Coming from /tg/station

If you have played /tg/station, most of your muscle memory transfers. Surgery, chemistry, atmospherics, botany, construction, combat, hacking. All of it is upstream code and all of it behaves the way you expect. What changed is the frame around it: there is no station, no shift, and no departments in the sense you are used to. This page is the diff.

The round is a ship, not a shift

There is no station and no arrivals shuttle. You start on a small crewed ship parked on the safe edge of a galaxy map, and that ship is the entire round for you. See The Overmap.

You cannot call the emergency shuttle. Attempting it tells you so. There is no evac, no escape pods to fight over, and no round-end alert level theatre. A ship that wants out of the round can charge a bluespace jump at its own helm, which removes that ship and everyone on it from the round, that is as close as Voidcrew gets to escaping, and it is a per-crew decision, not a server-wide one.

Because there is no station, there is also no permanent geography. Your medbay is a room on your ship that a random module roll gave you, and another crew's ship might not have one at all.

No telecomms

Radio does not route through machinery or z-levels here, so all the usual tricks are gone: no telecomms room to bomb, no signal degradation, no z-level dead zones, no relays to sabotage.

Instead, every frequency except a few is scoped to a ship. Your headset binds to a ship the first time you use it aboard one (at job spawn for the headset you woke up in) and that binding is sticky. Take it onto a planet, a ruin or someone else's ship and your crew channel keeps working. A multitool re-tunes a headset to whatever ship it is currently standing in, which is also how you make a stolen headset useful.

The one channel everyone shares is Wideband, prefix :w, a galaxy-wide hailing channel carried by every headset. Traders, pirates and events announce on it, and so can you. Counterplay lives at the item level now, EMPs, jammers and stealing headsets. See Comms.

Antagonists

Voidcrew does not build its rounds around an antagonist roster. Its own antagonist content is environmental and opt-in rather than assigned: pirates and NPC ships hunt you across the map, dynamic events go wrong on your ship, threats and elites guard the good loot, and vestige ruins (signals that surface one at a time as the round ages) hold patrons who will trade you a genuine ported antagonist ability for a bespoke trial. Heretic rites, changeling flesh, wizard spells and shadow walking are all things you can earn as a normal crewmember by doing something dangerous for something dead. See Vestige Ruins.

The other source of antagonism is other players. Whether you are allowed to shoot them depends entirely on where you are standing, which is what the green, yellow and red zones exist to answer. Ship Combat covers doing it with the ship rather than a gun.

Research and cargo

Research is not a department you either have or do not have. Any ship with an autolathe (which is very nearly all of them) can print a Research & Development Kit for twenty iron and forty glass sheets, with no research needed, and that box contains the R&D console, protolathe, destructive analyzer, ship R&D server and (importantly) a circuit imprinter, which is the only machine that prints machine boards. Any hull can therefore bootstrap the whole suite. What a ship can build is a question of how far up the techweb it has climbed, not which rooms it launched with.

Research points come from a survey scanner, a machine that converts power into points while parked somewhere new, rather than from standing around holding an experiment. There is also a radar research tree that extends how far your sensors reach and what they can identify. See The Overmap.

Cargo is smaller and ship-shaped. Your ship has its own bank machine holding the ship's account, and a cargo console that orders against it; the supply shuttle flies out and docks alongside your ship rather than landing in a station bay. Most real money comes from traders and missions instead. See Money and Trade.

Jobs and roles

There is no fixed job roster. Each hull's theme defines its own crew. The same Goon-class might launch with Captain, Shaft Miner and Station Engineer, or Team Leader, Combat Engineer and Salvage Operative, depending on the theme it rolled. Modules can add jobs of their own.

You therefore do not pick jobs in preferences; you pick categories (Command, Security, Engineering, Medical, Science, Cargo, Service, Assistant) at high, medium or low priority, and the game matches you to whatever that hull actually has. Each ship gets exactly one captain, contested between the players who wanted Command most.

Job slots are not fixed either. The cryogenic oversight console aboard your ship adds and removes slots, up to six per job, on a two-minute cooldown, and the captain can shut off cryopod joining entirely.

Access works off your ID as normal, but there is no station-wide access hierarchy to appeal to. If you cannot get into a room, the answer is the captain or a toolbox, not a bureaucracy.

What has not changed

Everything at personal scale. Medicine, surgery and cloning-adjacent care; chemistry and reagents; botany and hydroponics; atmospherics, pipes and canisters; power and the engine types; construction, deconstruction and wiring; guns, melee, wounds and combat; food, drinks and the bar; mechs, cyborgs and robotics; genetics and xenobiology; virology; the crafting menu; quirks and loadouts.

If a page on this wiki does not exist for something, that is usually because it works the same and the /tg/station wiki already covers it.