Contact

Contacts are the characters in Starsector that work with the player and have various missions and opportunities. They are located on a specific market and can be talked to by visiting it and using the Comm Directory. Contacts acquire missions over time (around a month), and will usually have several missions to offer to the player, depending on their type, importance, and relationship with the player.

Obtaining & Developing Contacts

The most common way to make a contact is a bar encounter. Completing a mission or accepting the deal will sometimes generate a potential contact. A potential contact is not yet active, and needs to be developed by clicking a button in the intel menu. They otherwise remain indefinitely and can be deleted.

Sometimes a potential contact can be obtained during a story mission, these contacts are story characters and can always be gained each playthrough.

There is a limit of 5 contacts that can be developed at once. It's possible to develop a contact beyond the limit for 1 SP 0% XP, but keep in mind that it doesn't increase the maximum - if a contact is later erased, creating a new one will still cost a story point.

A developed contact can be deleted to make room for more, or suspended for 1 SP 100% XP. A suspended contact doesn't function, doesn't count against the limit, and can be redeveloped at any time.

A contact on market that gets destroyed (due to bombardment, decivilization, or because it's a station that got destroyed) is lost.

Story Contacts

• Callisto Ibrahim, Independent, Argeus (size 5), Trade, High importance. Can be obtained during Project Ziggurat.
• Horus Yaribay, Persean League, Kazeron (size 7), Military & Trade, High importance. Can be obtained after finishing Project Ziggurat. Has special dialogue.
• Rayan Arroyo, Tri-Tachyon, Eochu Bres (size 6), Military & Trade, High importance. Can be obtained during Kallichore Archive.

Contact Properties

Each Contact belongs to a particular faction, with completed missions slowly raising relation for both the faction and the contact. Contacts with higher relationship will offer better & more dangerous missions.

Contacts tend to belong to the faction of the market where they are located, though it's not always the case; Pirates, in particular, can be found anywhere. There are no contacts for player's faction: contacts in player's markets will be Independent (or Pirates) instead.

A contact can be designated as a priority contact. Priority contacts offer more missions, and their missions have higher quality. The more priority contacts the player has, the less impact the setting makes. It takes a month for the change in status to take full effect.

Type

There are three types of contacts:

• Military ~ offers a whole variety bounty missions along with other stuff.
• Trade ~ offers missions pertaining to trade such as procurement, commodity production and so on.
• Underworld ~ offers missions that usually requires undermining the major factions or other pirates, along with some unusual missions.

Most contacts have one type; it’s possible (though very rare) for a contact to have two.

Importance

Each contact has Importance:

• Very Low
• Low
• Medium
• High
• Very High

Contacts with higher importance have more difficult and more profitable opportunities, along with certain mission types available. As such, it is recommended to choose & develop contacts of higher importance.

Missions

Main article: Generic missions

Generally speaking, Contacts serves as a consistent way of getting missions to both make Credit & raise Reputation with the associated faction, however, there are also some specific things of note.

Developed Underworld contacts can offer Blueprint Intel missions similar to random bar encounters, and serves as a somewhat more consistent source of blueprints. They can also provide Security Codes too, of which an opportunistic player can use to "acquire" some blueprints in this manner.

Both the Underworld & Trade contacts can offer Custom Production Contract, assuming they are of sufficiently high importance. The former will offer every ship, weapon & fighters (with certain exception) at a 200% mark-up while the latter will offer ship, weapons & fighters available to the faction or learned by the player. The better the relations the player has the bigger the discount that the contact will give.

Military contact will offer unique missions that can't be found in bars or from intel given by Comms_Relay, which are namely bounties on Derelict fleets, REDACTED fleets or rival faction's Star Fortress. The Derelict bounty in particular has an interesting yet negigible use case as it can serve as a way of generating Derelict ships if the player has completely cleared out the sector.

After getting a sufficiently important Military contact to a high enough relation, you would be entrusted with a bounty to

hunt down a large Remnants fleet led by an Omega Tesseract. This bounty is particularly difficult as on top of dealing with an Omega Tesseract, it is also supported by a large Remnants fleet possessing S-mods (the only instance at the time of this writing). This mission can only be completed once per playthrough, and serves one of the few sources of Omega Weapons.