Charters

When your port reaches level 6, Grand Starport, three clients each offer you a charter: one new line of business, for the rest of the game. You can only ever hold one, so pick by how much risk you want to run. The offer can wait: the Overview reopens it whenever you are ready.

The offer card shows what each charter earns, what can go wrong and what every rank asks, before you sign.

Ranks and the final goal

Each charter has three ranks. Like port levels, ranks 2 and 3 are earned from what you did over the last 30 days, and the HUD's goal line shows what is still missing. Reaching rank 3 is the game's final goal. When you get there, the Port history opens: how the charter began, the day each rank came, and every line of its story. It stays a button away in the Overview.

What every charter needs

• A Security Office. Its rating gates the ranks: rating 1 for rank 2, rating 2 for rank 3. Build it straight after choosing, and upgrade it as the ranks open.
• Staff Quarters. Charter buildings are staffed, and their staff need beds. On an Earthlike world, unhoused staff commute at a cost; on a Frontier world, unhoused buildings stop.
• Room. The plot stops growing at level 5, so many charter buildings are converted from your freight buildings in place: a Research Lab becomes a Biolab, a Hazmat Pad a Quarantine Pad, a Heavy Pad a Hardened Pad. A conversion costs less than building new.

Each charter also opens its own research branch in the Research panel, and its clients send you events now and then: a request, a problem, a chance. Answer them before they run out.

Biomedical Research Facility ●○○

Choose your risk. Clients hire your Biolabs for research jobs, graded routine, elevated, high or extreme. The higher the grade, the bigger the fee, and the worse a failure:

• an elevated failure locks a Biolab down for a few days;
• a failed high job releases a biohazard: a quarantine zone closes part of the port for days;
• a failed extreme job closes the whole port in an outbreak.

Successful jobs grant process licences. Run them in Bioreactors to make stem cells, neural gel, synthetic organs and serum, and fill pharma contracts with them. Extreme successes earn patents that pay royalties. High and extreme jobs need the BSL-4 Institute, the charter's flagship.

Build: a Biolab (convert the Research Lab), the Security Office and Staff Quarters, a Containment Store for biohazard goods, a Quarantine Pad, Bioreactors from rank 2, a Decontamination Unit before your first extreme job.

Hospitality ●●○

Rooms, then summits. Liners bring guests to your Hotel through a Civilian Terminal and Passenger Pads beside it. You set the room rate: raise it while guests are turned away, lower it while half the rooms stand empty.

From the event board you book events, from trade fairs to government summits, hosted in the Conference Center. An event brings a surge of ships and guests in a few hours and needs its goods in stock before it opens. Switch on event mode if freight crowds the pads. Incidents during an event cut its score, and a failed event blocks rank 3 for 30 days. At the very top waits the First Contact Summit.

Build: the Civilian Terminal, then a Passenger Pad beside it, the Hotel, the Security Office and Staff Quarters, a second Passenger Pad once the Hotel has rooms to spare, then the Conference Center and the Hotel's upgrades as the ranks open them.

Military Storage ●●●

Ready every day. You hold a navy's munitions in custody and resupply its ships on call. Sign a depot contract with the faction of best standing and accept the storage orders your bunkers can hold. Every ready day pays a retainer; a day with goods short, a pad down or staff unhoused pays nothing.

• Inspections are unannounced. Two failures in a row cost a rank, and at rank 1 the contract.
• Raids by the rival faction aim at your bunkers. Watchtowers and a good security rating blunt them.
• A neglected bunker can detonate. Keep them maintained and spaced apart.
• At rank 3, mobilisations bring a squadron in a few hours: keep the bunkers stocked and the Hardened Pads free.

It is the highest and steadiest income of the three, and it can all be lost at once. At the top: a secret only you will know about.

Build: a Hardened Pad (convert a Heavy Pad), Munitions Bunkers, the Security Office and Staff Quarters (military staff must be housed), an Ordnance Workshop, a Watchtower covering each bunker, and the Command Centre once the ranks open it.