Buying & Upgrading Ships
Ships are bought with ship parts: physical items you find out in the galaxy, lock in an extraction case, and carry home. Parts bank to your account rather than your character, so they survive the round and pay for the next ship, and everything you buy stays bought. For the hulls themselves and their prices, see the Ship Catalog.
Ship parts
Parts come in four classes, and hulls ask for specific ones: a Goon needs 5 trade, 3 misc and 2 science, and no amount of combat parts will substitute.
| Class | Colour | Usually found in |
|---|---|---|
| Combat | Red | Wrecks, armories, syndicate sites, bounties on hostile ships |
| Science | Blue | Laboratories, research sites, occult ruins |
| Trade | Gold | Stations, trade posts, cargo and industrial ruins |
| Misc | Grey | General loot, derelicts, expedition caches |
Parts are not the credits your crew spends in-round on cargo and trade goods. Those are a separate, ship-level economy covered in Money & Trade. Everyone who plays a character gets one part of a random class at round end regardless of how the round went, but that is a floor, not an income.
Getting parts home
A part in your backpack is worth nothing. To bank it you need an extraction case, which you request with the Request Extraction Case verb under the IC tab. It holds five parts, accepts nothing else, and locks with a five-digit PIN if you use it in hand. Parts inside are banked when your ship completes a bluespace jump from the helm, or automatically at round end.
The case is the whole system
Loose parts are never extracted. You can carry only one case, only the first case found on you is emptied, and each player banks once per round, and you have to be alive for it, so nothing is recovered from a corpse.
The case is also a target: it can be stolen off your body, unscrewed and hacked open with a multitool over about forty seconds, or broken permanently with an emag. Do not walk into a boarding action with five parts on your back.
The Withdraw Ship Part verb, also under IC, pulls a part back out of your account as an item. That is how you give parts to another player. Hand it over and let them bank it themselves.
The shipyard
From the lobby, the join menu has a Start Your Own Ship section with an Open Shipyard button. Everything about buying a ship happens in that one window, because it is the only place that shows you what you are buying.
It has three tabs beside the map preview. Hull is the shelf: every ship with its part cost, crew capacity, slot count and theme count. Theme lists that hull's whole-ship variants, with the free default pre-selected. Upgrades gives one row per slot and the modules that fit it, with one free default in each.
The preview panel draws the actual ship map, and it is live: change the theme and the whole hull redraws, pick a different module and that room changes in place. Use it. A hull's description tells you less than its floor plan does.
Buying anything asks for confirmation and tells you the cost. Purchases are one-time and permanent: a theme or module you unlock is yours on every future ship of that class. Selecting is separate from buying, so you can own four modules for a slot and still fly the default. Once the hull is paid for, LAUNCH SHIP appears next to Cancel.
Look before you spend
Switching hulls in the shipyard costs nothing and the preview works on hulls you do not own. Read every floor plan first.
What happens when you launch
Your ship is built to order (hull, theme and the module in each slot) and placed in the safe outer ring of the overmap. You spawn aboard as its captain, so you set its course and manage its crew. It then appears in every other player's join menu with its job list, so people can pick a role and spawn straight in. If you want a crew, launch early and put something useful in the ship's memo. Then read Piloting, Ship Systems and Ship Combat.
Modular hulls: slots and modules
A modular hull is a fixed frame with empty pockets in it. The frame owns everything the ship cannot fly without (helm, engines, power, air, airlocks and at least one cryopod) so a bare hull with every slot on its default module is a working ship. Slots are the rooms, not the plumbing.
Two rules follow:
- Every module for a slot brings that slot's critical machines. Every Goon engineering module includes a generator and a SMES; every Goon mining module includes an autolathe. You cannot fit yourself out of a power source or a fabricator by picking the wrong room.
- Modules add, they do not subtract from the hull. What a module drops is the other module's contents, not the ship's infrastructure. Swapping the Goon's Prospector Bay for the Freight Dock keeps the autolathe and loses the ore redemption machine.
Some modules also add a job to the manifest, a hydroponics bay brings a Botanist, a brig brings a security role. Those seats stack on top of the theme's crew list, so a fitout choice is a headcount choice too.
Example: the Kilo's modules
The Kilo has three slots. These are all of its options, and a fair sample of what the other hulls look like.
| Slot | Module | Cost | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| Service | Galley | Free | Kitchen line, lounge corner and a boozeomat. |
| Service | Hydroponics Bay | 5 trade | Three trays, seed vendor and a biogenerator. Adds a Botanist. |
| Service | Surgical Suite | 5 misc | Operating table, stasis bed, sleeper and morgue. Adds a Ship's Doctor. |
| Service | Saloon Bar | 3 trade | Jukebox, card table, keg and a stocked bar. |
| Dock | Mining Prep | Free | Autolathe and a stocked materials bench. |
| Dock | Ore Refinery | 9 trade | Ore redemption machine beside the autolathe, smelt and print without flying home. |
| Hold | Freight Stowage | Free | Crates, the mining kit and the emergency internals stash. |
| Hold | Salvage Bay | 5 combat | Spare EVA suit, charging bench, plasma cutter, fulton rig and mining GPS. |
| Hold | Secure Stowage | 3 misc | A personal locker, a secure crate and a floor safe. |
Themes
A theme is a refit of the entire ship, not a paint job on one room. It changes the deck, the walls, the lighting and the fittings bow to stern, and it rewrites the crew list, job titles and starting outfits both. The Kilo's four are the Dust Hauler (free, the default), the Saloon (a timber refit with a piano hall in the cargo bay and a Barkeep on the manifest), the Dollhouse and Factory Fresh. The Phalanx's turn a marine carrier into Fleet Surplus, a spacer family's Hearthship, the garden ship Verdant, or The Springs, a travelling bathhouse with hot pools where the mess used to be.
Each hull's default theme is free; the rest cost parts, and you must own one before you can select it. Themes also decide which modules are on offer, so pick the theme first and the modules after.
The round-start fleet
The ships the round begins with are rolled at random and cost nobody anything: a random hull, a random theme, and a random module in every slot. The fleet is sized to turnout (roughly one hull per six players who ready up, to a maximum of four) and hulls are drawn without repeats, so a three-ship round is three different classes. See the New Player Guide for how to join one.