Player Stations

You can build your own station in an asteroid belt and let it work the rocks while you fly on.

Staking a claim

Find a system with a belt and build there. A claim costs Alloy Plate out of your hold plus a credit fee. The platform anchors into an open slot near the belt. If the belt is crowded and nothing clears the other stations’ dock zones, you have to wait until there’s room.

You get one station per system, so pick where it counts.

What it is

The station flies your flag. Fit it with guns and they fire on anyone hostile to you, the same as your own standings decide. It sits out in the belt where the ore is.

Working the rocks

The platform mines on its own clock: a steady trickle of ore, second by second, straight into its hold. There’s no shift to schedule and no button to press — as long as it has power, it pulls.

Two things stop the trickle. A full hold — the platform won’t mine ore it has nowhere to put, and it starts again the moment a hauler makes room. And a dead reserve — a dark station does no work at all, and whatever cells arrive feed the reactor before the production line, because ore can wait and a reactor can’t.

You don’t have to babysit any of it. The books keep moving whether you’re in the system or halfway across the map: stock accrues, upkeep burns, deliveries land. Come back after a long haul and the hold reflects the hours, not your absence.

When someone comes for it

Nobody can blow your station up. That is not a boast about how tough it is — it is how stations work, yours and theirs alike (see Battle Stations). What a raider can do is beat the shield flat and then keep shooting, and every point of hull that comes off dumps the same share of your hold into space.

Run the bar to nothing and your platform is vented: dark, guns cold, hold empty. It will sit there dark forever if you let it. It is not waiting on a timer and it will not fix itself — it is waiting on a delivery. Haul stock back in and the lights come up exactly as far as what you brought.

So the thing worth defending is not really the platform. It is the road to it.

Shipping the stock out

You don’t have to fly the ore home yourself. Once your platform’s hold has a real load in it, a drone launches on its own, docks at the nearest friendly market in the system, sells, and banks the credits to you — over and over, no orders needed.

The run is the weak link. A drone that gets shot down between your platform and the market takes the load with it — the sale happens at the dock, not at launch. That’s the road you’re defending.

If nothing in the system buys, a bigger hauler goes instead: one built for the crossing, carrying the transponder a gate actually honors. It docks and loads the same way, then rides a starlane to a market in another system entirely, picked by how many jumps the run is, not how it looks on the chart. Watch a busy gate and you’ll see it settle into the sender ring like any other traffic and get thrown down the lane (see Starlanes & Stargates) — the crossing itself is a formality. What matters is the far end: that load lands in the buyer’s stock on schedule whether or not you’re anywhere near the gate to see it happen. Nothing that clears the throat is lost to the void anymore, cargo included.

Running a repair pad

Ore is not the only thing your platform sells. When a prospector working the belt takes fire, it runs for the nearest friendly guns and parks in the dock ring until the shooting has been quiet for a while (see When the Belt Fights Back). If those are your guns, your crews go out and patch it while it sits there — and they bill for it.

They charge exactly what you’d pay at anyone else’s dock: one credit per point of hull and armor put back (see Trading). The work is slow, slower than a fitted Repair Bot, so one rescue is worth roughly what you’d earn for killing the raider that caused it. The credits land the moment the ship undocks — whole points only, and a stay too short to finish one is on the house.

Two rules on who gets served. It has to be your pad: another faction’s station patches its own visitors and keeps its own money. And the visitor cannot be someone hostile to you — your crews are not going out to mend a hull that shoots at you.

None of it needs you present. It’s the same quiet ledger as the ore: come back from a long haul and the balance reflects the traffic that came through while you were gone.

Which is the real argument for where you build. A claim on a dead ring mines rock. A claim on a lane where somebody is being hunted mines rock and runs a casualty ward, and the second one can pay better than the belt does.

Keeping your own lights on

Your platform burns Power Cells to run, the same as everyone else’s. Cells are refined from ice, ice comes out of cold outer belts, and a station does not care that you are busy — the reserve goes down on its own schedule and when it reaches nothing, your claim goes dark and stops working the rocks.

Nothing you can build changes that. It is not a difficulty setting or a tax on players; it is what a station is. The only question is whether the cells get there, which makes running one a standing logistical commitment rather than a thing you build once and forget.

You are not the only one who can make that delivery. A station short of cells sends for them the same way a refinery sends for ore: it looks for somewhere nearby holding some, and fetches. Cells arrive in the cargo hold like any other freight, and the station takes them into its reserve itself — which is why a dark station comes back the moment a load lands, without you being there.

That cuts both ways, and it is the shape of the whole grid. Somewhere in every cluster is the works that assembles the cells everything else burns. Cut the routes to it, or kill it outright, and nothing goes dark that instant — every reserve simply stops being topped up, and the lights go out one station at a time in the order their buffers run dry. A power plant is the quietest and most valuable target on the board.

A station also feeds its own reserve before it feeds its production line. Ore can wait; a dead reactor cannot, because a dark station does no work at all.

You are not the only prospector

The factions read the same charts you do. Give them time and money and they will stake claims of their own — a survey crew eyes a promising belt a jump or two from home, and a while later there’s a mining platform on the ring where there wasn’t one. A staked belt is spoken for: nobody builds a second claim on somebody’s rock, you included, so the good belts go to whoever moves first. Watch the traffic — a faction that keeps eyeing the same system is telling you where it’s going next.

One catch: a station you build now is gone when you reload. Saving your world comes later. For this run, it’s yours. The factions’ claims reset the same way — every run, the land rush starts over.