The Wave has been moving through the arm for three years without stopping. It leaves behind intact docks, intact piers, and not a single person. No one has seen it take anything. There were no negotiations.
Combat is real-time, but spacebar pauses: orders are issued on pause, like in genre classics.
The four points below are all you need to start. The game prompts the rest as you go, on the line at the bottom of the screen.
CORP insurance does not cover acts of God, and the Wave is classified as such.
Thus, the lines are held by those with nothing to lose: lone ships, three-man crews, sealed cargo.
You are one of them. Four sectors to the Frontier, no shipping beyond.
No one has returned from there, and that is considered a good sign, because there is no other.
5 · REACTORBottom left. Clicking a cell adds or removes power from a system, clicking the system icon adds a bar, right-clicking the row removes one — as in FTL. Right-clicking a weapon depowers it. There is less power than systems — that is the choice.
6 · WEAPON POWER HAS TWO FLOORSThe reactor feeds the WEAPONS system, and that system feeds each gun separately. A notch taken off the shields will not land on a gun by itself: put it into WEAPONS in the reactor panel first. The gun’s ⚡ button can also do it for you: if WEAPONS is tight and the reserve has room to spare, it takes what is missing and says so. When the system is at its level ceiling the reserve will not fit there at all — raise the level at a trader or with the “▲ LVL.N” button.
7 · UPGRADESScrap is not just for shops. In the reactor panel, use the '▲ LVL.N' button to upgrade systems outside of combat. Click the '?' for system details and upgrade benefits.
8 · SHOP INVENTORYShops sell weapons, drones, augments, and crew: a mercenary is extra hands to repair, fight fires, and fight. Purchased augments appear in the “AUGMENTS” panel below weapons, along with their descriptions.
9 · STANDING WATCHA crewman standing in a room does more than repair it: in the gun deck he speeds up weapon charging, in the shield room he speeds up layer regrowth, in the engine room he adds evasion, at the helm he takes the wheel, and a second man in the medbay works as an orderly. The size of the bonus rests on the skill of whoever is standing there, and it is shown right in the reactor panel on the WATCH line.
10 · CREWOn the right. Select a crew member and click (or right-click) one of your rooms — they go there to repair the system, put out a fire or patch a breach. For several people, Shift-click or drag a box. STATIONS saves where everyone stands, RETURN sends them all back after a fire or a boarding. Work raises skills: repairs get faster, a pilot adds evasion.
11 · DOORSDoors stand between rooms — narrow panels in the shared walls. A click on a door closes it: air stops flowing, fire goes no further, and enemy boarders have to break it down. Sealing a burning room and letting the fire suffocate is cheaper than putting it out with people.
12 · AIRLOCKSA hatch in the outer wall of each of your rooms (top for the upper row, bottom for the lower) opens the ship to space. The air goes, fire dies, enemy boarders suffocate — but your own people cannot breathe there either.
13 · BOARDINGThe enemy is boarding directly into a room from higher sectors. Send crew to intercept or vent the air.
14 · RETREATThe jump charge builds while the engines have power and someone is at the helm. Once it is full, you can leave the fight without loot. A damaged enemy will try the same: knock out his engines.
15 · EMPTY ROOMSFour rooms on the ship are marked “FREE”. Drones, teleporter, cloaking and hacking are bought from a trader and go exactly there — and their power has to come off shields or weapons.
11a · DECKRooms differ in size and do not lie on an even grid: the engine room runs along the stern, the shield room is twice as wide as its neighbors, the helm sits apart in the bow. The deck outline is stepped and follows the hull, so some rooms have their airlock above and others below, and the length of the shared wall with a neighbor decides where the door goes. Other ships have layouts of their own — from a short launch to a barge with two large cargo holds.
16 · SENSORSWhile they have power the enemy ship is readable: rooms, systems, damage. Level 2 shows their crew, level 3 the charge on their weapons. Lose the sensors or enter a nebula and the enemy ship becomes a dark rectangle; you fire blind.
17 · VOLLEYThe AUTO button in the weapons header turns autofire off. Charged weapons then wait: press VOLLEY (or Q) and everything ready goes out within one second. Shields eat two weapons fired one after another singly, but three at once break through. Clicking a charge bar fires one weapon; keys 1–4 fire a charged weapon and put an uncharged one on aim. With autofire on, 1–4 put a weapon on aim, as in FTL: the number, then an enemy room. Right-click or Esc cancels. Esc with no window open brings up a menu listing every key.
18 · HACKINGBought from a trader. Press “HACKING”, click an enemy room — a drone flies over and latches on for one drone part. After that the button kills that system dead for a few seconds: shields drop, weapons lose charge, engines stop, the helm builds no jump. The drone stays on the hull to the end of the fight.
19 · SECTORS VARYA Wave zone drives you twice as fast, a nebula blinds sensors and cuts shields for both sides, a trade arm puts up more shops and lowers prices. The sector type shows in the header and on the map.
20 · CARGO HOLD AND TRADEThe last room is the cargo hold. You buy goods at a shop and sell them at another: the price of the same crate drifts from sector to sector, and the whole run lives off the difference. Goods with a foreign mark are worth more, but an inspection will seize them, and your money with them.
21 · RATIONSThe crew has to be fed: every jump eats rations, and the more hands aboard, the faster. Run out and the crew weakens with every jump and repairs at half strength. Rations cost next to nothing; forgetting them costs a lot.
22 · QUESTSSome beacons hand out a chain of two to four steps. The next step waits on the map under a star, the quest log is under the sector map. A chain pays noticeably better than a chance find, but it takes you off the straight road, and the Wave is right behind.
23 · BERTHSA beacon marked ⌂ is a place you can go ashore. Its name is written on the map beforehand, so it is a decision and not a surprise: “the manifest archive” and “the stranded tug” are different evenings. Inside there is not one card but a scene: the approach, a junction, rooms, the way out. The scene remembers what you did: scan the berth on approach and you leave unnoticed; break a signal seal and they will be waiting at the airlock. Some of it the whole run remembers: a broken corporate seal surfaces at customs two sectors later.
24 · BLUE OPTIONSEvents sometimes carry lines locked behind a system, an augment or a race in the crew: “needs: sensors”, “needs: Welders in crew”. Keeping an off-profile hand aboard is sometimes worth more than one more bar of shields.
25 · PRIZESAfter a fight this shows what came off the enemy hull. A ship taken by boarding gives three times as much: the cargo hold, the guns and the augments — a destroyed one gives none of that.
26 · MIND CONTROL AND ARTILLERYMind control, for one drone part, turns an enemy hand against his own for nine seconds — or shuts down a boarder on your deck. Artillery is a gun on the hull: it asks for no power, waits for no aiming, and fires on its own once every twenty seconds.
27 · CLONE BAYReplaces medbay. Does not heal, but reconstructs the dead — even those left on enemy ships. Clone is weaker: skills lose a third.
28 · ZOOMThe mouse wheel zooms the scene toward the point under the cursor, dragging moves it, the + − 0 keys and the three buttons in the lower right corner do the same. On zoom, labels and doors are redrawn rather than stretched — a room can be looked at properly.
29 · CREW FACESEvery hand is dressed by race and by shade: Welders in rust, Anox in blue, Caissons in amber, Ducters in violet and smallest of all, Heavies the largest. At zoom the name shows above the figure, and for the selected one — race and strong suit. Double-click a line in the crew list to move the camera to that person.
31 · BEACON CONDITIONSSome beacons have conditions of their own, and the node card names them BEFORE you jump: an asteroid belt (rocks hit both ships), a red giant (flares set compartments alight — seal the bulkheads and vent the burning one), a pulsar (the pulse drops shields on both sides, so guns and evasion decide it here), an orbital battery (it belongs to someone and fires on whoever is hostile to its owner — the card says whether it will work on you or on him). This is a choice of route, not luck: conditions are marked on the map.
32 · SHIP WITH NO CREWFrom the second sector on you meet automatons: there are no people aboard at all, and the ship header says so. Nobody there repairs, fights fires or patches breaches — a knocked-out system stays out for the rest of the fight, a fire keeps burning, a breach never closes. Ion, fire and shield-piercing work twice as well against them. But there is no talking either: no ransom, no surrender, and nobody to seize by boarding — you have to take the hull down. In exchange they are tougher and carry one extra shield layer, and a mind block is useless on them.
30 · HANGAR AND ACHIEVEMENTSA run starts with the choice of hull. One is open at first — the other five come for specific deeds: clear a sector without a single fight, board three ships, earn 80 scrap on resale, destroy twenty hulls in total, take the flagship apart. Progress lives in the browser and survives both death and a closed tab. Each hull has its own deck: “Cinder” has nine rooms and a teleporter and drones simply will not fit on it; “Dry Remainder” has two full-width cargo holds; “Maw” has a wide weapons room for three guns and double the repair price.