Expeditions send a fleet to position 16 of any system — deep space — to hunt for resources, ships, Dark Matter, items and permanent artifacts. On this server expeditions are a full progression system: what you send, where you send it and how long you stay all change what comes back.
Requirements: Astrophysics research (level 1+). Your Astrophysics level sets both the number of simultaneous expeditions and the maximum expedition duration in hours. On top of the regular per-level count, Astrophysics milestone levels 20, 30, 40 and 50 each grant a bonus expedition slot.
The golden rule: rewards scale with the fleet you risk
Resource and ship finds scale with the total build value of the fleet you send (its metal + crystal + deuterium cost). Send a cheap token fleet and you find pocket change; commit a serious fleet and a single good expedition can return more than the fleet cost to build. No hull is "more efficient" than another for find value — the value you risk is what pays.
- Resource find — metal, crystal or deuterium worth up to the rolled share of your fleet value.
- Ship find — new ships worth a similar budget. What you can find is anchored on the largest warship in the fleet you send: an expedition of cargo ships and probes can only bring back small hulls, and adding a heavier warship brings heavier hulls into the pool. If your expeditions only ever return light ships, that is why — send something bigger.
- Dark Matter find — a Dark Matter payout that ignores fleet size (see below).
- Item find — a sealed loot box (bronze/silver/gold), opened from Shop → Inventory.
- Merchant, delay, speed-up, nothing — the flavor outcomes.
- Pirates / aliens — a real battle against the local faction (see bounties below).
- Black hole — the whole fleet is lost. Rare, but real. Never fly what you cannot lose.
How often each one happens
The exact odds are not published, and they are not a single fixed table anyway — the duration you pick reshapes them (see the risk dial below), and your own class, Academy talents, lifeform technologies and relics reshape them again. What is stable is the order. From most to least common on a standard short expedition:
- Resource find
- Found nothing
- Ship find
- Pirates
- Delay
- Item find (loot box)
- Dark Matter find
- Aliens
- Merchant
- Speed-up
- Lifeform signal
- Black hole (fleet lost)
Two things are worth reading off that list. Finding nothing sits near the top — it is a normal result, not bad luck, and it is the outcome that shrinks fastest when you hold longer. And losing the fleet to a black hole is the rarest outcome on the board by a wide margin: it is the one everybody fears and the one you will see least. Pirates and aliens, which people fear less, are considerably more likely — and unlike a black hole they are a fight you can prepare for and win.
Fleet value, and the fleet cap
Fleet value is the summed build cost (metal + crystal + deuterium) of the ships you commit — the same figure the dispatch pages price your selection at. Finds scale with it linearly up to a per-expedition fleet cap. In this universe your own cap is sized from your mines (next section).
Value above the cap still counts, but with steeply diminishing returns — over-committing pays less per ship the further past the cap you go. Ambush risk does not diminish: pirates, aliens and black holes roll against the entire fleet you sent, and the pirates or aliens you meet are sized from every ship in that expedition, freighters included. So every ship past the cap earns at a discount while carrying full risk: it earns less than it puts at stake, and there is a point where the next ship is no longer paying for its own risk. The dispatch pages price your selected fleet against the cap live, and the Expedition Journal on your profile shows what each past flight sent versus what counted.
Your cap is a budget from your own mines
In this universe the fleet cap is not one server-wide figure: yours is sized from your own daily mine income at trade value (a crystal counts as 1.5 metal, a deuterium as 3), so it grows as your mines do and every mine raises it by what its output is worth. Your first 45 paying finds of each day (reset at midnight server time) are measured against the full cap; after that the cap drops to a reduced tier until the next reset. Fleet value above either cap still counts at the diminishing rate above, and ship finds draw on the same budget as resource finds.
The budget is a multiple of your mine income set by class — the Discoverer's is by far the largest — so the more your mines grow, the more deep space is worth to you, and an active explorer out-earns a miner of the same depth without ever out-running one by fleet size alone. The debris an ambush leaves follows the same rule: the full field up to several times your cap, then diminishing. Above the full cap only a bounded multiple of it ever counts, however much you send. The dispatch pages show which cap your next find is measured against and when the count resets. Pathfinders are the salvage hull: with at least 10% of the committed value in Pathfinders, an expedition brings home a larger share of the debris its fights leave than Reapers alone would. They add nothing to the find itself.
Anomalies want a real fleet
A deep-space anomaly is claimed by the first expedition to reach it, and the claim requires a committed fleet worth at least the claim minimum the Scanner shows for it. Under the mine-income budget that minimum is your own full cap. A smaller expedition does not claim it: the anomaly stays on the board for someone else and your fleet returns an ordinary result. Anomalies guarantee at least a major find, so they are the one place where bringing a serious fleet is worth the most.
Dark Matter ignores fleet value
Dark Matter does not follow the fleet-value rule at all: unlike resources and ships, the Dark Matter roll ignores what you sent, so a big fleet does not buy big Dark Matter. What does raise it is your own Dark Matter stack — Academy Dark Matter Affinity, Kaelesh Gravitation Sensors, the Smuggler's Manifest relic and your explorer rank — and a ★ legendary roll pays in full. Fly expeditions often for Dark Matter, not heavy.
Jackpots: major & legendary discoveries
Every find rolls a hidden rarity: some come back as a ✦ Major discovery (×3) and, far more rarely, as a ★ LEGENDARY discovery (×10). The message arrives gold-bannered — you will know when it happens.
Expedition duration is a risk dial
The duration selector on the dispatch screen (1 hour up to your Astrophysics level) is a real decision. Every hour beyond the first:
- Finds (resources / ships / DM / items) become more likely,
- Hostiles (pirates / aliens / black hole) become more likely still — risk grows faster than reward,
- "Found nothing" shrinks.
Short trips are safe and boring; long holds are high-risk prospecting. Escort your haulers if you stay out late.
Reducing the chance of losing a fleet
Three separate investments push back on the black hole: an Academy talent (which shifts weight away from every bad outcome, not just this one), a Kaelesh lifeform technology and a relic. Two things about how they combine are worth knowing before you spend on them:
- They multiply rather than add. Stacking all three gives you noticeably less than the sum of their listed values — a common and expensive misreading.
- The risk can never reach zero. There is a floor no amount of investment gets under, and holding longer pushes the risk back up before any of these reductions apply. A fully-specced explorer on a long hold is still exposed.
Which is the same rule as everywhere else on this page: never fly what you cannot lose.
The Deep Space Scanner (⚓ top bar → Scanner)
The Scanner page (/anomalies) is the expedition hub: live anomaly feed, your star chart, explorer rank, wanted board and relic codex all live there.
Anomalies — race for the prize
Through the day, timed anomalies appear at random systems; the Scanner shows how long each has left. The first expedition fleet to arrive at the marked system claims the anomaly for a guaranteed, boosted (at least ✦ Major) outcome — everyone else gets a normal roll. Fleet speed suddenly matters; bots hunt them too, so fly fast.
- 🛰️ Wreck Field — guaranteed ship find.
- ☁️ Resource Nebula — guaranteed rich resource haul.
- 🏚️ Derelict Station — a loot box and a Dark Matter cache, plus a much higher relic chance.
- 🏴☠️ Pirate Den — an elite garrison that matches your technology and musters against whatever you commit: a bigger fleet meets a bigger garrison, so mass alone never cracks it. Bring a well-blended war fleet and expect real losses; the claim minimum shown on the scanner is a claim floor, not the garrison's strength.
Use the "Send expedition" button on a scanner row — it pre-fills the fleet screen with the anomaly's coordinates.
Star chart — first surveys
Every system you send an expedition to is recorded on your personal star chart. Your first survey of a virgin system never returns empty-handed — an empty roll is upgraded to a find (hostiles still happen: unexplored space is dangerous). Each system has a fixed, generated star name, and your profile tracks % of the universe explored.
One system, two names — the naming convention
Every system carries two canonical names. The charted name is the official catalogue entry you see in the galaxy view header — old-Earth star names and survey designations, kept for navigation and treaty paperwork. The survey designation is the name expedition crews actually use — coined at position 16, passed between flight logs, and permanent from the first survey on. Your expedition reports, star chart and the Scanner speak survey; the galaxy header speaks catalogue; the Scanner shows both side by side. Neither is wrong. Ask any crew which name is real and they will point at their logbook.
Explorer rank
Expeditions and first surveys earn explorer XP — a new system pays far more than a repeat visit. Six ranks — Recruit, Scout, Pioneer, Trailblazer, Voidfarer, Star Sovereign — each add a permanent +2% find value, +3% expedition Dark Matter and +0.1% major-discovery chance.
Relics — the permanent collection
Now and then an expedition recovers a relic: a permanent account-wide artifact (derelict-station anomalies are by far the best place to look). There are 8, in three rarity tiers, each granting its bonus forever — extra expedition slots, bigger finds, more DM, a smaller black-hole chance, faster expedition fleets, better jackpot odds. Duplicates never drop; the Relic Codex on the Scanner shows what you still miss. These are the rarest things in the game by design — a full codex is a season-long project, not a first-week milestone.
Named factions & bounties
Every system belongs to a fixed pirate captain or alien faction — fight in the same territory and you meet the same name, on the battle report too. Your win/loss tally per enemy is tracked on the Scanner's wanted board: defeat the same name 5 / 25 / 100 times and Fleet Command automatically pays a bounty of 50K / 250K / 1M Dark Matter.
Fleet Command threat files: the alien armada
Pirates fly stolen human hulls — read their spy report like any raid. The aliens do not: their boards field four hulls of their own, and no shipyard in the universe can lay one down. What Fleet Command knows about each is reproduced below.
Stinger
The first thing an expedition crew learns about the deep dark is the sound the sensor board makes when a Stinger swarm resolves out of the static — thousands of contacts where a moment ago there were none. Each Stinger is small, cheap by the aliens' unknowable economics, and alone almost harmless. They are never alone.
Salvaged fragments suggest the hull is not built but GROWN, a chitin lattice seeded around a reactor no human lab has managed to keep stable for more than a few seconds. Fleet Intelligence pays in Dark Matter for intact specimens. It has never had to pay out.
Void Lance
Where human line ships are boxes of armour wrapped around guns, the Void Lance is a single fused needle of alloy that no cutting torch has ever marked. It slides through a fighter screen as if the screen were weather, and its spinal battery — the "spine-light" of a hundred debrief transcripts — discharges with no visible projectile, no beam, only a target that has stopped existing.
Every navy that has met the Lance in numbers has tried to copy it. Every prototype has failed on the same problem: the hull is one piece, with no seams, no welds, and no obvious way it was ever assembled. The aliens do not build their ships, the analysts concluded. They summon them.
Hive Dreadnought
For years the survey corps insisted the aliens fielded nothing heavier than a Void Lance, and for years the wrecks said otherwise: expedition after expedition erased to the last hull, with damage profiles no Lance could produce. The Hive Dreadnought is why. A capital ship the size of a Tempest that moves like something a third its mass, its flanks studded with weapon growths that track and fire independently, as if the ship itself were watching.
It is the reason the great human capitals were laid down at all — the Juggernaut's plating, the Tempest's storm batteries and the Leviathan's graviton array were each, in part, an answer to it. The answer holds. Barely, and only when the capitals show up.
Broodmother
No confirmed kill of a Broodmother existed for a decade. The early reports — a hull measured in tens of kilometres, weapon discharges that registered as stellar events, Stinger swarms pouring from its flanks mid-battle like blood from a wound — were filed as sensor failure, because the alternative was worse: that the alien armadas humanity kept ambushing in deep space were not fleets at all, but foraging parties, and somewhere behind each one stood the thing that had grown them.
The first verified Broodmother engagement lasted eleven minutes and cost a top-ten empire its entire expeditionary arm. The battle log, declassified in fragments, ends with the flagship's gunnery officer reporting — calmly, by all accounts — that the target was "still getting bigger". Leviathan doctrine now lists exactly one approved response to a Broodmother contact: overwhelming capital-grade firepower, delivered immediately. There is no approved retreat protocol. Nothing that has tried retreating has filed a report.
Expedition debris (position 16)
Battles on expeditions leave a debris field at position 16 of the target system: part of everything destroyed in the ambush turns to debris (deep space keeps less than a planetary battle — the recycle trip is part of the price). It is a normal debris field open to every player, any class: send Recyclers from the galaxy view or a recycle mission to collect it.
The Reaper
The Reaper is the battle-harvester: when it survives a fight, it scoops part of the freshly created debris on the spot, capped by its cargo hold.
- Attacks: surviving Reapers auto-collect a share of the battle's debris (both sides' Reapers roll — the attacker scoops first).
- Expeditions: surviving Reapers scoop a share of their pirate/alien battle's debris; the remainder stays in the position-16 field for a recycle run. With enough Pathfinders aboard the expedition scoops a larger share instead (see the salvage note above).
Multi Expedition
The Multi expedition button on the Fleet page splits your ships evenly across several expedition slots in one click — the standard way to keep every slot busy. Its gauge prices each slice against your cap and says which cap tier your next find is measured against.
Tips
- A fleet sitting in port earns no expedition finds — its value only earns while it flies.
- Watch the Scanner: an unclaimed anomaly near you is yours if you arrive first.
- Long holds need a warship escort; long holds of naked haulers are donations to the local captain.
- Ship finds scale with your fleet too — a war fleet on expeditions grows itself.
- Freighters count toward the size of the pirates or aliens you meet but bring no guns: carry the hold a find needs, not more.