Game features
Features that shape a match, whether you're playing or hosting.
Map size
A Map Size option scales the playing field — from tight knife-fights to sprawling campaigns. Pick it when you set up the game.
Repeatable maps and seeds
Terrain is built from phased, keyed seeding, so the same seed always lays out the same battlefield (no surprise spawns inside an asteroid). Each map exposes seed options you can set.
Shareable game codes, and saved setups
A game code captures the exact setup — map, size, seed, and options — so crews can replay an identical match. Share the code and everyone gets the same challenge. It does not carry your ship names: those are yours, not part of the match.
The same machinery is also a saved setup. On the server screen: build the setup you want, type a name beside the Presets dropdown, and press the save icon. It is there in the dropdown afterwards — including after restarting the mission. Presets are kept per map, and a saved setup does bring your crew's ship names and hulls back with it.
Loading one puts those ships straight on the picker, so helm can still change them and the change sticks.
If you would rather not press anything, RESTORE_LAST_SETUP brings back whatever the
last game started with, automatically. It is off by default; see
Settings.
Saved setups live in data/missions/common_data/game_codes/, outside the mission folder,
so updating the mission keeps them. A map chooses which options its code carries with a
GameCode: list in its metadata; leave that out and it carries everything on the Options
panel, plus the ships.
The Flight Wing
Pilots have quests of their own. On the flight deck and in the cockpit, the quest screens list your own quests, the game's, and your side's Flight Wing — the quests every pilot of your side shares — rather than the carrier's. Pick a fighter or a shuttle and its sorties appear under Available Quests; accept them right there, on the flight deck or in the seat.
Bonus objectives
Optional bonus objectives give skilled crews extra goals to chase beyond simply surviving.
Quests offered
Peacetime's patrol quests — gunnery drills, hazard rocks, poachers, rescues, tows and the multi-console arcs — are no longer tied to one map. A Quests Offered option on the setup panel deals a random hand of them under Available Quests:
| Quests Offered | What is offered |
|---|---|
| none | nothing |
| few | about a quarter of them |
| some | about half |
| max | all of them |
Each quest waits under Available Quests until somebody Accepts it — select one to read what it asks and what it pays. Its targets only appear once it is taken on, and from then on it is on the Quests tab.
A seed deals the same hand. Set the map's Seed and the same quests come up every time, so a shared game code gives everyone the same set. Seed 0 deals a fresh hand each game.
Where you will find it:
- Peacetime Remastered — Quests Offered defaults to some. It sits beside the map's Quest Size option: Quests Offered picks which quests are offered, Quest Size sets how big each one is (how many drones, rocks or hulks it takes).
- Siege — Quests Offered defaults to none, so a siege plays as it always has until you ask for work between waves. The gunnery hulks are target practice, not part of the assault: you do not have to clear them to win.
A host can change either default in settings.yaml
(SIEGE_JOBS, PR_SIDE_JOBS).
Engineering: wear, tuning and work orders
Systems are no longer just broken or fine. Every room and system on the interior view now has a condition as well as a state, and Engineering can see it and change it.
| Tier | On the grid | Effectiveness |
|---|---|---|
| Damaged | crimson | nothing |
| Worn | gold | 75% |
| Nominal | its own color | 100% |
| Tuned | cyan | 110% |
A damage-control team patches a room; it does not rebuild it. Anything your teams repair in flight comes back worn — working, but not what it was. Only a dockyard repair makes it new. Wear also builds from use: firing a beam wears the beam, launching a torpedo wears the tube, a hit wears the shield facing that took it, and everything ages slowly with the clock — faster at warp than at impulse.
Tuning is the reward for looking after the ship. Send a team to a system that is perfectly healthy and they will bring it above spec — a tuned beam pool fires at 110 percent. Nobody tunes anything on their own initiative: it has to be ordered.
Giving the order. Select a room or system on the interior view and open comms on it. There is one button — Repair or Tune — showing how many teams are already on the job. It opens a short menu: who to send, who to call off, and raise or lower the priority. A job raised above the others turns the nearest team around; teams finish what they were sent to do rather than wandering onto whatever they pass.
The Engineering panel on the right of the console has three tabs:
| Tab | Shows |
|---|---|
| Selected | The room or team you picked on the interior view, in full. |
| Orders | Every work order on the ship, most urgent first, with raise and cancel on each row. |
| Systems | The four system pools, and the eight efficiency numbers — beam, tube, impulse, warp, turn, sensor, and both shield facings — each colored by how healthy it is. |
The cockpit's system lights show the same tiers.
The Director console
The Director console (formerly Console View) lets you pair and rotate multiple views, with a cinematic mode for the big screen — great for spectating, streaming, or running a venue.
Game results & scorekeeping
The end-of-game screen is a tabbed results board, and it keeps score.
The tabs:
| Tab | Shows |
|---|---|
| Summary | Difficulty, enemies destroyed, tonnage destroyed, damage dealt, surrenders, game time. |
| Fleet | Each surviving player bridge ship: kills, tonnage, damage, hull remaining. |
| Air Wing | Each fighter/shuttle pilot by call sign: sorties, kills, tonnage, objectives. |
| Quests | Game and per-ship quests with their final state (secret quests stay hidden). |
| Enemies | Ships destroyed, broken down by race. |
How the score works:
- Kills — every destroyed enemy is credited to the ship (or pilot) that landed the final blow.
- Tonnage — flavor "tonnage sunk," scaled by the destroyed hull's size, so killing a capital ship is worth far more than a fighter.
- Damage dealt — raw damage, so a crew that softens targets for others still shows up on the board.
- Bridge-ship credit and fighter/shuttle (cockpit) credit are tracked separately, so the two never double-count.
Saved every game. Each result is written to a rolling history with an even denser per-ship / per-pilot / per-quest breakdown than the screen displays.
Elite enemies, and what Science can see
Some enemies — Skaraans especially — carry elite abilities. They come in two kinds, and the difference is what your Science officer can do about them.
Always on. Low visibility, main-screen invisibility, drones, anti-mine and anti-torpedo defenses are part of the ship. Nothing switches them on, so there is nothing to catch. Science reads them off the Intel tab as soon as the contact is scanned, which is your warning.
Chosen. Cloak, warp, and the two teleports have to be decided on and powered up first, and an elite can only charge one at a time. The moment it commits, its Status tab says so, with a countdown:
Ready for combat. Preparing to cloak - 18s
That is the window. Call it out, and the bridge gets to act on it — hold fire for the cloak, close the range so the teleport is wasted, or kill it before the charge finishes. Talk it out of the idea — a Tag torpedo, or simply nothing left worth using the ability on — and the line disappears.
The window is wider on lower difficulty and tighter on higher: the same cloak that gives you thirty-five seconds at difficulty 1 gives you fifteen at 11.
Status is worth reading on any enemy, elite or not. When nothing is charging it reports the ship's condition — a damaged system, a shield facet that is down, or one visibly coming back up:
Rebuilding its forward shields.
Running a tournament
The pieces above combine into a simple, fair competition format — handy for convention operators and league nights:
- Set up a match and share its game code (map, size, seed, and options), or just agree on a seed — every crew now plays the identical battlefield and enemy layout.
- Each crew plays the match; the Fleet and Air Wing boards give you kills, tonnage, and damage per ship and per pilot.
- Rank crews (or individual pilots) by whichever number you're scoring on. The saved result gives you the full breakdown after the fact.
Use the Director console for a spectator / big-screen view of the action while crews compete.