What You Do Out There
Professions
Pick a path — or all of them. Mine, explore, build, and fight; the frontier gets more lawless and more rewarding the further out you push.
Mining
Extract · Refine · Supply
Fly to an asteroid belt, prospect the field, and run your mining lasers to fill a dedicated ore hold — then haul it home to refine and sell. The backbone of the whole economy: nothing gets built without ore.
◈ Mining Laser
Lock a rock and run your lasers on cycles — better lasers pull more ore per cycle, with the odd crit for a bonus haul. It's a commit-and-extract loop: keep the asteroid locked and let the ore hold fill.
◈ Mineral Survey Scanner
A quick active sweep that reveals every nearby asteroid's composition. Prospect before you extract — spot the Olivine, Troilite, and rare Pentlandite / Iridosmine veins before you waste a cycle on plain Ferrite.
FRAMES · Prospector (starter) → Burrow I (bigger yield) → Burrow II (biggest yield, mines rare ore, huge hold)
Exploration
Sweep · Triangulate · Crack
A free system sweep reports how many hidden Traces are out there. Hunt each one down by how you fly, resolve it into a cache, and hack it open for the rarest materials and exploration-only rig upgrades in the game.
◈ Resonance Scanner
A "fox-hunt." Your FIX % accrues from bearing rate — how fast the line to the hidden signal rotates. Fly straight at it and you barely progress; orbit or slingshot past it and the bearing sweeps fast. The HUD shows SIG (how close you are to the signal) and FIX (how far you've triangulated its exact position) — fill FIX to 100% and the cache resolves. It rewards flying, not waiting.
◈ Decryptor
Once a cache is resolved and locked, the Decryptor cracks it — a turn-based Mastermind hack: the server hides a code scaled by the cache's depth, and each guess scores Exact / Partial. Solve it inside your guess budget to claim the loot.
GEAR · Relic caches drop passive Rigs · Data caches drop rare crafting materials · FRAME · Wraith (3 Support slots = full explorer kit)
SIG rises as you close · FIX rises as you triangulate → the cache resolves
The Decryptor — a turn-based Mastermind hack scaled to the cache's depth
Industry & Trade
Refine · Build · Haul
Turn raw rock into the fleet. Refine ore into metals, research blueprints, and manufacture every module, frame, and structure in the game — then move it where it's worth the most.
◈ Refine & Manufacture
Each ore refines a 100-kg batch into metals (Ferrite→Tritanite, up to Iridex from low-security-system ores). Blueprints carry a bill-of-materials, and the strongest frames are built from the earlier version they upgrade plus rare Iridex — putting the best gear behind the lowest-security space.
◈ Market & Hauling
Buy and sell at station markets, or place a remote buy that fills and delivers elsewhere. Cargo genuinely occupies hold volume, and frames are packaged items with mass — a bigger run needs a bigger hauler. Sell escrow draws from hangar + cargo + ore hold at once.
STRUCTURES · Storage Depots & Corp Outposts you haul out and deploy · gated by the Research tree
Combat
Lock · Fly · Kill
Weapons are fixed-mount — no auto-tracking turrets — but you're not locked to firing straight off the nose. Fit a rack, manage your capacitor and shield, and take the fight to pirates, rival pilots, or an enemy corp's structures.
◈ Guns & Lasers
Autocannons & Artillery — kinetic and explosive guns you aim by free-look: they fire wherever you point, at any angle, even behind you. Lasers — hitscan energy that needs a lock and strikes whatever you've locked. Damage runs a kinetic / energy / explosive / ion type matrix.
◈ Missiles & Lock
Hold a target inside your lock circle to acquire it, then fire single missiles or stream them. Seeker missiles home hard; Ion missiles gut shields and capacitor. Break line-of-sight and the lock instantly drops — and the pilot you've locked sees the lock building and the missiles inbound.
◈ Tank & Countermeasures
Shields (cap-fed) and Ancillary burst modules for emergencies; Repairers (self or remote logistics). Flares spoof incoming missiles; a Jammer guarantees a lock-drop and a no-lock window.
◈ Tackle & EW
Webifier — sharply slow a target down.
Warp Bubble — a deployed slow-field that pins everyone inside.
Energy Neutralizer — drain an enemy's capacitor dry.
Targeting Computer — extend your lock range and speed.
Salvager — strip loot from wrecks.
Control the fight, don't just out-shoot it.
FRAMES · Talon I → Talon II (dogfighters) · Bastion I / II (siege) · Wraith I / II (EW & logistics)
Combat · Player vs Environment
Hunting the Frontier
The galaxy fights back — and it pays. Every PvE threat scales with system security: the deeper into lawless space you go, the harder the enemies and the richer the salvage. Difficulty comes from numbers, AI skill, and the clock — never inflated health bars.
◈ Pirate Hideouts
Every system hosts one roaming pirate den at a time, marked by a waypoint you can course to — though the pirates only reveal themselves once you're close. Clear it and it's gone; a fresh one spawns elsewhere a while later. Scales with security: high-sec dens are a light swarm, med-sec dens field tougher pirates in wingman pairs, and low-sec dens are a shield-tanked pack — the deadliest band. New pilots get gentler permanent tutorial camps nearby.
◈ Rifts
Tear open an instanced pocket site with a consumable Rift Key and fight through escalating waves of enemies against a survival clock, ending on a boss that guards the loot cache. Key tiers gate the danger and where you can open one: Faded (high-sec only), Charged (med-sec and lower), Volatile (anywhere, deepest tiers). Solo covers the lower tiers; the deepest are party-only and scale enemies and rewards to your group — the richest Rifts drop the rarest salvage in the game.
◈ Belt Ambushes & Patrols
Belts get more dangerous the lower the security. High-sec belts are guardian-patrolled and pirate-free — but med-sec belts are not safe mining zones: settle into an occupied belt and pirate ambush waves warp in on you. Low-sec is worse still — permanent roaming patrols on top of larger, shield-tanked ambushes: cruisers that spot you at range, give chase, and flee when hurt. Low-sec kills roll bonus salvage on top of normal loot.
Combat · Player vs Player
Open War
Where you can fight other pilots — and what it costs you — is set by each system's security rating. The law thins out as you push toward the frontier.
HIGH-SEC · 1.0
Totally safe from other players — weapons pass straight through fellow pilots, so no one can harm you (pirates are still fair game). System Guardians police everything.
MED-SEC · ~0.4
Policed but live. Fire on a lawful pilot and you're branded WANTED system-wide and the Guardians hunt you — but the fight is real.
NULL-SEC · 0.0
No Guardians, no law. Open, unpoliced PvP, the richest ore, and the biggest risk. The faction-warfare arenas are full-PvP zones too.
◈ Crime & Consequences
Attack a lawful pilot in policed space and you're flagged, in three escalating stages:
AGGRESSOR For a short window the Guardians drop everything to hunt you.
WANTED A lasting Criminal flag: any pilot can shoot you freely, and the Guardians keep coming (each new crime resets it).
OUTLAW Kill fellow pilots who Report you and you gain Infamy; rack up enough and you're a public outlaw with no protection at all — freely killable, ship and escape pod. Infamy slowly decays on its own.
◈ Bounties & the Kill Board
Bounties hunt Outlaws. A victim can Report a killer and attach a credit bounty, and anyone can add to it — the credits sit in a galaxy-wide escrow. Kill that outlaw while they're still flagged and the whole pot pays out to you; hunters can lock a target for a live directional ping. If their Infamy decays away first, the escrow refunds. A separate Kill Board publicly logs recent player-vs-player ship kills.
◈ Corporation Warfare
Anchor your own structures — a Storage Depot or a dockable Corp Outpost — and your corp becomes war-eligible. A Founder declares war on a rival, names a War HQ, and pays a recurring fee; after a warm-up the two corps can fight legally, Guardians standing aside even in high-sec. Structures shrug off ordinary guns: only the dedicated Siege class — Bastion frames with siege weapons — can harm them, and only during a sanctioned war. Grind the shield, wait out a telegraphed reinforcement window, crack it open; destroy the War HQ to win.
◈ Faction Warfare
Every pilot picks one of four factions at first login. Inside the four dedicated faction-warfare arenas, enemy-faction combat is fully legal and carries no criminal penalty. Factions fight to capture beacon nodes — hold a node's ring with the most pilots to flip it, and control most of the nodes to seize the whole system. Captures pay their contributors in credits, and owning an arena grants a system-wide bonus in its specialty.
⚑ WHERE FACTIONS APPLY · Your faction only matters inside the four arenas — Krios (combat), Ferro Basin (mining), Vulcan Verge (engineering), Umbral Expanse (exploration). Everywhere else it's inert: no name coloring, no attack license, no change to security rules.