FAQs

How to travel?

An activity you will do often in TextSpaced is finding a destination and travelling there, this could be for various reasons but commonly is to location systems with services that allow you to trade.

Navigation can be done entirely from the helm window and when you open the information panel at the top of this window informing you of your current ship, its current charge and fuel level. The first group of this window is "local" and details bodies within the current system and ships at the current location. Both of these items can be clicked to view more details about them and like most things in the game, have contextual options to perform actions. Commonly, you may need to change your orbit to a different body and this can be done by selecting the orbit option for a body row.

Below the local group is the "nearby" group that lists all of the local systems relative to your current position. Each row within this group tells you the system name, how far away it is and if a faction owns it. Clicking the system name will give you more details about the system (if known) and clicking the faction name will provide details about the faction that owns the system, if applicable. At the bottom of this list of nearby systems is a search field that allows you to search for any system by name with fixed suggestions given for NPC systems. This group also contains the first instance of the "engage" button, that when clicked confirms travel.

The travel confirmation message informs you of your current FTL fuel levels, your charge level and the time it would take to travel to the system at sublight speeds (not using fuel). This allows you to decide whether to use instant FTL travel and consume fuel or spend time travelling at sublight speeds. Once you confirm to engage in either sublight travel or FTL travel you will travel to the destination. During sublight travel, you are informed of your progress both in terms of remaining time and distance but can stop at any time if you wish.

Below the nearby group is the "sublight" group which contains options to explore and the option to travel to a specific galactic position. Travelling to a position is not something commonly done and only really performed by power-users, the explore option is however very useful. Using the explore options you can choose to explore in the negative direction or positive direction. Once in this mode, your ship will automatically travel in that direction at sublight speeds until a system your faction has not discovered is found, in which case your ship will stop there. This is a very useful activity for new factions as the galaxy can provide all sorts of wonder and bounty.

The last group of the helm window is the "services" group, this allows you to filter nearby systems by the services they provide. For example, if you require the port trading service as you wish to buy weapons for your ship, you can select the port trading service to view systems that provide this service. Clicking the engage button will show the same travel confirmation as mentioned before.