Selecting Systems

Most orders in Old Light can run at more than one system at once. Put several of your systems in a selection and a single click queues the same upgrade, recruit order, fleet or shipment at every one of them.

Building a selection

• Add or remove a system - alt-click or shift-click one of your own systems on the map. Only systems you own can go in; a rival's or an NPC's never can.

• Take a whole sector - right-click the map, or long-press it on a touch screen, and pick Select all my systems in this sector. That replaces the selection with every system you hold in that sector, including the ones currently off screen.

• Drop back to one - Clear selection in the same menu reduces the selection to the active system.

A selection holds at most 30 systems. A sector fill that would go past that stops at the cap and tells you.

What a batch order does

Every selected system gets its own order, and the amounts you set are per system, never divided between them.

• Structures. One upgrade order queues one level at each selected system. Levels and costs differ from system to system, so the panel stops showing a single cost while more than one is selected.

• Recruiting. A batch of 10 marauders across 8 systems is 8 jobs of 10, and each yard works through its own queue at its own speed.

• Fleets. Each selected system sends the counts you set toward the destination. A system holding only part of what you asked for launches what it has. If the destination is itself in the selection it is left out as a source. Each trip is its own flight, so arrivals are staggered by distance.

• Resource shipments. Each selected system ships the amounts you set out of its own storage, using its own Trade Hub cargo ships.

Resources are debited from each system separately, the same way a single-system order works.

When part of an order cannot run

Systems are queued one at a time, so an order can go through at some and not others. You get one report afterwards with the totals and a count for each reason the rest fell short: not enough resources, queue full, already at max level, the structure not unlocked there yet, docks full, out of range, or nothing to send.

Nothing is charged for a system that was skipped, and the selection stays as it was so you can fix the blocker and run the order again.

What to read next

• Active System - the one system the side panels point at.

• Structures - the build queue a batch upgrade lands in.

• Controls - every mouse, touch and keyboard input.