Krug

The Krug are one of the three non-player races in SFC2, alongside the Urcath and the Seekers. They are a warrior culture built entirely around raiding. They do not negotiate, they do not hold territory and they do not build anything of their own. Whatever a Krug fleet is carrying, it took off somebody else.

In game terms the Krug are an encounter race. You cannot talk to them, ally with them or be attacked by them. They drift into the galaxy, sit there for a few hours and wait to be shot at, and shooting them is one of the steadiest ways to earn resources in the game.

Finding them

Krug turn up as encounters in the Galaxy view. They take up a slot the same way a planet does, but the row is shaded green and the Player column shows a name like "Krug 818a". Those four characters are a random tag. They are not a rank, a version or a difficulty score, and they mean nothing at all.

The colour of the name is how hard that particular fight is for you, not how big the Krug is on its own:

Grey - Trivial
Blue - Easy
Amber - Challenging
Orange - Dangerous
Red - Overwhelming

Blue, amber and orange also carry a number from 1 to 100 saying where inside that band the target sits. 1 is the soft end of the band and 100 is the hard end, so a blue 62 is a much heavier fight than a blue 6. Red carries no number, because a red target might be three times your size or three thousand times your size.

New encounters are placed every 15 minutes, and each one is sized against an active player near where it lands. That means the Krug within reach of you grow as you grow. A solar system holds at most four encounters at a time. If you own a moon with an Oracle on it, you can scan whole blocks of systems for encounters instead of paging through the Galaxy view one system at a time.

Krug encounter types

These seven are the ones nearly everybody sees, smallest first:

Abandoned Cruiser
Abandoned Warship
Small Enemy Fleet
Enemy Fleet
Large Enemy Fleet
Floating Colony
Large Floating Colony

Above those the ladder keeps climbing, and every rung on it carries the Krug name. These only start showing up once your Resources Spent is high enough to draw them:

Krug Dreadnought
Krug Behemoth
Krug Citadel
Krug Leviathan
Krug Worldbreaker
Krug Annihilator
Krug Eclipse
Krug Voidlord
Krug Titan
Krug Juggernaut
Krug Nemesis
Krug Cataclysm
Krug Ragnarok
Krug Apocalypse
Krug Oblivion
Krug Eternity
Krug Omega
Krug Zenith
Krug Sovereign
Krug Apotheosis
Krug Infinity

The Urcath and the Seekers run the same ladder under their own names, but not at the same size. The Krug are the lightest of the three at every rung, the Urcath sit in the middle and the Seekers are the heaviest, so a Krug Citadel is an easier fight, and a smaller payout, than an Urcath Citadel.

You will never see the whole ladder at once. The game only offers you encounters near your own size, so the small rungs drop off the bottom as new ones open up at the top.

Armada variants

Roughly one in ten of the Krug-named tiers spawns as an Armada instead, for example "Krug Zenith Armada". An Armada is the same rung of the ladder, but it carries no ground defenses at all and puts its whole budget into ships. Ships leave debris and defenses do not, so an Armada leaves a much larger debris field behind when you break it.

How long they last

Every encounter is temporary. Small ones sit for about five hours. The biggest ones last close to a full day. They also vanish early once they have been looted down to about a quarter of the resources they started with, so a Krug that two or three other people have already hit will disappear well before its clock runs out.

Scouting one

The eye icon on the row sends probes. The espionage report tells you exactly what is waiting: resources, fleet, defenses and combat tech. Krug never have buildings, and they have no espionage tech of their own, so counterespionage against your probes is always 0 percent and they always come home.

Attacking one

The lightning icon launches the attack. The fight itself runs on the same combat rules as a fight against a player, but there are a handful of differences worth knowing:

None of the size protections apply. Newbie protection and the rank ratio both ignore encounters, so any player can attack any Krug they can reach.
The bashing limit does not apply either. You can hit the same encounter as many times as you like until it is empty.
PVE Mode does not stop you. Krug are not players, so a PVE Mode account can farm them normally.
Diplomacy mode does stop you. While you are in diplomacy mode you cannot launch any attack at all, encounters included.
Plunder is capped at half of what is sitting on the target, the same as a normal raid, so bring cargo.
Ships destroyed on both sides leave a harvestable debris field. Defenses do not.
Destroyed Ship Points earned off an NPC count at half rate towards your ranking.
A Krug can never give you a moon, no matter how big the debris field is.

Secret missions

Krug also show up in secret missions, which draw from the same set of encounters. Those ones sit in a galaxy only you can reach, so nobody else can pick them clean before you get there.