Contact

Up to date for latest version, 0.98a.

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 and 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 does not 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, does not count against the limit, and can be redeveloped at any time.

If the contact's market is destroyed (due to bombardment, decivilization, or because the market was a station that was destroyed), the contact is permanently lost.

Story contacts

• Caliban Tseen Ke, Hegemony, Coatl (size 5), Military, Medium importance. Can be obtained by visiting the bar of Coatl after met him during the tutorial in the Galatia system.
• Callisto Ibrahim, Independent, Agreus (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. An exceptional contact.
• Rayan Arroyo, Tri-Tachyon, Eochu Bres (size 6), Military & Trade, High importance. Can be obtained during Kallichore Archive. Doesn't offer nanoforge production oportunity.
• Wrestling Sedge, Luddic Path, Chalcedon (size 5), Military, Medium importance. Can be obtained during Knight Errant if a certain dialogue option is selected or if player's Luddic ethos is Pather-aligned.
• Orcus Rao, Hegemony, Ragnar Complex (size 5), Military, Very High importance. Can be obtained during Kallichore Archive by convincing a patrol chasing you in hyperspace (after evacuating Gargoyle) that you're working for him (then talking to him at Ragnar Complex).

Contact properties

Each Contact belongs to a particular faction, with each completed missions increasing the relationship with both the faction and the contact. Contacts with higher relationship will offer better and more dangerous missions.

Contacts tend to belong to the faction of the market where they are located, though pirate contacts can be found anywhere. Contacts cannot be developed for people from the player faction, although independent or pirate contacts may still be obtained within a player market.

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

A contact can having any of the following types:

• Military: offers a variety of bounty mission which are better then normal bounty missions. Also offers sat-deploy (stealth) and "atypical" extraction (raid) mission. Offers combat ships at a large discount (up to 66%), including capitals if importance is high and above. Will NOT offer nanoforge production if military tag only.
• Trade: offers missions pertaining to trade such as procurement, commodity production and so on. Trade contacts REQUIRE a presence of a orbital works on planet to be able to offer nanoforge production, unless they also have the Underworld tag.
• Underworld: offers missions that usually requires undermining the major factions or other pirates, along with some unusual missions.

Most contacts have one type; it is possible, though very rare, for a contact to have two or even three.

Importance

Each contact has an assigned Importance:

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

Contacts with higher importance have more difficult and more profitable opportunities, along with making certain mission types available.

Comm directory contacts

In addition to procedurally-generated people, people listed in the comm directory can also offer bar missions. Completing these missions may reward a potential contact with them. The possible contacts that can be acquired from a market's comm directory depends on these conditions::

• If the market has a Military Base or High Command:
  • Base Commander with Military tag
  • Size 8 or higher: Very High
  • Size 6 or 7: High
  • Size 5 or below: Medium

• If the market has a station:
  • Station Commander with Military tag
  • Size 8 or higher: Very High
  • Size 6 or 7: High
  • Size 5 or below: Medium
  • Also assigned as the market's admin

• If the market has a Spaceport:
  • Portmaster with Trade tag
  • Size 8 or higher: High
  • Size 6 or 7: Medium
  • Size 5 or 4: Low
  • Size 3 or lower: Very Low

• If any of the above conditions were true:
  • Quartermaster with Military and Trade tags (20% chance of also having the Underworld tag)
  • Size 6 or higher: Medium
  • Size 5 or 4: Low
  • Size 3 or lower: Very Low

• If all of the above conditions were false or if an admin was not assigned:
  • Administrator with Trade tag
  • Size 8 or higher: Very High
  • Size 6 or 7: High
  • Size 5 or below: Medium

Missions

Main article: Generic missions

Contacts of any type serve as a consistent way of getting missions to make credits and raise reputation with the associated faction.

Developed Underworld contacts can offer Blueprint Intel missions similar to random bar encounters, which serves as a relatively consistent source of blueprints. They can also provide Security Codes too, which can be used to significantly decrease marine casualities in a raid against a targeted faction.

Both Underworld and Trade contacts can offer Custom Production Contract, assuming they are of sufficiently high importance. The former will offer every ship, weapon, and fighter (with certain exceptions) at up to a 200% mark-up, while the latter will offer ships, weapons, and fighters available to the faction or learned by the player. The better the player's relations with the contact, the larger the discount provided by the contact. Contacts with only the trade tag REQUIRE the presence of orbital works on the planet to offer nanoforge slots.

Military contacts will offer unique missions, such as bounties on Derelict fleets, [REDACTED] fleets or a rival faction's Star Fortress, that usually cannot be found in bars or from intel given by a Comm Relay. In particular, the Derelict bounty provides a reliable source of Derelict ships even if all Derelict probes, survey ships, and motherships have been scavenged.

After getting a sufficiently important Military contact to a high enough relation, a special bounty may be offered against a large [REDACTED] fleet led by an unknown threat. It is arguably the most difficult contact bounty, as this fleet is also enhanced with s-mods. This mission can only be completed once per playthrough and is one of the few sources of unknown weapons.