About Ashway Shuttle

What you actually do

You start with one province, one port and enough credits for a ship. Planets produce things and want things, and the gap between the two is your income. Find the gaps, fly them before anyone else does, and reinvest the proceeds into ports that make the next gap cheaper to reach.

The catch, and it is the point

A port costs more than a new player has. That is not a difficulty setting — it is what stops this being a solitaire game. You will land at somebody else's port and pay their fee, and they will land at yours and pay yours. Both rates were chosen by a person. Alliances, undercutting and grudges all start there, and none of it is scripted.

Starting costs nothing

One click puts you in your own province with a capital port and enough credits to get trading. No email, no password, no download. Claim the account later, once there is something worth keeping.

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There is always something to aim at

When the tutorial ends the game keeps talking. You are given one goal at a time, never a list to pick from: build a Dyson ring on your own star, then run a wormhole to a province worth trading with, then work out an industrial chain and deliver the result. The last two alternate for ever, so there is no point at which the game runs out of things to ask you for. The first ring and the first wormhole come with a grant, because they are expensive enough that advice alone would not be much use. After that what you earn is a badge on your profile, with a count beside it that goes down again if you let the thing behind it go.

Nobody buys their way to the top

Wallet size is private and never ranked, no leaderboard is all-time, and granted or purchased credits are excluded from ranked income entirely. Money buys you options. Standing has to be earned in traffic.

Nothing you build is safe

Structures cost upkeep. Stop paying and they degrade, stop accepting traffic, and are eventually demolished — with a week's grace so anyone depending on them can react. A rival can settle your arrears and take a failing port off you. Empires that stop being run stop existing, which is what keeps the map worth looking at.

Not everyone out there is hauling

A warship carries no cargo. It exists to take other people's, or to stop somebody doing so — the first way to earn here that is not hauling. A leg is never raided at random: it happens because another player ordered a pursuit at it, and that pursuit is on the map with its trajectory pointing at its mark. So you can see one coming, and you can send an escort to catch it first. If a raid lands you lose the load and still owe the fuel, the upkeep and the port you left from. Trading inside your own province is always safe, a faster hull is genuinely harder to catch, and a coastguarded port breaks a pursuit off at its door. Cover is for sale from any escort standing where you are, and only your own is free. Loot moves no leaderboard; an escort's fee does, because turning up for somebody is work.

You can fund a line instead of flying it

Pick an industry on a planet you have actually visited — the food production at ORE-4 — and fund it. It repays a fixed multiple of what you advanced, known before you pay and capped: a bond, not a share. The money arrives a container at a time, as that line actually works, inside the settlement of the flight that moved the cargo. Nothing moves, nothing is repaid — and a line nobody serves loses value until somebody serves it, which can be you. It buys no berth, no discount and no hold over a rival. What it buys is a standing message to every hauler that somebody wants this rock served.

The formulas are public

Port market share, wormhole speed-up and delivery revenue are all published, because a game about competing on price is unplayable if the price rule is a secret.

A port's share of a planet's traffic rises with its size (exponent 1.2) and falls with its fee (exponent 1.5). The fee exponent is the larger of the two, deliberately: undercutting beats out-building.

portCost = 13000 × tier × expansion(distance)