Cargo & Commodities

Anything worth hauling has to fit in your hold, and anything in your hold dies with your hull. That’s the whole economy in one sentence — everything else is detail.

The hold

Every hull that’s built to carry cargo has a hold, measured in plain units. Fill it with any mix of commodities you like; there’s no sorting by type, just space. Run it empty and you’re a pure combat loadout — run it full and you’re a target worth boarding.

What’s in it

Commodities come from three places: things you mine out of a belt, things you salvage off a derelict, and things you take off a wreck you made yourself. All of it pays off the same way — credits per unit, no haggling, no grading. Every commodity carries its own mark — the little silhouette beside its name in the dock’s cargo table, and again on the toast when you fly through a canister and scoop it — so a full hold reads at a glance without reading a word. What you’re hauling:

• Ferrite — the baseline ore. Common, cheap per unit, and the reason the hold exists in the first place.
• Gem — a rare strike. It doesn’t replace a Ferrite haul, it rides along on top of one: mine normally and sometimes the rock throws in a Gem for free.
• Generic Salvage — stripped parts and plating off a derelict hull. Unglamorous, still worth the trip.
• Ancient/Exotic Salvage — the rare version of the same proc. Most wrecks give you scrap; some give you something nobody can date.
• Civilian Goods — furniture, ration packs, someone’s mail. Every civilian hull you scan is carrying crates of it, and it’s worth almost nothing per crate. If you shoot a freighter open expecting treasure, this is what you get, and it serves you right.

The mineral ladder

Ferrite is only the floor. Five tiers of ore exist, and where you can mine each one is tied straight to how dangerous the system is:

Tier	Mineral	Where
T1	Ferrite	every belt, everywhere
T2	Silica	common, but only in belts that carry it
T2	Ice	cold outer belts only
T3	Titanium	frontier belts
T4	Iridium	rare belts, thin even where found
T5	Voidite	only near a black hole

A belt has one dominant ore (most of its rocks) and sometimes a trace ore (a smaller share of rocks) — work a belt long enough and you’ll pull both. The trace is why a belt is worth a second pass instead of a one-and-done strip. Danger and richness climb together: the safest belts only ever give up Ferrite and its trace, the deadliest ones sit on Voidite and nothing lower.

The good rock sits where the guns are

That climb isn’t a suggestion, it’s a hard ceiling on every belt in the galaxy: how dangerous a system is caps how good its ore can get. A safe system never rolls better than Silica. A frontier belt can tempt you with Titanium or Iridium. Voidite exists in exactly one place, and it’s the one place with a black hole hanging over it. There’s no quiet corner of known space where the rare stuff turns up cheap — if a belt is rich, that richness is the reason something is shooting at the miners working it.

That’s why the loop isn’t “find the best belt and camp it.” It’s “decide how much risk this haul is worth,” every time you point a hold at a belt past the safe ones.

Wrecks spill

Destruction isn’t tidy. Kill a ship and part of whatever it was carrying survives the blast — a canister tumbling where the hull came apart, holding a share of the cargo plus whatever plating and parts the wreck itself gave up. Fly over it and your hold scoops what fits; if you’re full it keeps the rest, so making space and coming back beats watching it drift. It won’t wait forever — a canister that sits too long is gone.

You can’t tell what’s inside from range. A canister reads as a canister until it’s in your hold — the aftermarket keeps promising scanner hardware that reads manifests at a distance, and hasn’t delivered.

Two things worth knowing about who drops what. A working hauler spills what it was hauling, which is exactly why raiders hunt them. And pirate hulls are flying strongboxes: raiders carry their plunder with them, so a dead raider always pays out over and above the scrap — ore they stole from someone, sometimes something better. Hunting the hunters is a living.

The risk

Cargo is not banked anywhere until you sell it. It rides in your hold the whole way home, through however much pirate space sits between the belt and the buyer. Lose the hull, lose the hold — the value only becomes yours the moment it’s off the ship, and no canister of yours outlives you: what spills from other ships’ wrecks died with THEIR ledger, not yours. That’s what makes a loaded run worth escorting and an empty one worth risking alone.