Random Events
On a station, a random event hits the station. Here there is no station, so every event picks one crewed ship and confines itself to that ship's decks. A meteor wave that lands on somebody else is genuinely somebody else's problem. The ship next to them, the ruin they were docked at and the outpost down the road are all structurally untouchable by it. This also means events are not shared misery. When the deck starts shaking, it is shaking for you and nobody is coming to help.
How targets get picked
Roughly every three to eight minutes, one event fires somewhere in the galaxy. With several crewed ships flying, that works out to one event per ship far less often than it sounds.
Selection is not uniform. Every ship in play is checked against the event's own requirements, and the survivors are weighted by how many crew are aboard. A ship with six people on it is six times as likely to be picked as a ship with one. After a ship is hit it gets a four-minute reprieve before ambient events will consider it again.
The requirements are where most of the safety lives:
- Zone. Most dangerous events refuse to fire outside the Contested and Lawless bands. A handful: the meteor storm, the immovable rod, pyroclastic and vortex anomalies, the advanced disease: are Lawless-only. See the overmap for the bands.
- Hull size. Destructive events set a minimum ship size. A three-tile hull with no airlock and no medbay does not get a vortex anomaly or a portal storm dropped on it, because that is not an event, it is the end of the round for everyone aboard.
- Crew count. Some events need two or three people aboard to make any sense.
- Flying. The meteor family and the carp migration only fire at ships out on the overmap. A landed ship shares its ground with whatever it landed on, and cratering a ruin because one crew rolled a meteor wave is not the intent.
- Safe harbour. Ships docked at a trader outpost are skipped entirely.
Some events also have an earliest-start time, so the nastier material only turns up well into a shift.
What you'll actually see
A sample of the roster, roughly from routine to serious:
| Event | What happens |
|---|---|
| Ventilation clog | Harmless mobs climb out of a vent. Mostly a mess. |
| Ship camera failure | A chunk of your camera network goes dark. |
| Micrometeoroid shower | Grit and sand pit the hull. Might break a window. |
| Ship grid check | Every APC aboard shuts off until somebody reboots them by hand. |
| Gravity generator failure | The deck loses gravity for a few minutes. |
| Communications blackout | Every radio aboard cuts out for a while. |
| Scrubber overflow | The scrubbers vomit foam through the ship. Three severities. |
| Space vines | Kudzu takes root and starts eating the ship. |
| Radiation leak | A machine starts leaking until somebody repairs it. |
| Stray cargo pod | A pod containing a random supply crate lands aboard. Free loot. |
| Ship grey tide | Airlocks in one or two areas bolt open. |
| Meteor shower / storm | Waves of rock through the hull. The storm opens compartments. |
| Immovable rod | A rod passes clean through the ship. |
| Portal storm | Syndicate shocktroops pour out of portals on your deck. |
There are anomalies too (gravitational, bluespace, dimensional, hallucination, pyroclastic, vortex) and a long tail of small stuff: mice, a cow that tells you wise things, a random animal becoming sentient, spontaneous brain trauma, a fake virus, a market crash that raises vending prices sector-wide.
Not everything is bad. The stray cargo pod, at least, is a gift.
Reducing your exposure
- Dock at a trader outpost. Ships in a safe harbour are removed from the target pool outright. If you need to do repairs, do them there.
- Stay in the Neutral Zone. It is not immunity (the harmless events fire anywhere) but the ones that open your hull mostly won't touch you there.
- Fly a small ship, or accept the consequences of a big one. Size gates work both ways: a big hull is what makes the serious events eligible against you.
- Land. The meteor family and the carp migration require you to be out flying.
- Don't stack your whole crew on one hull. The weighting is per-ship crew count, so the flagship with everyone aboard is the ship the galaxy keeps picking on.
None of this makes you safe. Have a welder, spare plating, an extinguisher and a hardsuit somewhere everyone can reach.
Contested caches
Separate from the event roster, and worth flying for.
Thirty minutes into a shift a bonded courier drop platform surfaces in Contested or Lawless space, and the whole sector is told about it: a broadcast on every open channel, a priority announcement, and a waypoint pushed to every ship's helm. There is no mystery here, the announcement names the location and states plainly that the vault's escrow seals disengage in ten minutes.
That ten minutes is the point. Every crew in the galaxy heard the same message and knows every other crew heard it too. What happens in that window is up to you: get there first and hold the platform, arrive late and take it off whoever did, or stay away.
When the clock runs out the vault unseals and anyone alive can start forcing it open by hand, a thirty-second job that any hit interrupts. First crew to finish it gets the contents: a crate of five ship parts, weighted heavily toward combat parts, plus an extraction case to carry them in. The galaxy is then told the cache has been claimed.
Claiming it is not keeping it
The prize is a physical crate. It still has to be cased, carried back to your ship and extracted, and everyone in the sector was just told who has it. The dangerous part of a contested cache is usually the flight home.
The vault itself is indestructible (you cannot skip the window with a welder or a bomb) and the platform retires itself twenty minutes after the claim, or thirty minutes after the unseal if nobody ever showed up. Two of these surface per round at most, the second roughly fifty minutes after the first.
Ship parts are the currency of hull and module upgrades, which is why a cache is worth a fight.