Getting stronger

Three things decide how strong a ship gets: affinity, modifiers, and the parts that bend the grid rules.

This is where a ship you have flown for a while becomes your own.

Affinity

Affinity belongs to one ship. As the ship levels, you put points into types such as turret, shield, armor, utility and agility. Points in a type unlock that type's module modifiers and perks; Turret affinity, for example, leads to perks like Marksman and Brawler.

• The ship earns XP from kills, mining, harpooning loot containers and repairing others; one point per level, up to 20. Perks unlock at 5, 10, 15 and 20 points, and Marksman and Brawler are a pick-one pair at 20.
• If a module's modifiers show crossed out, you lack points in its type.
• The perks list shows which level unlocks more.
• Modifiers apply top-down, so an artifact's downsides apply first.

Affinity cannot move between ships, and it dies with the ship. The only reset is a Yata replicator, which copies the ship at the same level with its points unspent.

Modifiers and consumables

Normal items carry no modifiers and four is the maximum. The exact counts for each rarity colour are not yet confirmed. Hold Z on an item's tooltip to see the roll range of each modifier beside its value. Consumables work on modules or whole hulls in the stash grid; the target has to be identified first. The order you use them in matters:

• Hermes augmenter, Norn overclocker and Laplace matrix add modifiers.
• Kairo removes one. Dropping a modifier can drop the item's rarity.
• Ptah crucible rerolls quality, including a whole ship's.
• Skuld omen rerolls subsystems.
• Tyche's catalyst has a 25% chance to turn an item into its artifact or regalia variant, and destroys the item if it fails.

Some consumables add grid cells, each succeeding once per ship:

• Inverted Coil turns a core cell into a battery cell with a 50% chance.
• Arc turns core into subsystem.
• Wanderer Jet adds propulsion.

Ciphers

A cipher key reshapes a plain module.

1. The module must be Normal rarity with exactly as many ports as the key requires. All known cipher keys use two ciphers, so look for a module with exactly two ports.
2. Attach the required ciphers to its ports.
3. Apply the key. The ciphers fix in place permanently, change the module's shape and make it a harmonic.

The easy route is to research a blueprint and craft a fresh base module for it.

Regalia

Regalia sets, such as Amnion's Consecration, give bonuses when their pieces are linked. Pieces must physically touch; conduits do not count as links, though the devs are discussing changing that. A corner touch is not enough, and only fitted pieces count. The more of a set you connect, the more modifiers unlock.