Missions

Missions are short jobs you send a small fleet out on to bring back resources. You pick one off the Missions page, set how many you want to run, and click Start. The ships fly out, do the job, and fly home with the payout. There is no battle, nothing can be destroyed, and it costs you nothing to send them.

That makes missions the safest income in the game. Most new players live on them until their mines are big enough to carry the account.

How missions work

Every mission needs certain ships, and they have to be sitting on the planet you start it from. The ships are taken off the planet while the mission runs and put back when it lands.
Missions are free. No hydrogen, no ore, no credits. The only things you spend are time and a fleet slot.
You never lose ships. There is no combat and no chance of failure, so no debris and no ship destroyed points for anybody.
Each mission you run takes one fleet slot. You get 1 slot plus 1 per level of A.I. Tech, and that pool is shared with everything else you send out, so missions compete with attacks, transports and harvests for the same slots. The counter at the top right of the page shows how many you have left.
The payout lands on the planet that started the mission, not on your homeworld.
You can run missions from any planet or moon you own. A deployed Hephaestus Class Attack Platform cannot run them, and neither can a planet that has just been moved until its cooldown is up.
Nothing runs while you are in vacation mode, since the whole game is locked out.

Starting a mission

Each row has a number box and a Start button. The number is how many copies of that mission to send at once, and it fills in with the most you can send. That is whichever runs out first: your free fleet slots, or the ships you have parked on that planet. Fifty is the most you can start in one click.

If you are short on ships the button reads Not Enough Ships, and hovering it tells you what is missing. If every fleet slot is busy it reads No Fleets.

More Info opens a box with the mission's duration, distance, base payout and unlock requirements. Watch the payout there: the box shows the base numbers, while the figures on the row itself already include your bonuses, so the two do not match.

The round trip

Every mission is a round trip. Half the clock is the flight out and half is the flight home, so one running mission shows up as two progress bars in the Tasks panel, Outgoing and then Returning. You get paid when the fleet lands back home, not when it reaches the target.

While a mission is still Outgoing there is a Cancel button. Canceling turns the fleet around on the spot, and the flight home takes as long as it had already been flying. You get the ships back but no resources. Once the mission flips to Returning it cannot be canceled.

Missions also show up in the Tasks panel on your Overview, so you do not have to sit on the Missions page to watch them. If a mission is a minute or longer you can get a push notification when it lands, which you switch on under Settings.

What you get paid

Every mission has a base payout in ore, crystal and hydrogen. The exact amount is rolled fresh every run and normally lands within about ten percent of the base either way, so the same mission never pays exactly the same twice.

Two things move the base number:

Expedition Tech adds 30 percent per level to every mission payout. This is by far the biggest lever on mission income. At Expedition Tech 3 you are collecting 190 percent of the base numbers, and the page shows your total next to the fleet counter as Expedition Bonus.
Diplomacy mode cuts payouts. While it is switched on, missions pay 75 percent of base until you have spent 50,000 resources, then 50 percent, then 25 percent once you pass 100,000. That cut applies before the Expedition bonus is added, so a big diplomacy account earns a lot less per run than the list below suggests.

Unlocking missions

Missions unlock on research, not on ships. Once you have the tech the mission appears in the list whether or not you own the ships for it, so a locked mission always means a missing tech level. The bottom of the page names the next mission you have not unlocked and exactly what it needs.

Daily missions

Three missions carry a Daily tag. They pay much better for the time they take, but you only get one run each per day, and the quantity box is locked to 1. After you start one the button changes to Completed Today.

The limit is counted per planet, so an account with five planets can run each daily mission five times a day, once from each planet. The day rolls over at midnight server time, which is the clock in the top left corner of the game.

Canceling a daily while it is still Outgoing releases the lock, so you can start it again the same day.

Pinning the ones you use

The pin next to More Info sticks a mission to the top of the list, and the arrows that appear reorder your pinned ones. Pins are saved per planet, so each planet can keep its own short list of the missions you actually farm there. Everything else stays sorted by distance.

Mission list

Times are the full round trip. Payouts are base numbers before Expedition Tech and diplomacy mode, and the last column is total resources per second at those base numbers, which is the fair way to compare a two minute mission against an hour long one. Ship names are shortened here, so Atlas means Atlas Class Cargo and so on.

Mission	Time	Ships	Unlocks at	Base payout	Per sec
Raid an Unguarded Ore Mine	01:00	1x Atlas	None	200 ore	3.33
Raid an Unguarded Crystal Mine	01:16	1x Atlas	None	140 crystal	1.84
Raid An Abandoned Hydrogen Tank	01:26	1x Atlas	Energy Tech 1	130 hydrogen	1.51
Raid an Ore Mine	01:30	1x Artemis + 1x Atlas	Jet Drive 1	400 ore	4.44
Raid a Crystal Mine	02:06	1x Atlas + 1x Artemis	Armor Tech 1	270 crystal	2.14
Raid a Passing Atlas Class	03:00	1x Artemis + 1x Apollo + 1x Atlas	Pulse Drive 2	400 ore, 150 crystal, 50 hydrogen	3.33
Destroy Artemis Classes	03:30	5x Artemis + 1x Atlas	Weapons Tech 1	500 ore, 250 crystal	3.57
Harvest Debris Field	15:00	1x Dionysus	Shield Tech 2	1,300 ore, 1,600 crystal	3.22
Raid a Guarded Mining Asteroid	05:00	1x Poseidon	Laser Tech 3	670 ore, 310 crystal, 100 hydrogen	3.60
Haul Cargo (Daily)	50:00	1x Atlas	None	4,000 ore, 4,000 crystal, 1,200 hydrogen	3.07
Collect Nearby Debris Field	10:00	1x Zagreus	Energy Tech 3	850 ore, 1,000 crystal	3.08
Recon Enemy Territory (Daily)	25:00	2x Artemis + 1x Hermes + 1x Atlas	Expedition Tech 1	5,000 ore, 1,000 crystal, 500 hydrogen	4.33
Sweep For Enemy Mines	07:30	1x Ares	Expedition Tech 3	850 ore, 850 hydrogen	3.78
Escort Ship (Daily)	1h 15m	1x Apollo + 2x Atlas	Expedition Tech 2	5,000 ore, 5,000 crystal, 5,000 hydrogen	3.33
Defend Against Enemy Invaders	15:00	3x Hades	Warp Drive 3, Shield Tech 4	2,000 ore, 1,300 crystal, 800 hydrogen	4.56

A few things fall out of that table. Raid an Ore Mine and Defend Against Enemy Invaders are the best plain missions per second, and the three dailies are worth taking every day even though their per second numbers look ordinary, because they hand you a big lump for one click. The two recycler missions are the only way to turn a Dionysus or Zagreus into income when there is no debris field worth chasing.

Secret missions

The red row at the top of the Missions page is a secret mission, and it is a completely different thing. It drops an NPC enemy base scaled to your current strength at a hidden spot in the universe and you go attack it for real, with real ship losses. It needs a Capitol on the planet you start it from. See the Secret Missions page for how those work.