Missions
Missions are the reliable way to make money in Voidcrew. Every standard hull carries a mission board that posts fresh contracts all round, and a mission pad next to it where you hand things in and rewards appear. Contracts pay credits into the ship account and, on the dangerous ones, trade vouchers into your hand.
The board and the pad
The mission board is a console. It links itself to any mission pad within a few tiles, and the two work as a unit: the board is where you accept, track, and turn in, and the pad is where physical objects change hands.
The board keeps five offers posted at a time and tops itself back up as you take them. An offer nobody accepts rotates off after 20 minutes and is replaced. A refresh button wipes all five and deals a new hand, on a 5-minute cooldown. Use it when the board has nothing your crew can do, not to fish for the top-paying contract.
Your ship can run three missions at once. Each has its own clock, usually 30 minutes, longer on the planet-side contracts.
Accepting a contract does three things: it starts the timer, it drops a waypoint on the helm chart so the pilot can find the target, and for some contracts it dispenses equipment onto your mission pad. Tapping a handheld GPS unit on the board uploads the objective beacons of every active mission to that unit, which is how you find a small object inside a large ruin.
Contracts with more than one step show a checklist on the board, and only one step is live at a time. The board tells you which.
Turning in
Contracts finish one of two ways. If there is nothing to hand over (exploration, surveying, a kill sweep) the turn-in button goes live once the objectives are satisfied. If the contract wants something physical, put it on the pad first, then pick it from the item list on the board and turn in.
Rewards arrive in two places: credits go straight into the ship's bank account, while vouchers and item rewards materialise on the pad.
Missions fail on the clock
A contract that times out is a failure, and the ship is told about it. If it is going badly, abandon it from the board instead. Abandoning costs nothing and frees the slot.
Some contracts also fail if the thing they are about is destroyed. Recovery-family contracts will quietly re-pick a target twice before giving up; contracts built around one specific creature, beacon, or batch just void.
Pay and zones
Every contract that points somewhere on the overmap is priced by the zone band its target sits in. Deeper is worth more: a contract in the contested middle band pays roughly 1.7× the outer-ring rate, and one in the lawless deep pays about 2.6×. Contracts in the deep also add an extra trade voucher on top of whatever they already paid.
The board labels each offer Easy, Medium, or Hard, and that label is just the zone band restated. A "hard" contract is not a harder puzzle. It is the same job somewhere that will shoot at you.
The contract types
| Contract | What it asks |
|---|---|
| Delivery Contract | Bring a listed quantity of ore, sheets, or crystals to the pad. No travel required if you already have the goods. |
| Exploration Contract | Fly the ship to marked coordinates, then come home and collect. |
| Survey Contract | Scan a number of celestial objects (nebulas, asteroid fields, planets, stars, storms) with the orbital survey console. |
| Recovery Contract | Retrieve a named object from inside a space ruin and carry it back to the pad. |
| Kill Contract | Hunt down a named pirate captain holed up in a ruin and bring back their identification tag. Harder targets keep bodyguards. |
| Survey Contract (pylons) | Calibrate three survey pylons inside a ruin, one at a time. Each calibration is loud and draws a wave of defenders. The last pylon prints the core you carry home. |
| Extraction Contract | Unbolt a fixed piece of cargo inside a ruin. Wrenching it loose takes time and trips an alarm that answers in two waves. |
| Rescue Contract | A survivor is alive inside a wreck. Get them out and back to the pad breathing. The fee doubles if they are unharmed. |
| Suppression Sweep | Confirm a number of pirate kills anywhere in the contested band or deeper. No item turn-in; it settles at the board. |
| Gas Harvest Contract | Deliver a tank holding a required quantity of a specific gas. See Fuel & Gas. |
| Field Expedition | A probe went down on a planet. Find the wreck, pull its core, and be ready for whatever lifting it wakes up. |
| Big Game Hunt | Stake a supplied lure on a planet surface, kill the apex predator it draws out, and carry back a trophy. |
| Live Capture | Track a survey-marked animal on a planet, wear it down without killing it, and seal it in the supplied crate. It has to arrive alive. |
| Poacher Bust | Raid an illegal hunting camp on a planet, wipe the squad, and recover their tagged evidence cache. |
| Prospect Stake | Fly to marked coordinates in the contested band or deeper, deploy the supplied claim beacon aboard your ship, and keep it intact for eight minutes while holding station. The filing goes out on Wideband, so the whole sector knows. Top of the pay curve, and the deep-band version sometimes pays a crate of ship parts instead of vouchers. |
Not every type is available at once. Several are capped so the galaxy only ever has one or two running, and the planet contracts only appear when a planet of the right kind is actually in this round's sector.
Read the description before you accept
Each offer's text names its coordinates, its zone band, its beacon tag, and whether it dispenses equipment. The planet contracts in particular hand you a lure, a crate, or a claim kit at accept, if you launch without collecting it off the pad, you have wasted the run.
Bounties and broadcasts
The board carries three things besides contracts. Pirate bounties are competitive: a named pirate captain is posted galaxy-wide, several crews can hunt the same one, and it goes to whoever kills them and puts their ship key on the mission pad. Paying a fee out of the ship account tracks the target on your chart, deducted from the reward. Player bounties let you post a job for other crews yourself, funded from your account and delivered to your pad. Broadcasts list any player-founded outpost currently advertising, with coordinates. See Player Outposts.
Trader outposts also run their own boards, separate from your ship's. You take those by talking to the trader in person, and they pay in goods off that trader's shelves rather than money. See Trader Outposts.
Street Chemistry
One contract type is never posted on your ship's board and never rolls at random. Vex, the fence at the Undertow Exchange in the lawless deep, is the only person in the galaxy who posts a Drug Run, and the only counter that will take the product afterwards. You have to fly out there and ask.
The run has three stages and a one-hour clock.
Gather. A formula chip lands on your mission pad naming three wild ingredients, each growing on a different kind of planet. Each has a fixed harvest site on its planet's surface, marked on your chart and on the mission's beacon. The contract only gets offered when enough of the right planets are in this round's sector.
Cook. Accepting also raises a hidden laboratory out in space, marked as a signal on your helm. Inside is a three-station chain: a mixer that flashes hopper sequences at you, a catalyst rig running a timing chart, and a crystallizer you catch output from. Each station gives you attempts and lets you commit or retry a score. How well you play sets the batch's purity, 0.7× the fee at street grade, the full fee at pure, 1.4× plus an extra voucher at primo.
Deliver. The finished batch can only be handed to Vex, at the Undertow, in person. Nobody else fences it, and losing it after the cook voids the contract.
Base pay is 4000–5000 credits before zone scaling, plus three trade vouchers, the largest single payout on any contract.
The cook lights you up
There is a coin-flip chance that finishing the batch trips somebody's sensor net. If it does, an NT customs corvette spawns near your ship and runs a full shakedown: a hail, a fine, and interdiction and boarding if you refuse. The fine scales with the contract's value. You can also surrender the shipment instead of paying, which ends the run.