Living
Flying together
Fleets, chat rooms, syndicates and contracts — including the escrow that makes strangers usable.
Fleets
A fleet is a group with shared targeting: the leader can call a target and everybody sees it. Assist is the shortcut — lock what a friendly is locking, in one act, from a right-click on their bracket.
Assisting is not a way past any rule. It takes the lock and stops one step short of firing, and if you were already engaged elsewhere that engagement ends rather than following you onto a target you never chose.
Chat
Every map has a local channel, and you can make your own rooms. A room can carry a password, it has moderators, and moderators can mute and remove people. The last member out closes the room.
Syndicates
A syndicate is a player corporation with a treasury: members can pay in, officers can pay out, and every movement is a ledger row. There is a per-member withdrawal ceiling, because a treasury one person can empty is not a treasury.
Contracts
A contract is how you pay somebody you do not know. Both sides put something in escrow before anybody flies, and the server holds it.
| Kind | What it is | Built |
|---|---|---|
| Courier | carry this there, and here is what it is worth | yes, end to end |
| Mercenary | a job with real escrow and four ways to end | yes |
| Escort | stay with somebody for a journey | not yet |
| Bounty | a price on a named pilot | not yet |
The collateral on a courier run is derived, not chosen. It is set so that stealing the cargo is arithmetically worse than delivering it — a courier who runs off with the goods loses more than the run was worth. That is what lets you hand a stranger something valuable.
Standing
What you do to a faction is remembered. Standing decides whether that faction's patrols open fire on you, and it carries a military rank that opens forward posts in the deep. Factions are only formally at war in the Altum and the Abyssus.