The Galaxy — Regions, Sectors & Security

The whole galaxy is one big flat plane carved into a tidy grid. Every place you fly, mine, fight, or build a station sits in a region, and every region carries a security zone that decides how rich the ore is, how much your payouts get multiplied, and whether anyone is allowed to shoot you. This page is the map-reading guide: how the grid is addressed, what the colors mean, and which named regions you'll actually visit.

The grid: 8×8 regions

The galaxy is an 8×8 grid of regions — 64 cells in total. Each region is a square 8192 blocks on a side in master-sim space (the open void you fly through). Regions are addressed like a chessboard:

• Columns are letters A–H (west to east).
• Rows are numbers 1–8 (north to south).

So the northwest corner is A1, the southeast corner is H8, and a region like E4 sits squarely in the middle. That two-letter-number code is exactly what the regional map prints on each cell, and what the TAB HUD and warp selector use — one notation, one meaning, everywhere.

Sectors are the quarters of a region

Each region is split into 2×2 = 4 sectors, named by compass quadrant:

A full sector address is written region·quadrant, e.g. A1·NE or E4·SW. Each sector is 4096 blocks across. Because regions use letters+numbers and sectors use compass points, the two notations never collide. Quest objectives and belt names reference sectors ("mine in the NW sector of Solyn Cradle"), so it's worth knowing your current quadrant — the regional map shows it.

Across the whole galaxy that's 64 regions × 4 = 256 sectors.

Security zones — the color that rules everything

Every region is painted with one of four security zones. The zone is the single most important fact about where you are: it sets your risk, your payout multiplier, which ore tiers spawn, and whether PvP is legal.

A few things this table is really saying:

• Payouts scale with risk. Mining yields and quest credit rewards are multiplied by the zone factor of the ship's current region. The same ore pays four times as much in Wild Drift as it does in the Patrolled Lanes. (See mining for the per-ore breakdown and how this feeds your income-per-hour.)
• PvP is zone-gated. Player-vs-player combat is only allowed in Frontier and Wild Drift space. In CORE/MID, the server cancels the hit and tells the attacker PvP is disabled here. (Stations and planet surfaces have their own rules — a station's owner can toggle interior PvP, and planet surfaces are always contested ground regardless of the surrounding zone.)
• Higher ore tiers are gated to higher zones. Titanium needs MID+, Platinum needs FRONTIER+, Iridium and Tritanium Crystal are NULL only. Deeper space is the only place the endgame materials exist.
• Wormholes only tear open in NULL. The rare high-reward wormhole pockets spawn exclusively in Wild Drift regions.
• You can only plant your own station in Frontier or Wild Drift. Safe space is reserved; expansion happens out on the edge.

So the whole map reads as a risk gradient: green is the cradle (safe, cheap, beginner ore), and red is the lawless resource heartland (deadly, but the only place the best ore, wormholes, and player-built empires exist).

> An unpainted region defaults to CORE (safe space) — the galaxy > never serves up surprise PvP in un-authored territory.

How the zones are laid out

The current galaxy is hand-painted, so the zones aren't a simple distance-from-center ring — they're authored cluster by cluster. In broad strokes:

• A safe northwest corner (around A1–B2) holds the starting Patrolled Lanes, where the central hub and your first outpost sit.
• Outer Lanes (MID) form the settled trade corridors threading out from the safe clusters.
• Frontier (gold) is the unclaimed bulk of the map — most of the galaxy is Frontier, the prospector's "anyone's territory."
• Wild Drift (NULL) clusters in the deep south and far-east backwaters — the lawless fringe with the elite ore, capital pirates, sovereignty wars, and wormholes.

You never have to memorize this — the map item paints it for you in real time, and the color is the rule.

Named regions you'll actually visit

Regions all have proper names (the map shows them in chat and on the title bar). The ones tied to current content:

The remaining ~54 regions each have their own name (Carina Span, Korr Expanse, Tarsis Belt, Zephyr Crown, and so on) and fill out the Frontier and Wild Drift expanse with asteroid belts to prospect.

> A note on warp-gate names. The warp gates are labeled by the route > they run — "Solyn–Ronn Gate," "Ronn–Vesper Gate," "Vesper–Halcyon Gate," > "Vesper–Nimbus Gate." Those route names (Ronn, Vesper, Halcyon, > Nimbus) are the in-fiction names of the destinations the gate network > strings together — Hub Prime → Outpost Alpha → the deep-south hubs → the > far corners. The map cell each gate sits in shows its canonical grid-region > name (above); the gate label tells you where the route goes.

Reading the regional map item

You navigate with the Regional Map — a real Minecraft map item, not a chest menu (a spatial surface deserves a spatial UI). Right-click it to cycle through three zoom levels, which wrap around:

Galactic → Regional → Sector → (back to Galactic)

A small badge in the corner (GAL / REG / SEC) tells you which mode you're in.

Galactic mode — "where could I go"

The whole 8×8 grid at a glance, every cell filled with its security-zone color (green/yellow/gold/red). On top of the cells:

• Region labels — the A1…H8 grid coordinate centered on each region.
• Warp-gate routes — dashed bright cyan-white lines linking each gate to its partner, so the gate network reads as a travel backbone.
• AoI pins — single bright dots for the big landmarks: cyan = NPC station, blue = planet, orange = solar system, white-cyan = warp gate, and purple = an open wormhole (a rare, time-limited event worth chasing).
• Faction borders — claimed regions get a 1-px outline in the owning faction's color (unclaimed = none), so you can see who holds where.
• A legend in the bottom-right with the four zone swatches (C / M / N / F) and a scale bar one sector-cell wide.

Regional mode — "where am I, who owns this"

Follows your ship. Shows your current region — its four sectors blown up to fill the screen, each labeled with its quadrant (NW/NE/SW/SE) and colored by security. A white crosshair marks your position, AoI pins show the stations/belts/planets nearby, and the title bar names the region. It re-centers automatically when you cross a region boundary.

Sector mode — "where do I mine / who's nearby"

The tightest zoom: just your current sector, filling the canvas. The big addition here is asteroid-belt footprints — stippled gold discs showing exactly where the rocks are — plus the same AoI pins and your crosshair. This is the prospecting view: line up a belt, fly to it, fire the beam.

How travel relates

Knowing the grid is half of getting somewhere; the other half is moving:

• Sublight flight carries you anywhere within and between adjacent regions — you just fly. Cross a region boundary and the security zone (and its rules) flip to the new cell's color.
• Warp gates are the fast backbone for long hops between distant hubs — nose your ship's bow into the gate ring (proximity does it, no command) and you're carried to its paired gate across the galaxy. The dashed lines on the galactic map are the gate network.
• Wormholes are the one-way exception — temporary NULL-only pockets you fly into for rare loot (see wormholes).

For the full mechanics of warping, gates, and Drive Cell fuel, see travel.

See also

• Mining — ore tiers, zone payout multipliers, and where each ore spawns
• Travel — sublight flight, warp gates, and Drive Cell fuel
• Wormholes — NULL-only high-risk pockets and their loot
• Planets — the surface deposits scattered across the named regions
• Stations — building your own (Frontier / Wild Drift only)
• Factions — sovereignty, region claims, and the colored borders on the map
• Quests — objectives that send you to specific sectors