Fleet

In Old Light, your fleet is the mobile half of your empire: ships built at a Shipyard that you send between star systems.

Ships come out of the Shipyard in batches and wait at that system until you send them, unlike structures, which stay fixed to it. The fleet panel on the active system shows what's there.

Ship types

A handful of classes exist.

• Probe: fast and cheap. Used to learn about other star systems

• Marauder: a light offensive ship

• Sentinel: a heavy defensive ship

• Vanguard: a slow colony ship, the only one that can capture a star

Each ship has its own palladium + iridium cost, build time, speed, and combat stats.

Speed and distance

Space is big. Distances are measured in light-years (ly), and ship speed is measured in ly/hr (light-years per hour). Each tile equals 4 light-years in size.

What happens when fleets meet

When you send ships into another player's system, the two stacks fight it out over at most two rounds. Attackers strike with their offense stat; defenders strike with their defense stat. Larger fleets dominate, but no fight is fully deterministic. See the Combat page for the round-by-round detail, and Recon Missions for the probe skirmish that comes first.

A battle on its own never changes who owns the system, since only a Vanguard can capture a star. Defenders who survive stay where they were; attacker survivors immediately turn around and fly home.

How do you build ships?

You queue ships from the Shipyard panel of the active system. The yard has its own three-slot build queue, and a higher-level yard both builds ships faster and unlocks different ships.

Where do ships stay?

Ships built at a system stay at that system. The active fleet readout shows how many and what kind of spaceships are at the current star system.

There is no global fleet pool. Each system has its own stack. If you want to know what fleet the enemy has, send a probe.

Economy pressure

Ships are paid for out of the same palladium + iridium stockpile that funds your structure upgrades. Early game, lean into your economy first; once your extractors and Resource Depot are comfortably scaled, the cost of a fleet stops biting.

The Shipyard itself also costs Energy to run, like any other structure, so a system that's pushing a heavy build schedule needs the Reactor to keep up.

Upkeep

Every ship in your fleet also costs Credits per day to keep flying. Income from Trade Hubs pays for this upkeep. If your treasury runs dry, recruiting is blocked, your ships fight at reduced effectiveness, and they travel slower.

Scrapping

The fleet panel's Scrap link opens the Scrapyard, where you scrap ships already parked at a system. Choose how many of each type to scrap, at each star in your selection, the same way a recruit order works.

Only ships parked at the star, probes included, can be scrapped, and the star needs a Shipyard. Scrapping runs through that yard's build queue alongside recruit batches, at half a ship's normal build time. A ship stays parked, still defending and still drawing upkeep, until its own scrap step completes. An empty treasury or full docks never pause a scrap order. It also skips past a recruit batch that is paused for either reason, but waits behind one that is still building.

Each ship refunds 25% of its current palladium and iridium cost into the star's storage the moment it's scrapped; anything over the storage cap is lost, and credits are never refunded. Cancelling a scrap order keeps the ships and refunds nothing. If the star changes hands, any scrap order still pending there is cancelled.