Beacons & Scanning

Information is a resource in Fugari Wars. Not as tradeable as cargo, but more strategically valuable in the right hands. The game offers two ways to gather it — scanning, which pulls intelligence from the galaxy — and beacons, which push messages into it. Both are tools. Both can be used against you.

Passive Scan

Every time you arrive at a node, your ship fires a passive scan automatically. No turn cost. No activation required. The passive scan reveals:

Adjacent node types — exact classification (Port, Planet, Empty, Nexus, etc.)
Ownership — who controls adjacent nodes, exactly
Ship count — exact number of ships at adjacent nodes
Drone count — approximate band: None / Light / Moderate / Heavy
Beacon presence — if a beacon exists on an adjacent node, you see its type icon (Graveyard), but not the message text

What passive scan cannot do: detect Fugari presence. You will not see Fugari ships or drone networks in a passive scan. They exist in a separate detection layer that requires an active scan.

The passive scan on arrival is your first read of any new node's neighborhood. Make a habit of checking it before you spend any turns. Moderate or Heavy drone bands on adjacent nodes are significant — they mean someone has invested in that territory, and entering uninvited carries risk.

Active Scan

The active scan costs 1 turn and can be targeted at any node within 2 hops (not just adjacent — two warps away). It returns significantly more detail:

Exact drone count (not a band — a specific number)
Exact ship IDs (you know who is there, not just how many)
Port stock levels (exact, not estimated — prices are flat, stock tells you if the port can fill your hold)
Planet data (ownership %, energy/agri deposited, drone surplus by type, production split, garrison count, citadel level)
Fugari presence (yes/no, with context if present)

Scan results are narrated by Claude — not presented as a raw data table. The narration reads like an observer's report:

"Node 47 -- Keth Port. Stock is low across all commodities — you'll need to move on after buying. Drone deployment is heavy for a port this remote. Someone is protecting something here -- or waiting for someone."

Active scan results persist until the cycle ends. After each epoch reset they are marked stale: the numbers stay, but they are as of the moment you scanned, not live. Stale data is better than no data, but treat it carefully — a lot changes in 12 hours, especially near contested nodes.

Planets in particular: a planet's exact garrison and surplus drone counts are revealed only by an active scan. After you scan a planet, its panel keeps showing the counts as of your scan, with the scan's age, even as the real numbers move. Without a scan you see only the planet's size, owner and citadel tier. The planet's owner, and the owner's syndicate, always see live counts. The Fugari homeworld's defences are public.

When to Spend a Turn on an Active Scan

Active scans are most valuable in specific situations:

Before flying into a heavily-droned node (passive scan shows Heavy — active scan tells you exact count and who's there)
Before committing to a trade route at an unfamiliar port (exact stock levels tell you if the port can fill your hold)
Before launching a node assault (exact drone count is tactical necessity)
When tracking a suspected rogue or rival (ship IDs tell you exactly who's in the area)
When assessing Fugari presence on a node before purge operations

The 2-hop range means you can surveil nodes you haven't visited and won't visit, building intelligence about regions you're approaching or monitoring without being present.

Beacon Types

There are two beacon types in Fugari Wars. Neither is a text message. Both are functional.

Graveyard Beacons

Graveyard beacons are placed automatically by the game at the location of significant destruction events. Players cannot place them manually.

What triggers a graveyard beacon:

PvP kill — when a pilot's ship is destroyed in combat, a graveyard beacon appears at that node: "RHEN was destroyed here."
Citadel wrecked — when a planet's citadel is bombarded to tier 0, a graveyard beacon appears: "Ferthi was wrecked here."

Graveyard beacons persist for one Fugari cycle — they are cleared when the homeworld is destroyed and a new cycle begins. They are the galaxy's memory within a cycle. You will find them at strategic chokepoints, former power centers, and wherever the cycle's bloodiest moments occurred.

A graveyard beacon on an otherwise unremarkable node is a data point: someone fought for this location hard enough to die here. That might tell you why.

Ping Beacons

A ping beacon is a sensor pulse you fire into the galaxy. It travels up to 20 hops in a random walk from your current position, reporting back what it detects at each node in real time.

Cost: 1 turn Rate limit: 1 per minute — if you fire too soon, the system returns: "Waiting for Beacon System to come back online in 42s" Range: Up to 20 hops Path: Fully random — the ping picks its next node arbitrarily at each hop. It may zig-zag back toward you, cover significant distance, or anything in between. You cannot steer it.

What it detects at each node:

Signal	Description
Planet	Named 20% of the time; otherwise "a planet"
Trading port	Detected, unnamed
Reactor port	80% chance per port hop — if the port stocks a Reactor, the ping will almost certainly report "⚛ Reactor detected"
Player vessel	Named 20% of the time (callsign); otherwise "a vessel"
Cloaked vessel	Always reported as "a cloaked vessel" — never named
Fugari ships	Count reported
Drift lock	Detected
Guardian field	Detected — ping stops here

When named detection fires (20% chance per entity), you get specific information: a callsign, a planet name. When it doesn't, you get confirmation that something is there without knowing what exactly.

Reactor detection: Each time a ping passes through a port node, there is an 80% independent chance it detects a Reactor if one is in stock. A single ping covering a Reactor port will almost always reveal it. This is the only way to detect Reactors without physically visiting the port or spending an active scan turn on it.

Guardian stop: If the ping reaches a node with active guardian drones, it stops immediately. Guardians disrupt the pulse. You receive the block notification but no further hops.

Player notification: If any pilot is at a node when the ping passes through, they receive a real-time alert: "A ping beacon flies through the node." They know a ping was fired. They don't know whose.

Cloak disruption: Each time the ping passes through a node, cloaked ships present have a 25% chance of having their cloak stripped by the pulse. The disrupted pilot receives a notification. This is the only mechanic that can expose a cloaked ship without direct combat — but it costs you a turn and is entirely probabilistic.

Strategic use:

Fire a ping before moving into unfamiliar space — it may scout nodes you haven't visited
Use it to probe whether a region has guardian coverage (the block tells you where)
A named player detection outside your visible range is actionable intelligence
If you suspect a cloaked pilot is nearby, a ping is your only non-combat counter
The randomness is the mechanic — a lucky ping covers ground a scan cannot reach

Tracking Your Deployed Drones

The Activity → Drones filter shows every node where you currently have drones deployed — node ID, coordinates, and exact count. This is the fastest way to audit your territorial footprint without flying to each node or spending scan turns. Use it before committing to a long-distance trade session to confirm your key nodes are still held, or after a suspected assault to check whether any positions were lost.

Intelligence Warfare in Practice

The combination of scanning and beacons creates an information battlefield that runs parallel to the economic and military one.

A syndicate that coordinates active scans — each member scanning different regions each session — builds a collective intelligence picture that spans the galaxy. With shared node visibility, this data flows to all members automatically. A well-organized syndicate in a mid-cycle with multiple active scanners has a strategic information advantage over solo pilots that compounds over time.

Beacons layer on top of this. Graveyard beacons accumulate at the cycle's most contested nodes — a cluster of them on a single node tells a story worth reading before you commit forces there. Ping beacons extend your intelligence reach beyond scan range at the cost of a single turn, and double as a soft counter to cloaked threats.

The pilot who understands information — how to gather it, how to read what others leave behind, and how to act on it faster than rivals — plays a fundamentally different game than one who moves and trades on instinct alone.