Where you go
Position 16 of every system is deep space: an empty coordinate with no planet. Send an expedition there and your fleet lingers a while before returning with a result. You can use your own system, which keeps the flight short.
Outcome odds
The result splits as below. The Dark Force chance is decided first, and resources, Ether and fragments divide what is left.
| Outcome | Chance | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Resources | ~50% | 10–40% of your effective cargo in metal, crystal and gas |
| Ether | ~30% | 30–100 Ether |
| Tech fragments | ~5% | 3–8 unknown tech fragments |
| Nothing | ~10% | an empty return |
| Dark Force | 5–20% | 10–50% of the fleet destroyed |
Internally the fragment band is 15%, but inside it you roll again and only succeed one time in three. The real rate is about 5%; the other 10% returns empty. Fragments only feed Unknown Tech perks, and at the old rate a player finished the entire tree in a month — so we cut it.
The Dark Force — bigger fleets, bigger risk
The chance of meeting the Dark Force scales with the resource value of the fleet you send.
- Base 5%
- +5 percentage points per 100 million of fleet value
- Capped at 20%
So a fleet worth 400 million is ambushed one run in five. There is no total loss, though — 10–50% is destroyed and the rest comes home.
The cargo soft cap
Resource rewards scale with your total cargo capacity, but not forever. Up to 1,000,000 counts fully; beyond that it is flattened by a square root.
| Actual cargo | Counted as |
|---|---|
| 1,000,000 | 1,000,000 (100%) |
| 5,000,000 | 3,000,000 (60%) |
| 10,000,000 | 4,000,000 (40%) |
| 50,000,000 | about 8,000,000 (16%) |
Piling on freighters does not scale the reward with them. Several runs at around a million capacity beat one huge run — and if the Dark Force hits, you lose far less.
Gas is deliberately stingy
Gas is 6–12% of a resource reward, below its share of mine output (about 17%). That is on purpose: gas is fleet fuel, and if expeditions paid it out freely they would fund themselves forever. The rest is 55–70% metal, remainder crystal.
Once every perk is maxed and fragments are useless to you, the fragment band disappears and its chance moves to resources — so expeditions never become a dead roll for veterans.