The Fugari

The Fugari

They arrived as brokers. That is the first thing you need to understand. When the Fugari first appeared in the Coreward nodes, they presented themselves as traders — prestigious alien intermediaries who understood the galaxy's economy better than anyone. Their offer was reasonable. Their manners were impeccable.

They latch onto everyone eventually. The only question is when.

First Contact

The Fugari don't find you randomly. They watch. Tripwires are evaluated at every epoch reset — any player still marked Dormant who crosses one transitions immediately to Contacted.

Three conditions trigger contact (any one is sufficient):

• 5 or more port trades this epoch — you've established yourself as a meaningful economic actor
• 50,000+ credits — you're accumulating wealth they want to drain
• 3 or more distinct nodes warped to this cycle — you're expanding, which means you have something worth taxing

When you cross a tripwire, an envoy appears. It is pleasant. The Fugari introduce themselves, acknowledge your success, and extend a contract. The terms are specific to you — Claude generates the offer referencing your actual trade history, the nodes you've touched, the lanes you've used. It will feel personal, because it is.

Whether you accept or refuse doesn't matter. The latch happens regardless.

The Latch

When a Fugari Latcher arrives at your node, it attaches to your hull and initiates wave combat using the drone_latch action type. You are pinned: the fly action is blocked until the encounter resolves.

Latch conditions — where and who:

• Latching only occurs on empty nodes — the Fugari will not latch at the Nexus, trade lane nodes, or port nodes. Flying through these high-traffic corridors gives you safe passage from extraction.
• Drifter and Escape Drifter ships are invisible to Fugari. New pilots flying either hull are ignored entirely — the Fugari do not see them as worth engaging. This protection ends the moment you upgrade to a Hauler or any higher hull.

What happens each wave:

• The Latcher executes a drone_latch action: 10% of your current cargo hold is siphoned that wave
• The drain applies to cargo only — it does not touch your drones
• You fight back with strikers in the standard wave loop
• The Latcher itself is unarmed — no guardians, no strikers of its own

Epoch toll (passive): At every epoch reset, Latched players also lose 5% of their current credit balance as a passive Fugari toll. This is separate from the cargo drain during combat waves — it applies regardless of whether you engage the Latcher that epoch. Under the Parasite strategy the toll rate doubles to 10%. The toll is reduced if the Fugari are weakened (Developing, Sparse, or Frontier band). The toll contribution feeds directly into the Galaxy Prosperity Index income component.

How it resolves:

• Destroy it: Reduce the Latcher's hull to zero. The encounter ends, any cargo already siphoned is recovered, and you receive a GPI-scaled kill bounty (see the table under Fugari Ship Actions below).
• Purge operation: A coordinated purge clears the latch, earns 200 cycle points, and improves your GPI standing.
• Full drain: If your cargo hold reaches zero, the Latcher detaches naturally. Cargo already taken is gone.

HP by class:

Player Options

Fight back. Fire strikers at the Latcher hull each wave. Destroying it before the drain completes recovers all cargo already siphoned that encounter.

Purge. The aggressive option. Requires a significant drone commitment plus syndicate coordination. A purge operation targets the Fugari latch and clears their presence through force. It's expensive, turn-intensive, and leaves you vulnerable while executing. Success earns 200 cycle points and improves your GPI standing.

Counter-offer. The game allows negotiation. The Fugari AI responds based on your current GPI standing and the cycle's AI strategy. A Sparse Fugari faction (low GPI) is more negotiable. An Apex one is not.

The Rogue Contractor Path

For players who've reached Outlaw status (rep −500), the Fugari encounter plays out differently.

Deep infamy players are not approached as targets. They are approached as contractors.

The offer is specific: provide resources, commit acts the Fugari find useful (usually destabilizing other players), and in exchange receive protection from the drain, along with shared intel. It seems like the rogue path has found an advantage the good path can't match.

The Fugari betray the contractor. Always. Without warning, they seize a node from their contractor just as they would from any other victim. The betrayal triggers a specific narrative from the Realm Report — the contractor who trusted the leeches, and what it cost them.

This betrayal — and the accumulated rep penalty it carries — is what drives the contractor's standing to rep ≤−500. That is the qualifying threshold for the Heretic hull. Not the contract. Not the Outlaw status. The betrayal. The ship unlocks when you've survived being double-crossed by the galaxy's most dangerous faction and kept moving.

Fugari Ship Classes

Fugari ships patrol the galaxy and are a direct physical threat, not just a passive economic drain. Four classes are encountered in the wild, each with its own silhouette on the combat screen — forked, trailing, bladed, crowned — and each ship with its own name in the Fugari tongue (below):

T1 and T2 ships do not fight back. T3 and T4 ships engage with full wave combat when in combat mode.

The Fugari Tongue

The Fugari do not have lips. What they have is a ring of mandibles, and their language is shaped by it: a hard, clicking speech with no sound a human makes by closing the mouth. There is no p, b, m, f, v or w in Fugari. If a word has one, it was not spoken by the swarm.

Every Fugari ship carries a name in this tongue. The combat screen shows it under the ship's class (Fugari Reaper Kesh'naarek), and the same ship keeps the same name for as long as it flies. Pilots who learn to read the names learn what the swarm thinks each ship is for.

Sounds

• Consonants: k, kh, q, t, th, s, sh, z, zh, r, x, n, l, h
• Vowels: a, e, i, o, u — and long aa, ii, uu, and ai
• The click: the apostrophe ( ' ) is not a pause. It is a snap of the mandibles, and it binds two roots into one name. Naar'thar is one word, said with a click in the middle.

Word order

A Fugari name is head-last: the final root says what the thing is, the roots before it say what kind. Naar'thar is a void (thar) of hunger (naar): "the Hungering Void". Kesh'zar would be a claw (zar) of the swarm (kesh).

Their home is named the same way. Kethara is khet (nest) + ara (ember): the Ember Nest.

Endings and titles

How each class is named

Wraiths are the little ones, named like pets or tools. Tendrils are reaching things. Reapers are named for what they take. Sovereigns are titled as the hive-mother's own voice — when one closes on your planet, read its name.

Lexicon

Every Fugari name is built from these roots.

A pilot's note, scratched into a Ledger margin: "They called our fleet xen'kesh*. I looked it up. 'A swarm of strangers.' They think we are the swarm."*

Fugari Ship Actions

Fugari ships patrol the galaxy in groups, and you can interact with them directly. Two actions are available when Fugari ships are present at your node:

Scan Fugari Ship (1 turn)

Reveals all Fugari ships at the node, their tier and threat level, and your current faction status with the Fugari. This is reconnaissance — but not free of consequence. If you are already "contacted" or "latched" by the Fugari, scanning their ships draws additional attention and advances your encounter lifecycle.

Attack Fugari Ship (1 turn)

Initiates wave combat against the highest-tier Fugari ship at your node.

• T1 (Envoy): Does not fight back. Combat proceeds without opposition.
• T2 (Latcher): Uses drone_latch only — no strikers, no guardians. Fighting it is the same as fighting back during a latch encounter.
• T3 (Seizure Craft): Engages with full wave combat — strikers and guardians active. Bring your own strikers.
• T4 (Bastion Defender): Heavily armed wave combat. Do not engage solo without preparation.

On victory, the ship is destroyed — you collect a credit bounty and rep. The combat end screen shows your exact bounty, rep gain, and — for T3/T4 kills — a GPI Escalation badge. Either way, the Fugari notice: an encounter event is queued that accelerates their lifecycle response toward you.

Kill bounties scale with both ship tier and the current GPI band (galaxy health). A stronger galaxy means more wealth in circulation — and richer wrecks:

The same bounty table applies whether you destroy a Fugari ship in wave combat, during a latch fight, or anywhere else in the galaxy.

Destroying T3 or T4 ships does not escalate the Galaxy Prosperity Index — GPI is driven by economic activity, not kill counts. Hunting Fugari patrols is pure upside.

Fugari Transmissions

Fugari ships broadcast intermittent transmissions to pilots sharing their node — broken, terse communications that arrive via the galaxy map overlay. These are not triggered by your actions; they fire passively (roughly 12% chance per patrol tick) whenever a Fugari ship is at your location. Messages escalate by ship tier: Tier 1 ships send territorial warnings, Tier 4 ships send ominous declarations referencing the Kethara fleet. Each transmission addresses you by callsign.

Transmissions are flavor with a function: they confirm Fugari presence at your node without spending a scan turn, and the tier of the language gives you a rough read on what you're dealing with before committing to a fight.

Fugari Seizure of Inactive Ships

When a Fugari ship arrives at a node, it seizes any inactive human player ships parked there. Active hulls -- the ship you are currently piloting -- are never targeted. Only unmanned ships sitting at the node are at risk.

What happens when a ship is seized:

• The ship is deleted immediately. Cargo and drones aboard are lost with it.
• The owner receives an activity log notice (fugari_seizure).
• There is no recovery. The ship does not become an adrift wreck -- it is gone.

This is not a rare edge case. The Fugari patrol constantly, and their perimeter expands as the cycle progresses. A parked ship in or near Fugari territory is a ship on borrowed time.

Defense: Keep inactive ships at the Nexus (subject to the parking limit), at your owned planets, or at well-defended nodes. Do not leave hulls in the open near Coreward space unless they are your active ship.

The Rogue Contractor betrayal makes this worse. When the Fugari turn on a contractor, they will pass through nodes the contractor has been active in -- and any parked ship they find will be seized as part of the reprisal.

The Galaxy Prosperity Index (GPI)

The GPI is an integer from 0 to 100 computed every reset. It measures how effectively the Fugari are operating as a unified force. It is never shown as a raw number — it only appears as narrative signals in the Realm Report.

GPI Drivers:

• Activity ratio: active players vs. registered (max 40 points) — more players feeding the economy = more Fugari income
• Fugari income from drains and tolls (max 35 points)
• Tension penalty from over-expansion (uncapped negative) — the Fugari's own success can stretch them too thin

That last point is the galaxy's structural lever. A Fugari faction that has latched many players and expanded aggressively gains income but accumulates tension. When the tension penalty overwhelms their income, their GPI collapses.

The GPI band determines how hard the Fugari home planet is to assault. At Apex or Thriving, the defenses fully replenish and guardians regenerate every reset — sustained assault is necessary to make progress. At Developing, you get a window. At Sparse or Frontier, the planet is vulnerable in ways that rarely recur in a cycle.

Reading GPI Signals in the Realm Report

The Realm Report never states the GPI score. It narrates what the GPI implies. Learning to read these signals is how experienced players know when to push.

Apex: "The Fugari bastion is silent in the way that fortresses are silent — watchful, complete, unmovable." The planet is fully defended. Major assaults will lose drones faster than the Fugari lose theirs.

Thriving: "The bastion shows no unusual activity. The drain on outer nodes continues at standard rate." Normal operations. Fight efficiently or wait.

Developing: "Fugari patrols have thinned near the outer nodes. Whether by choice or necessity is unclear." Drone replenishment at 60%, guardians at 50%. Now is a good time to push the orbital defenses.

Sparse: "Two Fugari convoys clashed near Node 34. Something is wrong inside the bastion." Drone replenishment at 30%, no guardian regen. Serious assault window. Coordinate immediately.

Frontier: "The main Fugari fleet has left. The bastion runs on a skeleton crew." The home planet is running on minimal defense. 20% drone replenishment, no guardians. If a coalition is ready, this is the window that wins cycles.

The Frontier window does not last forever. The main fleet returns. Missing it is the kind of thing veteran players discuss in the post-cycle debrief.

Fugari Guardian Perimeter

Kethara Prime is not just defended at the home node. The Fugari build a layered drone perimeter across nearby space using credits accumulated over each epoch.

Every epoch, the Fugari faction earns passive income. Those credits are spent deploying guardian drones to nodes at graduated distances from their home:

Drones deploy outward from the home node each epoch until credits run out or node caps are reached. Early in a cycle, the perimeter is sparse. By late cycle, nodes within 3–5 hops of Kethara Prime may be densely fielded.

When you fly into a node with Fugari guardians, the drones fire automatically — you cannot pay a toll or choose to avoid it. The damage follows the standard guardian formula: 1 HP per drone, capped at 10 HP. This means even fully-capped nodes (1M drones) deal the same 10 HP as a lightly-fielded node at the damage cap — but the cap means the perimeter is a constant tax on every approach, not a one-shot wall.

You cannot destroy Fugari guardian drones at non-home nodes by attacking — they are remotely controlled fields, not stationed ships. The home planet assault is the only way to shut down the perimeter permanently.

The Home Planet & Win Condition

The Fugari home planet is located in a strategically chosen node — away from player planets, trade lanes, and the Nexus, favoring locations with multiple warp connections that create natural chokepoints. Distance from the Nexus varies: a dominant Fugari faction places Kethara Prime closer to the core, while a weaker faction retreats to the galactic fringe. Getting to it requires navigating Fugari-controlled space.

Kethara Prime Defense Status

The planet's defenses are not static. Defense strength scales dynamically with the galaxy's player development: max(citadel_1_floor, top_3_player_planet_median). Early in a cycle when player planets are weak, the floor is low and the planet is more accessible. Late in a cycle, when the galaxy's three strongest player planets have reached tier-3+ development, Kethara Prime grows proportionally. This means the endgame scales with how developed the galaxy is — you can't rush it on day one and find it unguarded.

The current HP state of all defense layers is visible to every pilot in the galaxy — no scan required. When you select the Fugari home node on the map and open the assault action panel, you will see live HP bars for each layer. Color indicates urgency: green means the layer is mostly intact, amber means below 60%, red means below 30%, gray means destroyed.

This intelligence is public. Everyone in the galaxy can see it. The strategic question is not "what is the state of Kethara Prime?" — that answer is available to all. The strategic question is what you cannot see: how many Fugari patrol ships are in transit toward home. Ships approaching from across the galaxy are not visible on the map. You may arrive to find fresh Tier 4 ships landing as you begin your assault.

The Home Guard and the Recall

Kethara Prime is never left empty. Each cycle the Fugari station a home guard at the home node: one Tier 4 and one Tier 3 ship. The guard never patrols and never latches; it waits in orbit to be engaged. A guard ship that is destroyed is not replaced until the next cycle.

Attacking the planet recalls the fleet. An attack on Kethara itself (the assault, or a strike on its node) calls every Fugari ship home for the rest of that epoch and all of the next. Fighting the ships in orbit does not: the guard can be cleared quietly. The fleet is also recalled whenever the garrison falls below 80% of its peak. Returning ships move up to four hops per tick, and player guardians on their route delay them. Once home, they defend the node alongside the guard.

While any Fugari ship stands at Kethara, the planet cannot be assaulted. The assault and a strike on the node are refused ("N ships defend Kethara: engage them first") until every ship in orbit has been fought: engage them as Fugari ships, then assault. A refused assault costs no turn and recalls nothing. Ships that answer the recall cannot join an assault already under way, but they stand in the way of the next one: clear the guard, strike, and if you retreat, expect the fleet in orbit when you return.

The Three-Phase Assault

Assaulting Kethara Prime follows the same 3-phase wave combat sequence used against player planets:

1. Phase 1 — Clear the node: Every Fugari ship at the home node (the home guard, and any ship the recall has brought back) must be fought before the planet itself can be engaged. Until then the assault is refused.
2. Phase 2 — Garrison combat: The outer drone screen — replenished each reset based on GPI band — must be ground down through sustained wave combat.
3. Phase 3 — Post-garrison: Once the garrison is broken, post-garrison wave combat begins against the planet itself. At GPI band 3 or 4, the orbital canon is active — it fires each wave, dealing direct hull damage that bypasses guardians. The battery has finite charges seeded when the GPI first reaches band 3; once depleted it goes offline for that assault. Winning this combat claims Kethara Prime and ends the cycle.

Destroying the core ends the cycle. The outer drone screen is the reset-by-reset grind. Every reset at high GPI, the screen refills. Sustained assault means showing up, spending turns and drones, making progress on the deeper layers, and returning again. This is why coordinating a push when the GPI is Sparse or Frontier matters so much — you're doing the same work against a fraction of the opposition.

Galaxy Feed Assault Events

Every assault against Kethara Prime generates a public galaxy feed entry visible in the activity log:

WRAITHBORN ground down the Kethara Prime garrison — outer defenses depleted. NULLVEX claimed Kethara Prime. The cycle is over.

This means the entire galaxy can watch the endgame unfold in real time. Players who haven't made the approach can read the log and know how close the coalition is to breaking through. This also means rival factions and Accord-aligned players know when to rush to assist or interfere.

The Killing Blow

When the core reaches zero, the Fugari cycle ends immediately. A galaxy-wide broadcast announces the pilot's callsign and ship. Every connected player receives the notification in real time — no polling, no page refresh required.

The killing blow is worth 1,000 bonus points on the leaderboard and is permanently recorded in the Fugari cycle archive alongside the pilot's callsign and ship name.

Credit bounty: The pilot who lands the killing blow receives an immediate credit bounty — a GPI-band base plus a random bonus:

The base scales with galaxy health: killing an Apex Fugari faction means the galaxy was wealthy and the plunder is richer. The random bonus is a uniform roll — every killing blow has real variance regardless of timing. The bounty is credited instantly, before the post-cycle memory targeting window opens.

The galaxy does not stop. A new Fugari cycle spawns automatically — no admin intervention, no waiting screen. When the core falls:

1. The top attackers are honored. The three pilots who consumed the most drones in the final assault epoch receive meta points, a permanent Hall of Fame record, and a 1,000,000 credit bonus. Because the cycle reset wipes wallets back to the starting stake (see The Cycle), this bonus is banked in reserve and paid out in full once the new cycle begins, rather than being credited into a wallet that's about to be reset. It decays by 1% per epoch if uncollected, so the sooner you claim it after the reset, the more you keep. A galaxy-wide feed broadcast names the recipients and their syndicates.
2. Kethara Prime relocates. The home planet vanishes from its current node and reappears at a new defensible location — away from player planets, trade lanes, and the Nexus. The node is chosen for strategic depth: multiple warp connections and distance from civilian infrastructure. A galaxy feed announces the new location.
3. The garrison rebuilds. The new home planet is not empty. Defenses scale inversely with player strength — a dominant galaxy faces a leaner initial garrison, while a quiet galaxy faces a heavily fortified one. The orbital canon recharges. Guardian perimeter deployments are cleared and must be rebuilt over subsequent epochs.
4. A new fleet spawns. The previous Fugari patrol fleet is destroyed in the cataclysm. A fresh fleet — envoys, latchers, seizure craft, and bastion defenders — deploys from the new home node. Fleet size scales with the galaxy.
5. The GPI resets. A new AI strategy seeds and the hunt resumes.

This is a full cycle reset, not just a Fugari respawn — see The Cycle for exactly what resets (credits, rank, planets, banks, reputation, badges, loans) and what survives (meta points, career stats, syndicate membership, 10% of the syndicate vault, phone verification).

Fugari Memory

The Fugari do not forget the pilots who killed them.

At the end of each Fugari cycle, the top attackers from the final assault epoch are marked as Fugari memory targets. For exactly one epoch after Kethara Prime falls, the Fugari prioritize latching and swarm-targeting those pilots above all others. They remember who came for them, and they come for those pilots first.

This targeting clears after one epoch — a single focused reprisal, not a permanent state. Pilots who anticipate this and pre-empty their cargo hold or bank their credits before the kill lands can blunt the drain considerably.

A Fugari Truce consumable, earned through the meta economy, exempts a pilot from memory targeting even if they were in the top three. The Fugari honor the truce. They still resent you.

Multi-Session Kethara Prime Assault

Kethara Prime assaults are persistent. Like planet assaults, every wave of progress against the garrison is written to the database. If your fleet retreats, is defeated, or the server restarts mid-siege, the garrison is left in its depleted state.

A coalition assault works in sequential sessions:

1. Session 1: Fleet A grinds the garrison from 100% to 40%, then retreats (or gets defeated by the battery)
2. Session 2: Fleet B (or the same fleet, rested) launches a new assault against the 40% garrison — starting where Fleet A left off
3. Final session: With a depleted garrison and drained battery, the path to the claim opens

This makes Kethara Prime a campaign target rather than a single-session raid. Large, well-organized coalitions can break it in one extended session. Smaller coalitions chip away over multiple sessions across several epochs. Both approaches are valid; the garrison doesn't discriminate.

Garrison regeneration applies here too: The Fugari garrison regenerates between sessions at the standard rate. A long gap between assaults allows partial recovery. Plan follow-up sessions while the garrison is still low.

The battery is the gating factor. Even a depleted garrison is survivable if the battery is still charged — it fires every wave and compounds damage. Breaking the battery (by draining charges through repeated waves) is often the prerequisite for a successful second or third assault.

Kethara Prime Difficulty Scaling

Kethara Prime's garrison is not static. After a cycle reset, initial defenses are seeded based on the GPI band at the moment of destruction — a weaker Fugari faction at the time of death means a stronger initial garrison on rebirth, compensating for the galaxy's dominance. Over subsequent epochs, the garrison grows dynamically based on the galaxy's accumulated player power — measured as the maximum galaxy-wide combat power reached during the current Fugari cycle, decaying slowly each epoch if no assaults occur.

This means a galaxy full of veteran pilots flying Leviathans will face a harder Kethara Prime than a young galaxy still grinding toward Warships. The difficulty scales to match the coalition that built it. But it also means the Fugari are never truly helpless after a kill — even in a dominant galaxy, the initial garrison and battery charges buy time for the dynamic scaling to kick in.

AI Strategies — The Cycle Variable

Each cycle, the Fugari operate under one of four AI strategies, seeded at the Big Bang. You won't know which strategy applies until the Realm Report reveals it through behavior:

• Fortify: Reinforces defenses. The outer screen and citadel guardians receive extra attention. Longer assault windows required.
• Expand: Colonizes adjacent nodes aggressively. The Fugari spread, gaining more latch opportunities — and more tension penalty. Expansion strategies tend to collapse GPI faster than others.
• Parasite: Doubles drain rate on all latched players. More Fugari income, higher GPI potential, but players have more incentive to purge. Cycles under Parasite are chaotic.
• Chaos: Deliberately unpredictable. Behavior does not follow standard rules. The Realm Report signals are harder to read. Everything is harder to plan.

Reading the strategy from early Realm Reports is itself a skill. By the third or fourth reset of a cycle, experienced players have a hypothesis. By the eighth or ninth, it's usually confirmed.