Mack
Old Alpha
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- Armak Mack Zardacon
Privateer Owners Manual
There seems to be a lot of information out on the forum about the various operations related to Privateers and Motherships, but it’s hard to find and much of it is missing. Thought I’d try to pull together what was available into one location and do some testing to fill in the blanks. Please post any corrections or additional information you have and I’ll keep the opening post updated. I did all my testing for this with a Privateer, but most of it is applicable to the Motherships as well. Much thanks to Deathifier, Rappa, Kanan and others who helped to work through this.
What is a Privateer?
“Privateer” is short for Vega Class Privateer, which is a mid-size space transport vehicle. It is capable of carrying passengers (and the inventory they carry) between space stations near the planets and other locations in space. The privateer is capable of warp flight (optional equipment required). This vessel and the hangar associated with it were the replacement for the old hangar ships pre-VU 10. Each Privateer has either the Pathfinder or Starfinder name along with a Roman-numeric value after to provide a unique ship name. There is no difference between the Pathfinder and Starfinder ships other than the names. Privateers can’t currently land on the planets, but MA representatives have said this capability will be available in the future.
Ownership/Deed/Claiming the ship
Ownership of a Privateer is controlled via a Deed. The avatar who holds the Privateer deed is technically “the owner”, but to gain control of the ship you MUST claim it. If you trade with someone for a deed and the ownership of a Privateer, you should claim it immediately. Until you claim the ship the previous owner still has full rights to the ship and can fly it wherever they want, remove engineering items, etc. Personally, unless you are dealing with a very trusted friend, I would conduct the trade on board the ship.
To claim a ship, just access the Spacecraft Guestlist Terminal on board the ship. If you have the deed in your possession when you do this you will “claim” the ship. You can also claim the ship from outside in space by flying close to it in another vehicle. Once you are close enough, right click and “Operate” and you will claim the ship. When you claim the ship it will wipe out the previous owners Guest List and they and anyone else on the ship besides yourself will be booted from the ship into space. You can then add your own friends to the guest list as you do for any other vehicle.
Throughout the rest of this document I will refer to the person who has full access to the ship as the “owner”, it assumes that they have claimed the ship. It is possible to temporarily trade the deed to another person, let them claim the ship, and then have the deed traded back to you. If you do this without claiming the ship once you have the deed back in your possession, then the other person will be considered the “claimed owner” and the only one who can access the Spacecraft Guestlist Terminal, the Engineering Terminal, and “Summon” guests until you claim the ship back.
NOTE: There is currently a bug where if the deed is traded and a new owner claims the ship while the engineering items are installed, the new owner can’t see the items in the Engineering Terminal. To work around this, and to make for the safest possible trade, the previous owner should uninstall these items first and trade them all to you with the deed. Then, besides being able to see/install/remove the items, you also won’t have to worry about the danger of the previous owner pulling the items on you before you get a chance to claim the ship. Once you have claimed the ship, you can reinstall the engineering items. They can be installed and removed as many times as you want, no decay happens when you do this.
Ship Layout
The Privateer has basically four levels on it. When you enter the ship (see a later section on how to enter a Privateer) you will be on the main mid-level. Here you will find most of the terminals including the typical Repair, Trade, Revival, Teleport terminals. There are also the Spacecraft Guestlist Terminal and Engineering Terminal which can only be accessed by the ship owner.
From the main mid-level there are stairs that lead to the lower level where you will find the Spacecraft Refueling Station, Reactor Repair Point, Propulsion Repair Point, and the Spacecraft SI Management Station.
If you take the stairs up from the main mid-level you will reach the first gunner level. There are four gunner positions here. If you continue up a final short flight of stairs you will reach the uppermost section where find the other two gunner seats and the pilots seat. Right click, “Operate” to get into any of the gunner/pilot seats. You must be granted permission in the Spacecraft Guestlist Terminal to access any of these seats.
Requirements to fly
For the privateer to be operational, you need to have three engineering items installed. You must be the current “claimed” owner in order to access the Engineering Terminal where these items need to be installed. The three items are the Energy Source (L), Sub Warp I Drive (L), and Armament Device (L). All of these items are usually available in the auction. These three items have a combined TT value of 400 ped, and will cost you about 430 ped total with markup in auction.
Just open up the Engineering Terminal by right clicking and “Operate”. You MUST install the Energy Source first. Just drag the Energy Source from your inventory to its location in the upper left under the box labeled “Energy Source”. It will only fit in one spot noted by the green border when it is held over the correct location. Next you can install the Sub Warp Drive (bottom center) and Armament Device (bottom right) in the same way. They will only fit in one spot each.
Finally, you will need to drop some oil into the Spacecraft Refueling Station which is in the corner on the lower level. Just drag and drop oil from your inventory just as you would for any other vehicle.
If you want to have warp flight capabilities, you will also need to install a Warp Drive (different from the Sub Warp Drive) using the Engineering Terminal. More on warp flight later.
Privateer & Hangar
Currently the Privateer can’t fly down to the planet surfaces, they have to stay in space like the motherships. MA has posted that privateers will be able to fly to the planet surface in the future, but it is left to interpretation whether hangars will be required for this process or if they can fly down to anywhere they want (or a single entry point) like Quads and Sleipner do now. It’s up to you to speculate if you should buy a privateer without the hangar or not at this point.
Entering a Privateer
There is no hangar bay on a Privateer, so you can’t fly into the Privateer with a Quad/Sleipner like on a Mothership. You can, however, fly up close to the ship and right click “Operate” and if you are on the guest list you will be teleported inside. If you are not on the guest list a request will be sent to the owner. If the owner grants you access you will be teleported into the Privateer. The vehicle you were previously flying will be sent to your inventory about 30 seconds after being teleported in. You can also enter a Privateer by teleporting from the nearby space station or by being summoned by the owner. Although it would be a nice feature, you can’t currently teleport directly from one ship to another even if you are on the guest list of both ships. You need to teleport to the space station and then back out to the other ship.
A quick pointer in case you haven’t used teleporters in space before. Once you activate the teleporter terminal you will see the familiar teleporter interface but usually there will be no teleporters available to select from on the left side. You may need to first select the area you want to teleport to via the drop down menu. It will give you some options like “Starfinder XXI”, “Space”, “Calypso Space Station”. Select the one you want to go to and then you should see a teleporter option displayed on the left. Select it and click on the execute icon as normal.
Guest List
The Spacecraft Guestlist Terminal will allow the owner to add up to 500 people from your Friend List. You can assign Pilot, Gunner, both or neither privileges to each person. I don’t believe anyone has been able to verify if there is an actual maximum capacity for the ship. I know that people have had at least 10 guests on board. I don’t know how you’d deal with 500 people up there, but I don’t see anything to limit that so far.
The owner of the ship can issue a “summon” command (action menu) which will send a request to everyone on the ship guest list asking if they want to be transported to the Privateer. In order to summon someone, they must be on the guest list and they must be located either on the space station to which the ship is docked or the associated planet. You can’t be docked at Calypso and summon someone who is currently located on Arkadia, for example.
What you can do on board with the various permission levels?
Not on the guest list: If you aren't on the guest list you can’t enter the ship. If you fly up to the ship you can right click “operate” and it will send a guest list request to the owner, but if they don’t accept it, you can’t do anything.
On the guest list, but no pilot/gunner privileges: You can enter the ship any time. You can use the repair, trade, revival, teleporter and ship repair stations. You can drag resource ingots to the SI Management Station to do an SI upgrade. You can also add fuel to the Fuel Station, but not remove it. You can remove yourself from the guest list via the Spacecraft Guestlist Terminal, but can perform no other operations nor see the actual guest list.
On the guest list with gunner privileges: Do all the basic terminals stuff listed above plus you can sit in any of the gunner seats and fire the guns (assuming you hold laser weapon cell ammo).
On the guest list with pilot privileges: Do all the basic terminals stuff listed above plus you can sit in the pilot seat. You can fly the ship including initiating warp drive if a warp drive is installed.
Claimed owner: You can do all of the above, plus you have full access to the Guestlist Terminal, Engineering Terminal, and can execute “Summon” to pull in people on the Guest List.
Have the deed, but haven’t claimed the ship: Basically you are like any other guest here, and only have access to the basic terminals and maybe the pilot/gunner seats depending on what privileges you have been granted in the guest list by the previous owner (who still has the ship claimed).
Note: Anyone on guest list has their corresponding access (gunner, pilot, none) regardless of whether the owner is present or even logged on. So is you grant someone pilot privileges, they can enter the ship and fly/warp it around any time they want. Just a note to keep in mind when handing out privileges. Pilots should be people you trust.
Structural Integrity and SI Upgrades
The Structural Integrity (SI) on a Privateer is like other vehicles. It’s basically the “health bar” of the ship. If damage is done to the Privateer it drops the SI value and if the value gets down to 0, the ship is temporarily destroyed (and all the passengers get booted out into the cold vacuum of space to die a slow and painful death). On a Privateer there are two sections of the ship, the Reactor and the Propulsion, each have their own SI. The current SI status for each section is shown to everyone once you enter the Privateer via a “health” status bar. If either sections SI drops to 0 the ship is destroyed. The base SI level for an unimproved ship is 500. That is 500 for each section, so really a total of 1000. The owner can see the current SI value on the deed, and it represents the value that each section holds, so in the case above it would read 500 (not 1000).
Guests on the ship can repair the ship using the RK-5 and RK-20 repair tools at the two repair stations located on the lower level of the ship. Just equip the tool, aim and click. Basically like fapping. The repair tools consume Welding Wire, so you will need a supply of that as well.
You can make SI upgrades which will increase the SI for the ship. When you upgrade the SI it gets applied equally to both sections. So if you increase the SI by 200, you will add 100 to each section of the ship. The SI reported on the deed would only increase by 100.
SI upgrades are accomplished by dragging stacks of ore resources from your inventory to the Spacecraft SI Management Station on the lower level of the ship. Anyone can do this as long as they are on the guest list. See the link below for the official Entropia Space Guide to see what ores you can use.
Basically you can use as much of any ore on the list as you want. If you choose to upgrade using Gold as an example, you are limited to 5K ingots at a time, but then you can repeat the process using other 5K stacks of Gold as often as you want until you reach the maximum SI for the ship. You don't have to use the full max stack size (5K ingots for gold), you can do any number up to that, even as low as 1 ingot. No one knows what the maximum SI is currently, but I have heard of motherships with SI values over 40K, and privateers with SI over 20K (that is per section).
The amount of SI increase that you get depends on both the ore you use as well as your own Vehicle Structural Engineer profession level. The higher the ore is in the list (Belk at the low end, Gold at the top) the more SI increase you get. When you drag the ore to the SI Management station you will get a dialog that tells you what range your SI increase will be in (based on the ore, the amount and your VSE), and if you decide to go ahead with the operation you will then get a message in the chat window that tells you how much the SI was actually increased.
Doing some testing with this with a couple different VSE levels, here is what we have so far that will give you an idea of the type of costs involved.
Someone with 15 VSE prof level puts 1 ingot of gold in the SI station and it said it would increase the SI in the range of 3.0 to 3.6. When he did it, it randomly chose 3.1 as an actual value. That is then split between the two sections of the ship, so the SI reported only increased half that amount, or 1.55 in this case.
Someone with 26.5 VSE prof level puts 1 ingot of gold in the SI station and it said it would increase the SI in the range of 4.0 to 4.6. When he did it, it randomly chose 4.4 as an actual value. Again, half to each station, so reported SI increased by 2.2
Someone with 26.5 VSE prof level puts 55 ingots of gold in the SI station and it said it would increase the SI in the range of 221 to 254.1 (that is 4.018 to 4.62 per ingot). When he did it, it randomly chose 247.0 (about 4.49 per ingot) as an actual value. SI was therefore increased by 123.5 for each section.
These tests were done on a ship that only had the base 500 SI. It is unclear whether the SI increases per ore input will remain linear so we can always expect to get about 4-4.6 increase in SI per gold ingot for someone with 26.5 VSE prof, or if it will decrease as the SI gets higher much like skill gains slow down as they get higher (logarithmic versus linear).
Taking Damage
Note: This is true of Motherships, and I am assuming it is also true of Privateers, but will need to test it.
Privateer and other ships can take damage from space mobs and from other ships that are armed with guns. There are safe zones around each of the space stations in which no damage can be done, but outside of those zones you can be hit. As you get hit, your SI gets decreased. If the SI for any of the sections of the ship hit 0 it will be destroyed and everyone in the ship will be ejected to space and can then be killed and looted of stackables (other than the usual ammo, welding wire, ME, etc).
When the ship is destroyed it will be transported to the closest space station, back inside the safe zone. The people from the ship once they die will be teleported either inside the adjoining space station, or back on to the ship itself (it seems to be kind of random which it chooses). If you were sent to the station, you can then teleport from the space station back to your ship and repair it and resume your flight.
When you are under attack from space mobs, you can stop the damage being done by having everyone get up from the seats (pilot, gunner...and co-pilot on MS). If none of the seats are occupied, the ship is not powered up and will not aggro mobs so they will stop attacking. It's basically the opposite of what you get on planets. You can't avoid damage from other ships in this way though, so pirates can attack and destroy your ship even if no one is in the seats. ALL seats must be empty for this to work on mobs. Gives you a chance to repair the ship up to full though if you are taking too much damage, then hopefully you have enough time to get away from the area before mobs cause too much damage again.
Update-Feb. 26: There have been some changes in the last VU, it is unclear if it will stay this way or if it is a bug. In the new VU, mobs only do damage to the ships when very close to the front of the ship. On a mothership, it is a very small zone, so small that you can't really move the ship without moving the mobs enough so that you take no damage. On a privateer, the "dmg zone' is a little bigger, but they still need to be pretty much on the ship to dmg. If they are a little behind the ship you get no damage.
Warp Drives/Jumps
One nice feature Privateers and Motherships have over the smaller space capable crafts is the ability to make Warp Jumps. To do this you must install a warp drive at the Engineering Terminal. To perform the warp jump the pilot uses the “Warp” command in the action menu. It will pull up an interface similar to the teleport interface where you click on the map where you want to warp to, then click the usual “execute” icon you use when teleporting. If you are too close to a space station, it will not allow you to jump and will throw some yellow text in chat telling you why. You basically have to move a little beyond the safe zone surrounding the space stations to initiate warp. You can just keep trying it over and over until it decides you are far enough away and then it will initiate the sequence and handles the rest automatically. Bunch of warp graphics and then some 30 seconds later or so you come out at your destination. I’ve only warped a few times, and I always seem to come out of warp outside the safe zones no matter how precisely I select one of the space stations. You then have to fly over to the safe zone at normal speed.
As I said, I’m a bit of a warp newb, but one thing I would suggest is to use the “W” or whatever key you have programmed for moving your ship forward as you try to get far enough from the space station, rather than using auto-run. Trying to initiate warp seems to drop me out of auto-run and I didn’t have the sound on so it was hard to notice I wasn’t moving for a while. Sat there for a couple minutes outside the safe zone thinking I'm getting farther and farther away while I keep attempting to warp and continually failing. Noob...
Warp drives decay by 3 peds per jump of its 150 ped total TT value, so it can be an expensive venture if you are paying a lot for your warp drives.
NOTE: Another area for more testing, but from what I understand on a mothership at least is that if you are taking damage from either a mob or another ship, it will stop the warp initiation process. Much like would happen on planet when you are trying to teleport. So it sounds like if you are taking damage from a pirate or mob you must either outrun (in the case of the mob) or deal with the pirate before you can warp out.
Ship guns
I need to do a little more research to fine tune the answers here, but here’s what I have so far.
On the privateer you can only operate 2 of the 6 guns at any given time until they come out with armament upgrades. The guns take laser weapon cell for ammo. I had the number written down somewhere, but can’t find it…but think the amount of ammo per shot is in the range of 70-80 pec.
Seems like range on the guns is around 0.076 AU and the max damage is maybe around 270-300. More testing needed to zero in on this more precisely. If someone has better numbers, please post them.
The ship guns have 360 degree “horizontal” rotation capability and about 50 degrees of “vertical” rotation capability. One tip I got somewhere was to use the strafe commands/keys “A” and “D” to rotate the guns and use the mouse for the “up” and “down” as you can rotate much faster using the strafe commands/keys.
Updated - Feb. 26: It looks like they fixed the broken Trade Terminals in spaceships and space stations, so you can buy stuff from them again, including ammo for the guns, as well as sell stuff to them as you could before.
Ship Movement
Piloting in space in any ship takes some getting used to. The whole idea of 3 dimensions without “ground” points of reference really can mess with you. Too much to deal with it here, but just wanted to point out in Privateers (and even more so in Motherships) you will notice a lot of “inertia” in your movements. Ships are slower to accelerate and decelerate than the smaller spacecraft like quads, and turning is slower.
There are a couple of hotkeys that I highly recommend to have set up if you intend to pilot or get in the gunner seat. The most important would be the "Exit Seat" command. This applies to both pilots and gunners primarily if you are going to be around space mobs. It is really nice to have a fast way to exit the seat if you are around mobs and start to take on too much damage. Remind all your crew that they must exit seat before the ship blows up.
For piloting, the other nice hotkey to have is the "align horizontal" command. This will spin the ship so that it is laying flat on the current z-plane. This is very helpful if you are flying around and realize you are flying upside down or partially on your side (you go to spin the ship one direction, but see on the map it actually turns the ship the other direction). Many mouse operations/movements will abort the "align horizontal" operation before it completes, so I've found the best way is to switch to cursor mode prior to hitting this hotkey, and then avoid doing things like changing the camera angle until the ship stops moving. Once you are aligned, "up" and "down", "left" and "right" will make sense again...at least for a minute or two
Ship Speed
The speed of a privateer without upgrades is pretty slow, even slower than a Sleipner. You definitely can't out run a Quad, but you can outrun space mobs. At least you can outrun the low maturity ones, I haven't tested on higher maturity yet.
Update - Feb. 26: I started doing some speed tests to see if the Captain profession affects the speed of the ship. It seems unlikely that this would be the case as Captain is a defensive skill, but heard it from a couple different sources so we'll test it to be sure. So far Captain profession does not appear to affect speed. I only have done one set of tests with two different avatars using the same ships and same distances, but we were logged in on different net connections, so it is unclear if that has any affects on the results. So far, we have the same times for both avatars, one with Captain profession of 6, the other with Captain profession of 16. Our times were both within a couple seconds of the ones posted below, so assume any variation we saw was in slight differences in techniques for capturing time.
Travel times:
Privateer to travel 1 AU - 5 minutes 25 seconds
Sleipner to travel 1 AU - 3 minutes 32 seconds
Quad to travel 1 AU - 1 minute 55 seconds
Other related links
I tried to pick through some of the other more useful space related threads to link here, but I'm sure I missed some. Let me know and I'll add the link. I don’t vouch for all information given in them, but a lot of it is very useful:
Entropia Universe official Space Guide
Aeris’ thread on general space navigation, pirating, hunting, etc
Oziris’ thread when Privateers first came out with lots of pics inside and out
Stave's Space Survival Map which shows server boundaries.
There seems to be a lot of information out on the forum about the various operations related to Privateers and Motherships, but it’s hard to find and much of it is missing. Thought I’d try to pull together what was available into one location and do some testing to fill in the blanks. Please post any corrections or additional information you have and I’ll keep the opening post updated. I did all my testing for this with a Privateer, but most of it is applicable to the Motherships as well. Much thanks to Deathifier, Rappa, Kanan and others who helped to work through this.
What is a Privateer?
“Privateer” is short for Vega Class Privateer, which is a mid-size space transport vehicle. It is capable of carrying passengers (and the inventory they carry) between space stations near the planets and other locations in space. The privateer is capable of warp flight (optional equipment required). This vessel and the hangar associated with it were the replacement for the old hangar ships pre-VU 10. Each Privateer has either the Pathfinder or Starfinder name along with a Roman-numeric value after to provide a unique ship name. There is no difference between the Pathfinder and Starfinder ships other than the names. Privateers can’t currently land on the planets, but MA representatives have said this capability will be available in the future.
Ownership/Deed/Claiming the ship
Ownership of a Privateer is controlled via a Deed. The avatar who holds the Privateer deed is technically “the owner”, but to gain control of the ship you MUST claim it. If you trade with someone for a deed and the ownership of a Privateer, you should claim it immediately. Until you claim the ship the previous owner still has full rights to the ship and can fly it wherever they want, remove engineering items, etc. Personally, unless you are dealing with a very trusted friend, I would conduct the trade on board the ship.
To claim a ship, just access the Spacecraft Guestlist Terminal on board the ship. If you have the deed in your possession when you do this you will “claim” the ship. You can also claim the ship from outside in space by flying close to it in another vehicle. Once you are close enough, right click and “Operate” and you will claim the ship. When you claim the ship it will wipe out the previous owners Guest List and they and anyone else on the ship besides yourself will be booted from the ship into space. You can then add your own friends to the guest list as you do for any other vehicle.
Throughout the rest of this document I will refer to the person who has full access to the ship as the “owner”, it assumes that they have claimed the ship. It is possible to temporarily trade the deed to another person, let them claim the ship, and then have the deed traded back to you. If you do this without claiming the ship once you have the deed back in your possession, then the other person will be considered the “claimed owner” and the only one who can access the Spacecraft Guestlist Terminal, the Engineering Terminal, and “Summon” guests until you claim the ship back.
NOTE: There is currently a bug where if the deed is traded and a new owner claims the ship while the engineering items are installed, the new owner can’t see the items in the Engineering Terminal. To work around this, and to make for the safest possible trade, the previous owner should uninstall these items first and trade them all to you with the deed. Then, besides being able to see/install/remove the items, you also won’t have to worry about the danger of the previous owner pulling the items on you before you get a chance to claim the ship. Once you have claimed the ship, you can reinstall the engineering items. They can be installed and removed as many times as you want, no decay happens when you do this.
Ship Layout
The Privateer has basically four levels on it. When you enter the ship (see a later section on how to enter a Privateer) you will be on the main mid-level. Here you will find most of the terminals including the typical Repair, Trade, Revival, Teleport terminals. There are also the Spacecraft Guestlist Terminal and Engineering Terminal which can only be accessed by the ship owner.
From the main mid-level there are stairs that lead to the lower level where you will find the Spacecraft Refueling Station, Reactor Repair Point, Propulsion Repair Point, and the Spacecraft SI Management Station.
If you take the stairs up from the main mid-level you will reach the first gunner level. There are four gunner positions here. If you continue up a final short flight of stairs you will reach the uppermost section where find the other two gunner seats and the pilots seat. Right click, “Operate” to get into any of the gunner/pilot seats. You must be granted permission in the Spacecraft Guestlist Terminal to access any of these seats.
Requirements to fly
For the privateer to be operational, you need to have three engineering items installed. You must be the current “claimed” owner in order to access the Engineering Terminal where these items need to be installed. The three items are the Energy Source (L), Sub Warp I Drive (L), and Armament Device (L). All of these items are usually available in the auction. These three items have a combined TT value of 400 ped, and will cost you about 430 ped total with markup in auction.
Just open up the Engineering Terminal by right clicking and “Operate”. You MUST install the Energy Source first. Just drag the Energy Source from your inventory to its location in the upper left under the box labeled “Energy Source”. It will only fit in one spot noted by the green border when it is held over the correct location. Next you can install the Sub Warp Drive (bottom center) and Armament Device (bottom right) in the same way. They will only fit in one spot each.
Finally, you will need to drop some oil into the Spacecraft Refueling Station which is in the corner on the lower level. Just drag and drop oil from your inventory just as you would for any other vehicle.
If you want to have warp flight capabilities, you will also need to install a Warp Drive (different from the Sub Warp Drive) using the Engineering Terminal. More on warp flight later.
Privateer & Hangar
Currently the Privateer can’t fly down to the planet surfaces, they have to stay in space like the motherships. MA has posted that privateers will be able to fly to the planet surface in the future, but it is left to interpretation whether hangars will be required for this process or if they can fly down to anywhere they want (or a single entry point) like Quads and Sleipner do now. It’s up to you to speculate if you should buy a privateer without the hangar or not at this point.
Entering a Privateer
There is no hangar bay on a Privateer, so you can’t fly into the Privateer with a Quad/Sleipner like on a Mothership. You can, however, fly up close to the ship and right click “Operate” and if you are on the guest list you will be teleported inside. If you are not on the guest list a request will be sent to the owner. If the owner grants you access you will be teleported into the Privateer. The vehicle you were previously flying will be sent to your inventory about 30 seconds after being teleported in. You can also enter a Privateer by teleporting from the nearby space station or by being summoned by the owner. Although it would be a nice feature, you can’t currently teleport directly from one ship to another even if you are on the guest list of both ships. You need to teleport to the space station and then back out to the other ship.
A quick pointer in case you haven’t used teleporters in space before. Once you activate the teleporter terminal you will see the familiar teleporter interface but usually there will be no teleporters available to select from on the left side. You may need to first select the area you want to teleport to via the drop down menu. It will give you some options like “Starfinder XXI”, “Space”, “Calypso Space Station”. Select the one you want to go to and then you should see a teleporter option displayed on the left. Select it and click on the execute icon as normal.
Guest List
The Spacecraft Guestlist Terminal will allow the owner to add up to 500 people from your Friend List. You can assign Pilot, Gunner, both or neither privileges to each person. I don’t believe anyone has been able to verify if there is an actual maximum capacity for the ship. I know that people have had at least 10 guests on board. I don’t know how you’d deal with 500 people up there, but I don’t see anything to limit that so far.
The owner of the ship can issue a “summon” command (action menu) which will send a request to everyone on the ship guest list asking if they want to be transported to the Privateer. In order to summon someone, they must be on the guest list and they must be located either on the space station to which the ship is docked or the associated planet. You can’t be docked at Calypso and summon someone who is currently located on Arkadia, for example.
What you can do on board with the various permission levels?
Not on the guest list: If you aren't on the guest list you can’t enter the ship. If you fly up to the ship you can right click “operate” and it will send a guest list request to the owner, but if they don’t accept it, you can’t do anything.
On the guest list, but no pilot/gunner privileges: You can enter the ship any time. You can use the repair, trade, revival, teleporter and ship repair stations. You can drag resource ingots to the SI Management Station to do an SI upgrade. You can also add fuel to the Fuel Station, but not remove it. You can remove yourself from the guest list via the Spacecraft Guestlist Terminal, but can perform no other operations nor see the actual guest list.
On the guest list with gunner privileges: Do all the basic terminals stuff listed above plus you can sit in any of the gunner seats and fire the guns (assuming you hold laser weapon cell ammo).
On the guest list with pilot privileges: Do all the basic terminals stuff listed above plus you can sit in the pilot seat. You can fly the ship including initiating warp drive if a warp drive is installed.
Claimed owner: You can do all of the above, plus you have full access to the Guestlist Terminal, Engineering Terminal, and can execute “Summon” to pull in people on the Guest List.
Have the deed, but haven’t claimed the ship: Basically you are like any other guest here, and only have access to the basic terminals and maybe the pilot/gunner seats depending on what privileges you have been granted in the guest list by the previous owner (who still has the ship claimed).
Note: Anyone on guest list has their corresponding access (gunner, pilot, none) regardless of whether the owner is present or even logged on. So is you grant someone pilot privileges, they can enter the ship and fly/warp it around any time they want. Just a note to keep in mind when handing out privileges. Pilots should be people you trust.
Structural Integrity and SI Upgrades
The Structural Integrity (SI) on a Privateer is like other vehicles. It’s basically the “health bar” of the ship. If damage is done to the Privateer it drops the SI value and if the value gets down to 0, the ship is temporarily destroyed (and all the passengers get booted out into the cold vacuum of space to die a slow and painful death). On a Privateer there are two sections of the ship, the Reactor and the Propulsion, each have their own SI. The current SI status for each section is shown to everyone once you enter the Privateer via a “health” status bar. If either sections SI drops to 0 the ship is destroyed. The base SI level for an unimproved ship is 500. That is 500 for each section, so really a total of 1000. The owner can see the current SI value on the deed, and it represents the value that each section holds, so in the case above it would read 500 (not 1000).
Guests on the ship can repair the ship using the RK-5 and RK-20 repair tools at the two repair stations located on the lower level of the ship. Just equip the tool, aim and click. Basically like fapping. The repair tools consume Welding Wire, so you will need a supply of that as well.
You can make SI upgrades which will increase the SI for the ship. When you upgrade the SI it gets applied equally to both sections. So if you increase the SI by 200, you will add 100 to each section of the ship. The SI reported on the deed would only increase by 100.
SI upgrades are accomplished by dragging stacks of ore resources from your inventory to the Spacecraft SI Management Station on the lower level of the ship. Anyone can do this as long as they are on the guest list. See the link below for the official Entropia Space Guide to see what ores you can use.
Basically you can use as much of any ore on the list as you want. If you choose to upgrade using Gold as an example, you are limited to 5K ingots at a time, but then you can repeat the process using other 5K stacks of Gold as often as you want until you reach the maximum SI for the ship. You don't have to use the full max stack size (5K ingots for gold), you can do any number up to that, even as low as 1 ingot. No one knows what the maximum SI is currently, but I have heard of motherships with SI values over 40K, and privateers with SI over 20K (that is per section).
The amount of SI increase that you get depends on both the ore you use as well as your own Vehicle Structural Engineer profession level. The higher the ore is in the list (Belk at the low end, Gold at the top) the more SI increase you get. When you drag the ore to the SI Management station you will get a dialog that tells you what range your SI increase will be in (based on the ore, the amount and your VSE), and if you decide to go ahead with the operation you will then get a message in the chat window that tells you how much the SI was actually increased.
Doing some testing with this with a couple different VSE levels, here is what we have so far that will give you an idea of the type of costs involved.
Someone with 15 VSE prof level puts 1 ingot of gold in the SI station and it said it would increase the SI in the range of 3.0 to 3.6. When he did it, it randomly chose 3.1 as an actual value. That is then split between the two sections of the ship, so the SI reported only increased half that amount, or 1.55 in this case.
Someone with 26.5 VSE prof level puts 1 ingot of gold in the SI station and it said it would increase the SI in the range of 4.0 to 4.6. When he did it, it randomly chose 4.4 as an actual value. Again, half to each station, so reported SI increased by 2.2
Someone with 26.5 VSE prof level puts 55 ingots of gold in the SI station and it said it would increase the SI in the range of 221 to 254.1 (that is 4.018 to 4.62 per ingot). When he did it, it randomly chose 247.0 (about 4.49 per ingot) as an actual value. SI was therefore increased by 123.5 for each section.
These tests were done on a ship that only had the base 500 SI. It is unclear whether the SI increases per ore input will remain linear so we can always expect to get about 4-4.6 increase in SI per gold ingot for someone with 26.5 VSE prof, or if it will decrease as the SI gets higher much like skill gains slow down as they get higher (logarithmic versus linear).
Taking Damage
Note: This is true of Motherships, and I am assuming it is also true of Privateers, but will need to test it.
Privateer and other ships can take damage from space mobs and from other ships that are armed with guns. There are safe zones around each of the space stations in which no damage can be done, but outside of those zones you can be hit. As you get hit, your SI gets decreased. If the SI for any of the sections of the ship hit 0 it will be destroyed and everyone in the ship will be ejected to space and can then be killed and looted of stackables (other than the usual ammo, welding wire, ME, etc).
When the ship is destroyed it will be transported to the closest space station, back inside the safe zone. The people from the ship once they die will be teleported either inside the adjoining space station, or back on to the ship itself (it seems to be kind of random which it chooses). If you were sent to the station, you can then teleport from the space station back to your ship and repair it and resume your flight.
When you are under attack from space mobs, you can stop the damage being done by having everyone get up from the seats (pilot, gunner...and co-pilot on MS). If none of the seats are occupied, the ship is not powered up and will not aggro mobs so they will stop attacking. It's basically the opposite of what you get on planets. You can't avoid damage from other ships in this way though, so pirates can attack and destroy your ship even if no one is in the seats. ALL seats must be empty for this to work on mobs. Gives you a chance to repair the ship up to full though if you are taking too much damage, then hopefully you have enough time to get away from the area before mobs cause too much damage again.
Update-Feb. 26: There have been some changes in the last VU, it is unclear if it will stay this way or if it is a bug. In the new VU, mobs only do damage to the ships when very close to the front of the ship. On a mothership, it is a very small zone, so small that you can't really move the ship without moving the mobs enough so that you take no damage. On a privateer, the "dmg zone' is a little bigger, but they still need to be pretty much on the ship to dmg. If they are a little behind the ship you get no damage.
Warp Drives/Jumps
One nice feature Privateers and Motherships have over the smaller space capable crafts is the ability to make Warp Jumps. To do this you must install a warp drive at the Engineering Terminal. To perform the warp jump the pilot uses the “Warp” command in the action menu. It will pull up an interface similar to the teleport interface where you click on the map where you want to warp to, then click the usual “execute” icon you use when teleporting. If you are too close to a space station, it will not allow you to jump and will throw some yellow text in chat telling you why. You basically have to move a little beyond the safe zone surrounding the space stations to initiate warp. You can just keep trying it over and over until it decides you are far enough away and then it will initiate the sequence and handles the rest automatically. Bunch of warp graphics and then some 30 seconds later or so you come out at your destination. I’ve only warped a few times, and I always seem to come out of warp outside the safe zones no matter how precisely I select one of the space stations. You then have to fly over to the safe zone at normal speed.
As I said, I’m a bit of a warp newb, but one thing I would suggest is to use the “W” or whatever key you have programmed for moving your ship forward as you try to get far enough from the space station, rather than using auto-run. Trying to initiate warp seems to drop me out of auto-run and I didn’t have the sound on so it was hard to notice I wasn’t moving for a while. Sat there for a couple minutes outside the safe zone thinking I'm getting farther and farther away while I keep attempting to warp and continually failing. Noob...
Warp drives decay by 3 peds per jump of its 150 ped total TT value, so it can be an expensive venture if you are paying a lot for your warp drives.
NOTE: Another area for more testing, but from what I understand on a mothership at least is that if you are taking damage from either a mob or another ship, it will stop the warp initiation process. Much like would happen on planet when you are trying to teleport. So it sounds like if you are taking damage from a pirate or mob you must either outrun (in the case of the mob) or deal with the pirate before you can warp out.
Ship guns
I need to do a little more research to fine tune the answers here, but here’s what I have so far.
On the privateer you can only operate 2 of the 6 guns at any given time until they come out with armament upgrades. The guns take laser weapon cell for ammo. I had the number written down somewhere, but can’t find it…but think the amount of ammo per shot is in the range of 70-80 pec.
Seems like range on the guns is around 0.076 AU and the max damage is maybe around 270-300. More testing needed to zero in on this more precisely. If someone has better numbers, please post them.
The ship guns have 360 degree “horizontal” rotation capability and about 50 degrees of “vertical” rotation capability. One tip I got somewhere was to use the strafe commands/keys “A” and “D” to rotate the guns and use the mouse for the “up” and “down” as you can rotate much faster using the strafe commands/keys.
Updated - Feb. 26: It looks like they fixed the broken Trade Terminals in spaceships and space stations, so you can buy stuff from them again, including ammo for the guns, as well as sell stuff to them as you could before.
Ship Movement
Piloting in space in any ship takes some getting used to. The whole idea of 3 dimensions without “ground” points of reference really can mess with you. Too much to deal with it here, but just wanted to point out in Privateers (and even more so in Motherships) you will notice a lot of “inertia” in your movements. Ships are slower to accelerate and decelerate than the smaller spacecraft like quads, and turning is slower.
There are a couple of hotkeys that I highly recommend to have set up if you intend to pilot or get in the gunner seat. The most important would be the "Exit Seat" command. This applies to both pilots and gunners primarily if you are going to be around space mobs. It is really nice to have a fast way to exit the seat if you are around mobs and start to take on too much damage. Remind all your crew that they must exit seat before the ship blows up.
For piloting, the other nice hotkey to have is the "align horizontal" command. This will spin the ship so that it is laying flat on the current z-plane. This is very helpful if you are flying around and realize you are flying upside down or partially on your side (you go to spin the ship one direction, but see on the map it actually turns the ship the other direction). Many mouse operations/movements will abort the "align horizontal" operation before it completes, so I've found the best way is to switch to cursor mode prior to hitting this hotkey, and then avoid doing things like changing the camera angle until the ship stops moving. Once you are aligned, "up" and "down", "left" and "right" will make sense again...at least for a minute or two
Ship Speed
The speed of a privateer without upgrades is pretty slow, even slower than a Sleipner. You definitely can't out run a Quad, but you can outrun space mobs. At least you can outrun the low maturity ones, I haven't tested on higher maturity yet.
Update - Feb. 26: I started doing some speed tests to see if the Captain profession affects the speed of the ship. It seems unlikely that this would be the case as Captain is a defensive skill, but heard it from a couple different sources so we'll test it to be sure. So far Captain profession does not appear to affect speed. I only have done one set of tests with two different avatars using the same ships and same distances, but we were logged in on different net connections, so it is unclear if that has any affects on the results. So far, we have the same times for both avatars, one with Captain profession of 6, the other with Captain profession of 16. Our times were both within a couple seconds of the ones posted below, so assume any variation we saw was in slight differences in techniques for capturing time.
Travel times:
Privateer to travel 1 AU - 5 minutes 25 seconds
Sleipner to travel 1 AU - 3 minutes 32 seconds
Quad to travel 1 AU - 1 minute 55 seconds
Other related links
I tried to pick through some of the other more useful space related threads to link here, but I'm sure I missed some. Let me know and I'll add the link. I don’t vouch for all information given in them, but a lot of it is very useful:
Entropia Universe official Space Guide
Aeris’ thread on general space navigation, pirating, hunting, etc
Oziris’ thread when Privateers first came out with lots of pics inside and out
Stave's Space Survival Map which shows server boundaries.
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