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¶

[scouts] → [explore] → [classify] → [plunder junk] → [cluster keepers] → repeat

You feed the loop until you've turned ~50 underlying planets into clusters (typically two C2s, ten C1s, or a single C3 if you go that far) buried under a border of junk. After that, exploration is largely done.

Scouts¶

Most races have a Scout-class ship. You need a fleet of them to explore — total fleet Scanning power drives how fast a single discovery completes. The Explore page reports Turns required to finish exploration with your current fleet based on this.

Marauder and Collective have no scouts and cannot explore. They grow exclusively through combat — Marauder by raiding and taking colonies, Collective by assimilating them. Race choice locks you into the corresponding growth path; if you want a cluster build off explored keepers, you have to play one of the other races.

The strategic target is turns_required = 1 — one discovery per turn allocated. As your empire grows the per-discovery difficulty climbs and turns_required creeps up; that's the signal to buy more scouts.

Scout fleets have no combat value (a pure-scout fleet auto-loses any battle), so they exist only to enable exploration. Disband them once you're done exploring — upkeep on a parked scout fleet bleeds credits indefinitely.

The Explore Action¶

One submission of the Explore form, with turns_required turns allocated, yields one discovery. Each discovery lands at the top of the colony list (the outermost, most-exposed position).

Costs¶

The Explore action itself deducts no credits — its direct cost is turns. What scales with empire size is the scanning requirement per discovery:

explore_requirement = 5000 × 1.2 ^ (planet_count - 1)

This is the exploration-points needed for the next discovery (source: res_researchstart = 5000, res_researchincrease = 1.2, i.e. compounding +20% difficulty). It drives the turn cost via your fleet's scanning power:

turns_required = ceil((explore_requirement − current_explore_points) / fleet_scanning_power)

As the empire grows the requirement compounds, so each discovery needs more scan points → more turns, unless you add scouts. The strategic target is turns_required = 1; buy more scouts to hold it there.

Credits do enter indirectly — exploring requires a scout fleet, and scouts cost credits to build and carry ongoing upkeep. So "exploring is free" is only true per-attempt; the scanning power that keeps turns_required low is paid for in ships.

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

The Explore Land Mod¶

The land value rolled by Explore is not simply the base land range listed on Planet Types. Explore first rolls a uniform random value across the planet type's full range, then applies multipliers on top:

useable_land = floor( round( randrange(land_min, land_max) × 1.25 ) × (1 + randrange(1, 20) / 100) )

So each roll starts somewhere in [land_min, land_max] (not at the max), then gets a flat ×1.25, then a uniform 0.01–0.20 bonus (the randrange(1,20)/100 term). The bonus multiplier is universal because every account has premium. Net effect: any given roll is 1.2625× – 1.50× of whatever base value was rolled — so the best possible roll is land_max × 1.50, but a typical roll is much lower.

Example (maximum possible). A Barren with a base land ceiling of 935 can roll at most:

935 × 1.25 × 1.20 = 1,402.5 useable land

A typical Barren rolls well below this, since the base is random across its range. This multiplier applies to every planet type, U-classes included — a U.Large with a 10,000 base ceiling can reach ~15,000 at the top end. (There is also a rare "special" multiplier that can push a roll above the 1.50× ceiling — the "S-class" mega-roll referenced on Colonies.)

All land ranges on Planet Types are base values. Add 25–50% on top to see what's actually possible from an Explore.

Classification¶

A keeper is a planet worth a colony slot. Everything else gets plundered.

keep   = clusterable type AND useable_land ≥ 1050
spaz   = U.Spazial AND you don't already hold one
junk   = everything else

The 1050 threshold reflects the practical floor for a 100k+ land C3 (125 keepers × 800+ land each, with headroom). Higher thresholds (1200+) yield bigger clusters but slow exploration significantly.

Why U-Class Is Junk for Clustering¶

U-class planets cannot be clustered. Each U.Large, U.Eden, U.Fertile, or U.Rich consumes a full colony slot for a single planet — the same slot that could hold a C2 (25 underlying planets) or C3 (125). Even a 15k-land U.Large is a slot waste against the cluster strategy.

The exception is U.Spazial: keep exactly one for artifact digging (see Artifacts & Digging). Plunder any further U.Spazials you roll.

Players who specialize in 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.

The Soft Cap¶

Most empires plateau at ~55–60 underlying planets of exploration before the per-discovery turn and credit costs make further exploring uneconomical. The typical "done" shape for a 15-slot race:

2 × C2 (50 underlying planets across 2 slots)
~13 × junk C0s as ablative armor

Past the soft cap, 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. Each plunder costs 5 turns per colony, regardless of batch size, and gives nothing back — 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, any non-Spazial U-class on a cluster build).
Shape the colony list for clustering — see Colonies & Clustering for the list-position mechanics.

The Cluster-Plunder Shortcut¶

Plundering 5 individual junk planets costs 25 turns. Clustering them into a single junk C1 first (0 turns) and then plundering the C1 (5 turns) frees the same 5 slots for 5 turns instead of 25.

This only works when the innermost 5 colonies of the relevant tier are all junk — clustering takes the innermost 5, you can't choose which. See Colonies & Clustering for the cluster mechanic.

Defensive Considerations¶

Fresh discoveries land at the top of the colony list — the outermost, most-attackable position. An attacker can take the outermost 3 colonies in a single hit (see Colonies & Clustering).

The bury rule: always keep ≥3 junk planets above any cluster. If a fresh keeper or a freshly-formed cluster ends up at positions 0–2, immediately explore enough junk discoveries to push it back under cover. C2s and C3s especially must never sit in the outermost 3 — they represent dozens of underlying planets each.

The Post-Cluster Burst¶

When you cluster the innermost 5 C0s of an empire whose other slots are all higher-tier clusters, the new C1 lands at the outermost position. The defense is to bank turns before clustering so you can immediately burst-explore 3+ junk discoveries on top of the new C1.

Rule of thumb: bank 4× the burst cost in turns before initiating a cluster that will surface (so 12 turns at turns_required = 1, 24 turns at turns_required = 2).