Fleet

Missions are how anything leaves home. Pick ships from the hangar, a target site off the map and an intent — the mission is the fleet for as long as it flies, and what happens on arrival is the intent's own resolution. A raid fights and loots what its holds can carry; a transport delivers its cargo; espionage reads the target colony; recycle sweeps a debris field; deploy moves ships to another of your colonies for good. Flying costs Hydrogen — more for heavier hulls, longer distances and greater speed, with distance read across the universe's layers — and whatever survives flies home with what it took. Every resolved mission files its report in the Inbox.

An expedition is its own kind of flight: the mission dives at a deep-water hex and holds there for a duration you choose, and what it found resolves only on return. Any ships may dive — there is no special hull for it. Longer holds and bigger fleets weigh the scales both ways: more to find, more to lose. Moons never take a dive — no deep water.

Some deep-water hexes carry a Kraken: a mark the simulation places there that multiplies what a dive at that hex returns, at greater danger. In the game the mark is a bare glyph — no tooltip, no legend, no name anywhere; this manual is the one place it is explained, so hunt the marks and weigh the odds yourself. A mark is not consumed by a dive: it lives out its own lifetime, several dives may ride the same mark, and a dive keeps the multipliers it launched with even if the mark fades beneath it.

Mission	Needs	Carries cargo
raid	—	—
transport	—	yes
deploy	—	yes
espionage	Spore	—
colonize	Seeder	—
recycle	Scavenger	—
expedition	—	—