Resources and crafting

Four resources, and everything you build comes out of them.

Storage is capped by your Depot. Raise it before you start losing what you gather.

Energy

Energy caps at 150 and refills one point every three minutes.

It gates gathering, never fighting. When you run out, the answer is to go and fly a match. Combat costs nothing, and the tank refills while you do.

Gathering

Two ways.

Nodes on the world map. Eight of them, each with its own yield, cooldown and the skill it trains. Fly out, harvest, come back.

Runs. Send a flight out from the base and collect it when it lands. There are 200 routes on the board, none of them instant, and the shortest is an hour.

A longer run pays more in total and less per hour. That is deliberate: the thing you are really choosing is how long until you are next at the controls, and if the long ones paid better per hour nobody would ever fly a short one. About one route in seven asks for no energy at all, so an empty energy bar never means an empty board.

Tier 3 and 4 runs can also come home with a salvage chest. That is the reward a pile of alloy is not.

You can have several flights out at once. The Hangar decides how many: two to begin with, another every two levels, six at a maxed hangar. That is the real throughput limit on gathering.

Each route is grounded for 24 hours from the moment it launches, not from when you collect it, so the board is ready at the same hour every day instead of drifting later.

Runs are the slow layer. The world map's nodes come back in minutes, and that is where you go when you want something now.

Crafting

Hardpoints are machined in the Workshop. Twelve exist across three tiers.

Tier one needs only materials. Tier two and three additionally need a blueprint, a skill level, or both. Blueprints come from gunnery milestones, so the way to unlock better hardware is to keep fighting.

Salvage chests

Chests turn up at sea. Opening one rolls loot. They are a bonus on top of the loop rather than a thing to chase.

Where it all goes