Home/Reference/Quests and lore

Quests and lore

Quests give you objectives + rewards. They're the structured progression on top of the open sandbox.

Quest sources

Quests come from two places:

Lore NPCs — narrative-driven character NPCs. Right-clicking them starts a dialogue tree; choices in the dialogue can accept quests.
Mission Officer NPCs — quest board UIs. Each Officer carries a catalog of board-listed quests you can accept directly.

Both flow into the same per-player quest state.

Quest types

Six types, with different lifecycle semantics:

Type	Reset	Slot cap	Abandonable	Where
STORY	Restart on failure	Unbounded	Never	Named NPC dialogue, auto-unlock
SIDE	One-shot complete	Unbounded	Yes	Named NPC or board
DAILY	24h rolling	5 active	Yes	Board
WEEKLY	7 days	3 active	Yes	Board
GRINDING	None, infinite repeats	10 soft cap (warn)	Yes	Board
QUESTLINE	Multi-step chain	—	Per-step	NPC or vendor

All of these types are live. The Mission Officer board hands out DAILY and WEEKLY quests with the active-slot caps above; completions are tracked and the board resets on its rolling / weekly schedule (with a separate per-day completion cap), and expired offers are pruned. STORY + QUESTLINE chains run off named-NPC dialogue.

Story arc (the MVP path)

A STORY quest is a named-NPC chain. The first time you talk to the gating NPC, they offer the quest. You accept; the quest is logged in your journal; objectives count toward completion.

When all objectives are met:

Rewards apply (credits, items, modules, story flags)
The quest moves to COMPLETED
If autoUnlockOnComplete is set, the next quest in the chain auto-accepts
The next dialogue with the gating NPC may acknowledge the completion + open new options

STORY quests are non-abandonable — you can't forfeit them from the journal. They restart on failure: if you abandon via admin, the next dialogue with the gating NPC resets the quest to step 0.

Objective kinds

Quests are built from 13 objective types. The most common:

MineN — break N blocks of a specific ore. Tracks ore mining.
TalkTo — open dialogue with a specific NPC (and close it without abandoning).
InteractWith — interact with a tagged site or block via a specific action.
BuyShip — purchase a specific hull from a Shipyard.
BuyItem — buy N units of a specific item from a vendor.
EnterStation — enter a specific station's VI.
OpenBook — right-click a specific lore book.
EquipModule — install N units of a specific module template.
EarnCredits — accumulate N credits since accepting the quest.
DestroyShip — destroy N ships in combat.
VisitRegion — enter a specific named region.
VisitSector — enter a specific sector (sub-region quadrant).
DepositItems — deposit N units of an item into a station's cargo.

Each quest combines one or more of these.

Journal + tracking

TAB menu shows your faction info, but quests live in their own journal — bring up the quest journal UI from chat (or /quests).
A tracked quest shows in your sidebar HUD (max 5 simultaneously).
The sidebar shows current/needed progress per objective.
Untracked active quests continue accumulating progress; they just don't show in the HUD.

Rewards

Quest rewards include:

Credits — straight wallet deposit
Items — appear in your personal inventory
Modules — appear in your personal inventory
Flags — story-state flags used by other quests + dialogue conditions

Quests are also the only source of the gated capital blueprints (BPCs): the Colossal Dreadnought BPC, the Battlecruiser Guardian BPC, and the T4 Manufacturing BPC all come from specific story/weekly quests — you can't drop or buy them, so the questline is the path to building a capital. (The crafting wiki shows "quest reward" as the acquisition path on each gated BPC's page.)

Story flags are what gate later quests + branch dialogue. They don't clutter your inventory, but they're how the narrative remembers what you've done.

Lore books

A lore book is a WRITTEN_BOOK item in your inventory. Right-click to read its pages — they cover lore, in-universe references, terminology, and sometimes contain quest hooks.

Some quests have an OpenBook objective — you complete that step just by reading the right book.

Dialogue

Lore NPC dialogues are MC book GUI trees:

Each node has a short text block (~256 chars total page budget) + a list of choices
Each choice has a label, can fire effects (accept a quest, grant a flag, open a book), and can be conditioned (only shown if you have a certain flag or have completed a certain quest)

You navigate with the choice buttons. The native MC book "Done" exits the dialogue.

Some dialogues conditionally branch based on your faction, your story flags, your active quests, or items in your inventory.

Lore canon

The MVP lore canon (5 lore NPCs + a 3-quest Salvager arc + a breadcrumbed mystery) is set. Future content will expand it — particularly Tier 4 LORE_NPCs that support click-events on book pages (quest accept buttons, branching dialogues directly in the book GUI).

What's NOT a thing

Faction standing / reputation — there's no NPC standing system. Quests don't move standing; they grant credits/items/flags.
Random / procedural quests — all quests are hand-authored, JSON- loaded from data/quests/.

Commands

There aren't many — quests are mostly NPC-driven. The journal UI does the work.