Four systems that change what you do between fights.
Forty war ranks
Earned with the war points you accumulate across your whole career, not with your level. Faction-specific names, a badge of its own, and a faction leaderboard in the station.
Because war points only come from the four contested sectors, rank measures actual war: if you never cross to the front you stay a Recruit, and that is how it should be. It also inherits the anti-farming brake that already protected sector war — killing the same victim over and over pays 100 %, 50 %, 25 %.
The ladder always steepens: 50 points for rank 2 and 421,000 for the last step. Rank 2 arrives in about ten minutes, deliberately — the first promotion has to land before you start wondering whether this goes up at all. Rank 40 is roughly 5,700 hours at today’s rate: a monument, not a target.
Rank grants no gameplay advantage. No damage, no discounts, no locked ships: it is reputation. The moment rank 40 gave you stats, those two million points would stop being a monument and become a wall for everyone who arrives later. It never goes down either.
You see it on your pilot panel with a progress bar to the next one, on the panel of any enemy you target — using their faction’s names — beside every squadmate, and in the station’s leaderboard tab, where your own row shows at the bottom even if you aren’t near the top. From rank 30 up, promotions are announced to your whole faction.
Ability bar
Seven combat consumables plus the mining drone, in an eight-slot bar you arrange yourself, bottom right. They are bought with Elisium and unlocked by war rank; the ones you can’t use yet appear locked with their requirement visible rather than hidden away.
The rules that hold it together:
- The cooldown starts when the effect ends, not when you use it. A 20 s buff with a 90 s cooldown is really a 110 s cycle.
- Three timed effects at once, maximum. Debuffs you throw take one of your three even though the effect lives on the enemy: they are yours.
- Debuffs from several players stack, each with its own timer, but with caps: damage −40 %, speed −45 %, and evasion never goes below zero. Without caps, six pilots would make the numbers on your sheet meaningless.
- Range is 1,000 u, the same as a heavy ship’s cannon: if you can shoot it, you can debuff it. Gravity ballast reaches 2,000 so you can slow someone fleeing.
Effect chips always live in the interface, never on the ship: yours on your panel, the enemy’s when you target them.
Log
Press L: the history of what has happened to you — kills, loot, experience, promotions, invitations, conquests — and also the “you can’t do that” notices. It keeps 50 entries and doesn’t survive a reconnect.
Repeats in a row collapse into ×N, only kills you took part in are recorded, and only the material that actually changed: with fifty slots, three lines of “+0 Elisium” would push your own kill off the list.
The Forge: upgrading can now fail
Upgrading a weapon or a module stops being paperwork. Every attempt has a chance, and every level charges Nexite — more each time — on top of quasicrystal and fragment energy. From 7 to 10 it also charges Elisium.
| Level | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Success | 100 % | 95 % | 90 % | 85 % | 78 % | 70 % | 60 % | 50 % | 42 % | 35 % |
On a failure you lose the cost, but the level never drops. Nothing breaks and nothing goes backwards: what you risk is the material, not the piece.
The numbers that matter: taking a weapon from zero to level 6 costs on the order of 5,900 Nexite — about the price of a corvette — and reaching 10 runs to roughly 42,000 with failures included, because 86 % of the total sits in the last four levels. And it is paid per unit: a heavy with four slots pays four times.
All of this happens in the Forge, a resonator you open from the inventory — or by right-clicking the piece. The piece enters the chamber, the electrodes discharge, and the result is revealed after the flash, in neutral blue first, so the machine doesn’t give the answer away early. Equipped gear is listed first, and upgrades without unequipping.
