Urcath

The Urcath are one of the three non-player races in SFC2, alongside the Krug and the Seekers. The game files describe them as beings you cannot negotiate or reason with. They have no language anyone has ever picked up, they fight far better than they look like they should, and the only way to move them is force.

In game terms the Urcath are an encounter race. You cannot talk to them, ally with them or be attacked by them. They drift into the galaxy, sit there for a few hours and wait to be shot at, and shooting them is one of the steadiest ways to earn resources in the game.

Finding them

Urcath turn up as encounters in the Galaxy view. They take up a slot the same way a planet does, but the row is shaded green and the Player column shows a name like "Urcath 6386". Those four characters are a random tag. They are not a rank, a version or a difficulty score, and they mean nothing at all.

The colour of the name is how hard that particular fight is for you, not how big the Urcath is on its own:

Grey - Trivial
Blue - Easy
Amber - Challenging
Orange - Dangerous
Red - Overwhelming

Blue, amber and orange also carry a number from 1 to 100 saying where inside that band the target sits. 1 is the soft end of the band and 100 is the hard end, so a blue 73 is a much heavier fight than a blue 6. Red carries no number, because a red target might be three times your size or three thousand times your size.

New encounters are placed every 15 minutes, and each one is sized against an active player near where it lands. That means the Urcath within reach of you grow as you grow. A solar system holds at most four encounters at a time. If you own a moon with an Oracle on it, you can scan whole blocks of systems for encounters instead of paging through the Galaxy view one system at a time.

Urcath encounter types

These seven are the ones nearly everybody sees, smallest first:

Abandoned Cruiser
Abandoned Warship
Small Enemy Fleet
Enemy Fleet
Large Enemy Fleet
Floating Colony
Large Floating Colony

What is sitting there depends on the type. The two abandoned wrecks are all defenses and carry no ships at all. The three fleets are the other way round, all ships and no defenses. Both colony types carry ships and defenses together, and so does every tier above them. That matters for what you get back out: ships leave debris and defenses do not, so an Enemy Fleet leaves a field worth harvesting and an Abandoned Cruiser leaves nothing.

Above those the ladder keeps climbing, and every rung on it carries the Urcath name. These only start showing up once your Resources Spent is high enough to draw them:

Urcath Dreadnought
Urcath Behemoth
Urcath Citadel
Urcath Leviathan
Urcath Worldbreaker
Urcath Annihilator
Urcath Eclipse
Urcath Voidlord
Urcath Titan
Urcath Juggernaut
Urcath Nemesis
Urcath Cataclysm
Urcath Ragnarok
Urcath Apocalypse
Urcath Oblivion
Urcath Eternity
Urcath Omega
Urcath Zenith
Urcath Sovereign
Urcath Apotheosis
Urcath Infinity

The Krug and the Seekers run that same upper ladder under their own names, and the Urcath sit in the middle of the three. An Urcath Citadel is a heavier fight than a Krug Citadel and a lighter one than a Seeker Citadel, and the loot follows the same order. The seven small types work the same way against the Krug: the Krug field Abandoned Cruisers and Enemy Fleets too, and the Urcath version of each is the bigger of the two. So an Urcath target unlocks later than the Krug target with the same name, and pays more when it does.

You will never see the whole ladder at once. The game only offers you encounters near your own size, so the small rungs drop off the bottom as new ones open up at the top.

Armada variants

Roughly one in ten of the Urcath-named tiers spawns as an Armada instead, for example "Urcath Dreadnought Armada". An Armada is the same rung of the ladder, but it carries no ground defenses at all and puts its whole budget into ships. Ships leave debris and defenses do not, so an Armada leaves a much larger debris field behind when you break it. The seven small types never roll an Armada.

How long they last

Every encounter is temporary. Small ones sit for about five hours. The biggest ones last close to a full day. They also vanish early once they have been looted down to about a quarter of the resources they started with, so an Urcath that two or three other people have already hit will disappear well before its clock runs out.

Scouting one

The eye icon on the row sends probes. The espionage report tells you exactly what is waiting: resources, fleet, defenses and combat tech. Urcath never have buildings, and they have no espionage tech of their own, so counterespionage against your probes is always 0 percent and they always come home.

Watch the tech line. Every Urcath carries Weapons, Shield and Armor tech, right down to the smallest wreck. The smallest Krug wreck has none at all, so an Urcath of the same name hits harder and takes more killing than the level difference alone suggests.

Anything carrying defenses also keeps a screen of Anti-Ballistic Missiles in with them. Those never fire at ships, so they do nothing in a normal attack. They matter only if your alliance has bought the Siege Missile Codes perk and you try a missile strike, and even then missiles can only lock onto Trivial and Easy targets.

Attacking one

The lightning icon launches the attack. The fight itself runs on the same combat rules as a fight against a player, but there are a handful of differences worth knowing:

None of the size protections apply. Newbie protection and the rank ratio both ignore encounters, so any player can attack any Urcath they can reach.
The bashing limit does not apply either. You can hit the same encounter as many times as you like until it is empty.
PVE Mode does not stop you. Urcath are not players, so a PVE Mode account can farm them normally.
Diplomacy mode does stop you. While you are in diplomacy mode you cannot launch any attack at all, encounters included.
Plunder is capped at half of what is sitting on the target, the same as a normal raid, so bring cargo.
Ships destroyed on both sides leave a harvestable debris field. Defenses do not.
Destroyed Ship Points earned off an NPC count at half rate towards your ranking.
An Urcath can never give you a moon, no matter how big the debris field is.

That report is a Floating Colony taken on the Dangerous band, and it shows the usual trap. The colony had about 9.2 million in the ground, so half of it was there for the taking, but the fight killed 350 of the 400 cargo ships that came to carry it. What survived could only lift 1.6 million. Bring enough guns that the cargo lives through six rounds, or you leave most of the prize behind.

Secret missions

Urcath also show up in secret missions, which draw from the same set of encounters, Urcath-named tiers included. Those ones sit in a galaxy only you can reach, so nobody else can pick them clean before you get there.