Pirate Base

Pirate Bases

A pirate base is a raid target that the game creates for you personally, inside one of your own solar systems. It carries a copy of a slice of your own fleet and a pile of resources derived from your own production. You have until the next weekly reset to raid it and carry the loot home. Pirate bases were introduced with Universe 7.

Who gets a pirate base

You get a base if both of these are true when the weekly spawn runs:

Your total points are at or above the universe's minimum, e.g. 10,000 points (may vary across universes).
- The points threshold applies to you personally. It has nothing to do with who else lives in your system, and nothing to do with the strongest player there.
- Crossing the threshold mid-week does nothing. Eligibility is only checked at the moment the weekly spawn runs, so you will wait until the next reset.
You have logged in within the last 7 days.

Important: vacation mode does not stop a base from spawning for you, as long as you logged in within the last week.

The weekly reset

Once per week, at a fixed day and hour based on the universe settings (Mondays in Universe 7), the reset runs. It is a hard wipe followed by a fresh creation, not an expiry:

Every pirate base in the game is deleted at once, along with its remaining ships, its remaining resources and its debris field.
New bases are then created from scratch for every eligible player.

Nothing carries over. Resources you did not loot and debris you did not collect are destroyed at the reset. Your new base will also be in a freshly drawn random system, not necessarily the same one as last week.

Where it appears

The game randomly picks one of your planets or moons and puts the base in that solar system. The draw covers all of your planets and moons, so a system where you hold several planets and moons is correspondingly more likely to be picked than one where you hold a single colony.

In galaxy view the base appears as an extra row underneath the last normal planet position, i.e. position 18 in a universe with 15 positions per system.

Tip: the fleet page adds a shortcut link labelled Pirate base with its coordinates, right alongside your colony shortcuts. One click sets it as your target.

What the base is stocked with

Resources

Depending on the universe settings, the base's resources are calculated from the hourly production of your whole empire or of your home planet only, multiplied by a fixed number of hours (Universe 7: 5 hours of empire production). The resources are generated only once; there is no ongoing production on the base.

Example: a player producing 10,000 metal, 5,000 crystal and 2,000 deuterium per hour across their empire, in a universe using 5 hours, gets a pirate base holding 50,000 metal, 25,000 crystal and 10,000 deuterium.

Your net hourly production is used. Three consequences:

A planet running an energy deficit produces proportionally less, which reduces the pirate base stock.
The flat basic income every planet receives is not counted.
Production maximizer research and your planets' resource bonuses do count, since they are already part of your hourly figure.

Fleet

The pirate fleet is a snapshot of your entire account's ships, including ships parked on all your planets and moons and ships currently in flight.

Each ship type is rolled separately: the game draws a random percentage within the universe setting (Universe 7: 50–80 %), applies it to the total number you own of that type, and rounds down, never below one ship. This means:

Every ship type you own will appear. The roll is per type, so if you own light cargo, heavy cargo and light fighters, you will face all three.
Owning even a single ship of a type guarantees at least one spawns (exception: Deathstar).
Each type gets its own percentage.
Never copied: espionage probes, solar satellites and Void Titans.

Example: you own 1,000 light cargos, 1,000 heavy cargos and 1,000 light fighters. With a 50–80 % range, your pirate base might spawn with 500 light cargos, 700 heavy cargos and 800 light fighters.

Defence

The base spawns with ships only.

What you can send

Spying: a fleet of espionage probes only
Attack: any combat fleet; ACS is disabled
Recycle: recyclers, if there is a debris field to collect

Everything else is blocked: you cannot transport resources to it, station or hold a fleet there, colonise it, destroy it, or fire interplanetary missiles at it.

Attacking a pirate base

Attacking a pirate base does not remove it. Surviving pirate ships stay on the base, and so do any resources you could not carry. This means:

You can farm it in several waves.
The base only disappears at the weekly reset.
There is no limit on how often you may attack it. Bash protection does not apply to pirate bases.
You can be detected by an opponent's phalanx if you start the mission from a planet.

Its weapon, shield and armour levels are three below your own (never below zero), the same rule that applies to the pirates you meet on expeditions.

Important: if the reset happens while your fleet is on its way, the fleet returns, even if the new base spawns at the exact same location. You then need to send it again.

Loot

The loot from pirate bases is 100 %, as opposed to 50 % when attacking a real player. With sufficient cargo capacity, the base can be stripped of all its resources in one attack.

What a pirate base does NOT give you

Pirate base combat is its own kind of battle and deliberately sits outside most reward systems:

no honour points
no achievements; in particular, the "defeat a fleet of pirates or aliens with at least 10,000 ships" achievement does not trigger here
no entry in the hall of fame
no wreck field, so no ships recovered in the repair dock
no moon, no matter how large the debris field gets

The debris field

Every fight at a pirate base leaves a debris field, which you harvest with recyclers like any other debris field.

Both sides contribute: your own losses as well as the pirates'.
It accumulates all week. Every wave can stack more debris onto the same field, so you can leave the cleanup until the end.
It is destroyed at the weekly reset along with the base.

Only you can harvest it. Pirate bases and their debris are private. Your base appears in galaxy view for you alone; it never shows up in anyone else's galaxy view or target lists. If two players have bases in the same system, each sees only their own base, their own pirate fleet and their own debris. Nothing is shared and nothing adds up.