Trader Outposts

Three trader outposts sit permanently on the overmap, one per zone band. They never move, never unload, and cannot be destroyed. Each is a market, a contract board, a repair stop and a safe room in one, and each stocks a different tier of goods depending on how dangerous the space around it is.

The three outposts

All three broadcast their positions constantly, so they show up on your helm's contact list from anywhere in the galaxy with no survey required. The ladder is deliberate: Quartermain is where a crew with no research bay buys the thruster and turret boards it could never print, and the Undertow is the only counter in the galaxy selling shield generators, interdiction systems and syndicate suits, for vouchers, mostly.

Docking and getting inside

Fly to the outpost and dock like anywhere else. Every ship that arrives gets its own private hangar berth, up to six at once; if all six are taken, traffic control tells you to come back later. Very large hulls are refused outright.

Your berth is not the shop. To get to the market you use the hangar elevator: step into the marked alcove beside it, use the wall panel, and pick a floor. Floor 0 is the concourse; floors 1 through 6 are the berths, and the panel marks which one your own ship is parked in. The ride takes a few seconds and moves everything standing in the alcove, so crates and dragged bodies come along. There is a panel in the concourse for going back.

Shopping

The trader is a person standing behind a counter, not a vending machine. Click them and a menu opens with Trade, Talk, and (on the main trader) Contracts.

The Trade window has two halves: the shop, sorted into category tabs, and the trader's wanted ledger of what they are buying. Prices are fixed. Some lines want credits off your ID's account, some want vouchers out of your pocket, some want both, and a few want a barter. Hold the asked item in your hand and swap it across.

Stock is a single pool every crew at that outpost draws from, arranged in three shelves. Core stock is the same every round and restocks. Rotating stock is a handful of items rolled fresh each round, one or two units each. Rare stock is one or two showcase items, single unit, gone when somebody buys it. One credit-priced item goes on special each round at 15–30% off.

Roughly every 22 minutes a supply convoy arrives: shelves refill, a sold-out rotating slot is replaced, the special rerolls, and the trader starts buying again. Every berthed ship is notified, which is a decent reason to swing back through.

The stalls

Each outpost's concourse has its own side vendors, each with their own shopkeep and their own stock:

The Chowder Pot at Halcyon is the waystation diner, and the menu is a quality ladder with real teeth. Counter grub is cheap factory food. It fills you up and does nothing else. The blue plate specials and the chef's table come off Roux's own pass, and a meal an actual cook made gives a genuine mood lift that scales with the depth of the recipe, so the expensive plate really does eat better than the hot dog. The pantry shelf stocks the raw staples a ship galley cannot print, flour, rice, milk, eggs, butter, enzyme, meat, even monkey cubes, which makes Halcyon the place to provision a working kitchen. Roux also buys home-cooked dishes, hand-made pies and whole cakes over the counter. She pays for real cooking only: vending-machine food is refused, and so are her own plates coming back around.

The Fitting Bay at Quartermain has a MOD fitting bench, a powered frame you back into while still wearing your suit. It swaps modules for free with no screwdriver work, sells permanent upgrades (plating, module capacity, actuator tuning, power regulation, cell swaps) and per-visit servicing, gives away paint and engraving, and trickle-charges your cell while the frame is shut. It will not convert a suit from one theme to another. For the tier Wick won't touch, syndicate and elite chassis, Interdyne and infiltrator control units, the antag modules. Go to Vex: 3600 credits plus 2 vouchers for a syndicate chassis, 5400 plus 3 for an elite, 5 vouchers for a fully equipped syndicate suit.

The Chop Shop at the Undertow is the galaxy's only cyberware parlor, a neon annex off the Dregs. Splice sells chrome implants off four shelves, street chrome for credits, pro chrome for credits or vouchers, military and legend chrome for vouchers only, and the Chrome Cradle in the middle of the room does the installing: you lie on the slab, pick a piece off the rack, and the rig does the surgery in seconds. Removals, repairs and ink re-keying run on the same console, an ammunition shelf keeps implanted weapons fed, and Splice buys back pulled street chrome at about half price. The full catalog is on Cyberware.

Vex's own shelves carry the other half of the deep-band trade: exploit software for ship hacking, from 500-credit lightshow cartridges to the voucher-only exotics, plus the electronic-warfare suite board itself. See Ship Hacking.

Services

Halcyon and Quartermain both have a neural schematic imprinter, which burns a weapon schematic into your memory for the round and shreds the paper. The Undertow does not have one, so a red-tier schematic bought from Vex has to be imprinted elsewhere. See Money & Trade.

Every outpost has a free first-aid locker and a heavy-duty recovery sleeper. The locker is an ordinary closet and taking the supplies is expected; the sleeper is fixed machinery and hitting it is not.

Nobody goes hungry at a market, either: Halcyon has the diner, Sarge sells field rations off a Mess Tin shelf at Quartermain (with snack and hot-dog machines beside the coffee corner), and the Dregs runs a heat-lamp Greasy Spoon menu at the Undertow next to its own hot-dog machine.

Quartermain, and only Quartermain, has rental stash lockers. Swipe an ID, pay 150 credits, and it is yours for the round, indestructible, unpryable, and immune to an emag. The lock is the entire product.

Charts and rumours

Every outpost sells intel, and this is the shelf that changes how you play the round. All three draw from the same galaxy-wide pool, so a tip bought over the safe outer-ring counter can point straight into the deep. You buy the intel before you commit to the flight.

Star charts reveal every contact in a whole zone band at once: 1200 credits for the outer ring, 2400 for the contested band, 2 vouchers for the lawless deep.

Word on the lanes costs 1500 credits anywhere. The trader marks one uncharted signal on your helm and names the band it sits in.

Ruin charts are the real prize. Each names a specific rare derelict that does not exist until somebody buys the tip. Purchase uploads a sealed rumour to your ship, and the helm gets a reveal button that spawns the ruin, marks it on your chart, and paints the signal gold. Reveal it when your crew is ready, not before.

There is exactly one chart per ruin per round, galaxy-wide. Once any outpost sells it, that trail is cold everywhere.

More on what is inside them is on Ruins.

Trader contracts

The main trader's Contracts menu is a second, separate mission board. Four offers stay posted, and they pay in goods off that trader's own shelves rather than money, which makes them worth taking when your account is empty.

The mix is supply requests, salvage and kill contracts on ruins, and courier runs hauling a sealed freight pod to a different outpost. Halcyon also posts angling requests and kitchen orders, because it has a fishing stall and a diner. A kitchen order wants dishes cooked by an actual person at a stated recipe depth. Factory food is refused at turn-in, and so are plates bought off Roux's own counter, so somebody on your crew genuinely has to cook.

Pay quality follows difficulty by reaching deeper into the shop: easy contracts off the core shelf, medium off the rotating stock, and the hardest out of a back room of items that trader never sells at any price. Chasing a trader's board is the only way to get those.

Turn them in at any outpost trader or at your own mission pad. Except courier runs, whose pod only opens at its destination. See Missions.

Violence

Outposts are indestructible. Walls, doors, machines and traders all shrug off weapons fire, so there is nothing to break into and nothing to rob. The deterrent is economic instead.

Attacking outpost property (or attacking another visitor inside the outpost) earns you a strike. The first two only get you a warning, with the turrets swinging around to point at you. On the third, three things happen at once:

• You are personally marked. Every trader on the station refuses to serve you for the rest of the round.
• Every ship your crew belongs to is put under a trade embargo for 15 minutes.
• The outpost's turrets go lethal on you and anyone else aboard your embargoed ship.

The loiterers hanging around each concourse, an off-duty pirate at the Undertow, a mechanic at Halcyon, a dockhand at Quartermain. Are the one exception. They are squatters rather than staff, they cannot be hurt anyway, and swinging at one does not count against you.

Fuel and gas sold at outposts, and the exotic gases Vex buys by the tank, are covered on Fuel & Gas. Deeds for founding your own station are sold at Halcyon and Quartermain and covered on Player Outposts.