FIELD MANUAL

How you win

Red vs Blue. Fight over a 3×3×3 grid of sectors. You're assigned a team automatically when you join. If teams numbers are off balance and you want to switch, just reload the page.

Victory is territorial. You win by connecting an unbroken chain of sectors you control from your home sector all the way to the enemy's. Capture a zone by planting a Forward Operating Base with no enemy FOBs in the zone. Victory occurs with an FOB in the same sector as the enemy spawn gate, with no enemy FOB present, and an unbroken chain from your gate to theirs.

• A sector counts as YOURS only if it holds at least one of your FOBs and NONE of the enemy's.
• Sectors connect face-to-face only. No diagonal shortcuts.
• The chain starts at your own home sector, so you have to still hold it with an FOB. One enemy FOB planted at home breaks your chain at its root.
• The final sector (their gate) needs at least one of your FOBs and zero of theirs.

One enemy FOB left standing anywhere along the route is enough to break the chain, which makes contesting a sector as valuable as holding one. Raiding an undefended FOB deep in their territory can undo a push without ever winning a fight.

That makes FOBs the win condition, and everything else (mining, combat, vehicles) the means to place and protect them.

The loop

• MINE ore from asteroids. It goes to your team's shared treasury, not your pocket.
• BUILD with it. Buildings claim sectors and unlock what your team can buy.
• EQUIP from the treasury: shields, grapple hooks, vehicles.
• PUSH toward the enemy home sector, taking and holding ground.

The treasury is shared across your whole team. Ore you mine funds a squad leader's FOB on the other side of the map, and their spending drains what you'd buy with. Coordinate over voice.

Flying and walking

You're in open space with a jetpack. There is no gravity, but you CAN attach to asteroids.

Fly into an asteroid slowly and you'll land and stick to it, walking on its surface with its own local gravity. Thrust away from it hard enough and you lift off again.

Momentum is real and there's nothing to slow you down in open space. Thrust the opposite way to stop. You will overshoot things at first and this is where grapple hooks come in handy. Land at any speed on an asteroid you grapple (R when equipped).

Mining

Press 2 for the mining laser, then hold the left mouse button on a single voxel in the asteroid. Ore is credited to your team's treasury as you cut.

Not all rock pays the same. Asteroids carry veins running through them like seams in stone, and the colour tells you what you're looking at:

Barren rock does pay a trickle, so mining anything is better than mining nothing — but finding a vein is worth far more than grinding grey. Crystal glows in its own light, which makes it findable on the unlit side of a rock.

A Refinery built on an asteroid doubles everything mined from that rock, including the barren parts. It's the single biggest economic upgrade available.

Squads

Press L to open the roster. It opens by itself in the lobby, and you can reopen it at any time — including mid-match.

Your team's column lists its squads. Click an existing squad to join it, or type a name and create your own. Everyone connected is listed, including players not yet in a squad.

ONLY SQUAD LEADERS CAN BUILD. Whoever creates a squad leads it. If nobody on your team has made a squad, nobody on your team can place a single structure — and buildings are how you win. Make one early.

• Up to 4 squads per team, 6 players each.
• You can create or join a squad after the match has started — late joiners are expected.
• Squads persist between matches.
• Squad leaders show a numbered badge on the tactical map, matching the roster.

Squads also drive voice: Z talks to your squad, C to everyone nearby, X to team command.

Building

Press F for the build menu, pick with the number keys, then left-click to place. Cost comes out of the team treasury. Build with the mining laser. The more poeple building, the faster the build goes.

The FOB comes first. Refineries and gravity labs need a completed FOB in the area before they can be placed, and the FOB is also where your team can respawn, so losing your forward FOB pushes your whole team back. Spawn points can be selected in the Tactical Map at any FOB or home.

Buildings take time to construct and can be destroyed. A Shield Factory hardens every friendly structure in its sector, which is what stops a lone raider from undoing an hour of work.

Gear

Press G to buy. Purchases are personal but paid for from the team treasury, and each one requires standing next to the building that unlocks it.

If a purchase is refused, you're almost certainly not close enough to the right building, or your team hasn't built one yet. Quickly buy shields with B next to a shield factory, or use the Buy menu.

Combat

Press 1 for your gun, left-click to fire.

• A personal shield absorbs damage before your health does, and scales with how many shield factories your team holds in the sector where you bought the shield.
• Die and you respawn at the selected FOB, so forward FOBs shorten the walk back.
• R fires your grapple to latch onto a surface; T retracts you toward the anchor. Tap R again to let go.
• E mounts a ball turret when you're stood next to one. It has far more health and shields than you do, and twin cannons — but your grapple is disabled while piloting.

Mining while an enemy is nearby is how most players die. The mining laser has much shorter reach than the gun, so cutting ore means giving up your range advantage and standing still.

Voice and audio

Voice is push-to-talk. Hold the key while you speak — nothing transmits when you let go.

Your microphone isn't opened until the first time you push to talk. Until then the game only listens.

ON BLUETOOTH HEADPHONES (AirPods and most wireless headsets), the first time you talk your audio quality will drop. That's your operating system, not the game: a headset with a built-in mic switches out of high-quality stereo into low-quality call mode the moment any app opens the mic.

The fix is to use different devices for input and output, so the headset never switches modes: set your microphone to your laptop's built-in mic, and keep the headphones as output. On a Mac that's System Settings → Sound → Input / Output.

• Wired headphones: nothing to do. Game voice, your own music and system sounds all mix normally.
• On Windows, other audio may drop sharply when voice starts — that's Windows ducking 'communications' by default. Sound settings → Communications → 'Do nothing' turns it off.
• Echo cancellation is on, but with headphones there's no echo path for it to work on, so it costs you nothing.

Reading the HUD

Two displays are always on screen, and they answer different questions.

COMPASS — the disc at the top. It's a radar centred on you, showing which way you're facing and what's around you: nearby players as coloured triangles, your waypoints as pinned circles. It also reads out the sector you're heading into, flipping over shortly before you cross the boundary, so you know what you're flying towards.

MINIMAP — the three stacked grids in the corner. This is the part players misread. It isn't three maps; it's three ALTITUDES of the same place. The middle grid is your layer and holds your white dot. The top grid is the space above you, the bottom is below you. A player showing on the top grid is overhead, not to the north.

• Each cell is one zone. Thicker lines mark sector boundaries.
• Cell colour is who controls that sector — red or blue when one team holds it, amber when CONTESTED (both teams have FOBs in that sector, so neither controls it), grey when empty.
• Your team colour marks your own dot; peers show in theirs.

The sectors are three-dimensional cubes comprised of zones. If an enemy seems to be missing, check the other two layers before assuming they've left.

The tactical map

Press M for the full-screen map. It is a 3D cake of the whole world, one layer per altitude, with each cell tinted by which team controls its sector. This is where you decide where to push.

• Octahedron = FOB. Box = refinery, shield factory, gravity lab or armory.
• Spheres are players, coloured by team; yours is bright white and friendlies are drawn slightly larger.
• A numbered badge marks a squad leader on your team, matching the roster numbering.

THE GAME DOES NOT PAUSE. It's multiplayer — you keep drifting while the map is open, and you can be shot while reading it. Land on an asteroid before opening the map, or you'll come back somewhere you didn't intend.

Waypoints you drop also show on your compass and minimap, which is how you actually navigate to a sector you picked out on the map.