Travel — Warp, Warp Gates, Blink & Stealth

The galaxy is an 8×8 grid of regions, each split into sectors, and your ship plods along at flight speed within whatever sector it's in. Crossing that grid is its own little game: there are four ways to move (or vanish), each with a different cost, range, and risk profile.

Warp drive — flexible point-to-point

The warp drive is your main long-haul tool. You pick a destination sector, the drive burns fuel and spins up, and after a charge timer your ship folds straight there. Unlike a gate, it can drop you anywhere your tier reaches — including empty sectors with no gate.

Targeting

Activate the warp drive's hotbar slot with no target set and a chest selector opens — the primary, non-chat way to pick where you're going. The selector only shows what your drive tier can actually reach:

• Non-T5 drives see a single page of sectors within your current region — you can't leave the region, so there's nothing else to show.
• A T5 drive gets a paginated region grid → click a region → click a sector. Full-galaxy resolution.

Each pane is colour-coded by security zone (green Patrolled Lanes → red Wild Drift) and labelled with its grid address, region name, and distance. Click a sector to lock it as your target, then activate the drive again to commit. (You can also set or clear a target by address with /spacewar warp <address> / /spacewar warp clear, but the chest is the intended flow.)

Range — the tier ladder

How far you can jump is set by your drive's tier, measured in region grid hops (Chebyshev distance — diagonal counts as one):

So the warp drive is a real progression vector: a starter Frigate's Mk I drive can only shuffle between neighbouring regions, while a T5 drive folds across the whole map in one jump. If you target a sector outside your range the drive refuses and tells you how many regions short you are.

Fuel — Drive Cells

Every warp burns Drive Cells (ammo.drive_cell), a cheap bulk fuel (~1 cr each). The cost scales hard with hull size:

The cells must be sitting in your ship's general cargo hold — the check sums every Drive Cell stack in the hold, so it doesn't matter how fragmented they are. Buy Drive Cells from a vendor's Ammo tab and deposit them in your Cargo Hold before you fly out. You can also farm them passively: a Fold Wave Harvester module trickles Drive Cells into a buffer while your faction is online, which is the main "earn fuel while doing other stuff" loop.

Charge — the commitment window

Warp doesn't fire instantly. Once you've paid the fuel, the drive spools up for a hull-class-gated timer before the jump executes:

This is the "small ships are agile, capitals are committed" axis. A Frigate is gone in ten seconds; a Colossal warping is a three-minute window during which it sits there spinning up and can be intercepted. While the drive is charging an action-bar countdown ticks down, everyone aboard gets the fold-drive nausea wobble, and — importantly — your other modules are locked out. You can't mine an adjacent rock or fire a weapon while a warp is spinning; warp is a commitment, not free time.

Cancelling, refunds, and getting interrupted

You can abort an in-flight charge with /spacewar warp cancel — the charge stops and all the Drive Cells you paid are refunded to your hold. Refunds also happen automatically if the charge can't complete (e.g. you leave the helm before it finishes).

Note that a warp cannot be triggered from inside a station (you have no projected ship to move) and is jammed inside a wormhole pocket — the only way out of a wormhole is its exit portal, see Wormholes. The jump itself drops you at the target sector's content plane, surrounded by stations and asteroid belts, with a blinding fold-collapse flash on arrival.

Warp gates — free fixed routes

Warp gates are colossal permanent rings scattered across the galaxy that link two fixed regions. Travel through them is completely free — no fuel, no charge, no tier requirement. They're the backbone road network: slower to set up a route than a warp drive (you have to fly to the gate) but they cost you nothing and any hull can use them.

Using a gate

Fly your ship so its bow crosses into the ring's portal opening — exactly the same "nose into the ring" mechanic as a wormhole. No command, no menu; proximity does it. The trigger is generous (an 84-block opening plus padding) so lining up at speed isn't fiddly, and the gate only accepts you from the open face — you can't reverse through the walled back. A transit flash plays and you drop out about 90 blocks past the partner gate, facing away from it.

When you get within ~220 blocks of a gate, a boss bar appears showing the gate's name and its destination (e.g. Vega-Solyn Gate → Solyn Cradle), so you always know where a ring leads before you commit. After any jump you're locked out of both gates for 10 seconds so you can't bounce straight back.

The gate network

There are ten functional gates — five linked pairs — forming a connected chain across six regions:

Vesper Hollow is the hub — three gates meet there, so it's the natural crossroads between the inner chain (Vega → Solyn → Ronn) and the two outer spurs (Halcyon, Nimbus). To reach a region with no gate of its own, take the network as far as it goes, then warp-drive the last hop.

Gate vs. drive — which to use

• Warp gate: free, any hull, but you can only go where a ring goes and you have to fly to the ring first. Use it for the long backbone hops you make all the time.
• Warp drive: costs fuel and a charge window and is tier-range-limited, but it goes anywhere in range from wherever you're sitting. Use it for the off-network sector you actually want to be in, or when you can't spare the flight time to a gate.

A common pattern is to ride gates across the galaxy for free, then spend one warp-drive jump to reach the exact sector you're after.

Blink drive — the escape teleport

The Blink drive is a short-range panic button, not a travel tool. Fire it and your ship instantly hops a few blocks along its current heading — no charge, no fuel, no target picker. Point your nose where you want to be and blink.

The distance is deliberately tight, scaling with tier:

Even a maxed Blink only moves you 30 blocks, and the cooldown is long by design — this is for breaking a missile lock, dodging an alpha strike, or slipping behind a rock, not for crossing space. Two safety rails: it truncates at the galaxy edge rather than flinging you out of bounds, and it refuses to land inside any station's buoy ring (no blinking into a docking perimeter to cheese a dock).

Stealth field — the cloak

The Stealth field (HELM slot 6) hides your ship from everyone else: while it's up, your hull is suppressed from the projection other players see and from your ship's nametag — you simply aren't there to them. It's Frigate and Cruiser hulls only; larger hulls can't install it.

It's a timed cloak with a tier ladder for both uptime and the wait before you can re-engage:

Because you're sitting inside the only thing being hidden, the game gives you cues you're cloaked: an engage/disengage sound, a boss bar bleeding from full to empty over the active window, and a faint screen tint.

The catch: stealth breaks the moment you fire another module. Loosing a cannon or missile drops the cloak and trips the cooldown — so stealth + weapon spam is never free. The cloak also auto-collapses when its duration runs out or you toggle it off manually, and any of those exits starts the cooldown. Use it to slip past a patrol, set up an ambush approach, or disengage cleanly — then commit, because the first shot lights you back up.

See also

• Ships — hull classes, cargo holds, and module slots
• Mining → Drive Cells — farming warp fuel with the Fold Wave Harvester
• Wormholes — the other "fly your bow through a ring" transit (and why warp is jammed inside one)
• Crafting wiki — full bootstrap tree for every item, including the drives above