Secret Missions

A secret mission opens a wormhole to a hidden solar system stocked with NPC enemy bases, and gives you several days to raid it. It is nothing like a normal mission. There is real combat, you can lose ships, and everything you carry home is loot you took off the enemy.

It is the safest big payday in the game. Nobody else can fly there, the bases do not shoot back at your planets, and there is no cooldown, so you can run one after another for as long as you keep winning.

Unlocking secret missions

All you need is a Capitol at level 1 on the planet or moon you are standing on. Nothing else. There is no ship, tech or shipyard requirement.

The row shows up at the top of the Missions page, above the normal mission list, on every planet that has a Capitol. On a planet without one the row is not there at all, so if it has gone missing, check which planet you are on.

Starting your first one also finishes the Into the Shadows quest.

Starting a mission

Press Start and the game builds a hidden solar system for you and drops you straight into it in the Galaxy view. The button then reads Active, and a countdown appears under it.

You can only have one secret mission open at a time. The Active button is how you get back to the location later, because the coordinates sit far outside the normal galaxy range and you cannot reach them with the Galaxy view arrows. The Oracle does not see them either.

The location

A secret system looks like any other solar system, except the coordinates are nonsense and there is a Secret Mission Health bar across the top showing how much of the enemy stockpile is still sitting there. It starts at 100 percent and drops as you plunder.

You normally get three enemy homeworlds. They are picked one per size band off the top of what your account has grown into, biggest first, so the top one is meant to be a genuine fight and the smaller two are cleanup. Nothing is fixed. Fleets, defenses and stockpiles are rolled fresh every time, so scout with espionage before you commit anything.

Players near the bottom of their universe get a more generous version without being told: five bases instead of three, and a much shorter clock once the raiding starts. The same easier treatment kicks in if you have recently lost a big fleet and your ship strength has fallen a long way behind what you have spent overall. Players at the very top of the leaderboard are left on the normal schedule.

Raiding the bases

Only attack, espionage and debris harvesting work at a secret location. You cannot colonize a slot there, deploy a Hephaestus Class Attack Platform, transport resources in or park a colony ship. Every trip costs a fleet slot and hydrogen like any other attack.

Not to be confused with the weekly Incursion, which is an alliance-wide event with its own sector and pays Alliance Points. A secret mission is yours alone.

Things worth knowing before you send the first wave:

• Travel is fast. Fleets go through the wormhole at a fixed short distance, roughly the same as hopping to another slot in your own solar system, no matter where in the universe you actually live.
• There is no bashing limit. NPCs do not count toward the 24 hour attack cap, so you can hit the same base over and over until it is empty.
• Newbie protection does not apply. NPCs skip the check completely, so a brand new account can raid a secret mission on day one. Diplomacy and PVE mode do not block it either.
• You plunder half. A won battle takes up to 50 percent of what is on the base, capped by the cargo you brought. Bring cargo ships or you will leave most of it behind.
• Defenses partly rebuild. Some of the defenses you shoot down come back before your next wave, the same as on a real player's planet.
• You earn ship destroyed points. Kills at a secret base count toward your destroyed ships points at the usual NPC rate, which is half of what the same kill would be worth against a real player. That is different from normal missions, which pay no points at all.
• Debris is real. Ships destroyed on either side leave a debris field in the slot, and you can send recyclers to collect it. Do it before the wormhole closes.
• Alliance mates can join in. They cannot send their own fleets to your location, but they can join a group attack you start against one of the bases using the invite link, the same as any other group attack.

The clock

A fresh wormhole runs for 5 days. The countdown sits under the Active button on the Missions page.

Draining the bases makes it close sooner. The game checks every 15 minutes and pulls the deadline in:

• Reserves down to about 65 percent: the clock is cut to 40 hours from that moment.
• Reserves down to about 26 percent: the clock is cut to 18 hours.

The clock only ever gets shorter, never longer. So a hard fast raid ends the mission early and lets you start the next one, while a slow one sits on the full 5 days. For players on the easier setting described above, hitting 65 percent expires the wormhole on the spot instead.

Collapsing the wormhole

When the timer runs out the mission does not end by itself. A Collapse Wormhole button appears next to the Active button, and the Missions link in the top nav picks up a badge so you do not forget about it.

Pressing it ends the mission and makes a new one available immediately. There is no cooldown of any kind.

You cannot collapse while any of your fleets are still flying to, sitting at, or coming home from the location. The button greys out and the tooltip says ships are still in transit. Wait for everything to land.

If you never press it, the game collapses the wormhole for you 5 days after the timer expired, and it waits for your fleets the same way. The Auto-collapse counter under the button tells you how long you have left. Either way you get a Wormhole Collapsed message in your inbox.

Remember that the row only shows on a planet with a Capitol. If the nav badge is lit but the Missions page looks empty, you are standing on the wrong planet, and the page will point you at the right one.

What survives the collapse

The whole location is deleted when the wormhole closes. The bases, the slots, the coordinates and any debris fields still lying there all go with it, so uncollected debris is lost for good.

Your ships are not at risk. The game refuses to collapse while you have fleets out there, and if a fleet is still in the air when the teardown happens anyway, the ships and everything in their holds are returned to the planet they launched from. Resources you already carried home are yours to keep.

Notes

• One secret mission per player at a time, across all your planets.
• No cooldown and no daily limit. Collapse one and start another straight away.
• The location is yours alone. Other players cannot see it, scan it or fly to it.
• Nothing runs while you are in vacation mode.

See also

• Missions
• Capitol
• Non-Player Character
• Plunder
• Debris
• Attack
• Group Attack
• Espionage