Research

Research in Voidcrew is per-ship. Your crew's tech tree lives on a hard drive in your own R&D server, it starts completely empty, and nothing you unlock is shared with any other crew. It is also the only route to things no trader stocks: longer sensor range and transporters. This page covers where the points come from and where they are worth spending.

The suite

Almost every hull carries an autolathe, and that one machine is enough. Print the Research & Development Kit (twenty sheets of iron and forty of glass, no research required) and the box holds the boards for the whole chain: R&D console, protolathe, destructive analyzer, circuit imprinter, ship R&D server, and the source code disk that goes in the server. See Ship Systems for where these sit aboard.

The disk is the techweb. Slot it into the server and that server hosts your research; pull it out and the research goes with it. The autolathe prints a spare disk for two sheets of glass, but a fresh disk is a fresh blank tree, not a copy.

Everything that earns or spends points has to be told which server it belongs to. Slotting the source disk into the server claims every scanner and operating computer aboard that has no link yet, so build the server whenever you like and anything you made earlier falls in behind it. Everything else, R&D console, orbital survey console, protolathe, nanite chamber, destructive scanner. Is linked by hand: multitool the server, then the machine. One click, including to move a machine from one server to another.

A scanner with no server says so when you examine it and buzzes when you try to use it, so an unlinked machine is obvious rather than silently useless.

Earning points

Ships launch with no research income at all. No hull is mapped with a survey scanner or an orbital survey console, and an R&D server generates nothing by sitting there powered. Every point below is something a crew member goes and does. Sources are listed roughly in the order a new crew can reach them.

Experiments: the best thing you can do in the first ten minutes

This is the strongest early faucet in the game and it costs nothing. Every completed experiment pays a flat 2,000 points.

The Experi-Scanner is a protolathe design your web already has at round start, and it prints for half a sheet each of iron and glass. It finds your server on its own; check the examine text, and multitool it across if it says it has no link. Use it in your hand to pick an experiment, then hit whatever the experiment wants with it. Your R&D console's experiment panel shows everything currently on offer with a progress bar and a hint. A blank techweb already carries several, including:

• Scan three patches of blood or vomit. That is the whole experiment.
• Scan three different species of fish. A basic fishing rod is also a free design.
• Scan a beaker of a named chemical at high purity.
• Autopsy a corpse on an operating table wired to your server. That one is done with an autopsy scanner, which cannot be printed: order the Autopsy Kit crate from your cargo console.

More experiments appear as you research deeper into a branch, so the supply does not dry up. The fishing chain pays a small bonus on top of the flat 2,000.

Ordnance experiments pay the same 2,000, but they are finished differently: you capture a tank explosion on a doppler array or burst a gas tank in a tank compressor, print the data to a disk, and publish it through the NT Frontier app. Nine of them exist (five explosive and four gas) and each pays the first time a paper actually completes it. Publishing further tiers of an experiment you have already finished pays nothing.

Research notes

Research notes are a physical document with a point value printed on it. Put one against a linked R&D console and the points go straight into your web. Hit one note with another to stack them into a single bigger document.

They turn up as loot, and the good ones are worth a lot: documents found in the wild are worth 250, 1,000, 2,500, 5,000 or 10,000 points. Research-themed loot caches carry one at every zone tier, cave dens on wasteland planets and old barrels on beach planets both roll the 5,000 and 10,000 tiers, and space ruins sometimes have one lying on a desk. This is the fastest way to a big number, and it is a good reason to have someone on every landing party checking the paperwork.

Salvaged documents can also be sold through the cargo console at half a credit per point, if your crew would rather have money than tech.

The orbital survey console

The Orbital survey console costs a single 40-point node, which makes it the first thing most crews research. It surveys whatever your ship is sharing an overmap tile with. You sit in orbit alongside it, you do not have to dock.

A survey takes 60 seconds and is cancelled the moment the ship moves, so park first. It pays points and an identical amount in credits, both banked in the console: Print research turns the points into a research-notes document, and Cash out spits the credits out as physical bills.

Those are family rates, so severity and flavour do not matter: a minor electrical storm pays the same as a major one, a tritium nebula the same as any other, and all five planet types the same 500. A contact nobody has surveyed before pays 20% more, and the upgrade nodes below multiply everything by 1.2, 1.5 or 2 in turn. Surveying a space ruin also reveals what it actually is on the chart. The console shows you the exact figure for whatever you are orbiting before you start.

Only one survey console works per ship, and it must be multitooled to your server. Unlinked, you get no payout multipliers and none of your surveys count toward the nodes that require them.

The survey scanner

The Survey Scanners node costs 1,000 points and sits behind Upgraded Parts, so it is a second-hour purchase. Bolt the machine down, switch it on, and it turns electricity into points by itself; right-click it to print out what it has banked.

Two parts set the rate:

• Servo tier sets the base yield: 50, 100, 150 or 200 points per two-second cycle.
• Matter bin tier multiplies that by one to four, and decides how long a location lasts. Value falls one percent per cycle wherever you are parked, and the machine shuts itself off when the spot drops below a fifth of its worth. A basic bin exhausts a spot in under three minutes; the best bin runs for roughly a quarter of an hour at four times the rate. The counter is tied to where you are, so land somewhere new and it starts fresh.

A better micro-laser cuts the power draw, which matters: a scanner on the cheapest laser pulls about 10 kW, and the best one brings that down to about 4 kW. That is a real load on a ship's grid, so watch the SMES charge.

Anomaly cores in the destructive analyzer

Feed a refined anomaly core to the destructive analyzer and it pays 200 points. Nine core types exist and each pays once per techweb, so the full set is 1,800. Load an item and the analyzer tells you what it is worth before you pull the trigger.

Getting there is about 240 points of bluespace research: Bluespace Theory, Applied Bluespace, then Anomaly Research for the refinery. Raw cores come from anomalies that turn up aboard your ship as a dynamic event, and from research-themed loot caches.

Cores are the only thing deconstruction pays for. The analyzer's other job (revealing hidden nodes from illegal or alien hardware) is often the more valuable one.

Dissection

Any crew can perform Dissection on a corpse with no research at all, and it climbs a four-rung ladder as you research surgery. Each rung replaces the last, so you only ever see the best one you own.

Advanced Surgery also wants the human autopsy experiment done, which you were going to do anyway for its 2,000 points. Counting its prerequisite, going from the 10-point dissection to the 1,000-point one costs about 120 points. One of the better returns on the tree.

Species change the figure: monkeys pay a fifth, most animals a sixth, jelly and pod people double, golems and zombies triple, abductors quadruple, adult xenomorphs five times and a royal xenomorph ten times. Each body can only be dissected once, and the result comes out as research notes.

Robbing somebody

Right-click another ship's R&D server in combat mode and hold still for ten seconds to strip 2,500 points off their techweb and print it as a document you can carry home. They have to actually have the points, and you can repeat it while they do. Destroying the server outright drops its source disk on the floor, and that disk is their entire tech tree.

What does not pay

Mining, missions and trading pay in ore, credits and vouchers, never in research points. No trader sells points or nodes either; what the Skunkworks at Quartermain Depot and the other stalls stock are job packs, which hand you a department's circuit boards outright so you can skip the research instead of doing it.

Bitrunning has its own separate pool of points on the quantum server, which only buys domains and never touches your techweb. The one exception is a reformatted technology disk, dropped by a top-graded run on a medium-or-harder domain, which unlocks one hidden experimental node for free when uploaded at an R&D console.

Spending points

Nodes are bought at the R&D console, one at a time, by hand, or queued and bought for you.

The research queue

The Nanotrasen Science Hub app is the other way into your techweb. Run it on a computer console, point it at your server with a multitool like any other machine, and its node list gains Enqueue buttons the wall-mounted R&D console does not have. A queued node researches itself within seconds of the points arriving, so a crew can line up what it wants and go fly the ship.

It also solves the survey-gated nodes. Queue the elite survey console or a transporter tier, go and do the surveys it wants, and it unlocks the moment the last one lands. Survey requirements are checked when the node is actually researched, not just when the button is drawn.

Department access is cheap

What your crew can build is gated by how far up the tree you have climbed, not by which hull you bought, and the inherited /tg/station tree is cheap, mostly 40 to 200 points a node. Robotics and the botany root are free from the start; Hydroponics is 80, Cytology 80, Xenobiology 120, Gene Engineering 160. Standing up a department is an afternoon's work, not a fortune. The expensive nodes are the Voidcrew ones, and they are what the big faucets are for.

Ship systems worth buying

All the ship combat hardware is covered properly in Ship Combat.

The radar ladder

Three nodes, each widening how far an active scan reaches from the helm. They unlock no printable object. The ship simply gets better sensors. See Piloting Your Ship.

The survey console ladder

The upgrades to the survey console are gated on what you have already surveyed as well as on points, so they cannot be bought out of order.

That star is the one at the dead centre of the map, so the elite tier means a run into the lawless ring and a minute of holding perfectly still once you are there.

Transporters

Three more nodes at 12,000, 20,000 and 30,000 points, gated on planets and asteroid fields surveyed, sitting behind both the advanced survey console and bluespace travel. They are the most expensive thing a crew can research and they are covered in full on Transporters.

Your first thirty minutes

1. Print the R&D Kit at the autolathe and build the console, protolathe, imprinter and server. Put the source disk in the server. That is the step that switches everything on, so do it first and the rest is easy.
2. Multitool the server, then the R&D console. Nothing works until they are talking.
3. Print an Experi-Scanner. Built after the server is up it links itself; built before, the server claims it when the disk goes in. Examine it to check. Then pick an experiment off the console's list and go do it. That is 2,000 points.
4. Buy the Orbital survey console node for 40 points, print its board on the imprinter, build it, and multitool it to the server.
5. Fly to the nearest nebula, storm or unknown signal and survey it while the pilot holds station. Print the notes into the R&D console and cash the credits into the bank.
6. Tell whoever goes planetside to bring back any paperwork they find. One 10,000-point document beats everything else on this page put together.