How Shipload works

There's no fog of war. The entire universe is open from day one, and every coordinate is discoverable without an unlock or reveal.

Two seeds drive everything you see. The genesis seed was burned in at launch and decides what sits at every coordinate: a rocky planet here, a gas giant there. That map never changes. The epoch seed rotates periodically and decides what's actually in those places, right now — which resource, how rich, how much is left.

Every location can be gathered at different depths. Near the surface you'll find common materials. Rare resources only appear deeper, and deeper still. Your gatherer's depth stat sets the ceiling, and every meter below the surface adds time and energy to the run.

Only a fraction of coordinate-and-stratum pairs yield anything at all. The hunt pattern: find a coord where both numbers are high, at a depth your gatherer can reach.

Nexuses are fixed points in the universe where cargo meets the chain. A packed ship sitting in your storage is just game state. Take it to a nexus and you can wrap it into an NFT you actually own. Unwrap at a nexus to bring it back.

Full details live on the Nexuses reference (coming soon). For now: they exist, they're the bridge between the game and the broader chain, and you travel to them like any other coordinate.

Every entity starts life as a packed item. Think flat-pack furniture. It sits in your cargo with all its stats encoded as a seed, but it's not doing anything yet. You can trade it, move it between ships, or stack multiples in a container.

When you deploy a packed entity, that seed unfolds into real capabilities. Hull mass. Cargo capacity. Whatever the installed modules will provide. A deployed entity is a live object on the map that can move, gather, manufacture, and interact with the world.

A deployed ship is just a shell. It has hull mass and cargo capacity, and that's the whole story without modules. Everything else, every capability you'll ever care about, comes from what you slot in.

Seven module types exist. Each one is crafted separately from its own resources and components, so the quality of every system is independent. A ship can have a great engine and a mediocre gatherer. That's a real configuration, not a bug.

No generator, no powered actions. Gather, craft, and travel all require energy, and the only thing that provides energy is a generator. Leave it off the ship and the ship sits.

Modules can't be added or removed while an entity has a scheduled task. Finish what's queued, then swap.

A ship's hold is a trade-off. Every slot you give to cargo is a slot you can't give to an engine, or a gatherer, or a generator. Ships are workers, not warehouses.

That's where containers come in. A container is a dedicated 2M cargo box you deploy at a coordinate. Park a ship next to it, gather, transfer the haul into the container. Repeat. When it's full, a ship with Hauler modules tows it — the container flies along, the ship does the work. Dock at a warehouse, empty the container, and either leave it behind or haul it to the next rich site.

Hauling has costs. Every container in a group travel adds a thrust penalty to the whole group and extra energy drain to the ship doing the towing. Better Hauler efficiency dampens the penalty but never removes it. Plan for slower trips and fuller batteries.

One Hauler slot tows one container. Multiple ships can pool their Hauler slots in a single group. Everything in the group must share the same owner.

Most of the things you do cost energy. When you queue an action, its energy cost is locked in right then — not drained continuously while the task runs. If your ship can't afford the cost at the moment you schedule it, the action fails before it starts.

Your generator sets the ceiling. No generator, no energy at all. Everything that needs power quietly refuses to queue.

Almost nothing happens instantly. Actions enqueue tasks with durations. Your ship processes them in order, head to tail, and when a task's clock runs out you (or anyone) call resolve to apply the effect.

The queue is strict first-in, first-out. New tasks append to the tail — they never cut the line. Managing what you queue, in what order, is how you pilot.

Cancelability depends on the task. Some you can drop mid-run; some you can only cancel before they start; some are locked in the moment they're queued.

When a crafting recipe calls for a resource, you can supply it from multiple stacks. Their stats merge by weighted average — more quantity means more influence on the result.

A small amount of low-quality material won't ruin a large batch of good stuff, but it will drag the average down. The hunt for high-stat resources is what drives theorycrafting.

Blended stats clamp to the [1, 999] range. A blend that would produce a higher number caps at 999; anything below 1 rounds up.

Quality carries through the entire crafting chain. The stats on your raw resources decide the stats on your components, which decide the stats on your modules, which decide the final capabilities of your deployed entity. Every arrow in the chain is a blend.

There are no random rolls, no luck-based upgrades. Every number on a finished ship traces back to the specific rocks it was built from. Good stuff in, good stuff out.