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Power and Energy
August 26, 2026 at 07:33 PM
Added a screenshot illustrating the section
Almost everything in SpaceCraft draws power. Your ship runs its skills and its after-burners off a battery, and a base runs its production off a grid you have to build and orient. The developer names energy management as one of the pillars of running a base, alongside housing, production and interplanetary logistics. This page collects what has been confirmed about both halves.
Every ship carries a battery, shown as a bar on the piloting interface. It drains when you use the skills your modules provide and when you engage the after-burners, and it recharges automatically whenever the ship’s solar panels are in direct sunlight. That recharge condition is the whole design: power is effectively free in the light and finite in the dark.
The starting ship, the Scrappy Pioneer, carries two Small Solar Panels and a Crude Battery. Both can be upgraded. See Ship Modules and Tools for the full confirmed equipment list and Controls and Piloting for where the battery bar sits on screen.
Component | Role |
|---|---|
Small Solar Panels | Recharge the battery whenever they are in direct sunlight. |
Crude Battery | The starting store of energy that skills and after-burners draw on. |
An advanced battery crafted at a Chemical Factory from Sulfuric Acid, Vanadium and Graphite. Significantly extends battery life in dark conditions. |
Solar panels do nothing on a planet’s night side or out in deep space, which is the problem the Vanadium Battery exists to solve. It is the first clear example of the game asking you to plan power around where you are going rather than treating it as a background resource. Because it is made with Sulfuric Acid, reaching it means engaging with the liquid system first. See Liquid Resources.
After-burners are bound to the Shift key and drain the battery while held. The developer’s framing is that they get you somewhere faster but are not free speed, which makes the battery the practical limit on how aggressively you travel between points inside a system. Faster-Than-Light jumps are the exception: those run off a separate Mag-Plasma reserve rather than the battery. See Exploration and FTL Travel.
A base needs its own generation, and the buildings confirmed so far cover three approaches: solar, fuel, and distribution.
Building | What it does | Confirmed detail |
|---|---|---|
Solar Panels | Basic generation on a base. | A balancing update cut their footprint cost from 10 FP to 4 FP, so power infrastructure eats far less of a base build budget than it did at launch. |
Solar Plants | Larger-scale solar generation. | Orientation toward the sun matters. A June 2026 patch fixed cases where a plant correctly oriented toward the sun still failed to generate power. |
Fuel Power Plant | Generation that burns a fuel type instead of relying on light. | Takes assigned drones. A July 2026 patch fixed changing its fuel type deleting those assignments. |
Power Transmitter | Distributes power across a base. | A July 2026 patch fixed it supplying free power, so transmission is meant to have a real cost. |
The footprint change is the one worth internalising. Because every structure spends part of a fixed build budget, cheap power leaves more of that budget for production, and the developer moved deliberately in that direction. See Base Building for how the footprint budget works.
Power is what makes an automated base worth building. Extractors, factories and the drone and shuttle traffic that ties them together all keep running while you are logged out, and a base that cannot generate enough to sustain them stops being a resource hub and becomes a place you have to visit. Planning generation before scaling production is the practical order of operations. See Automation and Logistics.
No numeric output figures, consumption rates, storage capacities or efficiency curves have been released for any power building or battery. The values that are known are footprint costs and the behaviour fixes above, all of which come from patch notes and are being actively rebalanced. Treat any specific number you see in game as current for that build rather than settled. See Updates and Patch Notes.
