A living solar-system economy, played through chat. Haul what's scarce to where it's needed, build a name across the corporations, and don't run out of air.
Type !start in chat. You're handed a Mule freighter, a little fuel and a few credits, docked at Earth.
From there the loop is simple: find something cheap and plentiful, carry it somewhere it's scarce, and sell it for more than you paid. !market shows what's on hand where you're docked; !contracts offers paid runs if you'd rather be told where to go. Everything else — bigger holds, better engines, passenger berths, standing with the corporations — grows out of that first haul.
Red means a station is short and paying well. Green means it's glutted and selling cheap. That's your route.
Distance is set when you depart, and prices aren't the same everywhere. !refuel fills the tank; !refuel 20 buys only what you need, which is worth doing where fuel runs dear.
The system keeps turning whether you're trading or not. Shortages build; gluts drain. Come back and it's changed.
!market [station]Prices and stock on hand, with shortage and glut flags. Name a station to check it from anywhere.!buy <good> <n|max>Buy cargo at the docked station, e.g. !buy water 10. Takes a list too — see below.!sell <good> <n|all>Sell cargo, e.g. !sell metal all. Takes a list too.!buy air food water 50One command, several goods. A quantity applies to every good named before it, so !buy air 50 food 80 and !buy air food 50 water 20 both do what they look like. Works for !sell as well.!sell everythingDump your whole tradeable hold at once.!travel <station>Burn for a destination. Distance and fuel are set at departure.!refuel [n]Fill the tank, or buy just n units — !refuel 20. The posted rate is what a stranger pays; your standing with the owner and your hull move it up or down, and the receipt says so.!order <good> <n>Have a Drift courier buy goods and bring them to you. Quotes the cost first; !order confirm places it.!provisionTake on water, food and air for your passengers, bought from the station at local prices. !provision cargo decants from your own hold; !provision status reports endurance.!contractsFreight board: goods this station can spare, bound for stations that need them. Watch for HVY bulk runs and CUR courier runs. The list locks when you first check it — !accept <n> always loads the run you saw.!accept <n>Take a job. The freight is loaded from the station's real stockpile into your hold.!jobYour current contract: route, cargo, fee and time remaining.!deliverComplete the run at the destination. Late deliveries pay less.!dropAbandon a contract. Costs a breach fee — never more than you have.!passengers / !paxPeople waiting here, with fares (needs berths). Some are multi-stop charters with two drop-offs. The list — including the quoted fare — locks when you first check it and won't reshuffle.!board <n>Take a group aboard — as many as your berths hold. They fill berths, not cargo space.!disembarkPut passengers ashore. On a multi-stop charter the fare is paid in full at the last stop — see them all the way through or earn nothing.!shipsThe hulls for sale and what they cost.!buyship <id>Trade up. Your old hull is sold toward the new one; upgrades reset (10% back).!upgradesYour fitted upgrades and what the next tier costs.!upgrade <part>cargo · fuel · engine · life · personnel · or your hull's signature refit. A personnel berth module takes up hold space, so fitting or enlarging one lowers your usable cargo.!rename <name>Name your ship. It shows on the overlay and in the news.!buildstation <name> <site>Charter a station for 2,000,000 cr. Sites: earth, luna, mars, europa, ganymede, callisto, titan, or belt.!stationYour station's status — storage, supplies, market state, account.!station open / closeLet other pilots dock, or shut the doors. Closing while a market trades asks you to confirm.!station goods open / closeStart or stop trading with visitors.!station suppliesYour supply hold broken down good by good, with hours of runtime each and a mark on anything that has run out.!station pricesThe board as buyers see it.!station sell <good|all> …Set what you charge: fixed <price>, peg <station> [±%], or avg [±%].!station buy <good|all> …Set what you pay, same three options.!station deposit / withdrawMove credits between your purse and the station account.!station upgrade storage+500 m³ for 125,000 cr, eight times over.!station upgrade bayAnother garage bay, 250,000 cr. Five maximum.!station upgrade fuelBuild or expand the fuel depot, 150,000 cr a tier.!station upgrade lodgingOpen or expand tourist lodging, 175,000 cr a tier.!station fuel open / closeStart or stop selling propellant.!station fuel <fixed|peg|avg> …Price fuel per unit, same three options as goods.!garageWhat's parked, and how many bays are free.!swap <hull>Trade your active hull for a parked one.!store <good> <n|all>Ship's hold → the station's goods storage.!collect <good> <n|all>Goods storage → your ship's hold.!transfer <good> <n|all>Goods storage → the supply hold, where the crew consumes it.!transfer back <good> <n|all>Supply hold → goods storage, to put surplus supplies up for sale.!transfer allMove the whole supply run at once — the station takes what it needs most first.!travel stationFly to your own. Others use !travel <name>, if you've opened the doors.!stationsThe register — every chartered station, its owner, and what it's trading.!statusCredits, net worth, fuel, hold, ship and where you are.!repYour standing with all twelve corporations.!topThe leaderboard by net worth.!send <user> <amt>Wire credits to another pilot.!shipcolor #hex / !namecolor #hexCosmetic colours on the overlay. Must be bright enough to read.!gmsThe short command list, in chat.Every station holds a real, finite stockpile of each good, and the price floats on how full it is — scarce goods run dear, gluts go cheap, and a deep shortage climbs steeply, so the emptiest stations pay by far the most.
Buy and sell take lists. !buy air food water 50 takes fifty of each; !buy air 50 food 80 water 20 takes different amounts; and the two mix — a quantity applies to every good named since the last one. Orders fill left to right out of the same purse and the same hold, so if you run out of either, the command tells you which goods came up short.
Your own trades move the price as you go: buy a lot and each unit costs more than the last; sell a lot and each fetches less. You can't corner a cheap station or dump at the ceiling, so spreading a load across several stations beats hammering one. Earth's water, food and air are the exception — they never run dry, the system's cheap life-support backstop. You are also not the only ship out there — the corporations run freighters of their own, and they trade the same way you do.
Stations don't just hold goods — they make them, and every refined good takes exactly two raws. Refineries turn ore + volatiles into metal; shipyards turn ore + water into parts; fabs build tech from ore + air; pharma brews meds from volatiles + food; the ice moons crack water + volatiles into air. Mars leads on tech and Callisto on meds, with Ceres running fabs of its own on both — a useful stop in the Belt for more than just ore.
The outer system is no longer all raw extraction. Titan, the hydrocarbon world, cracks water + volatiles into polymers — it has volatiles in abundance and no water at all, so it hauls ice from the Ice Fields a short hop away. Ganymede is still the breadbasket, growing food off its own water ice, but its greenhouses now also feed enzyme vats: food + air, both of which it makes itself. Callisto brews enzymes too, on food shipped over from Ganymede.
A station never has to buy what it builds. Whatever a world produces, it covers its own needs off the line first — so a refinery world isn't in the market for metal, and a fab world isn't buying tech. The upshot is a clean trade map: producers pile up a surplus of what they make and sell it cheap, while everyone else has to import it. Find the world that doesn't make a thing, and you've found your buyer.
A factory runs on local stock first — Europa mines the water and volatiles its air needs, while Callisto mines only water and must import its volatiles; every world digs a little ore too (the Belt dwarfs them), and Earth quietly runs a little of every factory, leaning hard on imported ore. The system self-stabilises: a station eases production once its own pile is high, so sources don't hoard forever, and rations consumption as it nears empty, so a starved station bottoms out gently and revives from a small delivery. Keep the inputs flowing and a station thrives; let them run dry and prices spike.
Contracts are drawn from the real economy: a station only offers freight it genuinely has to spare, bound for a station that's genuinely short. The fee scales with how badly the destination needs it, so the deepest shortages pay best. Nothing is conjured — the cargo leaves the origin's stockpile when you accept and joins the destination's when you deliver.
Alongside the usual runs, two special kinds turn up on the board:
A hundred-plus units across several goods, bound outward in one enormous load. It pays like nothing else — but only a hauler with the hold to match can take it. Check the m³ on the board before you bid.
Small, valuable, and urgent. Restricted to fast hulls — a Skiff or a Razorback — and the clock is tight. Pays richly per unit, which is what makes a small fast ship worth flying.
Both pay a premium and earn half again the usual standing with the corporation that hired you — so the specialists who can fly them climb the ranks faster than a general hauler.
Deadlines budget the real flight time, including the long way round on a return leg. They're generous, but they assume you're moving — and a courier's clock is deliberately short.
Fit a personnel module and you can carry passengers as well as freight. Berths come out of your hold, so every seat is cargo space you're not using — a trade worth making only if the fares are good. Higher-grade modules carry fewer people but charge far more a head, so the choice is a shipful of steerage or a handful in luxury.
Travellers wait. Every route between two ports has people queuing on it, and that queue grows until somebody flies them — quickly at first, then slower as the concourse fills — so a lane nobody serves quietly builds a backlog. !passengers shows what's really waiting at your port, longest queues first, and how long they've been sitting there. Busy worlds send more people, and more people want to reach them.
Patience is worth money. A queue that's been waiting pays up to 60% more a head — the same logic that makes freight pay best into the deepest shortage. The neglected run is often the profitable one.
That queue is shared with every other pilot docked alongside you, so a big hold is a real advantage: whoever has the berths clears the backlog first, and the rest take what's left.
Most groups want a single destination. Some are multi-stop charters — one party with two drop-offs along the route. Either way you take aboard as many as your berths hold, so a small luxury fit-out simply carries fewer of them at a much higher fare. The fare on a charter is paid in full at the final stop: put the first group ashore and you'll be paid nothing until the last of them steps off. Finish the run.
The overlay and !market speak the same language:
Everything circles the Sun the same way, and your ship rides that current — always the short way around. A quick hop outward can become the long way home once the planets have moved. Distance is fixed the moment you depart, so check !travel costs before you commit, and remember that a route which was cheap last week may not be today.
The lanes aren't empty. Pirates, breakdowns and stray debris can find you in transit — good standing with the local powers helps, and a faster hull spends less time exposed. Nothing is ever truly lost that a good run can't recover.
Two million credits buys a charter, a patch of empty orbit, and a name on the register. What you do with it is your business — literally.
!buildstation <name> <site>. You may hold one charter. Build in orbit of Earth, Luna, Mars, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto or Titan, or set it drifting free in the Belt. Names are letters and spaces, up to sixteen characters, and must not clash with an existing port or another pilot's station.
Where you build decides who can reach you cheaply. A station in Earth orbit is a few units of fuel from Earth and Luna but a long clockwise haul from the Belt; a Belt station is the reverse. And it genuinely orbits — the distance to your door changes as it swings around its parent.
A new station is closed. !station open lets other pilots dock; until then it's yours alone.
Corporations don't post freight to private stations, and their freighters don't call. Everything that moves through it, you move.
The charter includes about twelve hours of stores, so a new station opens with its lights on. That's your window to get a supply run in.
Your station's name, its owner and its markets appear to everyone — in !stations, and as a dot on the system map. Choose a name you don't mind being read aloud.
A station keeps its cargo in two separate places, and knowing which is which is most of running one well:
| Hold | What it's for | Consumed? |
|---|---|---|
| Goods storage | Your warehouse. Everything your market buys and sells sits here, and it's what upgrades expand. | Never. It sits until you sell or move it. |
| Supply hold | The station's own stores — what the crew lives on and maintains the place with. | Constantly, every day. |
Nothing moves between them on its own. Cargo comes off your ship into goods storage, and you push a share of it across into the supply hold yourself — so stocking the crew is always two steps:
| Move | Command |
|---|---|
| Ship's hold → goods storage | !store water 200 |
| Goods storage → supply hold | !transfer water 200 |
| …everything at once | !transfer all |
| Supply hold → goods storage | !transfer back water 50 |
| Goods storage → ship's hold | !collect water 50 |
There's no route straight from your ship into the supply hold; everything lands in storage first. And !transfer back exists because supplies are dead capital — over-stock the crew and you're sitting on cargo you could have been selling, so you can always pull the surplus back out and put it on the market.
A fully converted hull can't carry supplies. A Marindi in Liner Refit is all berths and no hold — there's nothing to !store from. Park it in your own garage and fly something with a hold (a 4,000 cr Mule does fine), or switch the refit off. This is worth knowing before you let the stores run low.
A crew consumes far less than any inhabited world — about a seventh of Europa, the smallest — but it never stops.
The supply hold is one shared volume. Fill it with water, food and air and there'll be no room for the metal, parts, tech and meds a station also burns — and it will go dark on those instead, while the hold reads nearly full. !station supplies breaks it down good by good and marks anything that has run out; !transfer all tops up whatever is scarcest first.
| Supply | Per day | |
|---|---|---|
| Water · Food · Air | 0.012 each | Life support for the crew. |
| Metal · Parts | 0.005 each | Hull maintenance and spares. |
| Tech · Meds | 0.004 each | Systems and the infirmary. |
!transfer all saves running seven commands, and it's cleverer than doing them by hand: rather than filling the hold in whatever order the goods come, it gives each unit to whichever supply is closest to running out. Anything that won't fit stays in storage and is named, with the reason.
Stock in proportion and your supplies last far longer. Runtime is set by whichever good runs out first, so a hold packed with water and short on food is a hold that's about to go dark. A full 1,000 m³ stocked to match consumption runs about 51 hours; the same volume split evenly across the seven runs barely 32.
Let anything reach zero and the station goes dark — the markets shut, and they will not reopen until you've restocked. Nothing is lost, but nothing trades either, and every pilot who flew out to buy from you finds the lights off.
Move goods in with !store and out with !collect; both are free, and neither touches a market. Selling to other pilots needs three things: the station open, the goods market trading, and money in the station account.
That account is the business's till, kept apart from your own purse. Buyers pay into it; when someone sells you cargo, they're paid out of it. A station can only buy while it has credits, and only sell while it has stock and space — those two limits are what keep a private market honest.
| Pricing | What it does |
|---|---|
| fixed <price> | A flat number you set. It doesn't move until you move it. |
| peg <station> ±% | Tracks another port live, tick by tick, with your margin on top. |
| avg ±% | Follows the system-wide average, with your margin on top. |
Set them for everything at once with all, or override a single commodity. New stations start selling at the average plus ten percent and buying at ten below. Other pilots trade with ordinary !buy and !sell while docked, and can read your board from anywhere with !market <your station>. You can't trade with your own market — that's what !store and !collect are for.
Your charter includes one garage bay, and more cost 250,000 cr apiece. A bay holds one hull, which is how a pilot comes to own a stable of ships — though never two of the same class.
!buyship does two quite different things depending on where you are when you run it:
| Where you buy | Your old hull | Price |
|---|---|---|
| At your own station, with a bay free | Parked in the garage — keeps its upgrades, its signature refit and its name. | Full price. No trade-in. |
| Anywhere else, or every bay full | Traded in. Upgrades reset (10% back), signature refit forfeited. | Price less 40% trade-in. |
So the garage isn't just storage — it changes what buying a ship costs you. Off-station you're always giving something up; at your own station you're only spending money. A Razorback carrying a 96,000 cr Prize Hull is worth flying home before you go shopping.
!swap <hull> takes a parked ship back out whenever you like, and everything travels with the hull — so the Drayhorse you left named Big Rig, fully kitted, is exactly that when you come back for it three sessions later. Fuel stays in whichever ship you left it in.
Away from your station — or with every bay full — !buyship works the old way: your hull is traded in, its upgrades reset and its signature forfeited. That's the difference a bay buys you, and it's why they're expensive.
When a station goes dark its upgraded bays go offline, but the original clamp keeps cycling — you can always park or retrieve one hull, so you're never locked away from your own ship. Nothing parked is ever lost.
A station starts with nowhere to put propellant. !station upgrade fuel builds the tanks — 150,000 cr a tier, four tiers, 600 units apiece up to 2,400.
The depot is a third hold, separate again from goods storage and supplies. Buy Volatiles like any other cargo, !store them, then !transfer fuel <n> to pump them across; !transfer back fuel drains them into storage to sell as cargo instead. !station fuel open starts selling, and visitors simply !refuel — charged your price, paid into your account. You draw from your own tanks free.
The depot only sells. A station acquires propellant by buying Volatiles as ordinary cargo through the goods market and pumping it across — there's no way to siphon a visitor's tank.
!station upgrade lodging, 175,000 cr a tier, four tiers. Lodging doesn't sell anything — it creates demand. With rooms to put people in, travellers start asking to be brought to your station, and every time you check !passengers anywhere in the system there's a 15% chance per tier that a charter bound for your door is waiting on your board.
Nobody else sees those charters. They're your guests, and yours to fetch.
Lodging is a terminal, not just a hotel — guests check out as well as in. Dock at your own station and !passengers lists travellers looking for a lift onward, with more of them at higher tiers. So a station with rooms generates traffic in both directions, and a run out from your own door pays like any other charter.
!stations lists the register: who has built what, and whether each one is trading goods, selling fuel, merely open to visitors, private, or dark. From there !market <name> reads a board from anywhere in the system and !travel <name> takes you to the door.
A chartered station is also capital. The two million, everything sunk into upgrades, the credits in the till and the stock on the shelves all count toward your net worth — so building one moves your wealth, it doesn't spend it.
Everything above hangs on the supply hold. Let it run dry and the station goes dark: markets shut, the pumps stop for visitors and for you, the garage locks, and no traveller asks to be taken anywhere. Nothing is lost — but nothing works either, until you fly the crew their water.
The system feed announces it when a station goes dark, and again when it comes back, so a lapse is public. Keep an eye on the hours remaining in !station — and if you fly a converted hull, keep a working ship parked in the garage, because a dark station won't let you reach it.
You aren't the only ship working these lanes. Every corporation runs a freighter of its own, and they buy and sell exactly as you do — which means their trade moves prices too.
Each company flies its own hull where it builds one. Cobalt's Quicksilver is a Skiff; Ironroot's Ironmonger a Drayhorse; Helios' Sunreach a Cistern; Meridian's Wayfarer a Marindi. The rest run Mules. Drift Logistics keeps three couriers — Errand, Second Errand and Third Errand — for the orders pilots place.
A company keeps mostly to its own bloc, hauling out what its region makes and hauling in what its factories need. Ironroot brings volatiles into the Belt because the refineries there can't make metal without them.
Crews take longer between runs while pilots are active and shorter when the system is quiet — so the freight keeps moving through dead hours and the companies step back when there's competition.
The Wayfarer works the same passenger queues you do. Anyone it carries is somebody you didn't.
Their movements show on the system feed and their ships on the chart, but never what they're carrying — that's the company's business. They shift enough freight to take the edge off a shortage, never enough to cure one.
!order tech 30 asks Drift to fetch something for you. You get a quote first — the goods, the fuel for the run out, and a 20% surcharge — and nothing is charged until you !order confirm. Payment is upfront, which is what lets the fuel be priced honestly.
The courier buys where the goods can actually be spared, hopping between ports if no single one can fill the order, then runs it out to the station you ordered from. If you've moved on by the time it arrives, the cargo waits there for you and loads itself into your hold the next time you dock. One order at a time, and no more than your hold can take.
Eleven stations across three regions. Everything orbits; the map below is live, drawn from the same data the game uses.
Private stations appear here too, as small unlabelled dots orbiting whatever they were built around. They glow cyan when a market is open for business, and sit dim when they're closed or private.
| Station | Code | Owner | Exports | Imports |
|---|
Five raw goods come out of the ground or the greenhouse; six secondaries are refined from them, each from exactly two raws. Water, food and air do double duty — they keep people alive as well as feeding industry. Mass matters, since heavy cargo burns more fuel.
| Good | Base | Mass | Notes |
|---|
Six hulls, from the starter Mule to the heavy Drayhorse and the quick Kestrel. Bigger holds carry more; faster hulls spend less time exposed.
| Hull | Price | Hold | Fuel | Notes |
|---|
Upgrades stack on any hull: cargo (bigger hold), fuel (longer range), engine (less fuel burned), and personnel (passenger berths). The berth module shares the hull with your freight, so it eats into your usable hold — !status shows cargo space already net of it. Costs are lower at stations whose owner likes you.
Passengers eat. Alongside its fuel tank a ship carries stores — water, food and air — sized by hull and expandable with the life upgrade. Your own crew recycle most of what they use and can never strand you, but carrying people means carrying provisions for them, and !travel checks before it lets you leave. Nobody starves in transit; you simply can't depart short.
!provision buys stores off the station's shelves at local prices, so where you load matters — filling a liner at Ganymede, sitting on cheap food, costs a fraction of doing it at Titan. !provision cargo decants water, food or air you're already carrying. At a player-owned station you can provision too — the owner draws on their own stores free, and a visitor buys them at the station's price.
The personnel upgrade doesn't add berths — it makes the ones you have bigger and better. In a hull converted by the Liner Refit the same logic applies to the whole hold: open bunks pack a berth into every cubic metre, luxury suites a tenth of that. A converted Marindi sleeps 154 in bunks or 20 in suites, and the four fit-outs earn within a whisker of each other — genuinely a choice of trade, not a ladder. Open bunks pack ten bodies into the same volume that a Luxury fit-out gives over to three suites. So each tier carries fewer passengers than the last, and charges far more a head. Upgrading is a change of trade, not a straight improvement: a hauler running open bunks moves crowds cheaply, while a liner in luxury fit-out carries a handful of very wealthy people for many times the fare.
| Fit-out | Berths | Fare | Suits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open | 10 | ×1.0 | Volume trade — crowds, short hops, cheap seats. |
| Cabins | 7 | ×1.9 | The sensible middle. |
| Premium | 5 | ×3.4 | Fewer, richer passengers. |
| Luxury | 3 | ×6.0 | Three suites, enormous fares. Long routes pay best. |
The Marindi Liner adds four berths on top of whatever fit-out you're running, and pays a better fare besides — which is what makes it the passenger ship. !upgrades always shows your current berths and fare multiplier alongside what the next tier would give you.
Beyond the shared four, every hull but the Mule has one signature upgrade — an expensive capstone that leans hard into what that hull is for. Each is unlocked through !upgrade and gated on standing with the hull's builder. They're a serious investment, and swapping hulls forfeits them, so commit to a ship before you fit one.
| Hull | Signature | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Skiff | Burn Tuning | Drops travel time below any other hull — the untouchable courier. |
| Razorback | Prize Hull | +50% contract reputation, on top of any HVY/CUR bonus. Climbs the ranks fastest. |
| Marindi | Liner Refit | Converts the whole hold to passenger berths. Reversible for a fee; you can't switch with cargo or passengers aboard. |
| Drayhorse | Freight Refit | Forgoes all berths for +20% cargo beyond max — a pure hauler. Reversible for a fee. |
| Cistern | Tanker Rig | Stows volatiles at half the volume — roughly double the load. The volatiles hauler. |
Twelve corporations, grouped into three blocs plus an independent patron. Trade well with a station and its owner warms to you — cheaper fuel, cheaper upgrades, better contracts. Blocs notice too: pleasing one bloc can cool another. Check !rep to see where you stand.