Objects you pick up in space or buy at a station go one of two places:

• into your ship (as cargo or equipment)
• into your personal inventory

This page is about personal inventory.

Finding items

The most common source of items is collecting dropped crates left behind when a ship is destroyed. [Some of these will contain inventory items that go into your personal inventory, others will contain Wares that go into your ship’s cargo hold, and some will contain missiles that will go into your ship’s equipment list.]

Collect crates by flying into them with your ship, or using your ship’s cargo magnet function.

You can also order your ship pilots to “Collect drops” to have them collect crates. [Wares will go into their cargo hold, missiles will go into their equipment list, and inventory items will go into the inventory of the pilot.]

See below for information about retrieving pilot inventory.

Mining for item drops

Asteroids that have mineable mineral content (not all do) may also yield special items when mined.

Even if you’re not in a mining ship, though, you can fly up to them and activate your ship’s scan mode. When you do, you may see orange “nuggets” on the asteroid you can shoot at with your ship guns. When you do a bit of damage, they’ll break off and become floating rocks.

Most of these broken-off pieces will be collectable minerals (silicon, etc) that a mining ship can pick up. A few, though might be valuables you can collect in any ship just like dropped crates. These may be:

• Spacefly eggs
• Unstable crystals
• Lodestones

Usually these “nuggets” will break off and yield nothing but collectable minerals, but keep trying and occasionally you’ll get a “crate” item you can collect.

Finding and collecting them can be tedious, but is a viable alternative if you have trouble finding another source.

Next to the trade counters will always be a workbench that you can use to assemble some useful items from parts (e.g. EMP bombs, security decryption systems, spacefly caviar, etc). You can use the workbench to see what items are required to create others.

Some inventory items you’ll pick up can’t be bought or sold, are used for creating installable “mods” for ships. [The inability to buy some of these items is intentional, to keep you from being able to mod every component on every ship.]

On Wharf and Shipyard stations, there will be a Ship Dealer. In the dealership area, there will be a second workbench. It looks like a crafting bench, but is used to create and install mods on docked ships.

See the Ship Modifications section for more information.

Most factions prohibit possession of certain inventory items. These may be used for illegal activities (hacking tools), or maybe used in construction of dangerous weapons (unstable crystals).

Being scanned by a police ship while piloting will reveal these illegal items, and you’ll be ordered to drop them. If you don’t do so, the police will turn hostile. Oddly, this does not happen if you’re a passenger on the ship, vs piloting.

See the Illegal Items section for more information.

Some stations in unclaimed space are “pirate” stations, and have an icon of two crossed swords. These stations buy and sell some items not available at regular stations.

Other than the inventory carried by the station trade desk, pirate stations are otherwise the same as other stations (faction ownership, landing permission, etc). [There are no pirate fleets waiting near them as in previous X games, etc.]

Black market traders, which you can find on some stations, will deal in some illegal items that are prohibited elsewhere.

Black market contacts are found by scanning signal leaks on stations. Some of these leaks (rarely) will be for a “Lucrative Opportunity” to deliver some needed illegal item to a person in the bar on the station. If you have, or can find, what the contact wants and deliver it, the contact will remain permanently on the station as a Black Market Contact you can visit to trade illegal wares.

Stations with a black market contact get a “shady guy” icon added to the station marker in the map view.

If you order a pilot (ship) to collect crates, the pilot may pick up personal inventory items. These items go into the pilot’s inventory (rather than yours). They are associated with that specific pilot, not with the ship.

You can tell “who has inventory?” in two ways:

• In the map, in your Owned Property screen, there is an icon on the top (box) for “ships with inventory” (which is really “pilots with inventory” despite the wording).
• In ship info screens, there is a tab for Crew. If the pilot has inventory you will see an Inventory line with an expansion control that you can open to see the full list of what that pilot is carrying.

You can transfer a pilot’s inventory to your personal inventory by:

• going to the ship and talking to the pilot
• giving the ship “deposit inventory” order to store it at your HQ station (see below)

Storing items

You can drop items in space from your personal inventory list. They will be placed in a lockbox that you can return to recover later.

Once you obtain the Player Headquarters station, you will have access to a Personal Office that contains a storage system you can activate and transfer inventory to for storage. You can also order your ship pilots to “Deposit Inventory” and they will fly to the station, dock and deposit the pilot’s personal inventory.

Note that some drops are consumables (missiles) and these go into the inventory of the ship itself. You can sell these by doing “repair/upgrade” order at a wharf or equipment dock and selling them to the station.