New Player Guide

There is no station in Voidcrew. When the round starts you are dropped onto a small ship with a handful of other players, somewhere on the safe edge of a galaxy map called the overmap, and everything you do that round happens on that ship or somewhere you flew it to. This page covers your first hour.

Joining a round

Ready up in the lobby like normal. When the round starts, the server counts how many people readied and builds a fleet to match: one hull per six ready players, up to four hulls. Everyone who readied is dealt out evenly across those hulls, so a full server is several separate crews flying separate ships, not one big crew.

Each hull is rolled at random: a hull class, one of that class's themes, and a random module in every one of its upgrade slots. Nobody chooses this and nobody pays for it, so the ship you wake up on is a surprise every round, and while the pool lasts no two hulls in the fleet are the same class. See Ship Catalog for the hulls and Ship Upgrades for what themes and modules change.

Your job comes from the ship category preferences in your character setup, Command, Security, Engineering, Medical, Science, Cargo, Service and Assistant, each set to high, medium or low. Each hull picks its captain first, contested between the players who set Command highest, with ties broken at random; if nobody wants Command, someone is drafted and told so. Everyone else is matched to an open job in a category they asked for, working down from high to low, then to any open job. Job titles vary by hull and theme, so the captain might be called Captain, Team Leader or something stranger.

If you join after the round has started, you get a ship menu instead. You can join any existing crew that has an open slot and has left joining enabled, or launch a ship of your own from the shipyard. The two Pill-class hulls are free; everything else costs ship parts you have banked from previous rounds.

What is already on your ship

Every hull with real rooms launches with the same core kit, wherever the mapper put it. (The two free Pill-class hulls are the exception. They are four tiles, a helm and a cryopod, and nothing else.)

That last one matters more than it looks. The R&D Kit is a box the autolathe prints for twenty sheets of iron and forty of glass, with no research required, and it contains the R&D console, protolathe, circuit imprinter, destructive analyzer, ship R&D server and the server's source disk. Any ship, however cheap, can build a full research suite on day one. You start with zero research points and no income, so Research is worth reading before someone wastes an hour looking for the machine that generates them.

Everything past that core kit comes from your hull's theme and modules: an engine type, a medbay or a chem lab, a mining bay, a galley, a bunkroom. Read Ship Systems for the parts you have to keep running.

The loop

Fly out, find something worth money, bring it home, spend it, go further out.

In practice that means picking a contact off the helm chart and going to look at it. Planets have ore, ruins and fauna; space ruins have loot and usually something guarding it; asteroid fields are the reliable mining stop; trader outposts buy what you dug up and sell what you cannot make. The mission board hands out contracts that point you at all of the above and pays for finishing them.

Danger and reward both scale with how close to the star you fly. The safe outer ring is where you start; the deeper rings have better ore yields, nastier wildlife and no rules about shooting each other. The Overmap explains the three zones, and it is the first page you should read after this one.

Keeping what you earn

Most of what you find is yours only for the round. Ship parts are the exception: they are the persistent currency that unlocks hulls, themes and modules for every future round, and they only carry over if you extract them.

To extract, the parts must be inside an extraction case, in your inventory, when the round ends or when your ship makes a bluespace jump out. Use the Request Extraction Case verb in the IC tab to get one. Only the first standard case you are carrying counts, and you have to be alive and conscious, nothing extracts off a corpse. Loose parts in your bag are lost. Everyone who played a character also gets one random part and a hundred credits at round end, so a bad round still moves you forward a little.

Staying alive

Your ship's hull integrity is not an abstract number. It is literally how much of the ship is still there: every floor tile is worth one point, every wall two, every reinforced wall three. Meteors, missiles and breaches destroy turfs and the integrity drops with them. Below sixty percent the ship starts screaming at you. At fifty percent it stops flying, crash-lands, and becomes a wreck other crews can find and either help or loot. Welding plating back down genuinely repairs it, and a crashed ship that gets rebuilt to sixty-five percent can fly again.

A few habits that keep new players breathing:

• Turn your suit sensors to full before you leave the ship. If you go down on a planet, that is how your crew finds the body.
• Do not fly into the red ring in your starting hull. Check the zone readout on the helm before you commit to a heading.
• Take internals for anywhere you have not personally seen the air in. Ruins and unfinished planets are often airless.
• Repair breaches immediately, not later. Damage compounds, and every lost tile is lost hull integrity.
• If your crew researches Vat Cloning, imprint on a cloning vat while you are still alive. It grows a spare body over twelve minutes that your ghost can claim when you die. It cannot be done after the fact.

Where to read next

The Overmap is the backbone of the game. After that, Piloting and Ship Systems cover keeping a ship moving and alive; Missions and Money and Trade cover earning; Mining, Planets and Ruins cover where to go; Ship Combat, Pirates and NPC Ships and Threats and Elites cover what will try to kill you. The Glossary explains any word on the radio you did not recognise, and Coming from /tg/station is the short version of this page for veterans.