Economy & Resources
Every colony produces four base resources from four dedicated extractor buildings — plus Rations, a fifth output that behaves nothing like a stockpile, and Munitions, a sixth resource manufactured by burning your other stockpiles rather than mined directly. Understanding why Rations drain, why Munitions never touches the Market, and why the rare Aurium can never be looted or traded, is most of what separates a stable empire from a starving one.
Alloys, Crystal & Isotopes
Three base resources are simple stockpiles: they accrue, they cap, you spend them. Each comes from its own extractor and is held in the shared Cargo Depot. Isotopes are deliberately the scarcest — their refinery produces less per level than the other two, so plan around them.
| Resource | Made by | Stored in | What it's for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alloys | Alloy Foundry | Cargo Depot | Hulls and heavy structure — the bulk material almost everything needs. |
| Crystal | Crystal Synthesizer | Cargo Depot | Electronics, sensors, shield matrices — the other bulk material. |
| Isotopes | Isotope Refinery | Cargo Depot | Reactor fuel and warheads. The scarcest of the three by design. |
| Rations | Hydroponics Dome | Ration Silo | The upkeep resource — see below. It behaves differently from the rest. |
| Munitions | Munitions Plant | Shares the Cargo Depot's cap | The ammunition resource — see below. Manufactured, not mined. |
Rations — Why A Fleet Is A Mortgage
Rations have a continuous drain: every single ship you own — sitting at home, flying a mission, or stationed as a guest defending an ally — eats rations every hour, forever, charged to whatever colony it's currently sitting at. The number your HUD shows is net production minus upkeep, and it can go negative. This one design choice does a lot of work:
- A big fleet is a mortgage, not a one-time purchase.Building ships raises your permanent burn rate — “how big an army can I afford?” is a question you answer every hour, not once at training time.
- Fleets want to be out doing something. A parked fleet is pure expense, so raiding and working fleets pay for themselves in a way an idle garrison never can.
- Reinforcing an ally costs the host's rations, not yours— so defending a friend's colony is a genuine, costly gift, never a free favor.
Nothing happens immediately — a negative net rate just means your Ration Silo is draining. Only once the silo actually hits zero does starvationbegin: units die off proportionally across every type at a fixed rate per hour until upkeep and production balance again. It's slow enough that a single missed evening isn't a wipeout, but real enough that ignoring a red rations rate for a long stretch genuinely costs you ships. Keep Hydroponics ahead of your fleet size.
Munitions — Fuel For The Ground War
Munitions isn't mined — a Munitions Plantcontinuously converts 2 alloys and 1 isotope into 1 munition every game-hour per level, throttled by whatever alloys and isotopes you actually have sitting in your Cargo Depot. It doesn't get a silo of its own either: its storage cap is a fixed fraction of your Cargo Depot's own capacity, so upgrading that one building quietly raises how much ammunition you can bank too.
It exists for exactly one purpose: fueling ground forces(see Ground Forces & Field Battles). Every ground unit — Recon Rangers, Colonial Line Infantry, Mech Vanguard, Armor Lance, Siege Artillery — costs a slice of munitions to train at the Muster Hall, and a garrison burns a further one-shot chunk of the colony's stockpile every time it actually fights. Run dry mid-siege and your garrison doesn't collapse outright — its power is floored at a fraction of normal, a real penalty, never an auto-loss.
Like Aurium, Munitions can never be listed on the Market — it's an ammunition cost for your own ground forces, not a commodity. Unlike Aurium, it isn't rare: any colony with a Munitions Plant and spare alloys/isotopes can manufacture it, and its output climbs in a straight line per plant level rather than compounding, so a maxed-out plant can never silently strip-mine your bulk resources overnight.
Aurium — Access, Never Advantage
Auriumonly exists once you've claimed territory that sits on an Aurium node. It has three hard rules that never change anywhere in the game:
- It can never be looted from you in a raid.
- It can never be traded on the market.
- It never makes anything you own flatly stronger — it only ever unlocks access to a small number of specific late-game things (the apex Dreadnought warship and the final ten levels of the season megastructure).
Holding Aurium ground lets you build different things, never universally better ones. It is the one resource the game never lets you buy your way around.
Storage Caps & Overflow
Both the Cargo Depot and Ration Silo have hard caps that grow with building level — Munitions shares the Cargo Depot's cap rather than getting a silo of its own (see above). Production that would push you over the cap is simply lost — not queued, not refunded, gone. Your HUD shows a resource in red when its store is effectively full: your cue to either spend it (queue a building, train ships) or upgrade the relevant storage building.
This matters most before you log off for a while. A colony that fills up in the first hour of an eight-hour session wastes seven hours of production sitting behind a full warehouse. Spend before you log off.