The Ground Game

Requires Odyssey.

• Every settlement runs on three levers: Power, Alarms, and Authorization. Learn those and every mission type becomes the same puzzle.
• Bind five keys before you do anything else. Especially Clear Authority Level and Holster Weapon.
• Cloning an NPC profile is free and silent. It beats buying E-Breaches.
• Level 2 access opens most things. Level 3 opens everything.
• Kill the alarms first, almost always. With alarms down you can loot, hack, and kill at your leisure.
• Reactivation missions are the best farm in the game. Empty settlement, level 3 clearance handed to you, loot everything.
• Land 100 m outside, never on the pad. The single best habit in ground play.
• If alarms go off, dismiss your ship immediately. Turrets will melt it.
• Threat level means enemy gear grade, not enemy count.
• Do your crimes in Anarchy settlements. No fines, no bounties.

The tutorial never mentions most of these. Not binding them is why new players die.

Own one of each. All three carry 1 primary plus 1 secondary. Only the Dominator gets a second primary.

"Lasers for shields. Bullets for bodies." That is the whole system. A thermal primary plus a kinetic secondary covers everything, which is why the Dominator's second primary slot matters so much. ADS vs. hip fire: aiming down sights is far more accurate but slows your movement significantly. Hip fire and keep moving in close quarters.

Community tiers from a veteran's comparison. Pick three total: 2 primaries and 1 secondary. Upgrading more than that wastes materials.

Your ship holds 100 of each. Your backpack gets a few on disembark, set by suit capacity. Restock at any Pioneer Supplies.

Gotcha: the Extra Backpack Capacity suit mod does not increase consumable capacity. Only data, goods, and assets.

Schematics only spawn in CMD and PWR lockers. Nowhere else. If that is what you want, go straight there.

Chain up the ladder: clone a Level 1 outside, use it to enter a Level 1 building, clone a Level 2 inside, use that to reach a Level 2 building, clone a Level 3 there.

Safest clone: stand on a roof, scan an NPC through a window while their back is turned. Crouch the whole time. Running and jumping draws attention. Second best: crouch-follow an outdoor NPC from directly behind. Cloning is only illegal if seen. Nobody, including the person you cloned, may be looking. Scanned while holding a stolen profile? Hit Clear Authority Level. You instantly read as clean and can steal another right away. NPCs do not react to you discarding it, and they do not react to seeing you inside a high-clearance area afterward.

Usually your first real objective. Alarms down means you can steal, hack, and kill without the settlement converging on you.

• Where the panel lives: usually CMD or PWR, inside a restricted area, at medium and large settlements. Small settlements barely protect it. Find it from any terminal under FACILITIES.
• What trips an alarm:
• Security catches you with an illegal item or a cloned profile, or you dodge a scan
• An NPC catches you committing a crime (cloning, killing, stealing)
• An NPC finds a body you left
• You ignore a second warning to stow a weapon or leave a restricted area
• You open a sample containment unit before disabling alarms
• NPCs do not care if they see you disable the alarms. Security may still scan you on the way there.
• While you are at the panel, also disable authorization scans. It makes re-entering buildings much easier if you had to dump your profile.

An unpowered settlement has no security, no working doors, and no consequences.

• Unpowered doors: Arc Cutter the maintenance panel, then Energylink to charge it open.
• Restore power: put a Power Regulator in its housing in the PWR building and engage the reactor.
• Kill power: shut down the reactor. Disable alarms first, or a Viper full of commandos arrives. NPCs will also try to restart it.

Learn these eight and stealth stops being scary.

1. 1NPCs walk fixed looping routes. Watch one loop and you can predict them. Two NPCs who meet will stop and chat for a moment.
2. 2One warning per settlement per offense type. One for trespassing, one for a drawn weapon or visible cloning tool. The second time, they go hostile instantly.
3. 3Civilians never scan you.
4. 4Passing a scan buys you a few minutes where no other guard will try.
5. 5Security cannot scan you from below. On a crate, on a roof, or mid-jump blocks the scan. They can still see you commit crimes.
6. 6NPCs ignore you opening lockers, using panels, crouch-walking, or items quietly disappearing over time.
7. 7They go instantly hostile if they see you take a good or asset, or download illegal data, even with alarms off.
8. 8Stolen assets and data do not show on a scan. Goods marked "traceable" do.

"Nonviolent" is a trap. It means you may not harm anyone at all. Hurt one person and the mission fails. These are often harder than combat missions. Threat level is gear grade, not headcount. Threat 3 means the enemies carry Grade 3 weapons and armor. It tells you nothing about how many there are. Guards run about one grade above the local scavengers.

Reactivation and Restore spawn conditions: ⚠️ Reactivation appears where a settlement's controlling faction is in Infrastructure Failure. Restore appears in Civil Unrest.

The single best source of Odyssey goods and assets. Also where most people unlock Jude Navarro (10 of these). Why it is great: the settlement is empty, you are handed Level 3 clearance, and nothing you do there is illegal. Even downloading illegal data is consequence-free.

1. 1Take every reactivation or restore mission on the board in that system.
2. 2Do not request docking. Land about 100 m outside, full pips to shields.
3. 3Scavengers on site? Kill them from your ship with dumbfire missiles. Firing on an unpowered settlement carries no fine. Run over stragglers in the SRV.
4. 4Go straight to PWR and restore power. Use a terminal to locate it.
5. 5Scavengers cannot spawn once power is on. Move fast enough and you skip combat entirely.
6. 6Loot everything. CMD and PWR first for schematics. Scan every data port.
7. 7Park the SRV mid-settlement as a drop-off so you stop running back to your ship.
8. 8Never relog mid-mission. All the loot vanishes.

Note on Power Regulators ⚠️: the old trick of accepting these missions, keeping the regulator, and abandoning was popular before the August 2024 rework removed regulators from suit upgrade costs. Mostly obsolete now.

The fastest known route to Carbon Fibre Plating (Maverick upgrades), Titanium Plating (Dominator upgrades), Tungsten Carbide, and Weapon Components. These are the expensive tech assets that gate G4 and G5 gear. Yield: roughly 5 to 10 of those four per loop, plus Graphene, Electromagnets, Micro Thrusters, and Microelectrodes. Each loop takes 10 to 15 minutes. No combat. No weapons needed.

• You want a specific medium Extraction settlement layout, the one with two large storage buildings that contain only civilian NPCs and sit far apart from the security patrols.
• Medium settlements show "++" in their name.
• Search Extraction economy systems. Prefer Anarchy so a mistake costs nothing.
• Use EDSM's advanced search to filter economy and government.
• Match the layout against the OMG settlement database (elitedangereuse.fr). It is the third Extraction layout.
• Some trial and error is needed, but you only have to find one.

1. 1Land near building #1. Not the landing pad, which draws security.
2. 2Clone a Level 1 profile. Level 1 is enough. Go on the roof of building #1 and scan the NPC patrolling the second floor through the window. Crouch the entire time.
3. 3Enter building #1. Scan every NPC inside so they show on your radar. These are all civilians, so being seen is fine.
4. 4Take the loot, but only when no triangle on your radar points at you. Assets live in lockers without passcodes. Ignore passcode lockers, they hold near-worthless goods. Also check floors and box tops.
5. 5Walk to building #2 and repeat. You should meet no security on the way.
6. 6Return to your ship.
7. 7Enter supercruise, then immediately abort it. This resets the loot in the settlement.
8. 8Land again. Repeat from step 1.

• Theft vs. Heist: theft items sit in a locked locker and you get the code. Heist items sit in a sample containment unit, which takes 3 minutes to open and always trips the alarm if alarms are live. Start with thefts.
• Covert means the mission fails if alarms go off at all. So covert heists require killing alarms first. Covert thefts usually do not.
• Containment unit behavior: any NPC who sees you near an open unit turns hostile. If nobody is nearby, they will close it, and you start the 3 minutes over.

Difficulty depends on settlement layout, not threat level. Specifically, whether the alarm panel and the item sit in restricted areas.

Check the target on Inara and the OMG layout database before accepting. Abandoning a theft or heist costs almost nothing: no fine, just a small rep hit.

1. 1Land 100 m outside.
2. 2Walk a lap first. Scan every NPC you can. Note entrances, terminals, power sockets. You are clean, so scans do not matter yet.
3. 3Clone a Level 2 profile. Roof, window, back turned.
4. 4[Heists, optional for thefts] Kill the alarms. Locate the panel from a terminal under FACILITIES. Watch the guard's patrol before entering the restricted area.
5. 5Locate the item from a terminal. It gets marked on your map.
6. 6Theft: open the locker with your code. Make sure nobody sees you take it. Heist: open the unit, then hide somewhere you can still see it. Wait 3 minutes. Grab it when clear.
7. 7Leave. If it goes loud: shields on, get to a rooftop, run for the ship you parked outside.

The recommended way to learn settlement layouts, farm materials, and climb Mercenary rank.

• Gear: Dominator with two primaries. Lasers for shields, bullets for bodies.
• Stack them. Hold several raid missions at once. Scan every kill for bounties.
• Snipe first. Guards only raise personal shields once threatened, so picking them off from a rooftop before entering buildings works well.
• Energylink overload kills silently. Bodies still raise suspicion when found, but nobody saw you.
• Shield Disruptor plus kinetic is the fastest way to delete a shielded target.
• Kill the alarms early if you want a calm cleanup.
• Expect ships to come after you once the mission completes.

• No fines, no bounties, no notoriety. Guards still shoot back.
• Important: settlements inherit the controlling faction's government, not the system's. An Anarchy system can hold a non-Anarchy settlement and vice versa. Check the settlement, not the system.
• Commonly cited Anarchy systems: Usdia, Eurybia, Iah Bulu. Find more on Inara. Keep a list, because a system can drop off when it enters Civil War or another state.

Only Frontline Solutions shows real intensity. The desk displays a system map with each zone's Conflict Intensity. Ignore the plus signs and shield icons in the nav panel, and the Threat level in the system map. They are unrelated.

• Capture points are the fast win. 50 enemy points per capture versus 5 per kill.
• The dual Karma L-6 Dominator is the community's top High-intensity build. Splash damage gets multi-kills on grouped enemies.
• Access restrictions are off in a conflict zone, so powered doors open for both sides. Consoles and data ports are locked down.
• Unpowered zone? You still need the Energylink and possibly the Arc Cutter to get inside buildings.
• Ships can intervene, but anti-ship turrets and Enforcers with Karma L-6 rockets punish them. Ground allies must clear those first.
• Best anti-infantry ship weapons: Missile Racks and Pack-Hound Missiles.
• Best anti-ship handheld: the Karma L-6.

Locked lockers open with the Arc Cutter (aim at the red striped beam at the base). Locked containers need the code or an E-Breach, which is why loose ground containers usually are not worth the time. Backpack fills fast. Offload to the SRV or ship often.

Documented 2022 to 2024. Frontier patches these, so verify before relying on them. Never relog during a reactivation or restore mission. These are standalone POIs.

Relogging spawns scavengers. Relog again to clear them. They stop after 3 to 5 cycles.

Good picks: Vulture, Diamondback Scout or Explorer, Viper, Cobra Mk III or V, Dolphin, Imperial Courier.

This is how people get stranded. On-foot weapons shred parked ships.

• Park a short distance away and approach by SRV at any POI expecting company.
• If alarms go off, dismiss your ship immediately.
• When you are ready to leave, relog first to reset the instance, then summon the ship safely.
• If you must have the ship during an alarm: clear every hostile, disable the anti-ship turrets from the control console, and destroy any skimmers first.
• No ship and no Apex booking means death. Keep credits for an Apex shuttle.

• Land 100 m outside the settlement. Not the pad.
• Ground missions only exist on the concourse board. You cannot see them from your ship.
• "Nonviolent" means zero harm to anyone. Harder than it sounds.
• Negotiating with a concourse NPC can backfire and lose you the mission.
• Never relog during a reactivation or restore. The loot disappears.
• E-Breaches are not auto-loaded. Transfer them from Manage Inventory at your ship.
• E-Breaches are only sold under Anarchy or Communism factions.
• Check data terminals before lockers in each room.
• Scan before you shoot. Powerplay NPCs and friendlies mix in with scavengers at restore sites.
• Dead bodies raise suspicion when found.
• Discard a cloned profile the instant you get scanned.
• Threat level is gear grade, not headcount.
• Settlements inherit their controlling faction's government, not the system's.
• Extra Backpack Capacity does not cover consumables.
• Fleet carrier Pioneer Supplies never stocks pre-upgraded gear, but does stock every suit, weapon, and consumable.
• Carrier escape pods teleport you to the last station you docked at, leaving your ship behind. Useful if a carrier jumps away with you aboard.