Game Basics
New to Starborne Frontiers? This is what the game does not tell you: what every stat is actually for, what each role does, and how the game decides who gets hit.
Speed and turn order
Rule
Ships act in order of speed, fastest first. That is all speed does — it does not give you extra turns, it decides who moves before whom.
That still makes it one of the most contested stats in the game, because moving first is how a debuffer lands its debuff before the enemy attacks, how a supporter gets a shield up before the hit lands, and how you kill something before it acts at all. Some skills push a ship's turn earlier or shove an enemy's later — those are strong for the same reason.
Fights are not open-ended
A fight you have not won after 30 rounds in PvP, or 100 rounds in PvE, counts as a loss.
The four roles
Every ship is an Attacker, Defender, Debuffer or Supporter. The role is not cosmetic — it tells you which stats are worth putting on the ship and which are wasted.
Attacker
Kills things. Everything else on your team exists to let the attacker connect.
Stats to gear
Sets to look for
Defender
Survives being shot at, and takes hits meant for someone else.
Stats to gear
Sets to look for
Debuffer
Weakens the enemy — damage over time, stuns, freezes, stat shreds.
Stats to gear
Secondary — picked by the ship's kit
Sets to look for
Supporter
Repairs, shields and buffs your side, usually before the damage lands.
Stats to gear
Crit Rate and Crit Power if it repairs
Sets to look for
This planner's Autogear offers finer presets — Debuffer(Bomber), Supporter(Shield) and so on. Those are instructions to the optimiser about what to prioritise, not extra roles in the game.
What each stat does
Common mistake
The most common new-player mistake is gearing a stat the ship cannot use. Hacking on a ship with no debuffs does nothing. Crit power with no crit rate does nothing. Read the ship's skills first, then gear it.
| Stat | What it does | Who wants it |
|---|---|---|
| Offensive | ||
| Attack | Scales almost all damage, including the damage-over-time effects that read off it. A handful of ships also read attack for a shield or a repair, but that is specific to their kit. | Who wants it — Attackers first. Also debuffers whose damaging debuffs scale off attack. |
| Crit Rate | The chance a hit crits. Worthless on its own — a crit that lands with no crit power behind it is a normal hit. | Who wants it — Attackers, and healers whose repairs can crit. |
| Crit Power | How much extra damage a crit does. Equally worthless on its own — crit power you never trigger is a dead stat. | Who wants it — Attackers, and healers whose repairs can crit. Only alongside crit rate — balance the two rather than stacking one. |
| Defense Pen. | Ignores part of the target's defense, so more of your attack gets through. | Who wants it — Attackers hitting high-defense targets, where raw attack has stopped paying. |
| Shield Pen. | Ignores part of a target's shield. It is not a stat you can gear: it comes only from a ship's own skills. | Who wants it — Nothing to gear for. A ship either has it in its kit or it does not. |
| Defensive | ||
| HP | How much damage you can absorb before dying. Several skills also scale their effect off maximum HP. | Who wants it — Defenders and supporters. Anything that has to survive being shot at. |
| Defense | Reduces every hit you take. The reduction climbs with diminishing returns, so the first points are worth far more than the last. | Who wants it — Defenders. Worth some on anything that sits at the front. |
| Security | Resists incoming debuffs. The attacker's hacking is measured against it. | Who wants it — Defenders, and anything you cannot afford to see stunned or frozen. |
| Shield Regen | Generates shield each turn as a share of maximum HP. Shield absorbs damage before HP does. | Who wants it — No ship is "built around" the Shield set — gear it for raw survivability, for a ship kit that synergises with shield, or to feed the Arcane Siege implant. |
| Critical DR | Reduces the extra damage a critical hit does to you. | Who wants it — Defenders, and anything being focused by a crit-built attacker. |
| Utility | ||
| Speed | Decides turn order, fastest first. It does not give you extra turns. | Who wants it — Everything, but debuffers and supporters most — their whole job is to act before the enemy does. |
| Hacking | The chance your debuffs land. Every point above the target's security is one percent. | Who wants it — Debuffers first, but every role has outlier ships whose kit inflicts a debuff and wants hacking to land it. On a ship whose kit inflicts nothing, it does literally nothing. |
| Heal Modifier | Increases the repairs this ship performs. | Who wants it — Supporters that actually repair. A few tanks that heal on hit can build around it too, but that is an outlier strategy, not the norm. |
Defense is the one with a curve: each point reduces incoming damage a little less than the last, so past a point more HP beats more defense. The Defense Calculator shows where your ship sits on it.
Affinities
Every ship has one of four affinities. Three of them beat each other in a cycle; the fourth, Antimatter, sits outside it and neither gains nor suffers.
Point at an affinity, or tap one, to isolate its matchups.
Affinity advantage
- 25% increased Damage
- 25% increased Hacking
Affinity disadvantage
- Damage and Hacking decreased by 25%
- Crit. Rate decreased by 25% (Hard cap at 75%)
- Effects that do not require hacking will not be applied
Common mistake
That last line is the one that catches people out. Your damage still lands at a disadvantage — 25% smaller, but it lands — and debuffs that roll against hacking still get their reduced chance. What stops entirely is every debuff that would normally apply with no hacking roll at all: those simply do not happen.
Hacking and security
Debuffs are not guaranteed. Whether one lands is decided by the attacker's hacking against the target's security: every point of hacking above the target's security is one percent chance to land. Affinity shifts your hacking by 25% either way before the comparison — see Affinities above.
Your debuffer has 80 hacking. The enemy has 40 security. 80 − 40 = a 40% chance to apply the debuff.
Tip
Anything above 100% is wasted — there is no overkill bonus. And security works the other way: it is the only stat that stops a debuff landing on you, which is why it belongs on defenders and on anything you cannot afford to see frozen.
Rows and targeting
Both fleets sit on a board of three rows — top, middle and bottom — with four positions in each, numbered from the back forward.
Position 4 is the front
A skill does not just pick whoever it likes. Targeting starts in the attacking ship's own row, steps down a row if that one is empty, and wraps from the bottom back around to the top. The first row that still has a living enemy in it is the row that gets hit.
Try it — the attacker below sits in the bottom row, and the enemy has nothing in theirs:
Targeting rule
Pattern
Your fleet
Enemy fleet
Front
Strikes the front-most enemy in the row.
Patterns are clipped at the edge of the board
Any cell that falls outside the board is simply not hit. That is why Circle and Cone look identical from T4 — four of Circle's six surrounding cells fall off, so a bigger shape aimed at a corner reaches exactly the same ships as a smaller one.
When a skill hits more than one ship, the main target takes full damage and every other ship caught in the pattern takes half, unless the skill says otherwise.
Taunt, provoke and stealth
Four things override everything above.
Taunt — a buff on one of your ships. Every enemy attack has to target it instead. If two ships are taunting, the most recently applied one wins.
Provoke — a debuff on an enemy attacker. That specific attacker must target whoever provoked it.
Concentrate Fire — forces a whole team onto one target, and ignores stealth completely.
Stealth — a stealthed ship cannot be targeted by an ordinary skill. Taunt, Provoke and Concentrate Fire all bypass it: if one of those is forcing the target, stealth does not save the ship.
Gear, briefly
Not every slot rolls every stat
The three fixed slots always roll the same primary stat. The other three are where your build actually gets decided — a ship only gets hacking or security from its software slot, and only gets speed from its thrusters.
Fixed slots
Weapon
Hull
Generator
Flexible slots
Sensors
Software
Thrusters
Sets pay out at 2 or 4 pieces
A set bonus only applies once you have enough matching pieces equipped, and most two-piece sets pay out again for each further pair. Six pieces of a two-piece set is three times the bonus.
| Set | Pieces | Bonus |
|---|---|---|
| Fortitude | 2 | +15% HP |
| Attack | 2 | +15% Attack |
| Defense | 2 | +15% Defense |
| Protection | 2 | +10% Defense, +20 Security |
| Ambush | 2 | +10% Attack, +5% Speed |
| Critical | 2 | +5% Crit Rate, +10% Crit Power |
| Speed | 2 | +15% Speed |
| Boost | 4 | All buffs last an extra turn |
| Burner | 4 | +15% Attack — Applies Inferno 1 for 2 turns. |
| Decimation | 2 | 10% extra DoT damage |
| Hacking | 2 | +30 Hacking |
| Leech | 2 | Leech 15% from damage dealt |
| Repair | 2 | +20% Heal Modifier |
| Reflect | 2 | Reflect 10% of damage dealt |
| Revenge | 2 | Increase damage by +25% * lost HP% |
| Shield | 2 | +4% Shield Regen — Generate 4% shield each turn |
| Cloaking | 2 | 2 turns stealth |
| Abyssal Assault | 2 | +15% Attack, +5% Crit Power |
| Abyssal Safeguard | 2 | +15% HP, +10 Security |
| Abyssal Ward | 2 | +15% Defense, +5% HP |
| Abyssal Breach | 2 | +30 Hacking, +5% Crit Rate |
| Omnicore | 4 | +10% Attack, +10% Defense, +10% Hacking, +10% Security, +10% Crit Rate, +10% Crit Power, +10% Speed, +10% HP |
| Swiftness | 2 | +15% Speed, +10 Hacking |
| Recovery | 2 | +10% HP, +10% Heal Modifier |
| Exploit | 2 | +20 Hacking, +10% Attack |
| Piercer | 2 | +7% Defense Pen. |
| Hardened | 2 | +5% Critical DR — Reduces critical damage taken by 5% |
Where to go next
Import your game data using the Import button in the sidebar (also on the Home page), and the rest of the planner fills itself in.
Let Autogear pick a loadout for a ship, then look at what it chose and why.
Test a team against a real encounter in the Combat Simulator.
For the planner itself rather than the game, read the documentation.