Flying

Your first hour

What the game is, and the shortest honest path from undocking to earning.

Argus Dominion is a persistent-world space game. One universe, one economy, no instances, no shards. Everything you fly is something somebody built, everything you lose is gone, and the record of both is public.

It is played from a top-down camera over a flat plane. You do not fly the ship with the keyboard — you tell it where to go and it goes, the way a ship does. Fights are won by range, angle and what you fitted, not by reflexes.

The first ten minutes

1. Pick a faction. It decides which ships you can buy and who shoots at you later, and it is the one choice on this page you cannot casually undo.
2. You start docked at a harbour — a Portus. Nothing in a harbour can shoot you, which is the point of it.
3. Undock. The station is behind you and the gate is a long way ahead; both are things you warp to rather than fly to.
4. Find the belt. It sits on the far side of the harbour from the gate, so you never cross it by accident on the way out.
5. Shoot a rock until your hold is full, fly back, dock, sell. That is the whole loop, and every other loop in the game is a longer version of it.

The three things that will surprise you

• A harbour belt is not safe. The rocks are on the far side of the Raptores crews that live between the station and the field. The first belt you fly to is on the far side of the first fight you pick.
• Warp goes to things, not to coordinates. You warp to a gate, a station, an anomaly — something the map knows about. Empty sky is somewhere you fly.
• A harbour pays almost nothing, deliberately. Roughly a thousand credits an hour, against half a million on the shore. Safety is priced, and what you are buying in a harbour is the chance to learn the verbs before anything costs you.

Where to go next