Exploration¶
Exploration is how you grow your colony list before you start fighting for it. Every empire begins with one homeworld and acquires the rest of its planets — keepers and junk alike — through the Explore action. Past the soft cap, further growth means combat.
See Colonies & Clustering for what to do with the planets you find. See Planet Types for the per-type modifiers and base land ranges.
The Loop¶
Exploration is a cycle you repeat until your colony list is built:
- Build scanning power so discoveries come in fast.
- Explore to find a planet.
- Judge it — is it worth a colony slot?
- Plunder the junk to free the slot again.
- Cluster the keepers once you have five of them.
You run this until roughly 50 underlying planets have been folded into clusters — typically two C2s, ten C1s, or a single C3 if you go that far — all buried under a border of junk. After that, exploration is largely done.
Scanning Power¶
Exploration runs on your fleet's scanning power. Most races build dedicated Scouts for this; the Explore page shows how many turns your next discovery will take with the fleet you currently have.
You want that number at 1 — one turn per discovery. As your empire grows each discovery gets harder and that number creeps upward. When it does, build more scouts to bring it back down.
Marauder and Collective have no Scout-class ship — but they can still explore. Their scanning power comes from regular combat ships, which carry scanner values like anything else in the fleet. The catch is Damage Protection: scouts don't break DP, but offensive ships do. So these two races effectively explore out of DP — the only way to explore while under DP is to already hold the scanner ships when the DP period begins.
Scouts have no combat value — a fleet of nothing but scouts loses any battle automatically. They exist purely to enable exploration, so disband them once you're done exploring. A parked scout fleet bleeds upkeep every turn for no benefit.
The Explore Action¶
One Explore attempt yields one discovery, and each new colony lands at the top of your colony list — the outermost, most exposed position.
What It Costs¶
Exploring deducts no credits. Its direct cost is turns.
What makes it expensive over time is that every planet you already own raises the bar for the next one. The scanning points your next discovery requires:
scan required = 5,000 × 1.2 ^ (planets owned − 1)
That's a compounding +20% per planet. Your fleet's scanning power is what pays it off, and the turn cost is simply how long that takes:
turns = (scan required − scan already banked) ÷ fleet scanning power [rounded up]
So as the requirement compounds, each discovery eats more turns unless you keep adding scouts. "Exploring is free" is only true per attempt — the real cost is the scout fleet, in credits to build and upkeep to hold.
What You Find¶
The result page reports:
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Name | Cosmetic prefix (E.NNNN, S.NNNN, etc.) |
| Planet type | Balanced, Barren, Forest, …, U.Large, U.Spazial, … |
| Useable land | The only number that matters for keep/discard |
| Available ore | Initial ore deposit |
| Mineral produced | The ship-mineral type this planet's mining yields |
Why Land Beats the Listed Ranges¶
The land you actually get is better than the base ranges on Planet Types. Exploring rolls a value somewhere inside the type's range — not at the top of it — then multiplies it:
useable land = base roll × 1.25 × (1.01 to 1.20)
A flat 25% bonus, plus a random 1–20% on top. So any roll lands at 1.2625× to 1.50× whatever base value came up, and every account gets this.
A great planet therefore needs two things to go right: a high roll inside the range, and a high bonus on top. A Barren whose base range tops out at 935 can reach roughly 1,400 useable land at the absolute maximum, but a typical Barren lands well below that.
This applies to every planet type — a U.Large can reach around 15,000. Rarely, a "special" roll pushes a planet past even the normal bonus ceiling; that's the S-class mega-roll mentioned on Colonies.
All land ranges on Planet Types are base values. Add 25–50% to see what an Explore can actually produce.
Which Planets to Keep¶
A keeper is a planet worth spending a colony slot on. Everything else gets plundered.
- Keep any clusterable planet with roughly 1,050+ useable land.
- Keep exactly one U.Spazial for artifact digging.
- Plunder everything else.
That ~1,050 floor is what a 100k+ land C3 needs when built from explored keepers — 125 planets averaging 800+ land each, with room to spare. Holding out for 1,200+ builds bigger clusters but slows exploration considerably.
Why U-Class Is Junk for Clustering¶
U-class planets cannot be clustered. Each U.Large, U.Eden, U.Fertile, or U.Rich eats a full colony slot for a single planet — the same slot that could hold a C2 (25 underlying planets) or a C3 (125). Even a 15,000-land U.Large is a poor trade against the cluster strategy.
The exception is U.Spazial: keep exactly one for artifact digging (see Artifacts & Digging). Plunder any others you roll.
Players building non-cluster income paths — a U.Eden tax build, a U.Fertile food economy — value U-class planets differently. But for the standard cluster-and-bury strategy, they're junk.
This is explore-phase guidance. Once you have gordos in hand, a U-class colony can be grown into a U-Class Colony Cluster and the calculation changes — see Colonies → Clusters vs U-Class.
The Soft Cap¶
Most empires plateau at ~55–60 underlying planets before the turn cost per discovery makes further exploring uneconomical. The typical finished shape for a 15-slot race:
- 2 × C2 — 50 underlying planets across two slots
- ~13 junk colonies acting as ablative armor
Past that point, the only way to grow is to take colonies from other players in combat.
Plunder for Slot Management¶
Plunder is the only way to remove a colony from your list. It costs 5 turns per colony regardless of how many you batch, and returns nothing — its purpose is freeing slots, not income.
Use it to:
- Discard junk discoveries that didn't clear the keeper threshold.
- Remove duplicate U-class planets — a second U.Spazial, or any non-Spazial U-class on a cluster build.
- Shape your colony list for clustering — see Colonies & Clustering for the list-position mechanics.
The Cluster-Plunder Shortcut¶
Plundering five junk planets one at a time costs 25 turns. Clustering them into a single junk C1 first (which costs nothing) and plundering that C1 instead frees the same five slots for 5 turns rather than 25.
This only works when the innermost five colonies of that tier are all junk — clustering always takes the innermost five and you can't pick which. See Colonies & Clustering for the cluster mechanic.
Defending What You Find¶
Fresh discoveries arrive at the top of your colony list, which is the most attackable position. An attacker can take your outermost three colonies in a single hit (see Colonies & Clustering).
The bury rule: always keep at least three junk planets above any cluster. If a keeper or a newly formed cluster ends up in the outermost three, explore junk immediately to push it back under cover. C2s and C3s especially must never sit that exposed — each one represents dozens of underlying planets.
The Post-Cluster Burst¶
When you cluster the innermost five plain colonies of an empire whose other slots are all higher-tier clusters, the new C1 appears at the outermost position — fully exposed the moment it forms.
The defense is to bank turns before you cluster, so you can immediately explore three or more junk planets on top of it. Bank about four times what that burst will cost: roughly 12 turns when discoveries take 1 turn each, 24 when they take 2.