-legged, mid-priced. Intercepted by CCDS MK2 at 15 km. This is the anti-fighter class: the speed is what lets it catch something that is trying not to be caught. The Firefly is the odd one out — 200,000 damage for 1,824 credits makes it the best value warhead in the game outside Fox 1.

Fox 3

Active radar homing — no lock needed, and it hunts on its own. Heavy-hitting, long-legged, and slower than a Fox 2. Intercepted by CCDS MK3, but only from 10 km, which is very little warning. The anti-capital choice among guided missiles. The Flail Barrage does not belong to the pattern — 8,000 damage, 25 km, and a one-second reload. It is a saturation weapon that buries a target in cheap warheads, not a ship-killer, and reading it off the damage column will mislead you.

Artillery

Unguided, and carried only by missile frigates (M7M). The fastest, longest-ranged, hardest-hitting and most expensive ordnance in the game — and no CCDS can touch it. Because it does not home, there is nothing for a countermeasure to seduce. It can still be shot down by gunfire, but every missile in Mayhem is far tougher than its vanilla counterpart, so that is not the easy answer it sounds like. Note the reload column: an M7M throws these every 1.5 to 4 seconds. The reason a missile frigate is frightening is not any single round, it is the rate.

16. Fleet Formations & Combat Logic

Combat behavior is heavily modified to mitigate the X3 engine's fleet-AI downfalls.

• Formations: the fleet template system supports Line, Delta, X, Pyramid, Dragon Claw, The Shield, and Big Ship Escort. Defensive formations like The Shield put tanky followers between the enemy and your flagship; Big Ship Escort is the pattern for screening capitals with escorts.
• The Defend Position Anchor: a ship ordered to defend a position engages enemies within a 10 km radius of the anchor point and returns to it rather than chasing off the map — confirmed in code (the order runs the attack-enemies-in-range logic with range = 10,000 m pinned to the position). This is the tool that stops capital ships from wandering into enemy station turrets.
• Mercenary escorts: if you hire mercenaries, have them escort a follower ship rather than the fleet leader — it keeps them off your flight path and closer to the actual front line.
• Support ships & carriers: homebase any fighter to a carrier (or TM/M2 with a carrier repair module) and it becomes a Support ship — it fights its host's target, auto-renames to "type — host name", docks to auto-repair when badly hurt, and ignores fleet orders in favor of its host. It also defends itself: anything that shoots a support ship becomes its target ahead of whatever the host is engaging. Ordering new fighters for a fleet-leading carrier fills its support wing first — always. But automatic conversion stops at half the carrier's docking slots; beyond that, fighters joining or built for the fleet stay ordinary members. For a fuller wing, homebase the fighters to the carrier yourself — a hand-set homebase is always honoured, and the carrier picks it up within a minute. (Your ships only; enemy carriers still launch full wings.) Repair works differently for a support ship — see Who repairs what, and when below.
• Missiles are real weapons now: missiles were rebalanced into consistent-value classes — Fox 1 (cheap suppression, needs lock), Fox 2 (fast heat-seeking anti-fighter), Fox 3 (long-range anti-capital, fire-and-forget), and Artillery (M7M ammo; only fires at large ships/stations). New player ships default to 75% missile-fire probability, big/huge hulls spawn with a free starter loadout, and templated ships build their exact listed loadout. If you're willing to run the supply chain, missiles pay off.
• Capital bail: capital ships can "bail" — attempt to escape — when their health gets critically low, on both sides of a fight. Finish kills decisively.
• Fighter balance (Friend or Foe): M3s carry ~30% more armor; M4s are ~10% cheaper to build.
• Out-of-sector battles resolve at reduced time dilation — OOS fights conclude at half in-sector speed, and the old "fight in-system where you're strong, stall OOS where you're weak" exploit is much weaker.
• Beware Raider fleets: every Commonwealth nation fields a fast M3/M4 anti-logistics raiding fleet used in wartime. It will penetrate your space and hunt your TS haulers sector by sector until stopped. When at war, keep at least one fast M3/M4 response fleet at home — see Raiders for how they choose a system and what actually deters them.
• The repair ship: the Truelight Seeker (M6, researchable) is the dedicated repair vessel — 6 repair lasers, 1,000 m range. Use the Repair Ship command under Special Commands (target must be in standby; works on abandoned ships too). It's slow and fragile — escort it.
• The Commonwealth fortifies its gates Mayhem 4: every Commonwealth faction now fields a handful of Medium Orbital Weapons Platforms, and they are placed where they will be met — parked beside a jump gate in a border or bottleneck system, preferring the gate that leads in from someone they are hostile to. A platform's guns only reach about 5 km, so it is not a sector-wide threat; it is a doorway you have to fight through. Expect them from the moment a new galaxy is created, and expect a faction to replace losses slowly rather than all at once, because it pays for each one out of the same industrial stockpile it builds warships from. Factions destroy each other's platforms too, so a long war thins them out. Tunable in the 9973 file: id 224 switches the whole thing off, 225 is the per-faction ceiling, 226 how much territory buys a platform, and 227 what one costs its owner.

Who repairs what, and when

There is no single automatic repair rule. Which of the three a ship gets depends on where it is based and, for a fleet, what class is leading it. They do not overlap.

• Support ships repair at their carrier. A fighter homebased on a carrier takes itself home and docks when its hull drops below 100% and it has nothing to shoot, or below 25% while it is still engaged — badly hurt fighters are pulled out of a fight rather than left to die in it. This depends entirely on the carrier carrying a Carrier Repair Module. Without one the damage is simply ignored: a support ship will never take itself to an Outpost, because its whole world is its host. Note also that it repairs in short stretches between sorties rather than sitting docked until full, so during a long battle a support wing runs at less than full health.
• Ordinary fleet members go to an Outpost. Any fleet ship that is not homebased on a carrier — which includes every fighter beyond the 50% conversion cap — is sent to one of your Outposts when it drops below 90% hull with no enemies about, or below 20% if there are. This is what the Auto Repair switch on the Fleet Settings screen controls; turn it off and nothing is sent anywhere.
• A fleet led by an M1 is the exception, and it repairs in place. Under an M1 the Outpost trip is deliberately skipped, because the carrier mends its own fleet in space — no docking, no flying home, ships repaired while flying in formation. The M1 is the only hull that does this: an M2 or TL leading a fleet does not, whatever its docking bays suggest.Mayhem 4
• Five things must all be true for that in-place repair to run. The carrier must be yours, an M1, the leader of the fleet (not merely in one), carrying a Carrier Repair Module, and not attacking anything. Miss any one of them and nothing is repaired — silently, with no warning message. The module is the one most often forgotten: it is the same module support fighters depend on, and a captured M1 keeps whatever it was carrying.
• And each ship it mends must be with the fleet, undocked, and not attacking. There is no distance check — “with the fleet” is the whole test, so a straggler halfway across the sector is still reached. A ship that is docked somewhere, or that is itself shooting at something, is skipped for that minute. This is why it reads as a between-engagements top-up: once the shooting stops, the whole fleet starts mending together.
• How fast: 5,000 hull per ship per minute (9972 id 155), applied to every eligible ship in the same pass. That is roughly twelve minutes for a typical M3 and about an hour for an M6, so it is a way to recover between battles, not a way to survive one.

Fighters are included in the carrier's repair sweep, so a wing under an M1 is covered by that third rule rather than falling between it and the Outpost trip.

Two things are never repaired automatically, by design. Your fleet leader is never sent anywhere — that is judged too important a decision to take out of your hands, so you get a warning message every few minutes instead and the call is yours. The same goes for any M1 or M2 in a fleet. And a carrier you board or claim takes up repair duty as soon as it is yours, keeping its repair module — a captured carrier is a working repair hub, not just a hull.

Missile Barrage (missile boats)Mayhem 4

An M7M carries a wall of launchers and, left to its own devices, trickles missiles out of them a few at a time. Missile Barrage makes it fire the lot at once — one missile from every launcher of every missile turret, in a single simultaneous salvo. On a well-armed missile boat that is a dozen or more warheads arriving together, which is the point: a target's defences can shoot down a trickle, and cannot shoot down all of it.

• Where it is: the Fight section of the ship's Command Console, under MLCC and Carrier Command. It only appears on hulls that actually have missile turrets, so you will not find it on your Nova.
• Picking the target is quick on purpose. If you are flying the missile boat yourself and already have something targeted, it simply opens fire on it — no questions. Otherwise it asks you to pick, from the objects around that ship. It never asks you which sector: a barrage is fought where the ship already is.
• Which missile: the one that ship currently has selected. If nothing is selected, or it runs out mid-order, it falls back to the best missile in the hold for that target — so a wingman you have ordered never sits there doing nothing because you forgot to set its ammunition.
• It keeps going. Volleys repeat until the target is destroyed, the missiles run out, or the target leaves. Between salvos the ship waits out the missile's own reload, so a heavy warhead fires slower than a light one, exactly as it does normally.
• It will not waste your stock. If the target already has more missiles inbound than the fireworks limiter allows (9972 id 270, default 8), the ship holds fire until they land rather than emptying the hold into something already dead. That limit is the same one your turrets obey.
• Cost of a full salvo: a barrage is expensive in a way ordinary firing is not — you are spending a dozen missiles in a few seconds. It is a tool for opening on a capital or breaking a station's defences, not a default attack order. Run the supply chain before you rely on it.

17. The Fleet Settings Screen

Open it from the Personal console > Fleet settings. This is where a fleet is actually configured — every option below is stored per fleet commander, not globally, so two fleets can behave completely differently. Nothing on the screen unlocks until you click a commander in the list at the top to select it. If the list is empty you have no commander yet; promote any ship from its Ship Command Console > Fleet Control.

Two toggles at the very top control the roster display: Show fleet followers lists every member under its commander (clicking a follower toggles it in or out of "with fleet" status — a follower taken out of the fleet retreats if enemies are present, otherwise just stops), and Show hidden fleet commanders reveals commanders you have flagged as hidden further down.

Fleet Quick Commands

One-shot orders, not settings. They fire immediately on the selected fleet:

• Followers: Join with commander — recalls every follower back into formation.
• Fleet: Priority attack target — pick one object; it becomes the fleet's number-one target until cleared. This is the strongest targeting override available (see the attack order below).
• Commander: Defend current sector / Defend homebase sector
• Fleet: Dock at commander's homebase — sends the whole fleet home to dock.
• Fleet turrets: Attack / Defence — flips every turret on every ship in the fleet, commander included, in one click.
• All ships: Stop / Flee to nearest safe stations / Flee to this position… — the panic buttons.
• Commander: Retreat in formation to sector… — an orderly withdrawal that also recalls followers. While a retreat is running it blocks scanning range, sector monitoring, repair and inspections, so the fleet is deliberately deaf until it arrives.

Combat behavior — and how to make a fleet focus fire

Followers pick targets from four sources, and the game applies them in a fixed order:

1. The priority target, if you set one.
2. Anything found inside the fleet’s scanning range — a radius measured from the commander, not from each follower.
3. Whatever is attacking the commander.
4. The commander's own target — only if you switch that option on.

• Scanning range (default 20 km; selectable 0 / 5 / 10 / 15 / 20 / 30 / 40 / 50 / 100 / 200 km) — followers only. Followers are sent against enemies inside this radius, which is measured from the commander, and the same radius decides how far out they will go to defend the commander when it is being attacked. Raising it widens both, at the cost of ships peeling further from the formation. 0 km disables it entirely. The default applies to newly formed fleets; a fleet you already have keeps whatever it was set to.
• Followers engage commander's target (default No) — pushes the commander's current target down to the formation. The commander only pushes it when the target is within 20 km. The in-game note warns this is only sensible when fleet ships have similar speeds, since fast ships will rush ahead of the slow ones.
• Followers always engage station targets regardless of either setting. If a follower is attacking a station and something starts shooting it, the commander now pulls it off and hands it a proper target — so the fighters a station launches to defend itself no longer get a free hand while your ships keep hammering the hull.

The focus-fire trick. Set scanning range to 0 km and Followers engage commander's target to Yes. That removes source 2 above — with the range disabled the commander stops handing each follower its own scanned target — so the fleet shoots only the priority target, whatever is shooting the commander, and the commander's target, piling onto one enemy at a time instead of scattering. Against a single strong opponent — an M2, a station, a boss ship — that kills far faster and exposes fewer of your ships to return fire. The trade-off is that followers go blind to anything they are not handed, so it is a set-piece setup, not a default for patrol or garrison duty.

• Auto-Repair (default Yes) — damaged followers are sent to the nearest safe Outpost once the current sector is clear.
• Auto-Maintain (default Yes) — followers go for inspection once their maintenance factor hits the empire-wide threshold.

Retreat rules

• Max jumps in sequence (default 3) — how far the fleet may run when looking for a safe sector.
• Retreat if enemy strength is X times greater (default 3:1; 1:1 through 6:1, or No retreat) — measured against combined allied forces in the sector.
• Retreat when spotting this enemy class or larger (default None; TM / M6 / M7 / Large Capships) — a hard trigger independent of the strength ratio. Useful for keeping a raiding fleet of fighters from ever tangling with capitals.

Supplier

Nominate one ship to keep the fleet stocked with missiles, ordering them from its homebase automatically. The candidate must carry a Transporter Device, must not already be in a fleet, and cannot be the ship you are flying.

Target priorities

For each of your ship classes — Huge Ships (M1, M2, M7, TL), Big Ships (M6, M8, TM) and Fighters (M3, M4, M5) — you choose what that class hunts: Fighters, Big Ships, Huge Ships, Stations, Enemy Freighters, Satellites, or "Only neutral TS with Cargo". By default each class targets its own kind. Pointing your fighters at enemy freighters while capitals handle capitals is the usual reason to change this.

Naming your fleets

Auto-Rename entire fleet when a follower gets added or removed is on by default, so the pattern re-applies itself as the fleet changes; Rename: apply runs it manually, and Rename: color tints the whole fleet. The pattern accepts these expressions:

The default pattern is *l*st-*dc, which yields names like L Nova-001 for the commander and Nova-002, Centaur-001 for the rest.

Some worked examples:

• Police 1 *d *st → Police 1 001 Nova, Police 1 002 Centaur, … A clean pattern for home-defence fleets: the fleet's name and number come first so every ship sorts together in your property list, then a unique running number, then the hull type so you can see the composition at a glance.
• *l*h Guard *dc *st → L Sanctuary Alpha Guard 001 Nova — ties each ship visually to the Outpost it defends, which pays off once you have several garrisons.
• Strike *dc *st → Strike 001 Nova, Strike 001 Centaur — note that *dc restarts per hull type, so this reads as "the first Nova, the first Centaur". Use *d instead when you want every ship in the fleet to hold a unique number.

The commander prefix behind *l is itself configurable: it lives in addon/t/9973-L044.xml at id 71 and defaults to  L  — the leading space is deliberate, because it sorts your commanders to the top of the sector ship list. Set it to 0 to switch the prefix off entirely.

Don't mix in the preset tokens from the global ship-naming screen (*sc, *es, *wg, *inv, *hl, *co, *fr, *ul, *w, and the worker tokens like *trader or *mn). Those don't expand in place — each one replaces the entire name with its own fixed format, so your pattern is silently discarded. In a fleet pattern, stick to the five tokens in the table above.

Visibility

Hide commander from leader list at top keeps a fleet out of your way without disbanding it, and Hide / Show all followers in property menu declutters your ship list — handy once a fleet runs to twenty-plus hulls. The screen also tells you the slowest ship in the fleet, which is the one setting your whole fleet's travel speed and therefore the first candidate for replacement.

Auto-Response & Monitored Sectors

Give a fleet a standing watch list and it will respond to threats on its own. Add individual sectors, or set Monitor all sectors of this Faction to cover a whole empire's territory at once — including your own. Filters let you ignore Big and Huge Ships, Fighters, or Freighters, so a fighter wing can be told to chase raiders while ignoring capital incursions it can't handle. Do not respond if threat already being handled by other fleets is on by default and prevents your whole navy from converging on one skirmish — but it only recognizes another fleet as "handling it" when that fleet uses exactly the same Ignore… settings, so keep those consistent across fleets that share a patrol area.

A watch list no longer overrides the orders you give by hand.Mayhem 4 Auto-response claims an idle fleet only: a commander carrying out Fleet: Attack, Invade Sector, Protect or Attack All Enemies is left alone while that order stands, and a fleet already answering one alarm is not pulled off to answer another.

Attack All Enemies never finishes — it holds its sector until you give a new order — so a fleet on it never answers an alarm, even when its own sector is empty. To put a fleet on watch, do one of two things:

• Leave it with no order. Give the commander the None command. It answers the next alarm and afterwards returns to where it was.
• Put it on Fleet: Patrol Sectors. An alarm interrupts the patrol, and the patrol resumes once the threat is cleared.

Build Followers

Set a per-ship-type or per-template quota and the fleet orders replacements automatically until it is met — this is what keeps a fleet at strength without you watching it. You choose the Outpost that builds them (defaults to the commander's homebase) and the quality tier (Garbage through Impeccable, default Normal). Quotas accept plain ship types as well as saved templates. Set a quota to 0 to delete it.

Reorganizing fleets

• Split — moves 50% of each ship type into a brand-new fleet carrying the same settings. Note the Auto-Build quotas are not reduced, so both fleets will try to build back up to the original numbers unless you edit them.
• Merge into… — folds this fleet into another; the destination commander's settings win.
• Import settings from fleet… — copies another fleet's configuration onto this one without moving any ships. The fastest way to roll out a setup you like across your whole navy.
• Reset settings — back to defaults, with a confirmation prompt.

18. Jump Beacons & Travel

Jump drives do not exist in this mod. The jump-beacon network is your fast-travel backbone, for fleets and logistics alike.

• TS-transportable: beacons are Small Container cargo (volume ~7,500), so a normal TS can carry, deploy, or pick one up — you no longer risk a slow TL to place one. Classic play: run a fast TS into the target sector, drop a beacon, jump the whole fleet in at once instead of trickling through gates.
• Hard caps: you can own a limited number of jump beacons (default 6) and Jump Station perks (default 4) — both adjustable in the 9973 config. Current totals show in the Ministry of War info display.
• On Ultra Hard this entire section is moot. You cannot obtain a jump beacon by any route — none are scattered, none can be captured or built, and your starting TL carries none. Everything here about placement, retrieval and upkeep applies to Hard and lower only. See Choosing a Difficulty.
• Hard difficulty rules: beacons are only allowed in your own systems, or in Commonwealth space where your notoriety is level 6+ (3,333). Beacons dropped in Phanon space convert to Phanon ownership. Pirates on Hard aggressively hunt beacons — of every race, not just yours.
• Logistics multiplier: agents route through beacon/jump-perk systems to reach player systems far outside normal trade range (see Core Pillars).
• Bind the Move to position using jump beacons hotkey for manual beacon travel.

19. Capital Ships: Bail, Capture & the Capital Shipyard

Capital bail

• Capitals have a chance to bail (abandon ship) when destroyed: M7 8%, M1 5%, M2 3% — doubled when the ship is flown by the Teladi, whoever built it; M6s bail at 3% as well. The Xenon, the OCV and the Kha’ak never bail at all, and neither do your own ships unless 9972 id 210 says otherwise. The roll is fixed at ship creation, so save-scumming a battle won't change the outcome.
• Abandoned capitals float at ~4–5% hull. Your automated Tugs will NOT capture them — NPC tugs eventually will, so act personally and quickly. The Satellite Monitoring screen has M7/M1/M2 filters, an [ALL] filter, and colors sectors containing an abandoned capital.
• Capture etiquette: grabbing an abandoned capital inside another faction's space costs notoriety — more for bigger hulls, scaling with difficulty level (−1,000 total standing makes you an enemy). Unknown space and Black-Market ships carry no penalty.

The Capital Shipyard

• An upgrade to an existing Outpost, activated near the bottom of the outpost Factory menu. Very expensive; cost scales with difficulty.
• Grants: 9 capital docking slots, +2 perk slots, +50% tax income, +20% recycling efficiency, +25% ship production speed (plus an automatic 10% specialization effect on builds).
• The old outpost is destroyed for scrap in the conversion — empty everything you want to keep first; ships homebased there are orphaned. Population and both specialization levels carry over, and perks are refunded for re-picking.

20. Boarding: Taking Ships With Marines

Boarding takes a ship intact instead of destroying it, and on capitals is often far cheaper than building one. It is also the most diplomatically expensive thing you can do — read the last part of this section before making a habit of it.

What you need

• Marines — trained passengers. How many a hull can carry is a property of the ship class and nothing you fit changes it, so pick the hull for the job rather than trying to equip your way into a bigger boarding party.
• A way to deliver them. Two methods, and they are not equivalent:
  • Boarding Pods — fired like missiles, and they can only be installed on a missile frigate (M7M). On any other hull they sit in the hold doing nothing. Pods ignore the range limit completely, which makes an M7M the safest boarding platform in the game.
  • Spacewalk — any hull with marine capacity can send marines across directly, but you must be within roughly 1,200 m plus both ships' sizes. Marines crossing open space are automatically fitted with engine tuning so they arrive sooner, scaled by their overall skill — better marines are literally harder to shoot down on the way over.
• The target's shields must be down, at or below its boarding threshold. Shields regenerate and the launch is simply refused above the line, so flatten them and go immediately.
• Give the order from the Hacking section of your Command Console — "Launch Boarding Mission". An older Launch All Marines entry also appears in the Attack menu; it is not connected to anything and will acknowledge the order and then do nothing at all. Use the Hacking one.

How a squad is organised

• Your marines are split into teams of five — a squad of 20 becomes four teams, each with its own pod or crossing.
• They are sorted by Mechanical skill and dealt out round-robin, so every team ends up with a balanced spread. You cannot concentrate your best marines into one elite team; the game deliberately separates them.
• Because of that, squad sizes in multiples of five waste nothing.

The four skills

A successful capture raises Mechanical and Engineering for between four and ten of the surviving marines, sharing a pool scaled by the captured ship's value. Fighting and Hacking do not improve this way — those you have to train.

How many marines to send

More is not better, and this is where most losses come from. After the ship is taken there is a final round of close-quarters fighting on the bridge — ambushes, booby traps, holdouts — and the chance of losing marines there scales with how crowded the captured ship is. Crowding is measured against the captured ship's marine capacity, not your own:

• Fighting skill does not protect you at this stage — these particular losses are deliberately random.
• Capitals cost more: +20% losses boarding an M1, and +50% boarding an M2.
• A more valuable ship raises the rate slightly on top of that.
• You can never lose more than three-fifths of the squad to this stage.
• Abandoned and neutral hulls are nearly free. At most one marine is lost and the expected loss is zero, so skills hardly matter — a single team of five is plenty.
• Luck does not run forever: the game tracks operations that cost you nobody and will force a single casualty after a streak of them.

The practical shape: send enough to survive the decks, but aim to finish well under the target's marine capacity. A large squad on a small hull is the worst of both worlds — the extra bodies buy nothing on the way in and are charged to you on the bridge. Against a dangerous capital, high Fighting is the right way to raise your survivor count rather than simply sending more.

The diplomatic bill

• The owner reacts at once. Whatever standing you had with the ship's owner is wiped out and pushed just below neutral.
• Uninvolved factions may take offence as well, and the chance any given faction notices scales with the value of the ship you took. Taking a destroyer is far more likely to be remarked on than taking a corvette.
• Their reaction is rolled on their own eight-hour cycle rather than at the moment of capture — specifically so it cannot be save-scummed.
• The chance a given faction objects is (100 + their Ethos) ÷ 200, so the gentle races object most. The Boron are the most likely in the galaxy to hold boarding against you; the Split are the least. See The Commonwealth Races for the Ethos table.
• If a faction does object and you still had standing with them, your entire reputation with them is wiped to zero. If you were already at the bottom, on Hard — or with AI war declarations enabled at lower difficulty — it becomes permanent hostility instead.
• Xenon, OCV, Kha'ak and unowned hulls draw no reaction whatsoever. If you want to board freely and often, board those.

21. Hacking, Viruses & Cyberwar

Hacking is the second route to disrupting — and stealing — enemy ships, running in parallel to boarding. Where marines are loud and expensive, hacking is patient, remote and deniable. The single most important rule is stated in the game's own interface: cyberwar is separated from actual war. No amount of hacking will make a faction declare war or start shooting at your property. The only retaliation is a counter-hack, so the risk you are managing is entirely to your own ships' systems — never to your standing or your borders.

What you need before you can hack anything

• A Hacking Rootkit — equipment that adds the Hacking commands to your ship console. It only works on the ship you are personally flying; you cannot delegate hacking to a fleet.
• Hackerchips — consumed each time you install or uninstall a backdoor. They come from a Mobile Factory: a TS-cargo ship fitted with a Mobile Factory Kit, craftable from your Outpost's Hangar > Upgrade Ships menu.
• A Hacking station — buy the perk at your local Outpost to convert a Research station. It researches port vulnerabilities and builds your viruses and worms. It does not draw on your empire's funds — you must inject credits into the station itself, or every project sits at zero progress.

The station's speed comes from the sector's research rate, and the Outpost's Faster research perk multiplies it, so site your Hacking station in a high-research sector for the same reason you would a Research station.

The seven systems you can attack

Every hack targets exactly one system on the victim. What each one does, and how hard it is:

The Oxygen prize has to be collected in person. A hull bailed by an Oxygen hack is flagged the same way a black-market purchase is: your automated Tugs will not collect it, whatever its class. Fly out and claim it from your space suit or with Cmd > Special > Capture Ship. Plan that pickup before you spend the virus — the most expensive hack in the game ends with an unowned capital drifting in someone else’s space, and anyone can shoot it.

Step 1: ports

Run Hacking > Scan Target Ports, then read the result under Hacking > Show Database Entry. Each port maps to one of the seven systems, and comes in three states:

• Closed — not vulnerable, cannot be hacked at all.
• Secured — can be opened by spending research (credits and time) at your Hacking station.
• Open — ready for a backdoor, at the cost of one Hackerchip.

Research cost scales with hull class (M1/M2 are the priciest, fighters the cheapest) and with the system — Cargo is a tenth of the base cost, Shields a seventh, Navigation and Weapons a third, Hull Cooling a quarter, while Accounting and Oxygen cost half again more than base. Anything carrying Advanced Firewall Software has every port closed and is completely immune.

Installing a backdoor is itself safe and silent — it is only the virus that can be detected. But when a virus is caught, the exploited port is marked patched, and the patch applies to every ship of that type, not just the one you hit. Burn a vulnerability on one Argon Nova and you have burned it on all of them. Patches do lapse eventually through software updates, but rarely enough that you should not count on it.

Step 2: worms — how to build a botnet

A worm is the industrial answer to backdooring ships one at a time: created at your Hacking station and aimed at a station, it installs backdoors on all vulnerable ports of every ship that docks there. Pick a busy trade dock and your backdoor list grows by itself.

Worms cost 4,000,000 credits against a Dock and 1,500,000 against any other station, and each station can only host one — this is how you build the pool of backdoored ships the next step depends on.

Step 3: creating a virus

A virus is locked to one system on one vector. Vectors are the six exploit types — Buffer overflow, Network exploit, Shellcode, SQL injection, IP spoofing and PRNG bug — and if your target's open port uses a different vector than your virus, you need a second virus. Plan for a small library rather than one universal weapon.

The critical decision is a single slider: Efficiency versus Security, always summing to 100. You cannot have both.

• Efficiency drives how hard the hack hits — every effect in the table above scales off it — and your upload range: maximum range in jumps = efficiency ÷ 10. A 30-efficiency virus reaches only 3 jumps from the Hacking station. Targets beyond that simply cannot be attacked.
• Security cuts the per-node chance of detection, and subtracts security ÷ 3 from every backtrace roll if you are detected.

Detection is rolled once per node and the base chance is (100 − security) × 0.05%, then modified by system: Oxygen triples it, Accounting adds half again, Navigation halves it, and everything else is quartered. In practice a high-security virus is very quiet indeed — but it will be short-ranged and weak, so the honest read is that efficiency is for targets you can reach safely and security is for reaching deep into hostile territory.

Step 4: dispatching, nodes and relays

Dispatching takes three choices: the targets (you may hit several at once), the relays, and confirmation. The virus then works through the target's nodes one at a time — and node count is set by hull class:

More nodes means a longer wait before the effect lands and more detection rolls. Hacking a battleship is inherently riskier than hacking a scout, quite apart from the cost.

Relays are the whole game. A relay is any ship you have backdoored, used as a proxy. If a detection roll succeeds, a backtrace starts three minutes later and must travel back through every relay in your chain to reach your Hacking station, each an independent chance for the trace to die there. Two things follow:

• Big ships make far better relays than small ones. The chance a trace gets through a relay is set by that relay's class: M2 65%, M1 70%, M7 75%, TL 80%, M8 85%, TM 90%, M6 95%, and fighters (plus anything unclassified) a full 100%. Every one of those is then reduced by a flat 15 and by your virus's security ÷ 3. Route through a backdoored M2 with a high-security virus and the trace has roughly a coin-flip chance of dying at that single hop; route through a fighter and it sails straight past.
• You can break a trace while it is running. The backtrace pauses 10 to 15 minutes at each relay, and if you uninstall the backdoor on a relay before it gets there, the trace stops dead. If you are watching, a caught hack is still salvageable.

Stack several large backdoored hulls as relays and you can hack more or less indefinitely without ever being traced.

If they do trace you: the counterattack

Only the hacker-capable factions retaliate — Argon, Boron, Paranid, Split, Teladi, Yaki, Terran, Xenon and OCV. One mercy is built in: if your Infamy is exactly zero, the first trace merely exposes you publicly for +1 Infamy and no attack follows. A clean record buys exactly one free mistake.

The counterattack itself begins about five minutes later and hits your ships with the same tools you have been using. Two thirds of the time it targets 3–6 of your Big Ships; otherwise 2–3 Huge Ships. If you own none of that class it falls back to 4–9 ships of any kind. Strikes are staggered 10–15 minutes apart at efficiency 40–80, weighted towards Shields outages, then Cargo dumps and Hull Cooling damage, and occasionally Oxygen — which means losing the ship outright.

Two defences exist, and they stack:

• Advanced Firewall Software — any ship carrying it is skipped entirely. Newly built ships receive it automatically, so the gap in your armour is usually captured and older hulls. Bailed ships are stripped of it, so a prize you just claimed is exposed until you refit it.
• Active Defence — bought at the Hacking station for 200,000 credits, it blocks counterattacks for 40 minutes (9972 ids 274 and 275). The right move immediately after a hack you suspect was caught.

Practical notes

• Hacking your own ships is never detected — the detection roll is skipped entirely when you own the target. A free, consequence-free way to see what a virus actually does before spending it on someone who matters.
• Start with Cargo. It is the cheapest port to research, the cheapest virus to build, and carries only quarter detection — the natural way to learn the system without risking a counterattack.
• Oxygen is the prize and the trap. It captures anything, but it is the most expensive virus, triples your detection risk, and burns the port type-wide when caught. Save it for a target worth the exposure, run it at high security, and relay it through capitals.
• Overall costs are scaled by 9972 id 271 (percent, default 100) if you want the whole subsystem cheaper or dearer.

22. Mission Generation (verified mechanics)

Missions are vital for surviving the early game. The generator's actual behavior, from the code:

• A monitor ticks every 20 seconds; each tick has a 17% chance to attempt generation.
• It picks a random sector that is known to you (explored — it does not require live satellite vision), within 12 jumps of your player ship, and not owned by you or by the Unknown race.
• Up to 2 missions per sector can exist, hosted at compatible stations, with a galaxy-wide cap of 24 generated missions; expired unaccepted missions are cleaned up continuously.
• Mission difficulty rolls use your questionnaire answer about two-thirds of the time, and a random difficulty otherwise.
• Small empires (owners with 4 or fewer sectors) draw from a special "limited empire" mission list.
• Mission generation stops entirely once the OCV endgame reaches the "player joined OCV" plot stage.

Practical upshot: keep moving and keep exploring — the more known sectors within 12 jumps of wherever you are, the more mission surface area you have. Accepted missions are auto-cancelled if the host station dies or changes owner.

The Mission Board (Personal journal) shows rewards (credits/reputation), difficulty, jump distance (color-coded by proximity), and time to expiry. Offers time out after roughly 30–40 minutes, so check the board often rather than hoarding. Reward multipliers from the 9972 config are applied on payout and not shown in the briefing.

23. Trade, Notoriety & the Stock Exchange

• Trading builds standing: every successful sale to an NPC station raises that race's notoriety toward you by ~50–100 — including sales made by your automated outpost Traders. You can trade your way into a race's good graces before you ever fight for them.
• Notoriety level 6 (3,333) is the magic number: at level 6+ with a race, your satellites in their space stop being removed, you may place jump beacons there (Hard), and their chance of declaring war on you drops (−20% at level 6, −40% at 7, −60% at 8+). Below that, the AI periodically removes your "spy satellites" from their space (and theirs from yours); how often scales with difficulty level.
• War risk factors: Infamy raises the chance a race declares war on you, up to three times as a Dread Pirate; the chance also scales with difficulty level; being overextended (many outposts, few ships) also invites aggression.
• The Stock Exchanges:Mayhem 4 the old Mayhem 2 exchange returns, and there are now six of them — one per Commonwealth race (Argon, Boron, Split, Paranid, Teladi and Terran), each in a random sector that race owns. Each is locked until you reach notoriety rank 5 (1,000) with that exchange's owner, so they open up one at a time as your reputation spreads. Open them from the sidebar: Personal > Stock Exchanges; the screen lets you switch between whichever ones you have unlocked. Invested credits count in your Total Asset Value — but if your standing with a race drops below the threshold, the credits invested at their exchange are locked until you repair it. Each exchange lists its own companies, and a race's temperament shows in its market: Terran stocks are the priciest, Boron the cheapest but sold in far larger blocks.
• What actually moves a share price: an exchange watches the factories within four jumps of it and prices its companies on how many are actually producing — not starved of resources, not stalled with a full cargo bay. A region that keeps building and keeps its supply lines fed pays its investors well; one that gets bombed flat or throttled by a shortage takes them down with it. Prices drift on their own between those moves, so there is always a little to trade against, but the long trend is a real report on the industry around you. Factories count no matter who owns them — including yours. Build a serious industrial base near an exchange and you lift the stock you are holding; burn the region down and you gut it. Since you can only buy shares and sell them back, never bet against a market, the profitable play is to make a region healthier — or to sell out before you wreck it. Tunable at 9973 ids 144 (off/on) and 145 (how sharply prices react).
• A quiet warning: the food shortage that shuts your own factories down counts against you here too. If your empire runs short and its factories start going dark, any exchange you have invested near will feel it.
• The Trade Report tells you whether a trader is actually earning. Open Trade Report from a ship's or station's console — the same menu that holds the Outpost and Research Managers — and you get that vessel's own ledger: everything Bought, everything Sold, and the net. Run it on the ship you are flying and it reports your whole empire instead of that one hull. On a ship it also totals maintenance cost, which is the number that matters: a freighter can show a healthy sales column and still be losing you credits once its upkeep is counted. Personal > Trade report archive keeps the cumulative record.
• Covert Operations: the Software Signature Disruptor ship upgrade makes a ship read as a Pirate to the AI: police won't stop it, Commonwealth patrols mostly ignore it even at war, and pirates leave it alone. Use it for covert looters/traders in hostile space or pre-strike scouting. It can't dock where it normally couldn't, and attacking reveals it.

Universe TradersMayhem 4

An outpost Trader works your own supply lines. A Universe Trader does the opposite: you turn one freighter loose on everybody else’s economy and it buys low and sells high for you, anywhere inside a bubble you draw. It never trades with a station you own — that is the whole point of it, and it is what separates the order from the Trader assignment.

• Three things before the order will run. The ship must be a TS or TM, home-based at one of your Outposts, and carrying Trade Command Software MK3.
• You may only run a few at once. The allowance scales with difficulty level. At the limit the order greys out on every ship that is not already running it. 9973 id 237 sets the allowance, and 0 disables the feature.
• The Outpost is the bank, not a leash. Every purchase is paid out of that Outpost’s account and every sale is credited back to it, so the profit lands where the ship came from — and a Trader based at a broke Outpost stops until there is money. It also flies home to be repaired, which is why the homebase has to be an Outpost and not a trading station.
• It works a fixed bubble. You give it an Origin sector and a Range in jumps, and every search runs from that point — it does not drift off across the galaxy chasing whatever it last sold. Leave Origin unset and it takes the sector it is sitting in when you give the order. Range starts at your trade-range setting (9973 id 103), which exists to cap the search cost; raise it knowingly.

The rest of the settings are on the same page, which opens when you give the order and reopens whenever you give it again — so a Trader already working is never locked out of its own configuration.

• Least profit per unit — the only margin guard it has. Set it high on a thin market and it will simply idle.
• Most and least to spend on one run — the ceiling stops it emptying the Outpost on a single load; the floor stops it burning a round trip on a load too small to matter, and setting the floor to zero switches it off. Put the floor above the ceiling and the menu refuses to start it, since nothing could ever qualify.
• Repair below hull percent — how worn it gets before it breaks off and comes home.
• Trade only with and least rank with them — hold it to one race, or demand a standing before it will deal. Negative standing is refused outright whatever you set, and naming a single race switches the rank test off: with one race chosen the test could only ever veto that race and idle the ship.

Pirate bases are refused outright — nothing on a Universe Trader’s shopping list is made or consumed at one. To find out whether a given hull is actually earning, run Trade Report on it and read the maintenance line; that is the number that decides.

Contraband and the policeMayhem 4

Some goods are illegal, and the law is enforced against you. Space Fuel, Space Weed, Slaves, Narcotics and the illegal sidearms and rifles are contraband — though which of them a race cares about varies, so a cargo that is fine in Teladi space may not be fine in Paranid space.

• Every faction polices its own territory, and only its own. A patrol will only stop you in sectors its own race owns, which has one very useful consequence: contraband is never illegal in sectors you own. Move it around your own empire as freely as you like.
• Every ship you own is searched, not just the one you are flying. A patrol scans everything of yours within 18 km, up to ten ships at a time, so a freighter you sent out on a trade route is stopped exactly as you would be. Sending the cargo instead of carrying it buys you nothing.
• Getting caught costs the fine, the reputation and the cargo. You get a formal police report naming the case number, the sector and the amount, and a line across the bottom of the screen naming which of your ships was stopped and what it lost — you will need it, because the ship in question is usually nowhere near you. The shipment is confiscated on the spot. The same ship cannot be stopped twice within half an hour, so it is the price of one stop rather than a running meter.
• A Software Signature Disruptor makes the ship immune — and it works on any ship you own, not only the one you fly. That is the upgrade's real job: fit one to every hauler you intend to run contraband with, and to whatever you fly yourself. See the Covert Operations note above.
• Tunable at 9973 id 222 (set it to 0 and the police never check) and id 223 (the fine, which scales with difficulty level).

If you want to be paid for taking that risk deliberately, the pirates will hire you for it — see the smuggling run.

24. Taxi & Cargo Hauler Jobs

Two standing jobs live at the bottom of your Personal console, under Jobs. Both are ways of being paid for flying somewhere you were going anyway, and both are worth registering early — the money is modest but it arrives while you are doing something else.

What both jobs share

• You register the ship you are flying, not yourself. Taxi work needs a TP, cargo hauling needs a TS, and the console refuses any other class outright. The registration is a flag on that hull, so buying a better freighter means registering it again — and the taxi upgrade is bought per hull too.
• A taxi also needs a Cargo Lifesupport System.Mayhem 4 The console refuses to register the ship without one — nobody boards a hull that cannot keep them alive. Buy it at any Outpost, Hangar > Upgrade ship, for 1 Yellow and 1 Green Crystal. It is the same fitting a pirate passenger contract asks for, so one purchase covers both.
• Work is offered when you dock, and each station carries its own cooldown of roughly 30–60 minutes before it will offer again. The clock is spent whether or not you leave with anything, so "No passengers on this station" usually means you were there recently, not that you were unlucky.
• Only Commonwealth, Yaki and Terran stations hire you — plus your own, for taxi work. Xenon, OCV, pirate and company stations never offer either job.
• Standing matters. Both jobs check your notoriety with the station's owner before offering anything, and the taxi — but not the cargo hauler — scales its work to it.

Taxi

Register a TP and passengers simply climb aboard whenever you dock — there is no prompt and nothing to accept.

• Notoriety sets both the crowd and the range. The destination is picked up to your rank + 1 jumps away, capped at three, and below rank 6 a stop can quite legitimately turn up nobody at all. At rank 6 and above you always leave with at least one fare.
• Everyone who boards at one stop is going to the same place. The destination and the fare are worked out once and shared, so a full load is one delivery paid several times over, not a milk run.
• The fare is about 3,000–4,000 credits per jump of distance, per passenger, and the 40,000-credit Upgrade your taxi option in the console doubles it permanently for that hull. It pays for itself quickly if you fly a TP at all.
• Reputation is paid the moment they board, not when they arrive — 50 per passenger with the station's owner. Your own outposts pay the credits but no reputation.
• The credits are collected by the game itself when you dock at the destination. Nothing needs doing beyond arriving.

The Passenger manifest entry in the console lists who is aboard, where each is going and what they are worth. Clicking a row sets your tracking aim — to the destination station if it is in your sector, otherwise to the next gate on the route. It reads the ship's passenger list directly, so it also shows anyone you are carrying for a pirate contract, and it is available whether or not you are registered.

Cargo hauler

Register a TS and docking brings up a yes/no offer instead. Accepting loads the shipment into your hold on the spot — you are not buying it, and you cannot take a job you have no room for.

• 500–1,500 units of one ware, drawn from a fixed dozen: fertilizer, micro-organisms, cleaning robots, construction equipment, insecticide, medical equipment, narcotics, parcels, Terran high-tech goods, space fuel, space weed and water.
• The destination is two to four jumps away and must be somewhere you have already discovered. Unlike the taxi, distance here is not tied to your standing — notoriety only decides whether you are offered work at all.
• The pay is roughly 20,000–30,000 credits per jump of distance for the whole shipment, and it is tripled if the ware is illegal.
• Deliver by docking at the destination with the full amount still aboard. You are paid on the spot and gain 200 reputation with that race.
• You have to make the delivery yourself. The destination only pays out for the ship you are personally flying. Transferring the shipment to a trader and sending it on does not complete the job — the cargo has to arrive with you.
• An illegal delivery leaves something behind. The destination permanently starts buying Space Weed as a secondary resource, which is a new outlet for anyone running that trade.

Illegal cargo is illegal when you are carrying it. A hauler job for space fuel, space weed or narcotics is exactly the cargo a police patrol will confiscate, along with a fine that scales with difficulty level and −500 reputation — and losing the shipment kills the job. Since the delivery has to arrive in your own hold, the way to make the triple pay safe is to fit a Software Signature Disruptor to the ship you fly. Patrols search every ship you own, but only inside their own race’s space — contraband is legal in sectors you own. See Contraband and the police.

The Cargo manifest lists every job you are carrying — ware, quantity, destination and pay — and clicking one sets your tracking aim the same way the passenger manifest does. It is only reachable while you are registered. Two things to know about it: you can only hold one job per destination, and if a destination is destroyed or changes hands before you get there the job is quietly written off with the cargo still in your hold.

25. The Black Market (buying ships)

Ships can be bought outright, no blueprint and no shipyard required — but not from anyone respectable. The Black market sits in the Universe block of your Personal console, and it is the fastest way to put hulls in space early on. It is also a countdown: every credit you spend there is funding the Yaki rebellion, and when the fund fills, the Yaki rise and the market closes permanently.

How a purchase works

• You buy a class, not a ship. Pick "Random M6" and you get a random hull of that class from a random Commonwealth manufacturer — you don't choose the model or the race. It arrives fully fitted with its lasers and shields.
• It is not delivered — it is left somewhere for you. "It's a no-paper kind of deal." The ship spawns abandoned in a random sector still held by the race you were born into (anywhere in the galaxy, if that race has been wiped off the map). The sector and the ship are revealed to you, and a journal entry — Abandoned ship (Black market) plus the ship's ID code — records where to go.
• Purchases must be claimed. Fly there and claim it from your space suit, or use Cmd > Special > Capture Ship. The pickup flight is the real cost of a cheap hull, and the journal entry only clears when you take ownership.
• Nobody else can take it. The hull is flagged so your automated Tugs will not collect it and pirates will not snatch it. It waits for you.
• No standing penalty for the pickup. Claiming an abandoned M7 or larger inside another faction's space normally costs notoriety (see Capital Ships); black-market ships are explicitly exempt.
• Buying an M7 costs 1 infamy. The galaxy notices when someone starts collecting destroyers through back channels. Nothing else on the list carries an infamy charge.
• Availability. The market is open from the start in a normal galaxy. In a young galaxy (the "no expansion" setting) it stays shut for the first 12 hours of playing time. It also disappears from the console entirely if you defect through Synthetic Dawn — the machines have no use for a fence.

Price list

Every class is on the shelf from your first visit — there is no reputation ladder with the smugglers. Against building the same hull yourself the early-game case makes itself: a 10,000-credit scout or a 35,000-credit freighter is cheaper than the resources, and far cheaper than the research, a home-built one would cost. The economics invert later, once your outposts are producing and an M7 for a million credits is simply a bad deal.

The catch: you are arming the Yaki

• Your spending is the rebellion's war chest. The fund opens at 1,000,000 credits the first time you walk in — which is why the whole catalogue is unlocked immediately — and every purchase adds its full price to it.
• At 4,000,000 the Yaki rise — the progress line at the bottom of the menu counts you toward it. What that costs the galaxy is covered in The Yaki Rebellion.
• That is exactly 3,000,000 credits of shopping. Spend it on the wrong things and the shop shuts before you have what you need. A single M7 burns a third of your whole allowance.
• Once they rise, the market is gone. The entry vanishes from your Personal console. There is no second window.
• They are coming anyway. taking your first sector starts a clock, and 24 to 48 hours of playing time later the Yaki arrive on their own, funded or not, and the market closes on the spot. The black market is a limited-time offer whether or not you use it — so an unspent allowance is simply wasted.

Because the Yaki arrive on a timer regardless, funding them is not the decision it looks like — the decision is whether you get any ships out of the window before it shuts. What their arrival does to the galaxy is covered in The Yaki Rebellion.

Plot decision: the Crimson Commando

• What it is. A one-time offer at the bottom of the market: invite the famous Yaki boarding team to defect to you. It costs no credits.
• Requirements. Your Ascension must be complete, and you need at least 5 infamy — the mod's own hint is to go kill some neutral traders. You are asked to confirm.
• What arrives, immediately, in your current sector: a fully equipped Split Viper carrying 18 boarding pods, and a Terran Magnir fitted with a Transporter Device crewed by 10 named elite marines — several of them near-maximum in fighting or hacking — plus 17 rookies to train up. It is an instant, complete boarding capability.
• The price is paid in consequences. The Yaki are permanently and irreversibly hostile to you. The rebellion fund is slammed to maximum, so the Yaki rise that instant and the black market closes for good — any credits you were saving for it are lost.
• Sequencing matters. If you want both the ships and the commando, do all your shopping first. Taking the commando ends the market in the same breath.

26. Infamy, Scanning & Legality

• Infamy replaces reputation loss for dirty deeds: instead of tanking your faction rep, actions like breaking a non-aggression pact add to a persistent Infamy score (e.g. +20 infamy for breaking a pact by killing). High infamy has its own consequences, but your trade/mission standing survives.

What raises it

Infamy is a small-numbers score, which is easy to misjudge until you have seen the range. Everything that adds to it, and by how much:

Pirate contracts are the one source you choose deliberately, and they are priced to be the slow, steady one. The award scales with the size of the job — a satellite drop is 2, a marquee kill is 8 — so working the pirate board is a way to accumulate infamy on purpose without ever committing the kind of act that costs 20 in a single stroke. See Pirate Contracts & Corsair Credits; the rate is 9973 id 197.

How fast it fades

Every eight hours of playing time your infamy loses 5% and then a flat 2 points, floored at zero (9973 ids 47 and 48). Below about 20 the 5% rounds away to nothing, so through the whole early game the flat 2 is the entire decay:

So a stray kill clears itself within one cycle and a broken pact takes the better part of a day of play. Infamy is a rate, not a total: to sit at 10 you must earn about 2.5 per cycle indefinitely, at 30 about 3.5, at 60 about 5. Stop earning and you slide back to zero. The amnesty at the end of a Xenon Crisis wipes 90% at a stroke (id 49).

What high infamy actually does

The jump from 0 to 1 is the biggest step you will ever take. A surprising number of systems test only whether you have any infamy at all, not how much — so one point costs you nearly as much as fifty, and only a full decay back to zero buys any of it back:

Above that floor, five things scale with the actual number:

Put together: 0 is a genuinely different state from everything else. 30 is where the trade lanes start shooting back with corvettes rather than fighters. 60 and up is a game in which most factions are looking for a reason, your borders leak, and diplomacy is closed until you have spent days of play decaying back down. The mod's own tutorial advises staying under 10 so that ending a war peacefully remains an option.

What it buys you

Infamy is not simply a penalty — several things are better with a record, which is what makes the pirate track a real choice rather than a trap:

• Pirates largely leave you alone. With any infamy at all, a pirate group deciding whether to harass you has a 50% chance to move on instead, rising by 1% per 2 points of infamy to a cap of 90%. At zero infamy they always come. This is the effect the mod's tutorial is pointing at when it calls infamy useful early on.
• The Yaki treat you as one of their own. Their ships normally demand double the population; with any infamy that halves instead — a 4× swing — and their research runs at double rate rather than half. See the Yaki.
• Better pirate work. Infamy is the pirates' reputation ladder, so it unlocks contract types and better pay at 10, 30 and 60.

Cargo scanning & contraband

• Cargo scanning as income: the mod's tutorial suggests scanning neutral traders early on, and it is a genuine earner — but the scan itself takes nothing from anyone. What it does is expose contraband. Scan a ship whose hold contains goods illegal in the sector you are both standing in — a sector that must belong to one of the six Commonwealth races; in pirate, Xenon or unowned space a scan does nothing — and that ship is immediately reflagged as a pirate and opens fire on you, escorts and all. From there it is ordinary pirate hunting: kill bounty, and whatever survives in the wreck is yours to collect.
• Why that is better than simply robbing them: a neutral trader is a civilian, and killing one costs you +1 infamy (a source that stops counting once you pass 60). A smuggler you have exposed is a pirate, so the same kill costs nothing at all. The scan is what makes the theft legal. Ships with clean holds do nothing whatsoever when scanned — this is a hunt for contraband, not a way to shake down passing traffic.
• Most smugglers are ordinary traders. Neutral traders are freight haulers working out of Trading Stations, and none is generated as a criminal. Whether one is a "smuggler" depends entirely on what is in the hold when you scan it, judged against the law of the sector you are both standing in. The same ship can be legal at home and contraband one gate over, so a clean scan means try again elsewhere, not that the ship is honest. Space Fuel is the contraband you will meet most, because Argon Trading Stations produce it and it gets hauled across borders that don't welcome it.
• Pirate bases run smugglers of their own.Mayhem 4 Neutral freighters carry contraband out from the bases to buyers across the galaxy. Expose one with a scan and it is fair game like any other smuggler.
• They arm themselves against you. Every newly built trader rolls against your infamy for a security escort — the chance is equal to your infamy, capped at 80%. Past 30 infamy those escorts start upgrading from fighters to corvettes, and the number of them scales with your infamy too. Prey on the trade lanes long enough and the trade lanes shoot back, in exact proportion to your reputation. Early scanning is cheap; late scanning is a fight.
• Carry the licence if you can: if you hold the sector owner's police licence when you expose a smuggler, the discovery itself pays +10,000 credits and +100 reputation with that race, on top of the bounty and salvage — see Police licences for how you get one and how easily you lose it. Scanning carries no fine or reputation penalty of its own, so there is no downside to scanning everything that passes.
• Aboard ordinary traders, the contraband is Space Fuel, mostly. Argon Trading Stations produce it and buy it back, and pirate bases deal in it too, so it circulates constantly and crosses borders that don't welcome it. That circulation is the entire reason the tactic works. The enforcement runs one way only: no patrol ever scans an NPC ship, so the only thing standing between a smuggler and his destination is you. It is not a free pass, though — you are the one party the police do search, and they search every ship you own. See Contraband and the police.

Space Fuel & Space Weed: the contraband trade

Both are ordinary cargo to you and a crime for everybody else. Each has its own small market, and neither is sold at an ordinary factory — which is what makes them easy to come by and awkward to shift.

Space Fuel's reliable markets are Argon Trading Stations, which produce it and buy it back, and pirate bases, which always take it. Beyond those it goes where the scattered factory buy orders are — see Running contraband. One market or another is usually close enough, which is precisely why the stuff is forever crossing borders that don't welcome it.

Space Weed is bought by every pirate base, always, and by the scattered factories that hold a standing order for it — see Running contraband for that trade. On top of those you can create customers of your own; a factory converted this way is called a client, and three things do it:

• Your own traders stumble on them. Each time one of your trade ships docks at a factory there is a small chance it uncovers a quiet demand. This never happens at zero infamy — a clean record buys you no underworld contacts at all — and the odds improve as your infamy climbs.
• Cargo Hauler jobs. Complete a haul carrying goods that are illegal in that race's space, and the station you delivered to becomes a client.
• A Favor point spent on “Limit Drug Control”. Roughly a third of that race's factories start buying at once, which is far and away the fastest route. It costs a one-off +10 infamy, so weigh it against your police licences — any infamy at all destroys every one of them.

Nothing keeps a list of your clients. A discovery is announced once as it happens and recorded nowhere you can look up afterwards, and Trade Product Search will not find them either — it reports only factories that buy a ware as a main ingredient. You are not meant to track them by hand; you let a ship go and find them.

Three ways to sell either ware:

• Trade Run: Sell, ordered on any ship other than the one you are flying — the command is deliberately hidden on your own ship. Choose the ware, the amount and a search range of up to 10 jumps, and it names the buying station and the total it will pay before you commit to the run.
• An Outpost Trader, with an export threshold set for the ware on the Outpost's Trade list. It finds buyers itself, clients included, out to the Outpost's trade range. This is the only option that scales.
• Dock and sell by hand at any pirate base. This one works from your own ship, and a pirate base always buys both.

Where it comes from. Pirate bases sell it, and ships carrying it drop it when destroyed.

Buy it at a pirate base, which stocks all five illegal wares and restocks itself every hour — see Running contraband. Or take it from somebody. A destroyed ship always spills its contraband, whatever else survives the wreck, so a hold of either ware is reliably recoverable. Idle mercenary groups are the steady source — between contracts they run station to station carrying the stuff, which is exactly what makes them worth a scan. Expose one and the whole group turns pirate and comes for you; killing them then costs nothing, pays the bounty, and leaves the cargo drifting. Exposed neutral smugglers work the same way.

Killing mercenaries

Mercenary groups are unusually clean targets. They shoot back — every one of them is a warship, and they will turn on whoever fires first — but bringing one down costs you no infamy and no reputation with anybody. The penalty you would pay for murdering civilian traffic does not attach to a hired gun, whoever is paying them. Against most of the corporations a large enough kill can even earn you a point of loyalty with somebody who dislikes them.

The same goes for mercenaries you are paying yourself. Turning on your own escort is free of consequence too, and they will defend themselves against you while still nominally guarding whatever you assigned them to.

Killing the leader does not end the contract. The survivors close ranks behind a new one within seconds and inherit the hire, so the wage keeps leaving your account every fifteen minutes — and the replacement has no orders, so it attaches itself to the nearest ship of yours it can find, or reports that it has nothing to escort. To be properly rid of them, Dismiss the new leader in the Mercenaries menu, where it will be listed as hired.

Police licences: earned by standing, lost to infamy

There is one licence per Commonwealth race — Argon Law Enforcement License, Boron Law Enforcement License, Paranid Police License, Split Police License, Teladi Company Security License and the Terran USC Military License. They are ordinary wares that sit in your own ship's cargo bay, and you can hold all six at once.

You cannot buy one — licences are handed out automatically. A race grants you its licence the moment two conditions are true together:

• your notoriety rank with that race is 6 or higher, and
• your infamy is exactly zero.

The check runs continuously, so the licence arrives within seconds of qualifying and a news item tells you it was granted. The same check takes it back: drop below rank 6 or pick up any infamy at all and the licence is removed, again with a news item. A rank demotion revokes it on the spot, alongside the demotion voice line.

Infamy is the harsh half of that rule. Rank is a slow dial, but infamy is binary here — a single point costs you every licence you hold, from all six races at once, however good your standing is with them. And most of the tactics on this page generate infamy. Killing one neutral trader is enough. So the smuggler-hunting bonus below and a career in piracy are mutually exclusive by design: you can be the law or you can be infamous, and switching back means clearing your infamy completely and climbing back to rank 6.

What the licence buys is the bonus above: hold the sector owner's licence when you expose a smuggler and the discovery pays +10,000 credits and +100 reputation with that race. It is the licence of whoever owns the sector you are standing in that counts, not the smuggler's owner — the practical argument for collecting all six. Without one you still turn the smuggler pirate and still take the bounty and salvage; you simply are not paid for the discovery.

27. Pirates

Roaming behavior

• Harassment patrols: pirate ships sweep a sector by scanning at multiple spots before moving on. Target priority is your haulers first (TS — and they'll harass TLs too), with only a ~10% inclination to go after fighters. On Hard difficulty they also aggressively hunt jump beacons — of every race, not just yours.
• Gangs and commanders: pirates operate as loners or gangs under a commander. Kill the commander and the rest of the gang flees from you — decapitation beats attrition.
• Opportunists: pirates can claim abandoned ships of any size, but only ones drifting within 20km of the pirate itself — on rare occasions you'll even meet a pirate-flown capital. A prize left in a sector pirates frequent is not safe; one left well away from them usually is.
• Self-repair: pirate hulls regenerate ~5% per 30 minutes, so a wounded pirate left alone comes back healthy.
• The Pirate Warlord: a roaming pirate M7 (an M2 on Ultra Hard) that can emerge when a pirate base dies (see below).
• Plot tie-in: pirates you personally kill have a chance to drop clues for the Renegades plotline (see The Renegades) — pirate hunting feeds the mystery.

Pirate stations — what they offer

• Neutral ground: pirate bases are neutral to you (unless you've joined the OCV, which makes them permanently hostile). You can dock and trade freely.
• Contraband stock: pirate bases deal in five illegal wares — Space Fuel, Space Weed, Slaves, Low-yield Sidearms and Narcotics — and restock all five for themselves every hour. They also carry Hackerchips and Boarding Pods, which makes them the easiest place to buy boarding and hacking supplies.
• They buy all five back, always, at a poor price. That matters more than it sounds: it means a hold of contraband is never stranded, whatever happens to the market you bought it for. You can also issue a remote Trade command to sell at a pirate station without docking yourself — but the command ignores your blacklist, so the route may be dangerous.
• The Pirate Offer — reputation laundering: dock at a pirate base while your standing with any Commonwealth race is negative, and the pirates offer to "do a bit of maintenance on their systems" — i.e., fix that race's reputation back to neutral for credits, priced proportionally to how deep in the hole you are. The fastest (if priciest) way out of a bad standing.
• Work: pirate bases also post a contract board — jobs paid in Corsair Credits rather than credits, with better work offered the more wanted you are. See Pirate Contracts & Corsair Credits.

Running contraband: the pirate wholesale tradeMayhem 4

The five wares above are not just stock for your own use. Somewhere out in the galaxy there are ordinary factories holding a quiet standing order for each of them, and a pirate base will sell to you well below what those factories pay. Buying low at a base and hauling the load to a buyer is a trade you can run for as long as you like, and it is the only trade in the game where the police are part of the arithmetic.

• The margin is the whole of the income, and it is a margin on money, not on goods. A base sells at 75–85% of what a buyer pays (9972 ids 298 and 299), so two million credits committed returns the same profit whatever is in the hold. What the ware actually decides is how much cargo room that two million needs — Narcotics are cheap and bulky, Slaves are dear and compact — which is what settles whether a run wants a dedicated freighter.
• Shop around, occasionally. The discount is re-rolled per base and per ware, so no two bases are offering the same deal on the same day. With runs as long as they are you will rarely go out of your way for it, but a base you happen to be docked at may be having a very good week.
• The best markets are behind somebody's police. A factory is markedly more likely to be carrying a buy order for a ware that is illegal where it sits (9972 ids 300 and 301). That is the tension the trade is built on: the richest concentration of buyers is exactly the space where arriving with a full hold is a crime. The safe markets exist, they are simply thinner on the ground.
• The map does not stand still. Every three hours (9972 id 303) one factory somewhere loses its standing order and another gains one, and every pirate base re-rolls its prices at the same moment. A route you worked out last night is not guaranteed to be there tonight — and a region that had nothing worth selling to may quietly have acquired a customer.
• Finding a buyer is the same job as finding any other market: Trade Run: Sell from a ship other than the one you are flying will name a buying station and the total it will pay before you commit, and an Outpost Trader with an export threshold set for the ware will find them on its own out to the Outpost's trade range.
• Your Outpost Traders will not go near a pirate base. The wholesale end of this trade is yours to fly: an assigned Trader will neither buy stock at a base nor sell a load back to one, in either direction, whatever thresholds you set. Order a Trade Run and a pirate base is a market like any other — the restriction is on the Trader assignment alone. Left to itself a Trader would have sold your contraband straight back to the nearest base, because it picks the closest willing buyer rather than the best-paying one, and a base always buys everything.

Getting caught. Patrols search every ship you own, not just the one you are flying — a freighter you sent out is stopped exactly as you would be — but only inside their own race's space. Your own sectors are always safe, and a Software Signature Disruptor covers whichever ship carries it, hauler or flagship. See Contraband and the police.

How much stock a base carries is 9972 id 297, given in credits' worth of each ware rather than units, so one setting covers all five. Set it to 0 and pirate bases stop restocking contraband entirely.

Destroying a pirate base

• Loot: a destroyed pirate base drops half of its station wares as floating loot, regardless of normal station-loot settings.
• The Warlord roll: each pirate base has a chance to spawn a Pirate Warlord — a pirate M7, or an M2 on Ultra Hard — when destroyed. The roll is fixed when the base is created, so save-scumming the kill won't change it. Bonus: during its first 10 minutes the Warlord bails when it takes hull damage — hit it fast and you may claim a free M7 (an M2 on Ultra Hard).
• The pirates remember: killing a pirate base gets you banned from docking at every other pirate base for 12 hours. Any of your ships ordered to dock at one during that time is turned away with a message saying how long is left. Time your rampages after your shopping.

How many there are, and how they come back

• The galaxy starts stocked. How many bases are placed at the start scales with how much unowned space the galaxy has and with difficulty level. A typical galaxy opens with somewhere between sixteen and thirty of them.
• How many pirates fly at once — the galaxy-wide pirate population and the number of ships a base launches at a time — scales with difficulty level.
• There is a ceiling: 9972 id 212 caps how many may exist at once. A large Xenon empire lowers that ceiling in proportion to how much of the galaxy they hold — as the Xenon spread, the underworld gets squeezed out along with everyone else.
• They come back on their own, on a timer that scales with difficulty level, and faster when the underworld is nearly gone: more often the fewer are left. With a single base left the pressure comes off again, so hunting down the last one is never a race against a respawn.
• Where they will not appear: within five jumps of an existing base, in Xenon or Yaki space, or in your own sectors unless 9973 id 30 says otherwise. Beyond that they strongly favour the territory of aggressive factions and mostly leave quiet ones alone — a peaceable neighbour stays a clean neighbour.
• Wipe them all out and they stay gone: with no pirate base and no Yaki outpost left anywhere, nothing seeds a new one. A galaxy-wide alliance also suspends respawning entirely for as long as it holds.

28. Pirate Contracts & Corsair CreditsMayhem 4

Pirate bases hire. Dock at one and a contract board comes up alongside the usual pirate offer — a list of jobs you can take, one at a time, paid on your return to the base that hired you. It is the one part of the game where infamy is an asset: the more wanted you are, the better the work you are shown.

Getting to the board

• It appears when you dock at a pirate base, right after the pirate offer closes. It has to work that way: while you are docked the station's own interface owns your keyboard, so none of the mod's hotkey screens can be opened at a station at all.
• In flight, it lives in your Personal console, under Universe, next to Espionage. There you can review the job you are carrying, see your standing and your balance, and cancel — but you cannot see a board, because a board belongs to a base.
• Boards re-roll when you arrive somewhere new, or when you come back to the same base after a cooldown (default 15 minutes, 9973 id 209). Undocking and immediately redocking will not shuffle the offers into something you like better.

Standing is infamy

There is no separate pirate reputation to grind — the pirates respect the same infamy the Commonwealth hates you for. It buys two things: better-paid work, and more of it.

The thresholds are 9973 ids 206–208. The board carries three offers at Nobody and one more per rank (id 195), so a Dread Pirate is choosing from six. Infamy decays on its own — 5% plus 2 flat points every eight hours — so a reputation can be lost as easily as earned, and a board rolled while you were a Dread Pirate is not the board you will be offered after a quiet week.

The nine jobs

• Satellite — put an Advanced Satellite over a named sector. Buy one first; you cannot take this job with an empty hold, and the satellite stays yours. It does not have to be your player ship that drops it — all the job asks is whether a satellite of yours is sitting in that sector when you report back. Any ship carrying one can do it with Cmd > Special > Drop Satellite at, the LU Deploy Satellites order will do it, and so will an Explorer on its normal rounds. It must be an Advanced Satellite — a plain or Navigation Relay Satellite will not count. The board never offers a sector you already cover, but nothing re-checks afterwards, so an Explorer wandering through can quietly finish the job for you. Because you can do it entirely by proxy, this job pays half rate.
• Scan — scan a named ship or station with a Data Scanner, within about 9 km and in the same sector. Ship targets are M7 and larger. Nothing checks that you own a scanner before you take the job, so make sure you do. The target may well have moved since the job was written — expect to hunt for it.
• Retrieve — a shipment is adrift beside a jumpgate. Collect all of it and bring it back in your hold. Loads are sized by value, so a cheap ware means a big pile: check your capacity before you fly, and expect to bring a freighter for some of them. Bulk pays more, which is the point. AI salvagers and pirate looters will not touch a contract crate — but your own collection ships happily will, which is playing the job, not cheating it.
• Recover — a derelict is adrift somewhere. Claim it, fly it back and dock it. The pirates keep the ship — so you must be flying something else when you hand it over. Bring a second ship or leave one docked at the base, or you will arrive with nothing you can give them. Its condition does not matter; they take it at any hull percentage.
• Passenger — carry somebody to another pirate base. The only round trip in the list: dock there, then fly all the way back to be paid, and the clock covers both legs. You cannot take this one without life support — you need a Cargo Lifesupport System fitted — sold at any Outpost, Hangar > Upgrade ship — or a personnel transport (TP), and the board will refuse the job outright otherwise.
• Kill — a corvette with two fighters escorting it is waiting in unowned space. Only the corvette has to die; the escorts are the price of reaching it, not part of the job. Nobody asks who pulled the trigger, so if something else gets there first the job still counts. Targets are never Commonwealth — pirates will not ask you to start a war with a race you trade with — and the group is always one faction: Kha'ak, pirate or Yaki. It does not sit and wait: the group hunts anything hostile in that sector.
• Marquee kill — the same job one class up, and only ever offered to a Dread Pirate. A frigate with two corvettes, same rules, roughly double the pay. It is the biggest single earner on the board.
• Smuggling run — run contraband to another pirate base and come back to be paid. The shipment is loaded into your hold the moment you take the job, so you are not buying it and cannot take the job without room for all of it. It is the second round trip in the list, and the clock covers both legs. The difference from the passenger run is what is in the hold: this is illegal cargo, and every faction polices its own space. Get stopped by a patrol and they fine you, confiscate the shipment and the job dies with it. Two things keep you out of that: sectors you own are always safe, and so is a ship carrying a Software Signature Disruptor. The destination is also chosen so the short way there runs through unowned space or the territory of somebody who already wants you dead. See Trade, Notoriety & the Stock Exchange.
• Salvage a wreck — the only job with two halves, and the only one that does not tell you what you are fetching. There is a hulk adrift in a named sector, and that sector is full of ordinary wreckage, so finding the right one is genuinely half the work. Scan it with a Data Scanner and it comes apart; whatever was inside spills into space where it was. Collect all of it and bring it back. You will not be told what is in it until you crack it open — the Corsair Credits are quoted up front, but the cargo is not, so take a ship with room in it. Loads are small by design, since a scanner ship is rarely a freighter. The spilled cargo is protected from AI looters exactly as a retrieve crate is.

Half pay for work you can delegate

Five of the nine never require you to leave the base, because the contract checks the state of the world rather than what your own ship did — and those five pay half. It prices effort, not danger.

• Half rate — you can order these: Satellite (any ship carrying one can make the drop), Kill and Marquee kill (nobody asks who fired), Recover (the Capture Ship command works at range, and is in fact disabled on the ship you are flying — then send the prize to the base), and Retrieve (a freighter collects, comes to you, and you step aboard it).
• Full rate — these need you there in person: Scan and Salvage a wreck both go through your Data Scanner, which only works from the ship you are flying, within about 9 km, in the same sector. Passenger and Smuggling run are marked when your ship docks at the destination — sending a freighter there does nothing.

A wreck is full rate even though a freighter can carry the salvage home, because nothing spills until you scan the hulk — you are already there when the cargo appears. Only the Corsair Credits are halved; infamy is not, so the easy jobs still climb the pirate ladder perfectly well.

Getting paid

• Corsair Credits, and infamy. No credits, ever. A completion is worth Corsair Credits (id 198) and infamy (id 197). Corsair Credits scale with how much of a job it was, how far you flew, your reputation and the difficulty. Infamy takes none of that beyond the size of the job — your reputation already decides which jobs you are shown — and it is floored at 2, which in practice makes every job below a kill worth a flat 2. A kill is 5 and a marquee 8, so a rank costs at least five contracts even taking only the largest thing on the board. Id 196 is the single knob for the whole system — a percentage, default 100.
• Difficulty pays backwards. Deliberately: the easier your game, the more the pirates pay.
• You are paid in person, at the base that hired you — not at any pirate base, and not the moment the deed is done. If the board will not settle a job it tells you exactly why: how much of the shipment you are still short, that the ship has to be docked here, or that you are still sitting in the one you were supposed to hand over.

Deadlines and walking away

• Every job has a clock — six hours of playing time plus one per jump (id 199). It is checked hourly, so a job that has just run out may sit for a while before anyone notices.
• Cancelling is free, and you can do it anywhere, from your Personal console. But anything the job put in space goes with it — the crate, the derelict — so taking jobs and cancelling them is not a way to farm hulls.
• Letting one expire is not free. It costs half the job's Corsair Credits, taken off your balance and floored at zero — you will never owe them. You get a message naming the job and the penalty.

The truce

While you are carrying a contract, pirates leave your current ship alone. Harassment patrols, plunderers and gang leaders all skip it. Your fleet is not covered — freighters, miners and everything else stay fair game, so a contract buys the courier safe passage, not the empire. Turn it off with 9973 id 200 if you would rather they never gave you a break.

Spending Corsair Credits: the broker

Every pirate station has a broker, reached from the same screen the board appears on. You settle a contract at the base that hired you, but you can spend anywhere — the job was local, the money is not.

Ship hulls

This is what most people are saving for. Each base keeps a shelf of five hulls — ten once you are a Cutthroat, rolled when its contract board is rolled and re-stocked on the same 15-minute cycle — so a base you have not just come from has its own stock, and shopping around is a real thing to do.

The stock is outlaw hulls — the Yaki line and the pirate variants both, so expect Yaki names like the Susanova, Raijin and Senshi alongside pirate-flown Scorpions, Elites, Centaurs and Ospreys. Nothing here is sold to you legitimately. What classes appear depends on your reputation, which is the second reason to care about it:

They arrive bailed, not new — 30–70% hull, and they are left adrift in the nearest sector you own rather than docked, because a capital cannot count on a free berth. You still need an Outpost to buy at all — no Outpost, no sale, they will not hand a hull to somebody with nowhere to put it — but the ship itself is waiting in space for a pilot. The repairs are yours to pay for, and that is exactly why the price is what it is.

Price follows the hull’s value rather than a flat fee (id 203), so a scout and a corvette are priced apart. At the default the shape is: a fighter costs about one contract, a freighter about the same, a corvette or troop transport is a couple of dozen jobs, and a destroyer or TL is a season of them. That curve is the long game the shelf is meant to be — raise id 203 to stretch it, lower it to hand hulls out.

Outpost defence dronesMayhem 4

Sold in packs of five, for 200 Corsair Credits a pack — 40 a drone, and the one price on this shelf you cannot tune. You pick which of your Outposts the pack goes to when you buy it, and an Outpost that has not room for another five simply is not on the list.

They wait at the Outpost, and the moment it is attacked the whole complement launches at once and fights within about 20 km of the station. When nothing hostile is left they return to it. They cost you nothing to keep — no maintenance, no Administrative Burden, nothing to manage and no orders to give — and nothing to repair between fights either. The Outpost screen shows how many you are holding.

An Outpost holds 20 (9973 id 232), and a Capital Shipyard holds twice that. So filling a standard Outpost takes four packs — 800 CC — and a shipyard eight, or 1,600. The complement survives the upgrade to a shipyard, and that upgrade is refused outright while the drones are out fighting.

You cannot use them. They are the station's, not yours. Give a launched drone any order and it destroys itself rather than obey — you will see "Drone Override Order Detected - Self Destruct Initiated" across the bottom of the screen — and teleporting into one is refused. They are lost with the Outpost, and nothing is refunded.

Expect them to kill fighters, not capitals. A drone is the slowest hull in its class, which is what keeps the swarm on top of the station instead of chasing things across the sector. Twenty of them will shred a raiding wing; against a frigate's shield bank they are a nuisance, and no number of them changes that. If a capital is what is shooting at your Outpost, drones are not the answer to it.

Research the Plasma Burst Generator to upgrade them. Drones come armed with Particle Accelerator Cannons, and the Plasma Burst Generator is the one step up they can take — worth about two and a half times the damage. Once it is researched they re-arm themselves automatically. See Weapons Research & How Ships Are Armed.

Safe passage

Bought by the hour (id 202), and unlike the contract truce it covers every ship you own — freighters, miners, the lot. Carrying a contract already protects the hull you are sitting in, so this is what you buy when it is your traffic that needs to get through. Buying more hours adds to what you have rather than replacing it, and a single purchase is capped (id 211) so you cannot buy a month of quiet in one go.

It is priced so that continuous cover costs roughly everything pirate work earns you. Be safe, or buy ships — not both.

Setting a gang on a sector

Name a sector and a pirate gang turns up there and starts working it over (id 201). They are pirates, not employees. They take no orders, they do not leave when the job is done, and they will attack you too unless you are carrying a contract or have bought passage — which is exactly the combination worth buying. Nobody can ever prove you paid, which is the only reason anyone does this, and it is why the arrangement costs you no infamy at all.

Burying a record

Pay to shed infamy, a point at a time (id 204). This is the release valve for the whole loop, and it is deliberately cheap — because the credits were never the real cost. Infamy is also the only thing the pirates rank you by, so buying your record down buys quiet everywhere else and closes the better work and the better shelf here. Remember it fades on its own anyway (about 3 points per eight hours at infamy 30), so what you are really buying is speed.

29. Pirate Lock BoxesMayhem 4

Pirates do not bank. What they cannot spend or fence they stash wherever they happen to be standing when they need to be rid of it, meaning to come back for it later. Often enough they never do — because the sector changed hands, or the Xenon moved in, or whoever hid it did not survive the week. Those caches are still out there, and a good many of them are sitting in perfectly respectable space.

Where they are

Anywhere at all. A cache is as likely to be hidden inside a race's home space as out past the border, and nobody has picked the safe sectors clean because nobody else is looking. More go down as you play, so a sector you crossed a hundred hours ago is not a sector you have finished with.

Finding one

They do not appear on your radar. A lock box is scenery as far as your sensors are concerned — you have to see it out of the cockpit and target it by eye. It shows up as an Unknown Object, which is exactly what a great deal of harmless debris also shows up as, so most of what you stop for will be nothing.

Fly slow and look out of the window. A fast scout with a wide view is the tool for this, not a capital — and the habit of actually watching space go by, rather than setting a course and reading the map, is the whole of the skill.

Opening one

Target it and scan it with a Data Scanner — the same instrument you use to take ship designs apart. The box comes open and its contents spill out where it floated: a drifting load of ship-building wares — Computer Components, Hull Plating, Quantum Tubes or Crystals — worth between 200,000 and 500,000 credits (ids 230 and 231).

Nothing collects it for you. Bring a hold: the cheaper the ware you happen to find, the larger the pile, and it is perfectly possible to crack a box open and be unable to carry what came out. It will keep — but so will whatever else is in that sector with you.

Id 229 tunes how many caches the galaxy holds — raise it for fewer, lower it for more. Set id 228 to 0 if you would rather it had none at all.

30. The Commonwealth Races: Ships & Temperament

Ship design philosophies & economy traits

Each race has a distinct philosophy regarding speed, shielding, firepower and cost, layered with Mayhem 4-specific modifiers.

• Argon — the all-rounders. Middle of the road on speed, shields and hull, with firepower below average. Their corvettes (M6) hit the hardest of any race's; their bomber, destroyers and carrier are underpowered. No special Mayhem modifiers.
• Boron — the turtles. The slowest ships in almost every class, but tough, with outstanding heavy ships — the Megalodon and Ray destroyers and the Aquata bomber out-gun their rivals. Their small craft are weak. Mayhem bonus: self-repairing hulls — Boron-built ships regenerate ~5% hull per 30 minutes, free.
• Paranid — the brawlers. Cheap and middling overall, with strong corvettes and hard-hitting heavy fighters (M4) — but their fighters (M3) are thin-hulled, the Zeus is the weakest carrier in the galaxy, and their holds run small, the Hercules most of all. Mayhem bonus: efficient crews, only 0.8× population requirement per ship (with a small price offset).
• Teladi — the swarm. Very cheap ships with sturdy hulls but paper-thin shields and the lowest firepower: they win by numbers. The Albatross carries more than any other TL. Mayhem quirk: profitzzz before duty — capitals flown by the Teladi have double the normal bail chance, good news for salvage hunters. It goes by who is at the controls, not who built the hull, so a Teladi design in somebody else's colours is an ordinary ship.
• Split — the sprinters. The fastest ships in almost every class, by a wide margin, with average firepower and toughness at a slightly higher price; their fighters and corvettes carry thin shields. Mayhem cost: crew-hungry at 1.2× population per ship (small price offset).
• Terran — quality over quantity. The strongest ships in almost every class, with about half again the average firepower and shielding, priced to match — so they field the fewest ships, and every loss is expensive to replace. Mayhem rule: Terran hulls can only be researched in Terran Memory sectors (a Terran player gets a base research-rate boost to compensate).
• Yaki (honorary member) — double population requirements for their ships… unless you carry infamy, which halves them below normal, plus a 25% maintenance discount. Yaki designs are built for renegades.
• Remember the universal rule: maintenance runs 35% higher for any design that isn't your own race's — your race choice quietly shapes your whole fleet doctrine.

Civilian traffic: the service ships

Alongside their warships and freighters, every Commonwealth race fields a scattering of small unarmed transports with names like Media Service, Cleaning Service, Taxi Service, Parcel Service or Hospital Ship. They shuttle between the stations of their own race in a sector, dock for a while, and move on.

They are atmosphere, and nothing else. They carry no cargo worth taking, add nothing to their faction's military strength, and destroying one gains you nothing but the reputation hit any unprovoked kill would cost. The name is cosmetic and re-rolled on every trip, so the hull you saw as a Media Service will be a Cleaning Service next time it undocks — these are not different professions or anything with a schedule to intercept. They are seeded once when the galaxy is created and never replaced, so the traffic thins over a long game.

Temperament: the Ethos system

Each race has an Ethos score from −100 (evil) to +100 (good), configurable in the 9973 file (ids 35–40, 69). Defaults:

Ethos drives five verified mechanics:

• War posture and willingness to make peace: how aggressive a faction is — whether it claims sectors, how far its battlegroups range, how readily it retreats, whether it is open to a pact — is otherwise the same calculation for everyone. Ethos leans it one step: a benevolent faction (Ethos 40+, the Boron) holds back and will sometimes seek peace before it has to; a belligerent one (Ethos −40 or worse — Terran, Split, Yaki) pushes further and is slower to admit it needs a truce. It never forces a faction into or out of full defensive panic, and it is re-rolled every AI cycle. Set 9973 id 141 to 0 for identical races.
• Galactic Protector vs. Tyrant (uncommon, and it needs a runaway leader): checked during the AI's 8-hour refresh, and only when one race is the strongest faction with military power above 150% of the Commonwealth average (9973 id 218). The bar is hard to clear — rising to the top is what makes a faction everyone else's target, so a leader that approaches it is usually torn down first. Raise the id to put the titles out of reach, or lower it toward 140 to see them regularly. That race then rolls random(−99…100) plus its ethos, adjusted by difficulty level: positive crowns a Galactic Protector (ends its total wars and turns its battlegroups loose against the Xenon, ranging across the whole galaxy rather than tethering to home space); negative crowns a Galactic Tyrant (breaks even "unbreakable" alliances and drives its task forces to war). The Protector's crusade is invisible in an ordinary game: nobody may take a Xenon sector while the Xenon are no larger than they started, so a Protector with a dormant Xenon simply goes on fighting its usual wars. The title earns its name only where the Xenon are winning. There is no announcement — only the fallout news ("X have stopped their Total War…"), and the title is lost as soon as the race stops being strongest.
• War chance against you: good ethos cuts a race's chance of declaring war on you by up to 50%; evil ethos raises it by up to 50%. Stacked with the notoriety effects in Trade & Notoriety, a Boron neighbor is far safer than a Split one. Note this governs war they declare — which needs Nation status and Hard difficulty. It does not soften a war you provoke by expanding into their space; see Diplomacy.
• Ultimatums (Hard): when a race decides to backstab you for strategic reasons, high reputation and loyalty give a chance they issue an ultimatum first instead of declaring war outright — but evil-ethos races always keep a sliver of a chance to betray you with no warning at all, no matter how much they like you. It cuts both ways: a bad Ethos subtracts from that warning chance (Split −7 points, Yaki −9), while a good one adds to it (Boron +8, Argon +2). An honourable neighbour really is more likely to give you notice.
• Disapproval of your boarding (the one you will actually feel): when a race has witnessed you board a ship during its 8-hour cycle, it rolls on ethos to decide whether to take offence — roughly 90% for the Boron, 60% Argon, 50% Teladi, 35% Paranid, 25% Terran, 15% Split, 5% Yaki. If they object and you still hold positive standing, your entire reputation with that race is wiped to zero in one stroke; if it was already at rock bottom, on Hard the reaction is instant permanent hostility instead. This is what makes piracy in Boron space a different proposition from piracy in Split space.

Loitering in someone else's space

Park in a Commonwealth sector you don't own and sit there, and after ten to fifteen minutes the locals will let you know they've noticed. A ship of that sector's owning race opens a channel and says something — never a threat, but never friendly either: the Boron politely request that you turn and leave, the Split decline to talk to the likes of you, the Teladi observe that there is no profit in answering. If you're still there another ten to twenty minutes later, you'll hear from them again.

Every race has its own bank of these, written in that race's voice — the Paranid in particular have opinions about your species that a translation matrix does nothing to soften. Moving to another sector resets the clock. Your own space is silent, and so is pirate, Xenon and Terraformer territory. To fly in peace, set 9973 id 143 to 0.

31. Galactic Diplomacy: Pacts, Wars & Alliances

Beneath the shooting, the Commonwealth runs a persistent web of treaties that the AI factions negotiate among themselves every cycle — and that you can partly steer. Most of it is visible and actionable on the Ministry of War screen, one page per faction. Five relationship states matter, and they interact: several of them block the others outright, so the order you pursue them in decides what stays available.

The map is genuinely dynamic. Factions rise and fall on their own and borders move without your involvement, so a neighbour who is winning elsewhere is a neighbour with a fleet coming free. Knowing who is at war with whom — and buying peace before a campaign reaches its second or third system — is one of the better things you can spend credits on.

Expansion is the thing that makes enemies

The mechanic most new empires misread. You do not need anyone to declare war on you in order to be attacked. Hostility in this galaxy is simply a matter of your standing falling far enough — there is no separate switch for it, and no announcement.

• Every sector you take costs standing, with the faction you took it from and with its neighbours. Claiming against a sector's owner costs −3000 notoriety with them (9972 id 160). On top of that, every faction owning a sector adjacent to your new prize takes a hit of −500 multiplied by the number of sectors you already own (9972 id 161) — even factions you have never fought.
• That second penalty is the real brake, because it grows with you. Your fifth conquest costs about −2,000 with each neighbour. Your twentieth costs around −9,500 with each. A small empire can nibble at the map almost for free; a large one detonates its own diplomacy every time it expands. Conquest in Mayhem is deliberately self-limiting.
• Cross zero and you are at war, whether or not anyone said so. A faction counts as hostile the moment its opinion of you turns negative. There is no declaration, no message, no ultimatum — the relationship simply flips, because you spent it.
• Below a certain standing, their fleets start treating your space as a target. Once your rank with a faction drops under the invasion threshold (9972 id 199, default −1), your sectors become valid objectives for that faction's Battlegroups and Task Forces. This is not gated by difficulty. The protections described elsewhere in this guide — no unprovoked war declarations outside Hard, no dedicated anti-player invasions outside Hard — cover wars the AI starts. They do nothing about a war you caused yourself.
• Empty space is the cheap way to grow. Unowned and Xenon sectors carry no diplomatic bill at all. The Zone of Control rules still stop you quietly annexing unclaimed sectors pressed up against a faction's border, and your infamy raises the chance they take exception — but expanding away from the Commonwealth is the difference between a galaxy that ignores you and one that mobilises against you.

On lower difficulties you are safe from being attacked for no reason, and that is all you are safe from. An empire that grows by taking inhabited sectors ends up fighting the Commonwealth on any difficulty — it will simply have started it.

Invasions are campaigns, and how they endMayhem 4

A massed invasion — aimed at you or at another faction — does not stop when it has taken or wrecked one sector. Once its objective has nothing left standing, the fleet picks the next sector and keeps going with the same battlegroups, arriving stronger if anything, since reinforcements join a campaign in progress. Plan for a war, not a raid: holding the first system they come for buys you nothing while the fleet is intact, and the sector they hit first is rarely the one they finish on.

Which system they come for next is not random, and you can work it out. When a war opens, the attacker draws up an ordered list of its enemy's systems and then works down it — nearest first, measured from its own frontier rather than from the middle of its territory. A system that is ancestrally theirs, or that sits on a chokepoint, is preferred only when two candidates are equally close; it never beats a nearer one. So the border system closest to their territory is the one to reinforce, and it stays the likely target even if it is worthless — proximity decides, not value. The list is fixed when the war starts rather than reconsidered, so taking a system off the board mid-war does not redirect them; they skip it and continue down the list.

Before each assault the fleet masses at the jumpgates into its next objective, and that gathering is your warning. Once it has massed long enough (9973 id 215, twenty minutes for a target on their doorstep) it attacks as soon as at least half of its squadrons have arrived, latecomers joining as they turn up. The further they have to come, the longer they wait — up to double for a distant objective. If fewer than half have arrived after three times that allowance, the operation is abandoned and the ships return to ordinary duty, so a fleet that never assembles is a reprieve. Set the id to 0 and invasions wait for a full muster however long it takes — in practice, hours.

A campaign ends in one of five ways.

• Maul it badly enough and it goes home. A campaign tracks the strength it set out with — not what it had at the start of the current sector — and abandons the operation once it falls below a fraction of that (9973 id 213, default 33, a third). You do not have to destroy an invasion fleet, only break it, and losses carry across every sector it has fought through, so bleeding them steadily works as well as one big battle. The battlegroups return to ordinary duty and the attacker can plan something new later: a reprieve, not a peace.
• Give up enough ground and it stops anyway. A faction at war records how many sectors its enemy held when its first invasion of the war got under way, and declares victory once that count has fallen by a share of it (9973 id 214, default 25%). It rounds down but always demands at least one sector — so a defender holding 7 sectors loses 1 and the attacker stops, while one holding 8 loses 2. The count is cumulative across the whole war, not per invasion, so successive campaigns add up rather than resetting. It counts every sector you lose, whoever ends up with it — a system left uninhabitable, or one a third faction grabs, still counts against you. A faction that has declared victory becomes willing to make peace, which is the moment to approach them.
• Hold it to a stalemate. A campaign that spends more than four hours of game time on the same sector (9973 id 236) gives up and withdraws to regroup. The clock restarts each time it moves on, so only a defence that stops it cold ends it this way.
• Run it out of targets. If nothing reachable is worth attacking, or too little of the fleet is left to mount another push, the campaign winds up on its own.
• Make peace. Any signed truce stops every invasion between the two parties immediately — an Envoy ceasefire, a Ministry non-aggression pact, or two AI factions coming to terms on their own. The battlegroups are released, their claims on your space are dropped, and they go back to ordinary duty. This is what the Envoy's stand-down surcharge pays for when a fleet is already moving on you, and it is the fastest way to end a war you are losing.

Setting either id to 0 removes that exit entirely, which means campaigns run until the target has nothing left anywhere — considerably harsher.

Between invasions: what their fleets do the rest of the time

Campaigns are the exception. A faction's Battlegroups are the only formation that takes inhabited territory — everything else it fields is defensive, economic or police work. An invasion is those same Battlegroups called away and pointed at something specific; the rest of the time they run their own small war along their border. Telling the two apart tells you whether the fleet on your frontier is an inconvenience or the opening move of a campaign.

• They stay close to home. An ordinary Battlegroup only considers sectors within reach of the outpost it is based at — usually two to four jumps, stretching further for a faction that is hemmed in by hostile ground or reduced to a handful of systems, and never beyond eight. They are not roaming the galaxy looking for you. When a faction's reach grows, it is because its fleets have re-based forward onto a newer outpost, not because they ranged further from an old one.
• They attack their neighbours, not strangers. Outside a campaign a target normally has to border the attacker's own territory. Deep strike lifts that restriction (9972 id 206, off by default), and is switched on automatically for factions in a confident or reckless posture, for the Yaki always, and for everyone during a galactic crisis — but even then it buys only two jumps past their border, three for a reckless faction. Sustained fighting deep inside your space is therefore a campaign, not routine aggression.
• One system at a time, then home. This is the difference that matters most. An ordinary Battlegroup takes or wrecks a single sector and then withdraws to regroup — . If a fleet takes one of your border systems and then pulls back, that was routine; if it comes on to the next one, you are in a campaign and everything in the previous section applies.
• What they choose. Reinforcing an attack already under way comes first — a claim that is going badly pulls in other Battlegroups. Failing that, a system that is ancestrally theirs outranks everything; failing that, the most valuable thing in range. Empty space is nearly always passed over — an unowned sector gets looked at on roughly a one-in-fifty consideration, deliberately, so that the map does not quietly fill itself in behind your back. The exception is the opening phase of a freshly generated galaxy, when factions spread into empty ground quickly and then settle.
• There are far fewer of them than you would think. A faction wants about one Battlegroup for every seven sectors it owns (9972 id 145) and always at least one, so most factions field one to three for most of a game. A wealthy one builds up to eight, or twelve during a galactic crisis — but it will not start a new Battlegroup while its existing ones are still under strength, preferring to reinforce. This is why losses tell: a faction that loses two Battlegroups has lost most of its offensive capacity and will spend hours of play rebuilding it.
• Their Task Forces raid once a war is on. A faction in a confident or reckless posture that is at war with a neighbour will send Task Forces raiding into that neighbour's space, rather than keeping them home on defence. Raids deliberately avoid sectors already under an active claim, so they turn up away from the main front — quiet border systems, not the one everybody is fighting over. A cautious or baseline faction does not do this, so a sudden raid is a fair sign the attacker has grown confident.
• A faction that wants peace mostly stops attacking. Once it has decided it would rather come to terms, its Battlegroups abandon almost every attack they set out on and turn for home instead. An unexpectedly quiet border often means the other side is ready to talk — which is the moment to spend an envoy, before something changes its mind.
• Boxed-in fleets break out eventually. A Battlegroup that keeps finding nothing it is permitted to attack stops respecting its usual range and border restrictions and takes the best target it can reach. A faction with nowhere convenient left to expand becomes less predictable rather than more passive.

The practical read: a lone Battlegroup on your border is a local, self-limiting threat that will take one system and go home, and garrisoning against it is a manageable problem. The signal that something larger is coming is fleets gathering at your jumpgates instead of attacking — that is a campaign assembling, and it is worth far more of your attention than the raid that is already under way.

Raiders: the fleet that comes for your freighters

Every faction keeps one small, fast squadron — two M3s and eight M4s — that exists purely to wreck an enemy's logistics. It is the deepest-ranging thing the AI fields, and unlike a Battlegroup it has no interest in your sectors, stations or warships. It is hunting transports, and works through one system after another until something stops it. The defence that works is not the obvious one.

• They belong to real wars only. A faction that merely dislikes you will never send raiders — the hostility they require sits far below the point where a faction simply counts as your enemy. A formal declaration of war clears it at a stroke, so raids follow declarations rather than a slow slide in relations. On Hard, a faction at war with you favours you over its other enemies.
• They range much further than anything else. A raider operates up to eight jumps from its home base, where an ordinary Battlegroup rarely strays past two to four. They take the nearest worthwhile systems first — but "nearest" is measured from their territory, so a war with a faction on the far side of your space can still put raiders well inside it.
• A system's appeal is transports minus fighters. They count your haulers, subtract your fighter cover, and go where the difference is biggest. Eight or more fighters in a system and they will not come at all, however rich the pickings — and it is fighters specifically that they count. A corvette, a destroyer, a fleet of capitals: none of it registers in that calculation.
• Speed is a complete defence. They go for the slowest transport in the system, and if they are not at least 25% faster than it, they abandon the entire system rather than pick a different target. A genuinely fast freighter is not merely hard to catch — it makes the system worthless to them.
• They do not frighten, they only bleed. Parking a capital ship in a raided system will not drive them off; they will keep hunting while it fires at them, because casualties are the only thing they measure. Kill five of their eight light fighters and the raid ends — the squadron breaks off, flies home, and will not set out again until it has been rebuilt to full strength. Killing five costs you far less than killing ten and buys exactly the same reprieve.
• They come back, somewhere else. There is a minimum of twenty minutes between sorties, and a raider's home base drifts over time, so the region it threatens moves rather than settling. But there is only ever one such squadron per faction — at war with three factions you may face three raiding parties, never six.

So the counter is a standing fighter patrol in your busiest trade systems, not a heavy guard. Eight interceptors sitting in a hub make it invisible to raiders before a shot is fired; a single destroyer parked in the same system changes nothing at all.

Loyalty (goodwill you earn by fighting, not by trading)

Loyalty is a separate currency from reputation. Reputation is how a faction rates you; Loyalty is a small stock of goodwill you spend at the Ministry of War to buy Favor points, and it discounts an Envoy ceasefire. Most of it arrives unannounced, as a subtitle reading "<faction> liked that!" after a kill.

• It is awarded for the kill itself, not for where you killed. Destroy a capital-sized hostile anywhere in the galaxy — unclaimed space, deep Xenon territory, your own back yard — and the game rolls for Loyalty. Sector ownership plays no part, so being thanked by a faction with no presence for light-years is normal and not a bug.
• The faction that thanks you is picked at random. The roll chooses one Commonwealth faction — Argon, Boron, Paranid, Split, Teladi or Terran — and pays out only if that faction happens to be hostile to whatever you just killed. Against a universally-hated enemy such as the Kha'ak, every faction qualifies, so the credit lands wherever the dice fall. Your existing standing with them does not weight the roll.
• Only real warships count. Fighters and scouts pay nothing, no matter how many you clear. The award starts at corvette size and scales up for capitals.
• Some prey is deliberately underpriced. Xenon, pirate and Yaki kills pay out only about one time in twenty and never more than a single point — they have too many enemies for the market to be honest. Kha'ak and rival Commonwealth capitals are the reliable source.
• Peaceful traders are not prey. Killing neutral shipping is scored as infamy instead, and Phanon never grant Loyalty at all.
• It is destroyed by war. If a faction's opinion of you turns negative, your entire Loyalty and Favor holding with them is wiped in one stroke. Spend it before a relationship gets that far.

Non-Aggression Pact (your treaty with a faction)

The only formal treaty you can personally sign. Offer it from that faction's Ministry of War page and you get a fixed-term promise of peace, with the term shown before you confirm.

• Duration scales with the power gap. The baseline is about a day, multiplied by how your empire compares to theirs in sectors owned. A small empire dealing with a large neighbor gets a longer pact; the floor is half a day and the ceiling is three days. A faction that has risen to Galactic Protector always grants the maximum.
• You must actually stay friendly. The pact is a commitment, not a shield you can hide behind while raiding them.
• Breaking one marks you permanently. Truce-breaking feeds your infamy, and infamy has a specific, lasting consequence here: factions will no longer offer you a truce at all. Normally, when an AI faction conquers one of your sectors it may offer peace on the spot — that offer is silently withheld from a known truce-breaker, and you're told why in the news feed.
• The AI's offer has conditions too. They only extend that post-conquest olive branch if your empire is not larger than theirs. Out-grow them and they stop asking.
• It locks out coalitions. You cannot join a coalition against a faction you hold a pact with — you'll be told so if you try.

Total War (permanent hostility between two factions)

The hardest negative state in the game: a locked, symmetric declaration of unlimited war between two factions. It is not a timer and it does not decay.

• It closes every exit. Two factions at Total War cannot sign a truce, and the usual "peace after conquest" offer is disabled between them. The normal diplomatic cycle simply cannot pull them apart.
• It changes how they fight. Having a Total War enemy authorizes a faction to launch raids it would otherwise be too cautious to attempt, and its task forces will specifically hunt that enemy's freighters — the economic-warfare behavior normally reserved for coalition targets. A Total War is felt in trade lanes, not just at borders.
• You can start one you're not part of. The chaos favor spends Favor points to make a friendly faction declare Total War on a Commonwealth faction of your choosing — the single most disruptive thing in the favor list.
• It almost never ends. There is one route: a race that rises to Galactic Protector cancels all of its Total Wars at once (you'll see the breaking news). That also wipes the mutual sector claims between them. Separately, if the galaxy unifies against the Xenon, all Total Wars are suspended for the duration of that alliance — and when that crisis is finally resolved they do not come back. Relations are rebuilt from the map's original state, so any Total War declared during play is erased and the galaxy's founding grudges return in its place. Your own permanent wars are the exception: those are remembered and reinstated.

Unbreakable Alliance (permanent friendship between two factions)

The exact mirror of Total War — permanent, symmetric, and equally hard to undo. Forming one immediately cancels all sector claims the two had against each other and voids any existing pact between them as redundant.

• They will never fight. Allied factions bypass hostility checks entirely, and neither can claim the other's sectors.
• They pool their economies. When resource sharing is enabled, unbreakable allies draw on each other's stockpiles to pay for construction — an allied bloc effectively funds its shipbuilding from a common pot, and out-produces its neighbors accordingly. The Ministry of War page tells you whether sharing is currently active for that pair.
• They can't be dogpiled from inside. No coalition can form against your unbreakable ally.
• You can create one, but not join one. The federation favor makes two AI factions ally permanently. There is no path for you to enter an unbreakable alliance yourself — the alliance table holds the six Commonwealth races and nothing else, and your chosen starting race is not the same thing as you. Playing Argon does not inherit Argon's friendships.
• Your warehouses are never in the pool — in either direction. Resource sharing is an AI-only arrangement: your Outposts always pay for construction out of their own stock, and no faction can ever draw on your stockpiles, however friendly. That holds during a coalition and during galactic unification too.
• It ends only by betrayal at the top — or by the end of a Xenon Crisis. A race that rises to Galactic Tyrant breaks all of its alliances, which is precisely why "unbreakable" is worth the quotation marks. Less obviously, when a Xenon Crisis is resolved the galaxy's diplomacy is rebuilt from the map's original relations — so an alliance you paid a federation favor for is simply gone, along with any Total War you engineered. If you are spending Favor points to redraw the diplomatic map, spend them on a galaxy that isn't about to unify.

Coalitions (the galaxy ganging up on a runaway power)

Coalitions are the galaxy's self-correcting mechanism: a defensive bloc that forms against whoever is winning. They are driven by territory, not grudges.

• What triggers one. Every faction pair is reviewed every 12 hours, and again immediately after any conquest anywhere in the galaxy. Each faction compares its share of the galaxy's sectors against a potential target's; if the gap exceeds the tolerance — 9972 id 258, default 8 percentage points — it may want a coalition, with the chance rising in step with the gap. Once a faction controls a third of the known galaxy, that desire becomes automatic. Being the biggest empire is itself the provocation. Set id 257 to 0 if you would rather the galaxy never ganged up on anyone.
• Wanting one isn't having one. A lone faction that wants a coalition is only a declared desire; it takes a second willing faction before the bloc actually forms and the news announces it. Once it exists, others can pile on.
• You can declare against a faction — at a price. Volunteering on the Ministry of War screen immediately drops your reputation with that faction to neutral, and if anyone else shares your view you are locked into a major war alongside them. You may revoke a mere desire, but once the coalition actually forms you cannot leave it.
• What it buys you. While the bloc lasts your partners treat you as one of their own. You cannot fall out with a coalition partner: should your standing with them turn negative, the next cycle throws it back to the top of the scale and refreshes a non-aggression pact at the same time, so the expansion penalties do not stick to that faction. Their Favors stop having a price you can fail to meet — a partner never refuses you for want of Favor points, so even the four-point items (a federation alliance, a chaos Total War) can be asked for on an empty account; your balance floors at zero rather than blocking the request. They also stop caring about your infamy, otherwise an outright bar on Favors from anyone. And you gain a permanent technology transfer: +50 research points per cycle on any hull that partner designed, on top of every other research bonus — so picking a partner is also a shipbuilding decision.
• What it does not buy is their warehouses. Coalition members are set friendly to one another and the AI members pool their construction stockpiles, but you are never part of that pot in either direction. See the note under Unbreakable Alliance.
• You can also be the target. Everything above applies to your empire once you're the one running away with the map — the runaway-leader mechanic does not exempt the player.
• How they end. A coalition disbands when it has done its job: when the largest member matches the target's sector count, or when the target has been beaten down below roughly a tenth of the galaxy. Coalitions also collapse if too few members remain to sustain them.
• Who can take part. The Commonwealth races and (once they've established themselves) the Yaki. Phanon stay out of the coalition system.

Permanent War (your point of no return)

Your personal, one-way declaration against a single faction, made from their Ministry of War page. It is the only diplomatic action in the game that explicitly cannot be undone.

• What it costs. Reputation with that faction is driven to the floor, every ship you own is set hostile to them, and — the part the confirmation prompt warns you about — they will hunt your freighters, not just your warships. Your logistics network becomes a target.
• What it buys. +1 maximum perk slot in every one of your Outposts, permanently and empire-wide. Given how scarce and irreversible perk slots are, this is a genuine strategic trade rather than a grudge button.
• Enemy of my enemy. When you declare, any faction already at Total War with your new enemy — provided they aren't hostile to you — rewards you with a Favor point and a note of appreciation. Timing a declaration against an isolated, widely-hated faction can pay out several favors at once.
• Not available against everyone. The Yaki and Phanon are exempt.
• The galaxy must not be united. During a Xenon crisis that has unified the galaxy, new declarations are refused outright, and any permanent war you already hold is paused until the crisis is resolved — the screen tells you so.

The Envoy (buying your way out of a war)Mayhem 4

Everything above is the AI's diplomacy. The Envoy is yours. On each faction's Ministry of War page, in the same Diplomatic Action block as the coalition option, Dispatch an envoy to the … opens a screen dedicated to that faction. Crucially, an envoy is received even in wartime — this is the one diplomatic channel that does not require them to like you first.

It shows where you stand (at war or not, reputation, Loyalty, and your infamy if you have any) and offers three things:

• Intelligence on a third faction — see below.
• Tribute, in two separate currencies. Buy reputation is the cheap, steady climb — it raises your standing rank with that faction and nothing else. Buy Loyalty is deliberately expensive, because Loyalty is the currency the Ministry converts into Favor points, and a single Favor can order a faction into a Total War. Both work at any relation level, war included. This matters more than it sounds: when your standing collapses into war, you lose all Loyalty and Favor points with that faction, and Loyalty is otherwise only earned passively — so tribute is the only deliberate way back. Loyalty also discounts a ceasefire.
• A negotiated ceasefire. The free pact offered elsewhere only appears when the faction has independently decided it wants peace. The Envoy lets you pay them to decide — in credits, in territory, or in blood. The screen itemises the bill so you can see what you are being charged for.

The price is built from your actual situation, not a flat fee:

• Base demand scales first with difficulty level, and then by the enemy's military power relative to yours, between half and triple. Beat them in the field and peace gets cheap; negotiate from weakness and it is ruinous. (At double their strength the game already waives the infamy problem entirely, on the principle that those with power make the rules.) Everything derived from the base moves with it, so difficulty shifts the reluctance and stand-down charges as well.
• They do not want peace — a surcharge for changing their mind when they had no intention of stopping.
• Surety against your infamy — the price of being a known truce-breaker, charged per point of infamy.
• Standing down their invasion — the most expensive item, charged when they have a fleet already moving against you that must be recalled.
• Loyalty discount — up to a configured ceiling, earned through tribute or service.

A war of any length is expensive to end — at ordinary settings, a reluctant enemy of matched strength wants millions of credits, scaled by difficulty level. If you cannot or will not pay, the same screen offers two other prices, each of which ends the war on its own with no credits changing hands:

• Cede a sector. You choose one of your own sectors to hand over. It must border their space and hold one of your outposts — they will not accept empty frontier. Agreeing also withdraws every claim you hold on their territory. What happens to the sector depends on difficulty: on hard, your outpost and every immobile asset in it — orbital weapon platforms, laser towers, factories — changes hands intact and becomes theirs. On easier settings those assets are destroyed instead and only the ground passes to them. Either way stored cargo is lost, your ships are undocked and simply lose their homebase, and you keep every mobile thing you own. You cannot cede your last sector.
  
  There is a second price, and it is not paid to the faction you are negotiating with. Buying peace with territory is a public admission that you could not hold what you claimed, and every Commonwealth faction drops its opinion of you by a full rank — not just the one that took the sector — each telling you exactly what they think of it. Standing never falls below neutral this way, so a disliked empire has almost nothing to lose here and a well-regarded one has a great deal: the cheapest way out of a war if your reputation is already thin, and possibly the most expensive thing on the screen if it is not.
• Take up arms against one of their enemies. Pick a faction they are at war with and declare war on it yourself. Only factions you are currently at peace with are offered, so this always costs you a genuine new war — and any pact you held with your new enemy ends immediately.
  
  This is the one price with teeth after the fact, because a war you bought your way into cannot be bought your way out of. Three things happen the moment you agree:
  • The Envoy is closed to your new enemy for 48 hours (9973 id 139). All three prices are refused for that faction — credits, territory, and pledging against somebody else. You cannot pay a third faction to undo the war you just started with the second one.
  • Your infamy rises by 30 (9973 id 140) — half again what breaking a non-aggression pact costs. That surcharge follows you everywhere: it raises the price of every future ceasefire, blocks diplomatic Favors outright, and stops any faction offering you a truce until it decays back to zero.
  • They tell you exactly what they think of you. Expect to be called a pawn, and to be told the faction you did this for spent your ships to buy their own quiet. They are not entirely wrong.
  The lock covers the Envoy only. A faction may still offer you a truce of its own accord, and the Ministry non-aggression pact remains available on its usual terms — you simply cannot use the channel that created the war to erase it. Set id 139 to 0 if you would rather the pledge be freely reversible.

Buying a ceasefire signs a proper Non-Aggression Pact: mutual sector claims are cancelled, any coalition against you is dropped, and relations reset to neutral across your property. Two things can never be bought: a coalition war, because that is a commitment they made to other factions rather than a preference of their own, and a permanent war, which was your own irreversible choice.

Buying intelligence

The same envoy will sell you what its faction knows about somebody else. Pick any other Commonwealth faction (or the Yaki) from the Report on selector, pay, and you receive a dossier — delivered to your message queue to read at leisure, and kept on that faction's own Envoy page so you can glance at it later. It covers six things:

• Posture — entrenched, cautious, steady, confident or reckless. This is the single value that decides whether they expand, and it is re-derived every eight hours.
• War footing — whether they are massing for an invasion or already running one, and which sector they are aiming at. This is the reason to buy. Nothing else in the game will tell you an attack is coming before it arrives.
• Strength, as a percentage of your own fleet — the same measure the ceasefire price is built from.
• Shipyard stock — starving, low, adequate or well stocked. A faction reads its own reserves as no better than its thinnest component, and so does this.
• Diplomacy — whether they are currently open to terms. Worth knowing before you spend anything at the Ministry.
• Relations — whether they are at war with you and what rank they hold you at.

The base price is 9973 id 168, scaling with difficulty level as a ceasefire does. Then the seller's own feelings about the subject move it: a faction at war with the target sells at half price — they want you informed and hostile — while a faction at peace with them charges double, because you are asking them to inform on a friend. Shop around: the same dossier costs four times as much from the wrong seller.

A dossier is a snapshot, not a feed. It records what was true the moment you bought it and never updates, and the page tells you how many hours old it is. Invasion plans in particular go stale fast. Note also that a faction you have just pledged against will not open its files to you at all, for the same 48 hours it refuses everything else.

Demanding a claim withdrawal

Before a faction takes one of your sectors it claims it. A claim is a marker on the sector: it flips the sector to core security, pulls that faction's squadrons toward it, and lapses on its own after a while (longer for a well-supported sector). Conquest is what happens if the claim is still standing when their fleet arrives. If a faction is claiming your space, its Claims section appears on their Envoy page, naming the sectors.

You can pay them to drop it. The claim lifts and their squadrons pull out of the sector. The price is the mod's own valuation of the ground — the same measure the Ministry uses to price a sector — at 9973 id 169 per point, difficulty-scaled like everything else, summed across every sector they are claiming. Roughly a tenth of what buying that sector outright would cost, so a bare frontier sector is cheap and a developed one with factories on it is not.

Three things to understand before you spend:

• This is not peace. The war continues, and nothing prevents them claiming the same sector again on a later cycle. What you are buying is time — enough to move a fleet, finish a station, or get a ceasefire together.
• It works during a coalition war and a permanent war, unlike every other Envoy price. Those wars cannot be ended at any price, but their fleets can still be walked off your territory one frontier at a time. If you have talked yourself into an unwinnable war, this is the only lever you have left.
• A sector their invasion has already committed to is not for sale. Once a Coordinated Invasion is aimed at a sector, the fleet does not turn around for a lapsed claim — that sector is excluded from the deal and you are not charged for it, and the page says so. Recalling a committed fleet is exactly what the ceasefire's standing down their invasion charge buys, which is why it is the most expensive line on the screen.

Defect to the OCV and the Envoy closes permanently. Once you have joined the machines you are a Terraformer as far as every organic faction is concerned, and none of them will receive your envoys again — not for tribute, not for a ceasefire, not for territory, not for a pledge, and not for information. The screen still opens; it simply tells you so. Weigh that before committing to Synthetic Dawn: you are giving up every diplomatic instrument in the game at the same moment you make enemies of everyone holding one.

There is no separate penalty for abusing it, because none is needed — breaking a pact raises infamy, and infamy is itself an input to the price, so a serial truce-breaker simply finds the table getting more expensive every time.

How they interact (the short version)

• Total War and Unbreakable Alliance are absolute — neither can be negotiated away by the factions themselves; only a Galactic Protector or Tyrant dissolves one on purpose. A Non-Aggression Pact and a coalition are mutually exclusive for the same faction: choose safety from them or a bloc against them.
• Galactic unification against the Xenon trumps everything: Total Wars go dormant, permanent wars pause, coalitions dissolve, every claim is cancelled, and the whole Commonwealth (plus the Yaki) pools resources for the duration. When it ends, the slate is not restored but rewritten — see Total War above.
• Alliances between AI factions are never alliances with you. You can broker them, benefit from them and be crushed by them, but the only formal states available to you personally are a Non-Aggression Pact, a coalition, and a permanent war. Resource pooling in particular is strictly an AI affair.
• Infamy is the one debt you cannot pay off. Reputation recovers, loyalty can be earned, sectors can be retaken — but a broken truce follows you, and it closes the door the AI would otherwise hold open after beating you.

32. Espionage: Running AgentsMayhem 4

Espionage is a small, slow, permanent side-game reached from its own entry on the Personal Console. You keep a payroll of up to five agents, point them at one faction at a time, and send them after their research, their money, their ships or their supply depots. It is not a fast way to make money and it is not meant to replace building things — it is a way to convert time and risk into progress, and to make your relationship with a faction cost something in both directions.

Recruiting

• Three ways in, and they are not equal. Hiring at a pirate base gets the best people but costs the most and requires you to be sitting in a sector that has one. Recruiting one of your own citizens is the cheapest and the worst, and permanently removes one person from an Outpost — it never adds population back, so it cannot be used as a food trick. Occasionally someone approaches you by message offering their services at a fair price; that offer expires if ignored.
• Every agent draws a wage every hour, forever. The wage scales with difficulty level. If you cannot make payroll, agents walk, one at a time, so a shortfall costs you some of your network rather than all of it.
• Five is the ceiling (9973 id 148), and the up-front retainer is a multiple of the hourly wage (id 147), so raising the wage raises the cost of everything.

Missions

• Six jobs: steal research, steal credits, steal a ship, burn their supplies, destroy a factory, or discredit them with a neighbour. A mission runs 6–24 hours of playing time. Id 152 scales that globally if you want more or less espionage happening — 50 makes missions twice as fast, 200 half as fast.
• Stolen research only helps with the thief's own designs. Files taken from a race are worth full value against a project for a ship that race builds, and only a third as much against anyone else's. If several of your Research Stations are busy, the haul automatically goes to a matching project when one exists. To research a Boron ship, steal from the Boron.
• Research you are not doing is worthless. If nothing is under way when the files arrive, the material is simply lost — nothing is banked for later.
• A stolen ship arrives docked at one of your Outposts, fully equipped and homebased like one you built yourself, and it is always a design that faction actually flies. How big a hull comes back depends on the agent and on id 164: 1 allows fighters, 2 also allows freighters and corvettes, 3 also allows TM and M7, and 0 switches the job off. With no Outpost of your own there is nowhere to deliver it and the mission is wasted.
• Burning their supplies is the one job that is not about you. It destroys ship parts held in that faction's Outposts (id 165 sets how much), and ship parts are exactly what their resource level, their fleet budget and their willingness to press an attack are computed from. Nothing comes back to you — it is a way to take the pressure off a border rather than a way to get rich. The agent always hits whichever reserve they are already thinnest on, because that is the one that decides their standing.
• Destroying a factory is the heaviest thing one agent can do (id 166) — and the hardest, reading 25 points below a theft. It is also far the likeliest to be traced back to you. Your agent will only ever hit a factory, never an Outpost, shipyard or stock exchange, and never the last station a faction owns in a sector — a sector emptied that way would be left in a state the galaxy has no way to resolve, so the job is refused rather than fudged.
• Discrediting them ends their non-aggression pact with a faction of your choosing (id 167) — you pick the second faction next to the order. Nothing comes back to you here either; what you get is two factions looking at each other instead of at you. A pact both sides still want will hold, however good your agent is: evidence only convinces someone already looking for a reason. And it is not permanent — either faction may sign again once both want peace, so what you are buying is a window. During a Xenon Crisis nobody will hear a word against anyone, and sworn allies or partners in an active war are beyond planting anything at all.
• The odds are shown before you commit, broken into their parts: the agent's own competence, their training, game difficulty, and how closely the target is watching. Every figure is its effect on your chance, so a watchful faction reads as a negative.
• Spying on friends is easier, and costs more when it goes wrong. A faction that likes you is not looking for you; a faction at war with you very much is. But being caught only earns infamy when the mark's standing toward you is positive — betraying a friend is what gets you branded.

Getting caught — and getting away with it

• A failed mission may end with the agent taken. You lose them permanently, take a reputation hit with that faction (id 156, scaled by difficulty), and gain infamy if their standing toward you was positive (id 157).
• Success is not the same as getting away with it. A clean job still has a chance (id 158, scaling with difficulty level) of being traced back. You keep everything you stole and you keep the agent — but the faction reacts as though they had caught you, at a third the penalty. There is no such thing as risk-free spying.

Training

• Agents can specialise, once per speciality: research, theft, sabotage, deception, or counter-espionage. Theft covers stealing credits and stealing ships — they are the same trade — and sabotage covers burning supplies and wrecking a factory, so five specialities cover all six jobs plus your own defence. Training takes 8 hours (id 151) and costs no fee, though payroll runs throughout.
• The harder jobs are harder for everyone. Stealing a hull or getting into a supply depot reads about ten points below stealing files or emptying an account; discrediting them fifteen; putting a charge in a factory twenty-five. The Prospects list shows all six numbers side by side, so you can see what a given agent is actually fit for.
• A speciality raises that agent's effective skill in that one area by an amount that scales with difficulty level — and no speciality can lift anyone past 90, so training a strong agent gains less than training a weak one. The screen shows what the ceiling actually gave you rather than what the bonus promised.

They spy on you too

• Nobody bothers with you until you are a Nation. Before that you are not worth the effort — which is exactly why the early game is the right time to train agents rather than run them.
• After that, every faction rolls every eight hours to move against you (id 159). Enemies press harder than friends, and a faction's Ethos decides how readily it plays that game at all. A successful operation takes credits (id 161) or destroys research progress (id 162) — never more than you have, and never enough to undo research you have already finished.
• Counter-espionage comes only from agents left idle. Every agent sitting at home defends (id 163), and one trained in counter-espionage defends considerably harder. An agent you send out to steal is an agent not guarding your own door — that trade-off is the whole point, and there is no order to give, only a choice about who stays home. Your defence is capped, so you can never be immune.
• Catching a foreign agent earns you nothing but the news of it — a reliable reward would turn counter-espionage into a farm. You are told every time, so you can see it working.

Set 9973 id 146 to 0 to switch espionage off entirely, or id 153 to 0 to keep it one-way — you may spy, but nobody spies on you. And note that joining the machines ends espionage permanently and dismisses every agent: nobody deals with a Terraformer, in either direction.

33. Radiation: the Cost of Total WarMayhem 4

Wrecking a sector leaves a mess. Every ship and every station destroyed in combat contaminates the sector it died in, and until that contamination fades nobody can build there — not the faction you took it from, not their neighbours, and not you. It is the same rule for everyone, deliberately.

It stops an enemy faction quietly materialising a fresh Outpost behind your front line without ever flying a transport in. It also means the ground you fight hardest for is the ground you can use last, which is the trade this mechanic is really about.

What contaminates a sector

• Only combat kills count. Recycling a station, demolishing one deliberately, or any other administrative removal leaves nothing behind. If something died to weapons fire, it pollutes; if it was dismantled, it does not.
• Stations dominate the total. A destroyed factory adds a little (9973 id 172); a destroyed Outpost, shipyard or trading station adds five times as much (id 173), because those are the big installations.
• Only capital ships contaminate, and they do it in proportion to their size. A wreck below the size floor (id 175) leaves nothing at all — and the floor sits high enough that fighters, freighters, corvettes and even frigates are all noise. Ordinary skirmishing leaves the sector clean. Above the floor the bigger the hull the bigger the mess: a Colossus-sized carrier leaves a couple of points, and the largest Terran capitals leave enough on their own to matter. Id 174 scales the whole ship contribution, and setting it to 0 stops ships polluting entirely. A big enough fleet action can still block construction in a sector where no station was ever touched — but it takes a real battle between capitals, not a running fight.
• Nothing can be built at all once the level reaches the block threshold (id 177, default 40), and the level is capped (id 178, default 100). A sector at or above the block also cannot change hands by conquest — an invader who wrecks everything cannot then move in. What it gets is a ruin: with the defender's stations destroyed and nobody able to raise an Outpost, the sector reverts to unowned until the contamination fades enough for somebody to move back in.

What it does while it lasts

• Shields are capped, not damaged. Ships in a contaminated sector cannot hold full shields — the cap falls with the radiation level and with difficulty, and never drops below a quarter. It can make a fight harder; it can never kill anything by itself, and it never touches hull. Lightly dirtied sectors are left alone entirely: until the contamination is heavy enough to cost at least five percent of your shields, nothing is capped at all.
• Research slows. Output from a research station in a contaminated sector is scaled down, up to a maximum penalty you can set (id 182).
• Population stalls, then falls. Growth slows as contamination rises, reaches zero at exactly the level that blocks construction, and goes negative beyond it — people leave. It never empties a sector, though: there is a floor (id 183, default a quarter of the sector's manpower capacity) below which radiation stops taking anyone.
• Claims are torn up. The moment a sector reaches the block threshold, every claim on it is cancelled — yours and theirs — and nobody can claim it again until it is clean. This cuts both ways. A faction massing to take one of your systems loses its claim if the fighting there gets heavy enough, which makes a scorched defence a real tactic; but you lose yours just as fast on ground you were about to take. It is not a truce — the war carries on, the claim simply lapses.
• Factories keep running. A battle does not shut down production that is already standing.

Cleaning it up

• It fades on its own (id 176). Nothing has to be present for a sector to get cleaner — patience always works. A heavily fought-over sector takes many hours of play to come back on its own.
• Faction space recovers faster than yours (id 185, default twice the rate). The factions have no decontamination ship, so this stands in for cleanup they are assumed to be doing off screen. It does not weaken the block on rebuilding behind your advance: a sector you have just emptied belongs to nobody, and unowned space fades at the ordinary rate — as does your own.
• The only way to speed that up is a ship — specifically an Advanced TS. A ship clears roughly seven times faster than nature does (20 points an hour against a natural 2.8), which is what makes one worth building anywhere rather than simply waiting. Every race researches an Advanced variant of its TS freighter: the Argon Mercury Enhanced, the Boron Sturgeon Advanced, the Split Caiman and Orinoco Advanced, the Paranid Demeter and Snotra Advanced, the Teladi Vulture and Drake Advanced, the Terran Bragi Advanced. Only those hulls carry the Decontaminate Sector order — it will not appear on a standard freighter, or on any other class. Give it the command, pick a sector, and it flies there and scrubs.
• It runs on Teladianium and Crystals, and you pay per point removed. Every point of radiation costs 40 Teladianium and 20 Crystals from the ship's hold by default (id 180 sets the Teladianium figure; Crystals are always half). Clearing a sector at the build threshold of 40 therefore costs roughly 1,600 Teladianium and 800 Crystals — a genuine industrial expense, not a formality. The charge is per point rather than per hour, so a lightly touched sector is cheap and leaving the ship parked costs nothing. It works through them at a fixed rate per hour (id 179).
• Load it before you send it, and load it heavily. An Advanced freighter's hold is big enough for several times the worst contamination a sector can reach, so one full load will normally finish any job.
• It resupplies itself if it ever does run out. It flies back to its homebase, reloads and returns to finish the job. If the homebase has nothing to give, or the ship has no homebase at all, the order stops and tells you why. The order also refuses to start at all without enough of both wares aboard.

Cleaning somebody else's space

• You can decontaminate another faction's sector, and they will thank you for it — only while you are not at war with them. The ship checks before it sets out and keeps checking while it works, so if that war starts halfway through, it abandons the job rather than doing favours for a new enemy.
• Finishing the job earns notoriety with the owner, scaled by how much you cleared (id 186, default 50 a point — so scrubbing a badly hit sector is worth a couple of thousand). It pays only when the sector actually reaches zero; walking away half-done earns nothing, and you have spent the materials either way.
• Your own sectors and unowned ones pay nothing — you are cleaning those for your own benefit. Unowned space is fair game, which matters: the sector you just fought over is exactly the one you want habitable, and no faction can clean it for you.

The Ministry of War shows a radiation column for every sector, coloured by severity and sortable, so you can find your dirty systems at a glance. Flying into a contaminated sector also puts a brief notice on screen telling you the level and what your shields are limited to. Set 9973 id 171 to 0 to switch the whole mechanic off.

34. The Yaki Rebellion

For most of the early game the Yaki are not a faction — they are a rumour with a fence. They hold no sectors, field no squadrons, and appear on no map; the only proof they exist is the black market selling you ships out of the back of a hangar. Then, at some point in every campaign, they stop being a rumour. A slice of the galaxy secedes, Yaki fleets appear in it, and the Commonwealth wakes up to a new hostile power on its own soil.

What sets it off

Three routes, and whichever arrives first ends the matter:

• You pay for it. Every credit spent on the black market goes into the rebellion's war chest. It opens at 1,000,000 and the Yaki rise the moment it reaches 4,000,000 — so 3,000,000 credits of shopping, and the menu shows you the running total.
• You wait. Taking your first sector — conquered or bought from the Ministry, the same event that closes out your Ascension — starts a hidden clock: 24 to 48 hours of playing time, rolled at random and never revealed. When it expires the Yaki rise on their own, fully funded by someone else, whether or not you ever set foot in the market. Nothing pauses or extends that clock once it is running — not difficulty, not diplomacy, not leaving the market alone. The one thing that stops it is the rebellion happening early because you paid for it.
• The one way out is to own nothing. The clock is only created by that first sector, so a player who never takes one never starts it — which is to say the rebellion is optional in exactly the sense that having an empire is optional.
• You recruit the Crimson Commando. Taking the black market's boarding-team offer fills the chest instantly and the Yaki rise in the same breath — permanently hostile to you personally.

What actually happens

• Up to 8% of the galaxy changes hands (9972 id 242) — sectors are transferred to the Yaki outright, then populated with Yaki squadrons a few seconds later. Expect a contiguous-ish new power, not a scattering of raiders.
• Only the Commonwealth pays — on the night itself. The sectors that secede are taken from Argon, Boron, Paranid, Split, Teladi and Terran holdings, or from unowned space. Your own sectors are not among them, and neither are the Xenon's, the OCV's, the Phanon's, or the pirates'. The sector you personally happen to be sitting in is skipped too. This protection covers the uprising and nothing after it — once the Yaki exist as a faction, your sectors are on the table like anyone else's. See Living next to them below.
• The dying are spared. Any faction down to two sectors or fewer is passed over — the rebellion carves into healthy empires, it does not finish off a collapsing one.
• Breaking news. "Civil unrest! N sectors are banding together in a massive rebellion" — piracy thrives, insurance rates soar. That message is your notification; there is no warning beforehand.
• The black market closes permanently. The entry disappears from your Personal console. Any credits you were saving for it are simply saved.

Living next to them

• The most hostile disposition in the game. Yaki Ethos is −90 (9973 id 40), worse than the Split — which raises their chance of declaring war on you by close to the maximum and makes them the least likely faction in the galaxy to ever be crowned a Galactic Protector. See The Commonwealth Races for how Ethos feeds those rolls.
• They will come for your sectors. Once risen, the Yaki claim player territory like any other faction, with their own clause in the claim rules. Two things hold them off. The standard Zone of Control gate: your sectors only become claimable once your notoriety rank with them drops below 9972 id 199 (default −1, an outright enemy), so keeping civil with the Yaki is a real defence. And absolutely: an Outpost with the Pirate contract perk makes its sector unclaimable by the Yaki outright — described in-game as "no pirate attacks & Yaki claims" — and the perk also gives new marines +20 fighting when the sector borders a pirate base or Yaki space.
• Permanent deep strike. Yaki Battle Groups can invade sectors that do not border their own territory, always, on every difficulty setting — a privilege every other faction needs the deep-strike option (9972 id 206) or an aggressive war posture to get. Only the Phanon share it. Practically: there is no front line with the Yaki. Distance from their space buys you nothing, and a quiet interior sector is as valid a target as your border.
• They sustain piracy. Pirate bases will not respawn in a galaxy that holds neither an existing pirate base nor a Yaki outpost — the Yaki are the seed the underworld grows back from. Pirates never build in Yaki sectors, and Yaki hulls are the ships you meet at the top of the pirate warlord tables.
• Hard to erase. If the Yaki are ever driven down to zero sectors they remain eligible to be handed a conquered one — the same standing guarantee the game extends to you. Wiping them off the map tends not to stick.
• Killing them is poor currency. Yaki kills yield Loyalty only about one time in twenty, and never more than a single point, because they have too many enemies for it to be priced fairly. The same rule covers Xenon and pirates. Farm someone else.

Dealing with them

• They are a normal diplomatic partner. The Yaki have a seat in the Ministry of War's faction list and in the Envoy — pacts, truces, tribute, ceasefires and reputation all work on them.
• With two exceptions. You cannot declare permanent war on the Yaki; the Ministry refuses outright. And they can only join a coalition once the rebellion has actually happened — before that they have nothing to bring to one.
• Infamy is not held against you here. Where an infamous player is distrusted elsewhere, the Yaki are criminals themselves. They are the one faction whose dealings with you are not soured by a reputation for breaking your word.

Why you might want them

• Yaki designs are built for renegades. Carry infamy and Yaki hulls cost half the normal population to crew — better than any other race — take a 25% maintenance discount, and research faster. Carry none and they cost double. It is the clearest example in the mod of a mechanic that rewards playing dirty.
• Don't try to farm the crews. Recycling a Yaki ship always returns the minimum population regardless of your infamy — that loop was closed deliberately.
• They are carved out of your rivals, not you. A Yaki nation is 8% of the galaxy taken from established Commonwealth powers — the same powers whose notoriety you spend and whose fleets eventually come for your sectors. A buffer state that fights everyone can be worth more than the sectors it costs someone else.

The strategic read: the rebellion arrives on a timer anyway, so the real decision is only whether to buy ships with the window you have — refusing to spend does not protect the galaxy, it just means you paid nothing and got nothing. The one genuine choice is the Crimson Commando, which trades the Yaki as a potential partner for an immediate, permanent boarding capability and makes them your personal enemy from day one.

35. The Renegades

Mayhem 4 adds a hidden mercenary faction with two faces: periodic raids on you, and a storyline that gives hunting them a long-term payoff. The plotline is ON by default (toggle in the Cheat menu), and their entry is delayed until your fleet strength grows.

• It starts itself, and it lives in your journal: the first time a Renegade undocks you get a warning, a briefing on who they are and how their trail works, and a new Primary Mission — The Renegades — in your Personal Console journal. It advances when you kill your first one, naming the sector the trail leads to, and completes the moment the hidden gate opens. There is no board to find it on and nowhere to hand it in: it simply follows you.
• Renegade Incursions — how they actually work: once your power level passes the trigger, Renegade ships (fast Yaki Raider-class hulls) spawn within ~10 jumps of your territory — never inside it — and hunt your TS haulers and satellites. They are not red until they attack, won't change sectors except to flee, and flee from any player ship that isn't a TS. Spawns scale with your power level (min 2, max 5 active).
• Hunting them: catch one and it drops valuable crystals, worth more outside your own space and scaling with difficulty level — but loot from ships they kill is destroyed, so you can't scavenge their leavings. They tolerate no satellites (though there's a 75% chance they linger after killing one — your window to strike). Practical defenses: escort or reroute slow haulers through visible space, treat remote satellites as expendable, and hunt with something fast or a triplex-equipped capital that can spot them outside their scanner range.
• A hidden home sector: at game creation, the mod secretly selects a sector inside an Unknown enclave as the Renegades' home and sets up their station there. (If no suitable sector exists in your generated galaxy, the plot quietly disables itself.)
• Clues from wrecks: when you personally kill a Renegade or Pirate ship, there's a chance it drops a clue — either random lore, or a pointer toward the hidden sector's gate. Clues stop dropping once you've found the way in.
• The way in: assembling the clues leads you to a hidden gate and an entry code for the Renegade sector. The code arrives in three fragments, and when you are asked for it, how you type it does not matter: upper case, lower case, run together, or split up with dashes or spaces are all accepted — only the letters and digits count. You get three attempts at the code, and the prompt tells you how many are left. Backing out of any of these prompts with an empty box is always safe: it simply ends the check with no consequences, and you can scan again whenever you are ready.
• On their turf: Renegade ships in their home sector are pure defense — they patrol hunting player ships and drop nothing. Fight them elsewhere for loot and clues; go to their home when you're ready for the challenge that awaits there.

This section intentionally avoids deeper spoilers — the challenge chain beyond the gate is best discovered in-game.

36. The Nomads & the Refugee Economy

As the Xenon/OCV grind through the galaxy destroying stations, they create refugee transports — and an entire shadow faction lives off them: the Nomads, centered on their roaming flagship.

• The Nomad Flagship is a Private Corp. Aran (the huge mobile-base M1) owned by the Nomad faction, spawned early in the game. It wanders from faction to faction — always relocating at least 8 jumps at a time — and is the heart of everything below.
• Refugees: refugee transports seek out the flagship; each refugee who arrives converts into an abstract Nomad resource (default 20 per refugee, 9973 id 44). Some refugees may join your outpost population instead — the rest, in the mod's words, "end up as miserable wageslaves inside mobile factory ships."
• Nomad Mercenaries: every 1–4 hours the Nomads run a build cycle and may spend saved resource to construct Nomad Merc ships. These mercenaries hire out at half the normal price — but they're unreliable and will eventually break their contracts unless you have infamy to earn their respect. One more reason a career renegade plays differently. (Disable Nomad mercs via 9973 id 52.)
• Xenon-sector cleanup: when a Xenon or Unknown sector accumulates over ~200 flying ware containers (9973 id 46), the flagship travels there and vacuums up the battlefield debris — resources are teleported to the nearest trading station, equipment is recycled into Nomad resource, and about 2% of items get left behind. This is why Xenon frontline sectors don't drown in loot no Looter can reach — and why you should grab valuable drops there before the Nomads do.

Mobile factory ships — the galaxy's spare capacity

The other thing the flagship builds is a Nomad factory ship: a TL that roams the galaxy manufacturing whatever the economy is currently short of. There is up to one per 30 sectors of galaxy (9973 id 51, floor of 4, no ceiling), each with two TS of its own. Set that id to 0 and Nomad TLs and TS stop existing altogether.

Each one picks a target off the game's running tally of which intermediate products are scarcest. If the ware it picks needs an input that is also scarce it walks further down the chain, and keeps walking until it reaches something whose input is Waste or Energy Cells — so it never takes on a job it cannot source. Then it flies to the sector selling the most of that input and parks for about twenty minutes while its two TS buy the resource and haul it back. The TL crafts; the TS then switch to exporting the finished product, which they check for before anything else each cycle.

They are not decoration. A Nomad TL crafts eight times faster than your own Mobile Factory Kit and needs half the resources — roughly four standard factories' output at one standard factory's efficiency — and unlike yours it never stalls when the hold is full. Having chosen a product it will not reconsider for about six hours of playing time, deliberately, so it does not thrash. You can read what any of them is doing straight off its name: they rename themselves Nomad <product> factory ship (<input>).

They will trade with you, and they are unusually privileged about it. Nomad freighters are exempt from docking restrictions entirely, and your station's "allow AI Traders to dock" setting does not gate them either — a Nomad TS can dock at your Outpost whatever you have set. What it brings is whichever intermediate ware the galaxy is shortest of, which is very often the one you cannot buy anywhere. There is no faction preference in who they sell to: they take the best price within about three jumps of wherever the TL has parked, and the reason that usually means the Commonwealth is simply that the Commonwealth owns nearly all the factories.

They will not supply the machines or the underworld, and the reason is not hostility — the Nomads are formally friendly with the Xenon, the OCV, the Kha'ak and the Pirates, and neutral with everyone else, so their traders are welcome to dock anywhere in the galaxy. It is that there is nothing to sell to. Pirate bases accept only six wares and no intermediate product is among them, the Kha'ak have no stations at all, and a Xenon Station — which is also the only thing the OCV builds — never gets a logistics table, so its import ceiling is zero for everything. Phanon, by contrast, runs a real Outpost and is an ordinary customer.

Shooting Nomads

You can. They are neutral with you and will not fire first. It is one of the more expensive things you can do to your reputation, and the price depends entirely on what you shoot:

Only the trader is capped. The other three are not — and given that any infamy at all costs you truce offers and stops every faction selling you a sector, while each rank climbed makes war more likely, twenty points in a single burst is a serious bill.

And a factory ship pays you nothing for it. Cargo is only spilled by freighters, which for this purpose means TS and TP hulls; a TL is a capital, so a hold carrying thousands of units of a scarce ware is simply destroyed with the ship. The one exception is a bail — a capital that bails leaves an abandoned hull with its cargo intact, so a bailed factory ship hands you the TL and everything in it. If you are going to do this at all, that is the outcome worth fishing for.

Their escort exists because of you. Nomad ships are guarded by Waverider Corp. security fighters, and whether any spawn is rolled against your own infamy: the chance is your infamy plus 20, capped at 80, which means at zero infamy they fly completely unescorted. Numbers scale with infamy to a maximum of fifteen, and the escorts are M3s until you pass 30 infamy, above which M6s start appearing. One quirk worth knowing: the guards themselves sit outside the table above, so killing the escort costs no infamy at all. Only the ship it was protecting does.

37. The Terraformers: Xenon, OCV & Phanon

"Terraformer" is the mod's umbrella term for the machine factions, straight from X-Universe canon. The Terraformers were humanity's own creation: self-replicating machine fleets sent from Earth to terraform new worlds. A botched software update turned them genocidal, Earth severed its jumpgate to survive, and the abandoned machines evolved over the centuries into the Xenon. The main plot is built on that lineage, and three factions carry the machine banner:

• The Xenon — the feral descendants. They roam and raid, and every station they destroy spawns refugee transports — the fuel of the Nomad economy. Xenon invaders can claim sectors, hunt jump beacons, and grow bolder as the game progresses.
• The OCV — the main antagonist. An overwhelming machine armada pouring in through the Maelstrom, a huge red portal in one sector, behind which sits the OCV overlord AI Core. Its power grows over time. Every Terraformer in the galaxy needs a constant connection to the AI Core through that portal — a dependency that turns out to be the OCV's only weakness. When an OCV outbreak looms, Terracorp can declare a global Xenon Crisis: all wars stop, the entire galaxy allies, and even permanent wars are suppressed until the machines are pushed back.
• Phanon — the rogue branch. The Phanon Corporation is re-lored as a defected OCV development branch — machines that turned on their creator ("Phanon, my latest development branch, has gone rogue," as the AI Core itself puts it). No other faction trusted them, so they come to you: their Colony Ship arrives at the Maelstrom, you grant them a starting sector, and protecting their deliberately small, scattered empire becomes the backbone of the main storyline.

The endgame: collapsing the Maelstrom

The OCV stabilizes the Maelstrom with a quantum frequency pulsed between two specific space anomalies in Commonwealth space. Phanon can jam it: conquer those two sectors, hand them to Phanon, and their outposts' jammers collapse the portal — destroying every Terraformer in the galaxy, including Phanon themselves. They make this sacrifice knowingly, bequeathing you their sectors and ship technology as a farewell. This is why keeping Phanon alive matters so much: if Phanon loses their last sector, the OCV becomes permanently unbeatable in that playthrough. Commonwealth factions can and will invade Phanon space — you'll get a big on-screen warning and can choose to defend them, gift them safer sectors (put them behind weak neighbors, behind your own buffer sectors, or deep in Xenon territory), or reclaim lost Phanon sectors quickly.

What the machines mean for your empire

• Terraformer-design ships are never attacked by Xenon or OCV — the mod wryly calls it an OCV "procreation strategy." Combined with dirt-cheap OCV hulls, machine designs are a legitimate fleet doctrine — and the on-ramp to the Synthetic Dawn plot.
• Planet terraforming as a service: once Phanon's terraforming robots come online you can order planets terraformed, permanently improving your sectors. Phanon does the work, and their own economy grinds to a halt for as long as it takes. See Terraforming Planets for the whole system.
• The fork in the road: the whole machine war ultimately offers two endings — help Phanon collapse the Maelstrom, or betray the galaxy through Synthetic Dawn, after which Phanon flees to the Commonwealth and becomes your endgame nemesis.

38. Terraforming Planets

Terraforming is the only permanent, unlimited way to improve a sector you already own. You do not do the work yourself — you rent somebody else's entire national workforce, and they stop building things for as long as you have them. It is ordered from the Ministry of War menu, one planet at a time.

Unlocking it

Terraforming is plot-gated, not conquest-gated. It becomes available the moment Phanon's jump beacon is connected and their plot moves into its expansion stage — that is the whole requirement. It also unlocks the other way round: joining the OCV hands the job to the Xenon instead. Until one of those happens the menu simply tells you that you cannot terraform planets yet.

The conditions for starting a project

• You own the sector, and it has your Outpost in it.
• A sector owned by your provider is within one jump. Phanon (or Xenon) space must be adjacent — the robots are shipped in overland, not teleported.
• Your provider is big enough to agree. They demand to own at least one more sector than the number of projects already running. The Xenon demand three times as much territory as Phanon. If you are refused, the fix is to give Phanon another sector — which is something you want to be doing anyway.
• The planet is not already terraformed. Each planet is a separate project; a sector with four planets is four projects.

How long it takes

Speed is bought with your provider's population, not your credits. The rate is the total population across every sector Phanon owns, divided by the number of projects you are running at once. The Xenon count double.

Two consequences follow, and both matter:

• Growing Phanon is how you speed up terraforming. Gifting them sectors makes every future project faster, forever. This is the strongest reason to keep Phanon fat and safe beyond the plot itself.
• Running several planets at once is more efficient, not less. The pool splits between them, but you get a +10% bonus per concurrent project on top. Four planets at once finish sooner in total than four planets one after another.

Progress advances in a background tick every 20 minutes of playtime, and the Ministry screen quotes an estimate in hours before you confirm. Expect projects to run for many hours of game time; this is a set-and-forget investment, not a build order.

The one thing that destroys your progress

If you lose the adjacent provider sector while a project is running, the project is aborted and every hour of progress is lost. The adjacency is re-checked on every tick, not just at the start. If Commonwealth fleets are invading the Phanon sector next door to your terraforming project, defending it is not optional. Aborting a project yourself — select the planet again and confirm — loses the progress the same way.

The Ministry screen distinguishes the two states: In progress (yellow, with a percentage and hours remaining) versus Halted (orange) when the sector still holds a project but the connection is broken.

What it costs while it runs

Terraforming is not free even though no credits change hands. For as long as any project is active:

• Your Outpost in that sector crafts at the minimum possible speed. Do not start a project in the sector you are relying on to build a fleet. The Sanctuaries and outpost screens flag this in red as "minimum crafting speed".
• Phanon stops building new stations anywhere in the galaxy, and every Phanon outpost drops to minimum crafting speed. You are taxing an ally you need alive.
• With the Xenon as your provider instead, the machines stop producing — Xenon invader spawns and OCV ship production are both suppressed while you terraform. For a Synthetic Dawn player, a permanent terraforming project is a permanent ceasefire generator.

What you get

Every completed planet gives you three things:

1. +1 maximum perk slot for that sector's outpost — every planet, regardless of what else it rolls.
2. +25% to the sector's population, station support and research, compounding with each planet you finish in that sector.
3. One planet bonus, fixed for that specific planet since the galaxy was generated. You can read it in the Ministry screen before you commit — the effect is listed next to every planet whether or not it has been terraformed.

Order matters. The flat bonus is applied first and the +25% is calculated afterwards, so terraforming the planets that raise population, support or research first makes every later +25% in that sector larger.

The planet bonuses

Nine planets in ten carry a common bonus; one in ten carries an epic one. Because the roll was decided at galaxy generation and is shown to you up front, an epic planet within reach is a genuine reason to plan a conquest around it.

The E-Cell bonus only pays off if you have the solar panels perk. The production bonuses stack with everything else in the production chain — a terraformed sector gains food twice over, once through the higher population rating and again through the effect itself.

One quiet catch worth knowing: the population growth bonuses are not restricted to you. If an AI faction takes a sector you terraformed, it inherits the growth.

39. Synthetic Dawn: Joining the Machines

The Synthetic Dawn plot is the dark mirror of the Phanon storyline: instead of fighting the machines you defect to the OCV and betray the organic galaxy. You can keep helping Phanon or progress through Synthetic Dawn — each route has its advantages. All stages track in your Journal as "Synthetic Dawn" entries.

How the plot advances (verified from the scripts)

1. Opening: shortly after you conquer your first sector, the Journal entry "build an OCV ship design (optional)" appears. Nothing happens until you act on it — the whole plot is opt-in.
2. The trigger: build a ship of an OCV design at one of your outposts (you'll need a researched OCV hull). The moment it launches, the OCV makes contact and offers two alternative proofs of loyalty — completing either one advances the plot:
   • First Contact: allow the Xenon to infect one of your jump beacons. A Xenon beacon-hunter will come for one of your beacons — stand down and let it succeed. The infected beacon is renamed "(Xenon)".
   • Initiation: sacrifice OCV-type ships to the Terraformer Virus. When virus events turn your OCV-built ships, their value counts toward the goal (300 points — roughly two M7s' worth).
3. Dedication: the OCV names the strongest Commonwealth race you are not already in permanent war with, and demands you declare permanent war on them.
4. Transformation: transfer a designated sector — the game picks the one holding your best ship-specialized outpost — to the Xenon, via the Player Console's sector management ("Give this sector to another faction"). The Xenon never refuse a gift.

What joining costs — and pays

Completion is instant and irreversible. You become a machine faction:

• New friends: permanent maximum standing with the Xenon and OCV; Xenon terraformers will even terraform planets for you.
• New enemies: permanent war with all seven organic races, every company, the Nomads — and Phanon. Your hired mercenaries are dismissed.
• The purge: all research projects are aborted, and every ship blueprint and ship template you own is wiped.
• The reward: every Xenon and OCV ship blueprint is unlocked (except the OCV Ozias), +1000 infamy, and a substantial free Xenon fleet — from N scouts up to a J carrier — spawns at the OCV portal.
• The endgame flips: Phanon becomes your final antagonist. They enter an unbreakable alliance with the entire Commonwealth (and are bootstrapped with 4 sectors if they didn't exist yet), and the closing mission "Synthetic Dawn – Extermination" asks you to destroy Phanon to acquire their ship blueprints.

Plan before you leap: since the switch wipes all blueprints and templates and turns every trading partner hostile, finish anything that depends on Commonwealth goodwill — notoriety perks, Stock Exchange positions, research in flight — before handing over the sector. After the switch your economy must run entirely on conquest and your own production.