Cargo & Commodities
Your cargo hold carries valuable commodities, and everything aboard is lost with your hull.
Anything worth hauling has to fit in your hold, and anything in your hold dies with your hull. That’s the whole economy in one sentence — everything else is detail.
The hold
Every hull that’s built to carry cargo has a hold, measured in plain units. Fill it with any mix of commodities you like; there’s no sorting by type, just space. Run it empty and you’re a pure combat loadout — run it full and you’re a target worth boarding.
What’s in it
Commodities come from two places right now: things you mine out of a belt, and things you salvage off a wreck. Both pay off the same way — credits per unit, no haggling, no grading. What you’re hauling:
- Ferrite — the baseline ore. Common, cheap per unit, and the reason the hold exists in the first place.
- Gem — a rare strike. It doesn’t replace a Ferrite haul, it rides along on top of one: mine normally and sometimes the rock throws in a Gem for free.
- Generic Salvage — stripped parts and plating off a derelict hull. Unglamorous, still worth the trip.
- Ancient/Exotic Salvage — the rare version of the same proc. Most wrecks give you scrap; some give you something nobody can date.
The mineral ladder
Ferrite is only the floor. Five tiers of ore exist, and where you can mine each one is tied straight to how dangerous the system is:
| Tier | Mineral | Where |
|---|---|---|
| T1 | Ferrite | every belt, everywhere |
| T2 | Silica | common, but only in belts that carry it |
| T2 | Ice | cold outer belts only |
| T3 | Titanium | frontier belts |
| T4 | Iridium | rare belts, thin even where found |
| T5 | Voidite | only near a black hole |
A belt has one dominant ore (most of its rocks) and sometimes a trace ore (a smaller share of rocks) — work a belt long enough and you’ll pull both. The trace is why a belt is worth a second pass instead of a one-and-done strip. Danger and richness climb together: the safest belts only ever give up Ferrite and its trace, the deadliest ones sit on Voidite and nothing lower.
The good rock sits where the guns are
That climb isn’t a suggestion, it’s a hard ceiling on every belt in the galaxy: how dangerous a system is caps how good its ore can get. A safe system never rolls better than Silica. A frontier belt can tempt you with Titanium or Iridium. Voidite exists in exactly one place, and it’s the one place with a black hole hanging over it. There’s no quiet corner of known space where the rare stuff turns up cheap — if a belt is rich, that richness is the reason something is shooting at the miners working it.
That’s why the loop isn’t “find the best belt and camp it.” It’s “decide how much risk this haul is worth,” every time you point a hold at a belt past the safe ones.
The risk
Cargo is not banked anywhere until you sell it. It rides in your hold the whole way home, through however much pirate space sits between the belt and the buyer. Lose the hull, lose the hold — the value only becomes yours the moment it’s off the ship. That’s what makes a loaded run worth escorting and an empty one worth risking alone.