Captain & Relics
Every account has a Captain: a personal progression track separate from your colonies, earning experience from combat and from claiming Directives. Skill points and up to five socketed relics give a real, meaningful edge — but a deliberately modest one, layered on top of your empire, never replacing it.
What The Captain Is
The Captain gains experience from combat and from claiming Directives / Daily Orders. Combat XP is proportional to the upkeep costof whatever enemy units you actually destroyed — a kill against a heavy Dreadnought is worth roughly twelve times a kill against a cheap recon probe — and it's win-or-lose agnostic: even a losing side earns XP for whatever it managed to kill before going down. Experience derives a level (capped at 30) and, from there, a portrait tier(bronze → silver → gold → platinum) shown on your commander portrait.
Like your points and rank, the Captain is a per-season track — it starts at level 0 each new season. If you link a durable account, a trophy record of your best-ever Captain level per season is kept permanently on your public profile, but that's a pure historical record with no effect on gameplay.
The Four Skill Branches
Every level grants one skill point, spendable in any of four branches. All four carry real, live gameplay bonuses.
| Branch | What it actually does |
|---|---|
| Tactics | A combat power multiplier, applying to both your attack and your defense. |
| Logistics | A fleet travel-speed multiplier — genuinely shortens your ETA on every mission. |
| Reconnaissance | A multiplier on your effective probe count in every spy contest. |
| Command | A multiplier on how much plunder cargo your fleet can carry home from a win. |
Every bonus follows a diminishing-returns curve(roughly, tripling your points in one branch gets you well under double the bonus) — because there's no cap on how many points you can dump into a single branch, this curve is what keeps an all-in specialist strong but not overwhelming. Spreading across a few branches versus dumping everything into one is a real, meaningful choice, not a trap either way.
Relics
Relics no longer feed a skill branch directly — instead, every relic belongs to a named Set. Your Captain has five free equipment slots: each equipped piece grants a small solo bonus by itself, and completing an entire Set (wearing every piece at once) unlocks a bigger set-completion bonus on top. Five slots is a real constraint — you can never have all four pieces of two different Sets equipped simultaneously, so committing to a Set is a genuine identity choice, not a checklist.
There are 35 relics across 9 Sets: two Sets — a cheaper starter tier and an endgame grail tier — in each of four domains, plus one special alliance-wide Set.
| Domain | Starter Set | Grail Set |
|---|---|---|
| Military | Raider's Kit — fleet attack | Bastion Doctrine — fleet defense |
| Economy | Prospector's Kit — resource production | Vault Doctrine — storage capacity |
| Exploration | Scout's Kit — sensor range | Wayfarer Doctrine — fleet speed |
| Diplomacy | Envoy's Kit — construction speed | Sovereign Doctrine — research speed |
Relics come in six rarity tiers — common, uncommon, rare, epic, legendary, and a top immortal tier — each a slightly larger solo bonus. Every bonus stays deliberately modest: relics are a nice edge on top of your empire, never the dominant source of power.
The ninth Set is different: three alliance-scope, Immortal-rarity piecesthat grant their wearer no personal stat at all. Whoever assembles and equips all three grants their entire alliance a resource-production bonus — spending 3 of their 5 slots purely to buff everyone else, forgoing a personal Grail build. Immortal pieces are the single rarest drop in the game, reachable only from the biggest events (below) — assembling a complete Concord is the rarest achievement in Void Reach.
Relics are earned only from combat, never purchased, from two kinds of sources:
- Routine play — ordinary NPC site kills and PvP raid wins. Common-heavy; legendary and immortal pieces never drop here.
- Major events — a Roaming World Boss kill, or capturing the one Relic Siteper galaxy (seated at the galaxy's core system on purpose, guarded by a garrison roughly double a Custodian Vault's). These never drop a common, and are the onlyway to reach legendary or immortal rarity. A Relic Site's location is public and famous by design — it's meant to be fought over.