Upkeep

Current revision as of 01:48, 24 January 2020

Upkeep is the amount of Credits that you must pay daily to maintain your ship modules and allies. All equipment increases the upkeep costs for your ship whether installed or uninstalled. Upkeep is normally 5% of the sum of all module prices and is automatically deducted from your credits on hand once per day. A module price is either the credit price you paid for the module, or a set value the module comes with when you get it. If you have insufficient funds to pay daily upkeep some or all of your equipment will lose 10% durability, but your remaining credit balance will not be depleted [1].

Managing Upkeep

As you add more ship modules and allies to your ship, daily upkeep costs will steadily increase. There are a variety of ways to compensate.

Mining Income

The main strategy is to boost your hourly mining income from planets. The most efficient planets to target are maxed toxic planets as their mining richness can be quickly boosted up to 15x or 16x megarich using Toxic Purifiers.

When you trade minerals for credits, there is a trade tariff cost of 20% which is lost in the transaction. Unlocking the Dark Aperture-Key ability reduces that trade tariff cost from 20% to 10% for 1 hour. Since this ability has a 12 hour cooldown, you can try to build up your Mining Points in between uses of the ability in order to maximize the benefit.

Galactic Trade Center

If you have surplus artifacts and materials, you can sell them on the Galactic Trading Center for credits.

Ship Mods

As your ship gets stronger due to increasing crew count and ship modules, some researched modules become less efficient. Selling these researched modules may be a way to decrease upkeep costs. Modules acquired from missions should NOT be sold as there is no way to go back and repeat those missions.

For mission modules that are not currently required, the better option is to repeatedly install and uninstall the module until it is broken. Modules will also lose 10% durability each time they are uninstalled. When durability reaches 0%, equipment becomes "broken" and no longer require upkeep. However, to repair the module to functional status, you will have to pay the full credit cost that you originally paid to purchase the ship module (less any mineral costs).

It is natural to want to have the highest level ship modules that you have acquired via the Research Tree, but there have been many pilots who have been caught unprepared by the higher upkeep costs after installing those new ship modules. Downgrading those ship modules to a lower tier on the Research Tree will give you lower upkeep costs at the expense of more inefficient modules.

Research Contract

Once you have spent at least 47,400,000 Research points on the Research Tree, or in the Collective Theory Lab, a blue-outlined box will appear at the bottom of the screen. After that, you have the option to 'sell' your RPs for Credits by clicking on the Research Contract button. The exact rate of exchange is 25,000 CR for each 1 Research point, so 1000 Research points will earn you 25 Million CR. This means that your maxed research planets still have some utility after you have finished researching the entire technology tree.

Dark AssemblyBot

You can acquire 3 Dark AssemblyBots from the Hastened Dispatch mission which is unlocked once you have found Caelon, Dark Dispatcher. Each Dark AssemblyBot will decrease daily upkeep by 5% for a total of 15.76% for the full set.

Builder Profession

The Builder Profession has a passive ability that reduces upkeep and hull repair costs by 50%. This can be enough to get you over a short-term fiscal crunch, but should not be relied upon in the long-term.

Going Inactive

After 3 days of being offline (without logging in to the game), upkeep for your ship modules will no longer be deducted [2]. The ship modules will continue to take damage until they are broken. This is obviously NOT recommended.

See also

• Modules