Shadow Probe

The Shadow Probe is the paid spy ship. It does the same job as the Hermes Class Probe, but it cannot be shot down, it brings back the whole report whatever the tech levels are, and the target never finds out it was there. You get one look out of it and then it is gone.

It is the only ship in the game with no resource price at all. It costs 20,000 Credits and nothing else.

Getting one

Two ways. The Shipyard sells them for 20,000 Credits each, and the Lucky Draw hands them out in ones, threes and fives in its rarest tier.

There is no research and no building level in the way, so the Shadow Probe is in the Shipyard list from your first day. Credits ships skip the build queue entirely: Time reads Instant and the probe is sitting on the planet the moment you press Build. Buy it on the planet you plan to launch from.

The Base and Current columns work like any other ship. Armor Tech lifts the hull and Jet Drive lifts the speed. Weapons and Shield Tech multiply a 0 and leave a 0.

Sending one

Only from the Fleets dispatch screen, on an Espionage mission. The eye icon in the Galaxy is Quick Espionage, and Quick Espionage always sends Hermes, never a Shadow Probe. Same for the eye on an Oracle result. If you would rather the eye icon took you to the dispatch form, set Quick Espionage to 0 probes in Settings.

Two rules on the form:

One Shadow Probe per run. Ask for more and it clamps back to 1.
No mixing. Put a Shadow Probe in the box and the Hermes field locks at 0, and the other way round.

The run holds a fleet slot until it lands, and that is the end of it. There is no return trip, so the slot frees up the moment the report arrives.

What comes back

Everything. Resources, fleet, defenses, buildings and technologies, every time, whatever your Espionage Tech is and whatever theirs is. The report header reads Counterespionage Chance: N/A (Shadow Probe) and Probe Status: Consumed (single-use).

Below is the same planet probed twice inside a minute. On the left, two Hermes sent at a player three Espionage Tech levels ahead: 96 percent counterespionage, both probes dead, and nothing but the resource line. On the right, one Shadow Probe.

One thing to watch. A Shadow Probe reads the planet without disturbing it, so the resource figures are whatever the target's planet was last updated to rather than what is sitting there at that second. On a target who has been offline a while that number runs behind. Everything else in the report is current. Resource figures are after Resource Den protection on both probe types, so what you see is what you could actually take.

What the target sees

Nothing at all.

No Espionage Detected message.
The inbound fleet never appears on their Overview. Ordinary probes do.
No counterespionage roll, so nothing for their ships to shoot at and no debris left over their planet.

That only covers the Espionage mission. A Shadow Probe riding along on an attack is just another ship, and the attack shows up on their screen like any other.

Speed and fuel

Identical to the Hermes: base speed 100,000,000 on a Jet Drive, which adds 10 percent of the base per level, and fuel consumption 1. These are one way times, which is all a Shadow Probe ever flies.

Jet Drive	Same system	Five systems over	Next galaxy	Two galaxies
3	21s	33s	1m 14s	1m 43s
6	19s	30s	1m 07s	1m 33s
10	18s	28s	1m 01s	1m 24s
14	17s	26s	56s	1m 17s

Fuel is 1 hydrogen anywhere inside your own galaxy, 3 to the next galaxy and 6 to cross two. Not the part of the bill that matters.

In a fight

Attack 0, shield 0, hull 100, the same as a Hermes. It never damages anything and it dies to anything. Fourteen ships have rapid fire against it:

Rapid fires the Shadow Probe	Rating
Zeus Class	x1250
Apollo Class Fighter	x5
Ares Class Bomber	x5
Artemis Class Fighter	x5
Athena Class Battleship	x5
Atlas Class Cargo	x5
Carmanor Class Cargo	x5
Dionysus Class Recycler	x5
Gaia Class Colony Ship	x5
Hades Class Battleship	x5
Hercules Class Cargo	x5
Poseidon Class Cruiser	x5
Prometheus Class Destroyer	x5
Zagreus Class Recycler	x5

The Shadow Probe has no rapid fire of its own. Nothing in the defense grid has rapid fire against anything, which is what makes cheap probes good fodder. A Shadow Probe is not cheap, so do not use it that way.

Because it costs no ore, crystal or hydrogen, two numbers come out at zero:

It leaves no debris when it dies. Nothing for anyone to harvest, and nothing towards a moon roll.
It is worth 0 rank points to own and 0 Destroyed Ships Points to kill. Rank counts resources, and Credits are not resources.

You can put a Shadow Probe in any fleet, not just an espionage run, and on those missions the one at a time rule does not apply. It flies home like any other ship unless it is shot down. Only the Espionage mission consumes it.

What it does not get you past

A Shadow Probe is invisible, not exempt. The dispatch screen blocks it in exactly the same places it blocks a Hermes:

Your own planets.
Players in Vacation Mode.
Players in Diplomacy Mode, both directions.
Players in PVE Mode, both directions. NPCs are still fair game.
Players under Newbie Protection, or too far from you in rank.
A Hephaestus that is moving. The probe finds empty space and files a Target Not Found report, and it is spent all the same.

It also still takes a fleet slot, so a full fleet list blocks the launch.

When to spend one

A Hermes costs 1,000 crystal and comes home. A Shadow Probe costs 20,000 Credits and does not. Keep them for the shots an ordinary probe run cannot make:

The last look before a fleet crash. An Espionage Detected message is exactly the warning that makes a target move their fleet.
Targets whose Espionage Tech is well above yours, where a Hermes run either comes back empty or does not come back.
Targets sitting on a big fleet. Counterespionage scales with the ships in orbit, so on a fat planet a Hermes run is close to a guaranteed loss.
Anything where you would rather not tell them you are interested.

For everything else, and especially for NPC encounters, a Hermes does the job. From Espionage Tech 3 up a single Hermes already returns the full report on an encounter, so a Shadow Probe there is 20,000 Credits wasted.

Quests

A Shadow Probe run counts towards the I, Spy quests like any other spy run, at 1, 5, 25, 100 and 500 espionages. No quest asks you to own or to destroy one.