Until today, Elisium only came from assaulting Custodian bases. One door for the most expensive currency in the game, and it showed: the Cruiser costs 5,000 Elisium and almost nobody had a clear road to it.

Incursions are that road.

One portal per contested map

A Custodian structure now floats in each of the four front sectors. It does not shoot and cannot be destroyed. It is a door. You get close, press R, and you come out the other side in a dungeon of your own, under a sky that exists nowhere else in the game.

It only opens if your faction holds that map. That is not an arbitrary toll: it ties the most valuable reward in the game to the metagame that already existed. If you want all four entries in a day, your side has to hold the whole front.

And it is one entry per map per day. Attempts come back at the 01:00 cut, the same one that closes the war day, so there is no second clock to learn.

What is inside

Ten waves. They arrive by jump, the same way you would, with fifteen seconds between one and the next and five minutes to clear each one. That deadline is not decoration: if you stall, the incursion closes.

The tenth brings the Executor Custodian and its escort.

Difficulty rises 3.5% for every level you carry. A level 5 pilot does not enter the same incursion as a level 1, and that is what stops the dungeon becoming routine the moment you grow.

Custodian hulls are drawn at random on every spawn from the variants of their class. Two consecutive waves will not bring the same silhouette.

There is no safety net

Dying inside cancels it. There is no respawn beyond the portal: if you go down it is over, and the day’s attempt is spent. That is the part that makes ten waves mean something.

What there is, is room for what is not your fault: if your connection drops you have ninety seconds to come back before the dungeon closes on its own. Losing an incursion to your router is not difficulty, it is bad engineering.

And the front pays

Clearing it leaves between 20 and 30 Elisium, and conquest stacks on top: 7.5% more for every map your faction holds, up to 30% with the whole front.

It is the first sector-war reward paid in the scarce currency. Until now, holding ground improved mining and Nexite — things you already had. Now it moves the needle on what actually costs.

The sky

The incursion has a sky of its own, built with the same procedural generator we wrote for the sectors. It is not a recycled backdrop: crossing the portal had to register before the first enemy showed up.