Your first breach

Every breach run ends at a train: catch one and your haul comes home with you.

A breach is a timed multiplayer zone where you fight, mine and salvage. Getting in is easy; timing your way out with a full hold is the skill this chapter is about.

Picking a breach

1. Open the Overworld map at the top of the screen.
2. Choose a breach. Each one has a build-rating range, and your ship, cargo included, has to fall inside it to enter.

Two early examples: Pilgrim's Gate II accepts 0 to 7K, and Crusader's Passage 0 to 4.6K. You can go in alone or in a squad of up to five.

Each faction also has lower-tier breaches the enemy faction cannot enter, which makes them the safer place to start. Cloud Wake and The Gallows are the opposite: faction-war maps with no BR limit at all. Leave those for later.

Deeper tiers open one at a time: you clear a tier by extracting from it.

Inside

• Scout around before you attack anything, and do not pull too many NPCs at once.
• Lock targets with Tab; ones near your cursor come first. Hovering a merchant and pressing Tab targets it too.
• If your turrets will not fire at a locked target, you are probably out of range; the range indicator above each turret in the module bar turns green once you are close enough.
• Use the harpoon to pick up loot. Since Beta Patch 1, dropped loot lasts 50% longer before it disappears.
• Merchants can spawn at high-value nodes and show as an orange map icon once someone finds them; their stock stays the same for as long as the breach is open.

Getting out

The only way out of a breach is a train.

1. Look for the extraction markers, drawn as green boxes.
2. Trains run to different destinations, so read where each marker leads before you board.
3. To get home, find the marker for your hub, for example ZHAT for Zhat Kali.

Cargo counts toward your build rating at 25%. A good haul can push you over the limit of wherever a train is headed, and trains into a breach region refuse any ship rated above that tier's maximum. If that happens, take a different train.

When to leave

Runs are meant to be short. The pattern that works: kill a few NPCs, loot, extract, refit, repeat. Every extra minute is another minute in which your cargo can be taken from you.