Inactive players

Inactive is what the game calls a player who has not logged in for 7 days. An orange i appears next to their name in the Galaxy view. At 21 days it turns into a capital I. The clock runs on your last login, so signing in clears it straight away.

The marker shows in the Galaxy view and on your alliance's member list. It is not shown on the leaderboards or on a player's profile page.

What you lose while you are inactive

• Newbie protection and the rank range check are dropped. Once you are inactive, any player can attack you however far apart your ranks are, and however small you are.
• Diplomacy mode stops protecting you. Protection comes back the moment you log in. The game emails you a warning before the 7 days are up if you have diplomacy mode on.
• Your alliance can replace you as leader. If an alliance leader goes 7 days without logging in and is not on vacation, leadership passes automatically to the longest-standing active officer, or to the longest-standing active member if no officer is active. Everyone in the alliance gets a message about it, and the new leader can hand it back when you return.
• After 35 idle days the player can be deleted. See below.

What does not change

• PVE Mode still holds. PVE Mode shuts off player combat in both directions for a set number of days, and being inactive does not break it. Nobody can attack, spy on, or missile a planet while it is running.
• Vacation mode still holds. A player on vacation picks up the inactive marker after 7 days like anyone else, and it changes nothing. They still cannot be attacked. You will see v and i together in the Galaxy view.
• The attack limit still holds. Six landings on one target in 24 hours, inactive or not.

Raiding an inactive player

An inactive planet is about the softest target in the game. Nobody is home to fleet save, recall a fleet, or call for help. That does not make it free.

• Defenses still fire. Nothing is switched off while a player is away. A turtled inactive planet can wipe a careless fleet.
• Ships sitting at home still fight. Whatever they left parked defends the planet.
• Spy first. Send enough probes to see ships and defenses, and preferably technologies as well. See Espionage and Espionage Tech for how many you need.
• Alliance mates and buddies can group defend them. The group defend option only appears on planets belonging to your alliance members and buddies, so a covered inactive can still be a trap. That is a ninja defense.
• The loot has a ceiling. Their mines keep running while they are gone, but resources stop at their storage capacity. A planet idle for a month is not holding a month of production, it is holding a full warehouse. Plunder works the same as on any other target.

Finding them with the Oracle

An Oracle built on one of your moons sweeps the solar systems around it and reveals one kind of contact per scan. Pick Inactive players and it lists every inactive player and unclaimed NPC planet in range, with coordinates and a difficulty rating worked out against your own Resources Spent. Each scan costs hydrogen from that moon.

Points from battles with inactives

• You still earn DSP. It counts on the Destroyed Ships board and in your Overall score, exactly like any other battle.
• It does not count on the PvP Destroyed Ships board, and it does not count toward Raider of the Week. Farming somebody who is not playing is not PvP.
• That works both ways. Ships the inactive player's defenses shoot down still earn them DSP, but that DSP does not reach the PvP boards either.
• In a declared war, the alliance declaring it chooses whether battles with inactive players count toward war points. Leave that box unticked and those battles do not move the war score.

Deletion after 35 days

A job runs every morning and deletes players who have been idle for 35 days or more, which frees their planet slots for everyone else.

A player is skipped if any of this is true:

• they are in vacation mode
• the account has ever made a purchase, counted across the whole account rather than one universe
• a hostile fleet or missile is already on its way to one of their planets
• the universe is archived

Only the player is deleted, not the account. The login still works, and you can join a universe again and start over from a fresh homeworld. There is no warning email for this one.