Space Lanes

Guild Super Spacelanes

ROUTE 1

Easily the most important spacelane in the Wilds, Route 1 sees heavy tanker ship traffic. Leviathan’s fuel-salt-laden water is hauled to Glance where it’s dumped on expansive fields for evaporation under the double suns. Without the critical work that happens on either side of Route 1, the Wilds wouldn’t have superlight fuel and none of the spacelanes would ever see a starship again.

ROUTE 2

A direct connection from the Guild’s commercial control center on Silo to processed morack exports from Leviathan and more critically, fuel salt exports from Glance.

ROUTE 5

A critical commercial trade lane, Route 5 connects Silo to the Wilds’ Resource Ring, production ports, and distribution pipelines. Once, this super spacelane ran all the way to the Core Worlds, linking the Guild’s remote government outpost on Silo to their primary seat of power. Now it runs from Silo straight into the Tempest. If you’re travelling that way, pump the brakes before the hungry storm swallows you.

ROUTE 8

All the produce from Three Rings is shipped straight to Silo. The juiciest, crunchiest, and most flavorful is sold at luxury prices to wealthy residents of the inner levels. The rest is packed for redistribution across the Wilds – price point doesn’t change much, but flavor takes a big hit.

ROUTE 12

The section of Route 5 on the far side of Fuel Station 1 used to be the busiest super spacelane in the Concord galaxy, carrying some of the highest-ranking Guild officials, wealthiest tourists, wide-eyed developers, and resigned laborers between the Core Worlds and Wilds. It was destroyed the day the Tempest erupted. No one knows if the Core Worlds it once linked to are on the other side of the Tempest. No one knows if the Tempest has another side. The storm is impenetrable and unknowable. Please do not attempt to use this spacelane to find answers.

ROUTE 39

Over 70% of the crafts built on Roost are commercial cargo ships. And over 70% of those cargo ships are destined to belong to Superlight Transport’s shipping monopoly. Newly launched cargo ships – whether they belong to SLT or not – are transported to Silo via Route 39. There, they are loaded for the first time with crate after crate of gadgets, electronics, furniture, clothes, shoes, housewares, tchotchkes, and whatever else is on the Wilds’ current “must have” list. They spend the next week in delivery mode, bringing (temporary) smiles to the faces of consumers across the Wilds, before returning to Silo to start the vicious cycle all over again.

Guild Spacelanes

ROUTE 4

Over 90% of salt fuel exports from Glance are shipped off world via Route 4. Given this traffic, it should easily be a super spacelane. But the Guild refuses to spend the coin to add the required additional navigation beacons and pacing counters – they’re satisfied with the rate of fuel exports as is. So, entrance ramps around Glance will be backed up for the foreseeable future. Fuel tanker pilots have invented ways to pass the time waiting for clearance. If you see hefty ships doing awkward loop-the-loops, rolls, or vertical stands, send an engine blast out to your favorite.

ROUTE 6

Garbage Run! All the Guild waste from Silo – food containers, last week’s fashion, once-worn accessories, discarded packaging, malfunctioning tech, broken appliances, dated tchotchkes – it’s all funneled straight to the incineration station that is the gas giant known as Husk.

ROUTE 7

Built as part of the Guild’s traffic-redistribution project, this route was designed to help relieve jams and prevent accidents on some of the major supply routes. And it’s a valuable shortcut from Scrounge to Silo – used when Scrappers retrieve Tempest ejection from the Core Worlds that needs to be routed directly into the Guild’s hands.

ROUTE 10

Route 10 is an important leg of the Resource Ring, especially for those who like palatable foodstuffs. It’s the main shipping line for the Flavor powder harvested on Akkar. Once it reaches Silo’s distribution hubs, universal Flavor is sprinkled on the bland, bitter, pungent, acidic, and otherwise unpleasant digestibles from around the Wilds, making them inoffensive to nearly every species – and making them profitable to the Guild.

ROUTE 11

One of the oldest spacelanes in the Wilds, Route 11 was constructed after the Guild conquered Kallos and began conscripting the mighty Kallosian warriors into their military. It’s also used as an export route for bloodtree lumber and forge-made weapons. ",

ROUTE 13

The Department of Space Traffic Planning tagged Route 13 to be a super spacelane. It was meant to connect the Core Worlds with the proposed military outpost on Scrounge, which would also act as a waystop for starships bound for Silo. Then the Tempest erupted. Route 13 never became super. Scrounge never became a functional military outpost. There are a lot of things that never “became” what they could have been thanks to the galaxy-sundering storm. ",

ROUTE 14

Despite the fact that Clax was relatively close to the Core Worlds, Route 14 wasn’t built until long after the Guild had expanded into the Wilds frontier. It took that long for the Galactic Development Directorate to discover the hidden planet tucked away in the Sea of Silt. But once the Guild found Clax, they showed an immediate interest, especially in the unique healing biology of its people – so along came Route 14.

ROUTE 15

The road to “nowhere.” The Guild had high hopes for Route 15, believing it would be a major supply line for fuel salts from Hox and foodstuffs from Creek. It cost significant time and money to construct the long route, a cost the Guild had to admit was sunk when all their hopes were shattered – no salt, no harvests. The only “resource” transported on Route 15 now is fertilizer (read: dung) from Creek.

ROUTE 16

It’s the scab that keeps getting picked. The Guild would love to put Route 16 and the Hox Debacle to bed, but the spacelane won’t die. It gets just enough traffic to justify the effort of tracking mininova activity in Cinder Nest and updating beacon coordinates so ships don’t wind up in a blast radius.

ROUTE 23

Informally known as "The Sick Route," not because it has rough space or too-tight turns for superlight, but because it’s the route to the medical facilities, hospitals, and trauma centers on Tyde. Inbound emergency starships have the right of way - outbound, it's the medical waste transports chock full of myriad species' biohazardous waste that get clearance to fly at speed to the Husk incinerator.

ROUTE 25

Once dubbed 'the route to the future,' Route 25 is now a dead end and a prime example of the consequences of the Guild’s slapdash methods. Eager to sink their teeth into whatever worlds might be waiting beyond The Nothing, the Guild rushed the construction of a spacelane to their way stop on Gloom. They knew they were building too close to a star ready to supernova, but they banked on at least a few hundred more years until collapse. And they wound up with a half route straight into a nebula - those are the breaks.

ROUTE 27

Shooting straight off the Resource Ring, Route 27 is a raw material supply line to Talon’s production facilities. Recruits to the Guild Guard train under Talon’s elements and extreme gravity – at least those who can hack it do. The recruits who cave under pressure are reassigned as laborers in Talon’s climatized factories. They work the assembly lines, pumping out weapons, ammunition, armor, field gear, comms equipment, and biotech, which their more successful counterparts use on missions.

ROUTE 29

An important leg of the Resource Ring, Route 29 connects Seeda to Kallos. Most of the cargo ship traffic flows in that direction, heading down to Route 5 and toward Silo for distribution. But a significant number of lumber ships fly in the opposite direction. They’re hauling the petrified timber from the bloodtree forests on Kallos. Once delivered to Seeda, the nearly indestructible timber is used as scaffolding to reinforce mine shafts that are being dug deeper and deeper as the world’s natural resources are depleted.

ROUTE 30

A leg of the Resource Ring – the loop that hauler ships use to collect raw materials from high-yield worlds (like Seeda and Akkar) and shuttle them to Guild manufacturing hubs. Route 30 had to be re-mapped after a Robot Wars battle left a major debris field smack in the middle of the old route.

ROUTE 35

Back before the Tempest, the biggest crime committed on Route 35 was flying a non-luxury vessel without a chauffeur. Now there’s nothing but crimes being committed on Route 35. Following the Olar evacuation, all Guild patrols were taken off this route, leaving it free for pirating and chicanery – though free is relative as 35 is far from free of the dangers of the Tempest and its tendrils. The dealers, melters, pillagers, mercenaries, and underhanded Guild officials who frequent it don’t seem to mind though. They feel safer when they go somewhere no one else in their right mind would follow.

Route 41

Raw materials for shipbuilding efforts on Roost arrive via Route 41, most of them coming straight from Hawsons Dredge. Heavy ores are smelted in mega-furnaces and the resulting metals are sheeted and transported to shipyards. The slag is sent off-world – also via Route 41 – for use in home construction projects across the Wilds.

ROUTE 42

This little route was a last-ditch effort to make fruit out of frustration. After the extreme letdown of Creek and Hox, the Guild demanded that development officials show a profit for their sunk investment – or face the consequences. Under pressure, the officials added an offshoot route. Their plan was for compost haulers to fill up on Creek – fertilizer is the only valuable thing produced on that world – and head straight to Three Rings. The natural manure increased agricultural production more than tenfold as compared to the Guild’s artificial stuff. The officials were rewarded with a post as “resource harvesters” on Creek.

Freegunner Shortcuts

Sladie's Cut

Named after the legendary gunner, Sladie, who flew with the Implacable crew and defied the Guild to deliver the Galactic Guide to Freegunners everywhere, this route is intended for those with defiance (and daring) in their blood. Salt fuel nabbed from Glance can be transported to underground markets on Silo without risking a Guild checkpoint – which doesn’t mean the rest of the job isn’t still extremely risky. In the words of Sladie – “It’s blaze of glory time!”

The Tunnel

If you’re up for tunneling through the Red Wall, this is a perfect shortcut to avoid the kind of Guild attention that comes when flying too close to Silo. Skip the checkpoints and patrol ships – just remember the structural integrity of the Red Wall is questionable; stay alert for starslides.

Pirate Pike

The name makes this route sound fun – it’s not. Sure, a Freegunner crew somehow found a route through the Overkill minefield, but there are no guarantees when it comes to a couple million devices that are just waiting to explode. The minefield is constantly shifting with the energetic winds of the dying nebula, so keep your flight coordinates updated – and it couldn’t hurt to hold your breath.

Long Shot

If you want to get to Gloom, you have to take the long way – around the remnants of a supernova. It's as harrowing as it sounds. Safe passage through a nova blast radius isn't a thing, but Long Shot is exactly what it claims to be, a shot, albeit long, at making it to the moon on the other side. No one knows who was daring enough to go in the first time and calculate the beacon coordinates. Leading theory is that it was sparked robots who hoped to to use Gloom as a launchpad into The Nothing during the robot wars. Could've been. You'd definitely need that level of motivation to risk entering a nova without a map.

Blood Road

Kallos’s bloodtrees are more than just trees, they are honored ancestors. And the Guild uproots them – they use the petrified lumber in their military and government fortifications. That is not acceptable. Kallosians made a vow to their warrior ancestors, promising they would be rooted in the soil of Kallos for eternity. Efforts are underway to ensure the wrongs that have come to pass are set right. The contingent of Kallosians who were not enlisted or eliminated by the Guild use the Blood Road to track down and return the bloodtrees that were uprooted. The war for their world is far from over.

Tread Carefully

This route isn't for the faint of heart. Of course, if your ship is full of stolen salt fuel and you’re being pursued by a swarm of Guild Patrols, it doesn’t matter how faint your heart is, this route will be your only option. It’s either escape the patrols or serve prison time – and everyone knows how fatal Guild prisons are. Once you careen off onto the Freegunner shortcut, you’ll be headed away from Guild patrols and straight toward the relative safety of: A GUILD MILITARY ROUTE. Good luck.

Sammich Run

Sometimes you need an extra pickle. And also you don’t want the Guild to have a monopoly on all the produce produced in the Wilds. This route is a backdoor into Three Rings; get in, grab what you can, and get out – before the Guild Guard gets you. That last part is the hardest, but it’s worth it, there’s a lot of coin to be made in the underground grub game.

Mockery

Coming down Route 8 from Hox, Creek, or Three Rings, the Mockery shortcut is your best bet to skip Checkpoint 8-B – and all the snacker bugs who hang out there – and head in the direction of Silo or Husk. The money-maker here is to haul the heavy, wet fertilizer from Creek straight to Husk where the Guild pays by weight for deliveries of meltable “trash.” This hack is most likely how the route got its name.

The Distance

Not very short, more of a long-cut. This is the only route to and from Scrounge – and all the Tempest regurgitate the Scrappers are hocking – if you want to avoid 4-S, the Guild’s heavily militarized checkpoint. You’ll have to slingshot around Clax and through the Sea of Silt to get back to the main route, but it’s worth going the distance to avoid going to prison. Guild prisons are notoriously fatal.

Salt Trail

Glance’s back door, this route will get you access to salt fuel straight from the source. The skimmers and salt workers staging a revolt sell their appropriated tanks (read: tanks they personally toiled in the boiling suns to harvest, produce, and fill) to clients who are out to undermine the Salt Lord. Freegunners who want to avoid Guild fuel stations make good customers as do defiant entrepreneurs who are looking to chip away at the Guild’s salt fuel monopoly and sell under cost. It’s the best kind of lose-lose wherein both the Guild and the Salt Lord lose.

Treacherous

For Resource Ring haulers who might be transporting resources that are not listed on a manifest, it’s best to avoid Checkpoint 30-F and the related inventory inspections. Treacherous is your best bet. It follows the original path of Route 30, the one used before the Robot Wars. In fact, it makes use of the old Guild beacons and route markers – but don’t worry, they’re linked to the Pirate Net and the Guild no longer has access. Treacherous takes you straight through the Lost Fleet(s), so be ready to make quick course corrections if your impact warnings go off.

Guild Military Routes

R-101

The most critical Guild route, R-101 connects military command centers on Havoc with commercial control centers on Silo. Most starships on this route carry high ranking directors, stuffy dignitaries, and their respective bootlicking entourages.

R-104

R-104 is the main route for rapid deployment of Guild military ships bound for commercial Route 5. When the Guild needs its presence to be felt on the Resource Ring, R-104 swarms with navy vessels – a warning to any non-licensed starships undertaking any unregulated jobs on the Ring to pull off onto Blood Road, The Tunnel, Tread Carefully, or whatever’s the nearest Freegunner shortcut.

R-102

A direct route between Havoc and Three Rings that ensures the Wilds' agricultural powerhouse stays protected (read: held in a death grip) by the Guild military.

R-103

A remnant of what was once a much longer route that connected the Wilds' military command centers on Havoc with Core Worlds Command. Post Tempest, R-103 was reduced to the relevant portion that heads toward Scrounge. Now it allows the Guild to keep tabs on Tempest-ejected Core World artifacts that Scrappers dig up.

R-105

An offshoot of R-102, this spacelane was constructed so the Guild military could have a stranglehold on the massive amount of fuel salt in Leviathan’s sea. Post Tempest eruption, it’s the primary source of fuel salt in the Wilds – over 90% of the known supply.

R-106

A personnel supply line connecting Wild’s military command centers on Havoc with recruitment efforts on Talon Fresh squads are shipped straight to mission deployment bays the moment they pass muster.

R-107

Starship exports from Roost are critical to the Guild’s commercial and military control efforts. It seems The Guild’s goal is to overwhelm the stars with their fleets, if so, they’re well on their way. It’s almost impossible to find a swath of space that the Guild doesn’t have at least one set of wings in. According to their commanders, it’s vital to keep growing their fleets. That puts extra significance on the fledgling ships being exported from Roost along R-107. They fly under guard until they reach their new hangar. A ship is not a Guild ship until it’s in the hands of a Guild pilot.

IMPASSABLE

ROUTE 26

There’s a reason surveys are performed before spacelanes are constructed, it’s critical to identify hazards, obstructions, and energetic disturbances that should be avoided. The survey for Route 25 found a pre-nova star too close to the planned path and suggested the spacelane route out around the probable blast radius – which would have added considerable cost and construction time. That survey report was “lost.” The pre-nova star, however, was not lost, and the Guild’s rushed efforts to get to Gloom and beyond were terminated by a massive supernova explosion.