PILOT'S HANDBOOK

Space Traders is a physics-flight game over a living trading world. You fly a small ship between seven worlds: buy goods where they're cheap, sell them where they're wanted, fight off the cartels who'd rather take them, and spend the profit making your ship more yours.

It's also a shared world. Everyone in the family flies in the same universe on the same server. You'll see each other's ships, race each other to salvage, watch each other's discoveries appear on your map — and the world keeps moving while you're logged out. Come back after a day away and the game will tell you what you missed.

The Combine built this reach, named everything like a spreadsheet, then vanished mid-shift. Everyone here is descended from the stranded. There's no navy and no law — just docks, debts, and nerve.

You start in a Sparrow Skiff — a cockpit, an engine, and hope — floating near Agricon Prime, the farm world the locals call the Lantern. Do this, in order:

1. Fly. Hold ↑ to thrust. Notice you keep drifting when you let go — there's no friction in space. Turn with ← → and thrust the other way to slow down (or tap ↓ to reverse-thrust). Flying well is half the game.
2. Open the map with M. Find the other worlds. Close it with M or Esc.
3. Dock. Fly close to Agricon Prime until the sidebar says you're in docking range, then press Space.
4. Buy Glowgrain. It's grown here, so it's cheap here. Fill your little hold.
5. Haul it to Mining Station 7 — the industrial world can't feed itself, so it pays well for food. Dock, sell, pocket the difference.
6. Repeat until you can afford your first upgrade — a bigger hold or a better engine. Now you're a trader.

Everything else in this book — combat, exploration, crews, the dark — grows out of that loop. Fuel isn't free and pirates exist, so read on before you wander far.

Panic exit: if you're docked or engaged and hit any arrow key, the ship undocks/disengages and flies. The game assumes that if you're mashing thrust, you mean it.

The top of the sidebar is a drawn schematic of your actual ship. It isn't decoration — it's the instrument panel. You should be able to read your whole situation from the shape, mid-fight, without reading a number:

• Cargo is the bay grid, filling cell by cell in each good's own color — a glance tells you "mostly ore, two relics."
• Shields are the blue envelope around the hull. It thins and fades as charge drops. A bigger shield bank is a visibly thicker envelope.
• Upgrades are size. Bigger engines draw bigger nacelles, a bigger weapon a bigger nose mount, a bigger tank a wider fuel spine. No level badges — the ship just grows.
• Damage flashes the exact part red. Hull outline goes amber, then red and pulsing when critical. A knocked-out engine flashes where the engine lives. When something's out, the strip below shows "R to repair" with your kit count.
• The thruster glow breathes with your real thrust.

The Now zone

Below the vitals sits a panel that reads your situation and shows only what matters right now — cruising shows your heading and nearest world; docking range shows "SPACE to dock"; combat shows hostile count, range, and a blinking SHIELDS DOWN alarm when it matters; an empty tank shows the nearest fuel stop. When it changes color, your situation changed. Trust it. (Flying with a screen reader? The shields-down and fuel alarms — onset and recovery — are also spoken aloud through a live region, so the cockpit klaxons reach you too.)

Records

Beneath that, a small tab row — Ship, Missions, Ledger to start. Crew, Reputation, and the Galaxy Log appear only once you've earned a crew member, a grudge, or a place in history. Badges on the tabs mean news: active contracts, factions that hold a grudge, world events you haven't read yet.

Every dock has two districts, split by how fast you're deciding:

The Dock — the seconds loop

Where Space always lands you. Three service gauges up top — refuel, rearm, repair — each showing its fill level and top-off cost at a glance. Below them: the market (buy and sell), the mission board (delivery contracts and bounties), and crew for hire.

The Shipyard — the considered purchases

Walk through the "⇱ walk to the Shipyard" door for the big-ticket stuff: new hulls, ship upgrades, weapon systems, and the mechanic's bench where the one-of-a-kind mods live. Nothing out there is an impulse buy; that's why it's a separate room.

"Nothing here is new — inherited, salvaged, or grown." The junkyard voice at the shipyard door isn't apologizing. It's the sales pitch.

The rule is one sentence: buy where they make it, sell where they can't. Every world's market shows prices before you commit. Watch the Galaxy Log for market events — a glut or shortage somewhere is free money for whoever flies first.

The seven worlds

Contracts. The mission board at any Dock posts delivery contracts and bounties. Contracts pay better than spot trading if the route suits you — and certain perks and mods sweeten them further.

Events on the road. Space isn't empty between worlds: fuel depots, derelicts, asteroid fields, distress signals. They appear as objects in space — fly close and use Space (or E if a planet is hogging the key). Nothing forces you; "keep flying" is always an option.

Three cartels raid these lanes, and each is somebody's grievance with a paint job. Every fight is somebody's errand:

• Rustfang Cartel — the Drum's abandoned shift crews, three generations feral. They hit cargo, not crews; in their telling, the reach still owes them back pay.
• Void Choir — signal-survey techs who listened too long. They raid for relics and shipminds, never money. Carrying relics makes you interesting to them. You don't want to be interesting to them.
• Iron Shoal — Meridian Deep's dispossessed harvest crews. They fly like divers: patient, then sudden.

Your guns

Lasers build heat — an overheated barrel glows amber on the schematic and won't fire until it cools. Missiles (C) hit hard but come out of a finite rack; rearm at any Dock. Buy new laser systems at shipyards and cycle what you own with Z:

Shields recharge on their own after a few calm seconds; hull does not — repair at a Dock, or use R and a Repair Kit to field-fix a knocked-out subsystem (dead engine, dark life support) in the middle of the fight.

Bounties, streaks, and grudges

Kills chain into a streak that multiplies bounty payouts — a wrecking resets it. Named cartel bosses carry posted bounties. And the cartels keep books too: hurt a faction enough and it holds a grudge (check the Reputation tab) — grudged factions hunt you harder, mount raid bands with a shielded boss who only unshields when the minions are down, and their grudges literally shape which sites they occupy out in the dark.

Fame

Fame is how much of the Reach's memory is about you. Every deed the chronicle records feeds it — charting a site, breaking a raid band, liberating an occupation, settling a cartel's debt, raising a banner. One thing dents it: getting wrecked. It shows next to your rank (✦ fame) once you've earned any, it never goes below zero, and it never touches your XP, rank, or perks — the Reach forgets debts, not deeds. Fame is earned online, where the family can see it; titles hung off it come later.

Hull hits zero and the outer hull blows — the boom, the shake, the debris field. But no one dies in the Reach. What's left of your ship goes dark, and the next two minutes are a scene, not a punishment:

• Half your hold blows out with the breach. It scatters at the wreck as drifting pods — the victor's reward, and anyone can scoop them, including the family member who watched you go up. The other half rides out the breach inside the core hull. A Fortified Cargo Hold (shipyard part) baffles the blast so only a quarter scatters — it survives three breaches, then it's spent; the precursor Reliquary Hold keeps everything, forever.
• You run silent. Dead stop for a few seconds, then emergency thrust comes back and you can crawl. While dark you are off every sensor — a cold, dead-reading hulk indistinguishable from the debris around you. Nothing targets you; nothing can hurt you. The pirates got what they came for, and they drift off.
• Your systems knit themselves back. Watch the vitals band: self-repair runs about two minutes to full hull, then the reactor relights, your shields come up, and you are visible — and targetable — again, wherever the crawl took you. No respawn. No teleport.
• Docking ends it early. Limp into any port and the dockhands swarm the hulk — full repair on the spot.
• Or call the wreckers. Press T while dark and a salvage crew hooks the hulk and tows you to the nearest port — for a price that scales with the distance. The Reach's most Mad Max profession, and worth every credit when you're drifting deep.
• Your bounty streak resets. That's the whole bill.

Credits, XP, rank, perks, charted discoveries, your ship, and its upgrades all survive the wreck — every time, forever. Only the scattered share of your hold and the streak are on the line. While dark you can steer, dock, or call the tow, but nothing else: no guns, no scooping, no events. The silence is for recovery, not passage.

Thrust burns fuel. Watch the gauge in the vitals strip, and top off at every Dock — it's the first gauge-button for a reason.

Run the tank dry out in the black and the ship doesn't die — it unfurls solar sails and crawls on starlight at a twentieth of your speed. The Now zone flips to EMERGENCY POWER and points you at the nearest fuel stop. It is survivable. It is also extremely humbling, possibly in front of your siblings.

Fuel depot events out in space sell emergency fuel at emergency prices. Better engines and the right perks stretch every unit further.

Credits buy things; XP makes you somebody. Kills, trades, deliveries, and discoveries all feed it, and it only ever goes up — it belongs to you, not the ship. Rank isn't a navy's ladder (there are no navies); it's your reputation among dockhands and dispatchers:

Perks — one choice per promotion

Every rank-up offers one perk from each of three lanes. This is where two pilots flying the same hull become different people:

The hull ladder

The hull is the ship's body — it sets the bunks, the hold, and how far every upgrade track can go. Buying a new one is THE progression moment, and naming it is what makes it a character instead of a stat sheet. Everyone starts in a one-seater, dreaming at shipyard windows:

Mods, upgrades & crew

• Upgrades (engines, cargo, fuel tank, hull plate, shields, weapons) are sold at shipyards — each world specializes, and the frontier sells the serious hardware. Your hull caps each track.
• Named mods live at the mechanic's bench: one-of-a-kind used parts with a past, and most carry a quirk alongside the gift — the compressor that runs your lasers hot, the plating that's grown rather than forged. Two ships with the same hull diverge here.
• Crew hire on at Docks and fill your hull's bunks — each hand brings a bonus, and higher rank opens more of them to you.

Past the charted worlds, the map just… stops. It shouldn't. Out in the dark are places the charts don't show — derelicts, beacons, anomalies, things the dockhands only trade rumors about. They say seven. They argue about which seven.

• The tease. Fly far enough out and your sensors may ping a faint ? — an unknown contact, bearing only. Your scanner range sets how far you can smell one.
• The chart. Reach it and you chart it: a discovery banner, a real reward, and the site becomes a permanent landmark on the family's shared map — stamped "first charted by" whoever got there first. Everyone who visits later still gets their own discovery reward; only the name is first-come.
• ✦ Salvage. Charted sites regenerate a salvage cache every 12–24 hours of real time — even while the server sleeps. A ready cache glows on the map, and it's first-come, galaxy-wide. Fly out before your brother does.
• ⚑ Occupations. Every so often a cartel digs in at a charted site — salvage blocked, their flag on your map. Fly out and the band musters at the site to meet you. Break it, kill the boss, and the site is liberated, the cache opens on the spot, and the chronicle credits you by name.

Some of what's out there hums. Some of it has gone quiet, which is worse. Chart it anyway — that's what the reach remembers you for.

The server keeps a chronicle — the reach's own history book. Charters, boss kills, market swings, salvages, occupations, liberations, and yes, deaths: if it mattered, it's written down, with names.

• While you were away. Log in after time away and you get a digest — "While you were away, N things happened" — before you've even undocked.
• The Galaxy Log tab holds the full ledger, newest first, with unread entries highlighted and a badge pulling your eye when history happens while you're busy.
• Other pilots are real. You'll see the family flying live — and traffic, raid bands, market prices, occupations, and loot drops are all shared. Kill loot and salvage are first-come; discovery rewards are per-visitor. Nobody can take your XP.

The long game in the reach isn't a throne — there are no thrones. It's your name in the chronicle, over and over, until the dockhands tell stories about you.

• Buy where they make it, sell where they can't.
• Top off fuel at every dock. Carry Repair Kits.
• Shields come back on their own; hull doesn't.
• Dying costs 25% of your credits and scatters your cargo at the wreck — race back for the pods.
• ✦ on the map means salvage is ready — first one there takes it.
• ⚑ on the map means a fight and a payout for whoever clears it.
• A faint ? means the map is about to get bigger. Go look.