Patch Notes

Pick how a contract pays out

• Boon picker at accept time. Every contract now asks you to choose one of four reward shapes when you take it on: Standard (40% RP + all items + a sliver of standing), Loot Run (all items, no RP, no standing), Mercenary (all RP, no items, no standing), Diplomat (no RP, no items, 110% of normal standing). Same mission, four reasons to take it: gear hunters skip the cash, cashflow players skip the loot, faction grinders skip everything else for the bar push.
• Mission XP is always paid. Whichever boon you pick, finishing the contract still earns the same rank-based XP. The boon shapes the loot, not the personal progression.

Faction-flavoured loot pools

• Every faction now drops their own kit. HCG contracts pay in weapons and interdictors. Derulon Trade Alliance pays in hyperdrives. Church of the Vatari pays in armour. Sharne High Council pays in hyperdrives and command kit. GTA in drives and utility. The Lost in scavenger drives and utility. Crown of Caradon in command and boarding. Working for a faction now builds a flavoured arsenal: switch your contract source and your loadout slowly shifts with it.
• Items now scale with mission rank. Rank-1 contracts roll on Common/Rare. Rank-2 on Rare/Very Rare with a small Common floor. Rank-3 climbs into Very Rare and Exotic territory. Story chapters keep their existing Exotic-at-milestone ladder.
• No more duplicate-spam. The specific item you get is picked at payout time, weighted heavily against copies you already own. The same contract delivered to two different captains gives two different items. Stockpiles of the same Hydra Missile Pod are over.
• Item quantities scale 1-10. Replacing the old fixed “0-2 items” roll. Hard rank-3 contracts can pay out a full bag.

Mission shape and pay

• Difficulty ladder, baked into the RP table. Hardest to easiest: Protect > Destroy > Locate > Survey > Deploy. Rank-1 contracts pay 1k-4k, rank-2 3k-7.5k, rank-3 5.5k-14k base RP. Deploy spikes at rank 3 because it goes multi-system.
• Multi-objective contracts at higher ranks. Rank-2 destroys and protects can have 1-2 objectives. Rank-3 deploys, destroys and protects can have 2-3. For example, “Deploy 3 Heavy Cruisers across 3 different systems.” Locate and Survey stay single-objective by design.

Story chapter payouts caught up

• Season 1 chapters rescaled. The 20-chapter Season 1 arc used to pay 100-2,500 RP per chapter, less than a random rank-2 generic contract. Now it pays 4k-23k along a clean ramp, with Exotic milestone chapters (5, 10, 15) spiking ~50% higher.
• The finale earns the word. The closing three chapters now pay 100,000 / 140,000 / 185,000 RP. Crown Above Caradon is the biggest single payout in the game.

Board polish

• Reward row pinned to the bottom of each card. Cards in the mission grid now line up cleanly: the RP & loot summary sits at the foot of every card regardless of how long the description ran.