Oracle

The Oracle is a building you can only put on a moon. It sweeps the solar systems around that moon and lists what it finds there, with a difficulty rating next to every contact. It needs a Lunar Base before you can start it, and each scan burns 5,000 hydrogen off the moon it fires from.

This is not the same building it was in the old game. The SFC2 Oracle does not watch fleet movements. It is a target finder.

What changed from the old game

In SFC1 the Oracle told you which fleets were flying to and from a planet, and people built one so they could see attacks coming. SFC2 does not need it for that. Every attack heading at you already shows up on your Overview and Fleets pages with a countdown and the coordinates it came from, and your Espionage Tech level decides how much of the attacking fleet you get to see: level 2 gives you a ship count, level 4 the ship types, level 8 the exact numbers of each.

So the Oracle was rebuilt around a different job. It finds you something to shoot at without paging through the Galaxy view one system at a time.

Building one

Moons only. It never shows up on a planet's Buildings page.
It needs Lunar Base level 1 first.
Every level eats one field on the moon. A moon has 3 x Lunar Base level + 1 fields in total, so the Lunar Base has to keep up.
A moon runs one build job at a time. While the Oracle is going up, the Lunar Base, Capitol, Warp Gate and Lunar Dock on that moon are blocked, and the other way round.
You can tear it back down. A teardown costs a third of the resources of the level below and takes the matching time.

Build time in seconds is:

Build time	(Ore + Crystal) x 0.72 / (1 + Capitol level)

There is no Foundry on a moon, so a Capitol built up there is the only thing that speeds this up. Level 1 takes 12 hours on a bare moon and 2 hours with Capitol 5. If your alliance has the Lunar Dockyard perk, every moon job runs faster on top of that.

Opening the Oracle

Switch to the moon, open its Buildings page, and press Open Oracle on the Oracle row. The same button sits in the row's More Info window. There is no link for it in the top nav, and the button only appears once the Oracle is finished.

If you own more than one Oracle, the dropdown at the top left of the page switches between them. Whichever moon is picked is the one the sweep is centred on and the one that pays the hydrogen. The Moons panel on your Overview page lists the Oracle level of every moon you own.

Running a scan

Choose what you are looking for and press Scan. Nothing happens when the page loads. A scan only runs when you press the button, and only then does it take the hydrogen.

You get one kind of contact per scan:

Encounters are the NPC fleets and colonies parked around the galaxy, the Krug, Seekers and Urcath. The Oracle uses the same rule the Galaxy view does, so an encounter that has expired or been picked down past 26 percent of the resources it spawned with has already dropped off the list.
Inactive players are accounts that have not logged in for seven days, mixed in with the NPC filler planets that sit in the galaxy and never play at all.
Active players is everyone else.

Tick Hide alliance & buddies to drop your alliance mates and your buddy list out of a player or inactive scan. Your own planets and moons are never in the results either way. The tickbox does nothing on an encounter scan.

Every row gives you the coordinates, the name, the owner on player and inactive scans, and a difficulty rating. Moons are marked (moon) and a deployed Hephaestus platform is marked (platform). Click the coordinates to jump to that system in the Galaxy view.

Difficulty ratings

Difficulty compares the target's Resources Spent against your own. Take the target's number, divide it by yours, and the answer lands in one of five bands.

Rating	Colour	Target is
Trivial	grey	under 0.005x your size
Easy	blue	0.005x to 0.35x
Challenging	amber	0.35x to 1x
Dangerous	orange	1x to 2.55x
Overwhelming	red	2.55x and up

Blue, amber and orange rows carry a number from 1 to 100 as well, telling you where inside that band the target sits. Easy 6 is near the bottom of blue, Easy 81 is near the top of it, and Dangerous 88 is close to being out of reach. Overwhelming carries no number, because a red target can be three times your size or three thousand times and a position would tell you nothing.

Encounters are scored slightly differently. An encounter's number is its fleet, and only about half of what a player spends goes into a fleet, so your own Resources Spent is halved before the comparison. Against another player nothing is halved, because both sides carry the same kind of number, so a player at exactly your size comes out at parity.

The Difficulty from boxes under the header hide rows outside a range. They start at Easy and up, so trivial targets stay hidden until you set the first box to Any. Whatever you pick is remembered for your next scan.

Copy report copies the rows you can currently see as plain text, with a header line naming the moon, the positions swept and the time. It is meant for pasting into alliance chat or a forum post. The small icon on each row copies just that one line.

Range

Range is Oracle level x 5 solar systems in each direction. A level 5 Oracle reaches 25 systems either way, so it sweeps 51 systems counting the moon's own.

A sweep never leaves the moon's galaxy. It stops at position 1 and at the last system in the galaxy, so an Oracle near either edge covers less ground than one sitting in the middle.
Secret mission locations are never included.
If a sweep turns up more than 2,000 contacts, only the first 2,000 are listed and the page tells you so.

Spying straight from the results

The eye at the end of each row throws a spy run at that target from the moon you are scanning from. Three things have to be true for it to work:

A Quick Spy probe count is set in Settings.
At least that many Hermes probes are parked on the scanning moon. They launch from the moon, not from your planet.
You have a free fleet slot.

The header of the Oracle page shows your fleet slots in use and how many probes are sitting on that moon, so you can tell at a glance whether the button will fire. Hover a greyed out eye and it says what is missing.

Protection, vacation and the two modes

Players under Newbie Protection still turn up in a scan. A scan is not an attack, so protection does not hide anyone from it.
Vacation players turn up too, but the eye on their row is dead while their protection holds.
Diplomacy Mode players turn up and cannot be spied. Being in Diplomacy Mode yourself does not stop you scanning.
PVE Mode blocks player scans. Active players is greyed out, and an inactive scan only turns up NPC planets. Encounter scans work as normal.

What the Oracle does not do

It shows no fleets at all. Not attacks coming in, not attacks going out, not group attacks, not harvests. Fleets belong on the Fleets page.
It does not show what a target is holding. You still need probes to see resources, defences and ships.
Nobody is told they were scanned. Unlike a spy run, an Oracle sweep leaves nothing behind on the target's account.
It never looks into another galaxy.

Quest

The quest One Who Sees All pays 327,800 ore, 258,200 crystal and 514,000 hydrogen for getting an Oracle up to level 6.

Cost and range per level

Every level costs exactly twice the level before it. Crystal is always double the ore, and hydrogen matches the ore.

Level	Ore	Crystal	Hydrogen	Range
1	20,000	40,000	20,000	5 systems each way
2	40,000	80,000	40,000	10 systems each way
3	80,000	160,000	80,000	15 systems each way
4	160,000	320,000	160,000	20 systems each way
5	320,000	640,000	320,000	25 systems each way
6	640,000	1,280,000	640,000	30 systems each way
7	1,280,000	2,560,000	1,280,000	35 systems each way
8	2,560,000	5,120,000	2,560,000	40 systems each way
9	5,120,000	10,240,000	5,120,000	45 systems each way
10	10,240,000	20,480,000	10,240,000	50 systems each way
11	20,480,000	40,960,000	20,480,000	55 systems each way
12	40,960,000	81,920,000	40,960,000	60 systems each way

There is no cap on the level, but a galaxy is only 300 solar systems wide, so a level 60 Oracle already reaches every system in it from anywhere and further levels buy you nothing.