Patch Notes

The biggest missions drop since the board went live. Faction standing stops being a number on a page and becomes the key that opens — and closes — contracts. Missions can be shared with your allies. And for commanders who earn a faction's complete trust, there is a new tier of work: three-system pirate raids, a military title with real teeth, and a fleet on call.

Standing runs the mission board

• Every contract shows its Rank. Mission cards and briefings now state the rank in plain words — Rank 1 through Rank 10 — your at-a-glance read on how hard the job is.
• Boards run three times deeper. Each faction now keeps fifteen contracts posted at all times — five starter jobs (Ranks 1–3), five mid-tier (4–6), four veteran (7–9), and one elite Rank 10 — with every mission type always represented. Whatever your standing, there is always work.
• High-rank work must be earned. Rank 5–10 contracts now require standing with the issuing faction: 50 for Rank 5, rising by ten per rank to 100 for Rank 10. Build your reputation with a faction and their serious work opens up.
• You outgrow the milk runs. As your standing climbs past 50, the faction stops offering you its smallest jobs — at 50 the Rank 1 postings disappear, and by 90 all of Ranks 1–5 are behind you. At standing 100 a faction's board shows Ranks 6–10 only. The faction trusts you with serious work now; the small contracts are left for newer pilots instead of being mopped up by veterans.
• Declaring a faction your enemy still zeroes your standing with them — and now that standing is worth something, think twice before you burn it.

Share missions with your allies

• Bring up to four friends. The holder of an accepted mission can share it with up to four mutual allies. A shared mission lands straight on the ally's Accepted Missions list — no confirmation needed, because there is no downside: it doesn't use one of their three mission slots.
• Fight together, get paid together. On kill contracts, kills by anyone in the group count toward the objective. On completion, the RP and equipment rewards divide evenly across the group (any remainder goes to the contract holder) — but every participant earns the full standing gain. Sharing is how your allies build reputation with factions they can't yet work for directly.
• Hand down the big jobs. A standing-100 commander can take a Rank 10 contract and share it with allies who can't even see it on their board.
• One hard rule: a mission cannot be shared with a player who has the issuing faction set to Enemy. The faction refuses to pay its enemies.

Mission reports in your Comms

• Every completion is now documented. Finish any mission — solo or shared — and a Mission Complete report lands in Comms → Reports for every participant, listing the rank, the faction, and exactly what you were paid, including how a shared reward was divided.
• Ambush contact alerts now have their own report filter too.

Destroy contracts pull level with Ambush

• The same enemy fleet, on their ground. Destroy contracts now mirror the ambush party exactly — the same mix of light, medium, heavy, and super heavy ships at every rank, with each class line dug into its own system. A Rank 10 destroy order is 125 ships across four battle lines, identical to a Rank 10 ambush; the difference is you go to them.
• And they pay 20% more. An ambush comes to you; a destroy contract makes you cross the map and dig the enemy out. That travel carries a permanent 20% pay premium — and a destroy contract is now guaranteed to pay at least 20% more than a same-rank ambush, whatever class of ship it sends you after.

Loot with a signature

• Each mission type now has its own equipment profile. Destroy and ambush work skews toward weapons and armour, deploy contracts toward drives, protection details toward armour, recon toward utility systems — with the issuing faction's own specialities still showing up in the mix.
• Surveys are the tech line. Half of all survey equipment rewards now come from sensor and stealth technology: interdiction systems, targeting computers — and for the first time outside story missions, cloaking devices can drop from survey contracts. If you want to run dark, fly surveys.

Ambushes bite back

• Rank 5+ ambushes now send a second wave. Ten minutes after first contact, if the raiding party is still alive in your system, reinforcements answer their distress call — half the surviving strength again, in heavy metal. The newcomers are not on the contract manifest; they are pure trouble. Kill the first wave fast, or fight two.

New: RAID missions

• Pirates have dug in. Raids identify three neighbouring unclaimed systems and fill all three with entrenched pirate crews — Human and Sharne raiders — at strength beyond anything a Rank 10 ambush throws at you, plus defence stations and orbital batteries on top of the fleets. The target systems are marked on the galaxy map and named on the contract.
• Three levels. Level 1 is a hard fleet action. Level 3 is a war: hundreds of ships per system behind layered defences.
• Standing 100 to sign on. Raids only appear on the board once a faction trusts you completely — but sharing works exactly as on any mission, so you can bring up to four allies regardless of their standing. You can take one alone. It is not recommended.
• Everyone is paid in full. Unlike ranked contracts, raid rewards are not split — every participant receives the entire payout: triple RP against the value of the garrison you destroy, plus a crate of equipment (20–30 items of one kind and a smaller cache of something rarer, scaling with the level). Raids pay no standing — at 100, you have nothing left to prove.
• A raid ends when the systems are cleared. Every pirate ship, battery, and station destroyed or captured — by anyone on the contract — closes it out.

Standing 100: Strategic Military Partner

• A title with teeth. Hold standing 100 with a faction and you are named their Strategic Military Partner — shown on the faction's page, and carrying two hard benefits.
• +25,000 MP capacity. Your military-points ceiling rises by 25,000 while the title is held. Stacked with a top rank and high morale, that puts a 150,000-point fleet within reach.
• Reinforcements on call. Once per week you can call in a faction reinforcement wing — 5 super heavy cruisers and 10 support ships of the faction's own race — delivered instantly to any system where you have forces, under your command, yours to keep.
• Strictly earned, strictly held. The title exists only while your standing sits at exactly 100. Slip below — even by abandoning a single mission — and the benefits are withdrawn until you climb back. Declare the faction your enemy and it is all gone at once.

Fixes

• You can declare war on the pirates again. Setting Pirates — or any faction — to Enemy was being blocked for high-rank commanders by the "pick on someone your own size" rule, which exists to protect new players, not institutions. Factions and pirates are now always fair game.