Plunder

Plunder is the loot an attacker carries home after winning a battle. When your fleet clears the defender's ships and defenses off a planet, you fill your cargo holds from the resources sitting on that planet and fly them back. It is the main reason to attack another player at all.

Plunder is worked out automatically the moment the battle ends. You do not pick what to take. Two things decide the amount: how much of the planet's stockpile is up for grabs, and how much cargo space your surviving ships have.

The total shows up on the battle report, and both sides see it, so the defender knows exactly what was taken.

The resources are not credited straight away. They ride home in the fleet's holds and land on the planet you launched from when the fleet arrives. You get a second message, the Attack Return Report, when they are delivered.

How much is up for grabs

Half of each resource on the planet can be taken. Ore, crystal and hydrogen are each split in two and the attacker can only touch one of those halves. The other half stays on the planet no matter how big the attacking fleet is.

Two things change that pool:

A Resource Den on the defending planet hides resources from the pool before the split happens.
During a declared War the share rises from 50 percent to 55 percent.

The war rate is stricter than it sounds. It only applies when every fleet in the attack is at war with the defender and no outsider has joined the defense. If one fleet in the group is not at war, or an ally from a third alliance is sitting on the planet with a Group Defend, the attack drops back to the normal 50 percent.

Cargo space

However big the pool is, you can only carry off as much as your surviving ships can hold. Ships that die in the battle take their cargo space with them, so what counts is the capacity left standing at the end, not what you launched.

Two things carry nothing at all: probes and the Hephaestus Class Attack Platform. The Hephaestus has an enormous listed cargo capacity and none of it counts toward plunder. If you want the loot, bring real cargo ships.

The Calculator page works all of this out before you launch. It shows what you would plunder, how full your holds would be, and how many haulers you would need to take the lot.

In the shot above the planet was holding 400,000 ore, 140,000 crystal and 100,000 hydrogen, so the pool came to 320,000. The fleet only had 200,000 of cargo space between its surviving ships, so it went home with 200,000 and left the rest behind.

How the load is split

When the pool is bigger than your cargo space, the game tries to take an even amount of all three resources instead of filling up on whichever one there is most of. It works like this:

Halve each of the planet's three resources. That is the pool, and nothing below touches the other half.
If your cargo space is bigger than the whole pool, load all of it and stop.
Otherwise find the smallest of the three. If there is at least a third of your cargo space in it, take a third of your cargo space in each resource and stop. Your holds are full and the load is even.
If the smallest one is short of that, take all of it and take the same amount of the other two. One resource is now emptied out of the pool.
Repeat with the two that are left and half the space you have left, then with the last one on its own, until the holds are full or the pool runs dry.

Example

You send a fleet with 200,000 of cargo space at a planet holding 400,000 ore, 140,000 crystal and 100,000 hydrogen. The pool is 200,000 ore, 70,000 crystal and 50,000 hydrogen, which is 320,000 in total. That is more than you can carry.

Hydrogen is the smallest at 50,000, and a third of your space is 66,666, so you cannot fill evenly. You take 50,000 of each instead. Hydrogen is now empty, you have 50,000 of space left, and the pool still holds 150,000 ore and 20,000 crystal.

Crystal is now the smallest at 20,000, and half your remaining space is 25,000, so you take all 20,000 of it plus another 20,000 of ore. That leaves 10,000 of space, which you fill with ore.

You fly home with 80,000 ore, 70,000 crystal and 50,000 hydrogen. That is the battle shown in the screenshots above.

Group attacks

In a Group Attack the plunder is worked out once for the whole group and then shared out. Each fleet's cut is its surviving cargo space as a fraction of the group's surviving cargo space. Send half the group's cargo and you get half the loot, whoever did the shooting. Everyone in the group sees the same full total on the battle report, and each player's share flies home to the planet their own fleet launched from.

This is worth planning around. A fleet of pure warships in a big group attack does the damage and comes home with nothing, while the player who packed haulers takes the lot.

Resource Den

The Resource Den is the only building that shields resources from plunder. It holds back a fixed amount that an attacker cannot reach, and it is applied first, before the half is worked out.

Level 1 protects 30,000 and every level after that adds another 7,500, so a level 8 den protects 82,500.

That figure is one shared pool across all three resources, not 82,500 of each. The game spreads the protection evenly and starts with whichever resource you have least of. A planet holding 400,000 ore, 140,000 crystal and 100,000 hydrogen behind a level 8 den has 27,500 of each shielded, so the attacker works from 372,500 ore, 112,500 crystal and 72,500 hydrogen.

Protected resources are also hidden from Espionage reports. A spy sees the plunderable amount, not your real stockpile, so a well built den makes you look poorer than you are.