Forge

Forge is for building. Where FFA hands you ships, Forge hands you raw material and asks what you will make of it.

Asteroids are the whole economy. Each is made of a single material, and the rarer a material is the fewer of its rocks there are to find, wherever you look. Every block is bought with materials, and the price of another of the same kind climbs with how many you already have, gently for structure and steeply for weapons, so a ship is rewarded for being a design rather than a wall of guns. The builtin ships are on offer too, priced against what your own is worth, for anyone who would rather start from something that flies.

Fighting is meant to matter without ending you. Weapons siphon material from the ship they hit instead of tearing it apart, and a ship keeps its shape while it has anything left to take. Stealing is wasteful on purpose: much of what a victim loses is lost to everyone, so the mode favours mining over piracy without forbidding it. A ship that would rather not fight can stand down, at a price when it is under fire and for free when it is left alone, and nothing can touch it until it chooses to re-engage.

Your score is what your ship and your hold are worth, at each material’s exchange rate, so the way to climb is to build something valuable and keep it.

How it works

• Asteroids come in five materials, each with its own colour and rarity: iron (gray), copper, carbon (black), cobalt (blue) and iridium (white). Drilling one adds to that material’s counter, and collecting the chunks you break off adds more.
• Every ship is a blueprint you may edit. Press B, or click Build on the hotbar, to open the editor at any time. Building offers no protection: you can still be hit while the editor is open.
• Each block is paid for in materials. The price of the next block of a kind rises with how many of that kind your blueprint already holds: slowly for structure, quickly for weapons and projectors. Breaking a block refunds it.
• Copy and paste ship codes from build mode. A pasted design is bought whole, or not at all.
• Fights siphon materials. Weapons draw a share of the victim’s hold into the attacker’s in proportion to the damage, so a hold empties in bounded time. While the hold holds anything, the core, hull, struts, thrusters and projectors can’t be destroyed and everything else grows back for free. Once it is empty, every block can be destroyed, the core included.
• Stand down to stop a fight. After being hit for five of the last ten seconds, a Surrender button appears: it gives up half your hold as tribute to whoever hits you next, and in return your ship becomes untouchable, pushes other ships away, and can’t fire or drill. Its lights go out, its loaded weapons are emptied, and any cloak drops so it stays in plain sight. A ship that is already out of the fight — not hit in a while, with no enemy near — can Disengage for the same protection at no cost. Press Re-engage to power back up.