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11 The Company is the organisation the player works for, and it is the closest thing SpaceCraft has to a central institution. It owns the stations, it issues the contracts that open the game, it takes a cut of your refining and crafting, and it controls the permits that gate your progression. Almost every early system routes through it in some way.
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33 Your Employer
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55 You begin as employee number 115-C, an ex-convict who has just been released from prison and has earned the right to reintegrate society. In practice that means working for The Company. The tutorial opens aboard a Company station, where Controller U456B introduces themselves as your trainer and walks you through your first contract.
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77 That framing explains the shape of the opening hours. You start with no money, one ship and an obligation, objectives arrive as contracts rather than quests, and the things you are allowed to build are things The Company has licensed you to build. See Setting and Story and Getting Started.
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99 What The Company Owns and Runs
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11-Asset or systemRoleSpace stationsThe stations are Company-owned. Babylon 7, where the tutorial begins, is the first one you see.The SmelterTurns ore and nuggets into ingots at a station. Roughly five seconds per ingot.The WorkshopTurns ingots into components, tools and ship modules.PermitsThe tech tree that unlocks recipes, modules and services is issued through The Company’s systems and paid for in Credits.ContractsThe missions that structure the opening and keep arriving afterwards.
11+Asset or systemRoleSpace stationsThe stations are Company-owned. Babylon 7, where the tutorial begins, is the first one you see.The SmelterTurns ore and nuggets into ingots at a station. About five seconds per ingot before Community Update #1 doubled Smelter speed.The WorkshopTurns ingots into components, tools and ship modules.PermitsThe tech tree that unlocks recipes, modules and services is issued through The Company’s systems and paid for in Credits.ContractsThe missions that structure the opening and keep arriving afterwards.
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1313 The Commission
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1515 The Company does not provide its facilities for free. Refining at the Smelter costs a commission of 15 percent of the market value of the output. The Workshop takes a commission too, smaller than the Smelter’s and scaling with the value of what you craft.
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1717 This is the game’s first economic pressure and it shapes early decisions: refining at a station is convenient but never free, which is part of why building out your own production eventually matters. See Crafting and Base Building.
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1919 An Unanswered Question
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2121 The Company is not presented as straightforwardly benign. The developer’s Early Access roadmap groups it with the narrative content coming later in Early Access, under the heading of uncovering the galaxy’s secrets, and lists discovering the truth behind The Company alongside uncovering humanity’s past and learning more about rival megacorporations.
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2323 That is as much as has been published. No revelation, no faction detail and no story beat about The Company has been released, and the rival megacorporations have been named only as a category. Nothing on this page should be read as implying what that truth turns out to be. See Combat for the rest of the later Early Access wave and Early Access for how the roadmap is banded.
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2525 The Wider Backdrop
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2727 The Company operates in what is left after a catastrophe. Humanity reactivated the Tripods, autonomous self-replicating war machines, while studying the technology of a forgotten civilisation. A century-long war followed, and the H Incident destroyed much of the human fleet and pushed the United Planets to the brink. Survivors fled through a hidden portal into an uncharted galaxy, which is where the game takes place. The Company is one of the structures rebuilding there. See Setting and Story.