Pilot’s guide

Getting started

OUTERLINE runs in your browser. There is nothing to download. Open /login and choose how to play:

• Play as a guest to jump straight in. Your journey saves on this device.
• Create an account with an email sign-in link (there is no password to remember) and pick a callsign. Your save goes online, and you can bring an existing device save with you.
• Pick a server. The public server is shared with everyone; private servers let you play with friends. Each server is its own world with its own character, and an invite link drops friends straight into yours. Your solo journey stays separate.

It plays on desktop with keyboard and mouse, and on phones and tablets with touch controls.

Controls

Keyboard & mouse

Touch

• A floating stick on the left of the screen moves you; drag anywhere on the right to look.
• On foot: Jump, Fire, Sprint (toggle), Weapon, Throw and Medpack buttons.
• Flying: Up, Boost, Down, Brake and Fire.
• The Jobs and Pause pills at the top open your contracts and the menu.

Your first hour

You arrive at Solace spaceport on Kestrel with nothing in your pocket. Follow the gold marker:

1. Meet Mara at the contract terminal. She has your arrival contract.
2. Pick up the crate at the cargo depot and deliver it to Frontier Supply: 1,600 CR and 100 XP, enough for Clearance 2.
3. Buy a home. The Solace micro-loft is 600 CR. Rest at your bed to heal and save.
4. Buy your first ship. Take the lift to the roof berth and buy a Nomad at Asterion Shipworks for 900 CR.
5. First flight: W to fly forward, Space to climb, C to descend.

From there the story picks up: Act I sends you to the Fallen Leviathan to cut scrap, out to the trees at dusk, and into a sandstorm after lightning. Story contracts radio in when you are on the right world and meet their requirement.

Earning credits

Contracts

Press J for the contract board. Bigger ships open bigger work:

The 13 story contracts pay 600 to 20,000 CR and 900 to 8,000 XP each; Act II and III pay 6,000 CR and up so the story keeps pace with freight.

Requisitions and odd jobs

• Requisitions: each planet’s board posts four daily orders for materials. They pay about 3× the Exchange, and each fills once a day.
• Odd jobs around town: droid hunts (700 CR), timed parcel runs (800 CR) and raider bounties (1,100 CR).
• Exploration: stunt rings pay 150 CR each with a bonus for the full circuit, and finding all five echo shards on a planet pays 1,000 CR.

Gathering

Salvage wrecks, mine ore, tap resin, catch storm glass, net aurora silk and fish. Everything you gather sells at the market or goes into gear. Each world’s planet page has the details: Kestrel, Borealis, Vanta.

Every world has a mine. Rocks go dark after a few strikes and refill each 24-minute day cycle. The foreman hands out tasks: every fifth in a row adds 500 CR and a crate of resin, and every tenth adds 1,500 CR more.

Trading and freight

• Every city has a Trading Center with nine counters. Prices drift ±30% a day. Materials sell for 0.75× on their home world and 1.4× elsewhere.
• Trade crates (Dune spice, Glacier water, Neon circuitry) are cheap where they are made and sell for about 1.75× on other worlds.
• Ships with 1,000 kg or more of hold take bulk crates of 100 units (20 kg of crate each), bought at a discount and loaded at your berth.

Clearance & progression

Clearance is the one number that matters. All XP counts towards it, and every gate in the game reads from the same table: worlds, ships, homes, gear tiers, commercial contracts, blacksites, foundry caches and the later story. Once you reach a world it stays open.

• The NEXT line. Under the quest tracker the HUD always names your single next step: the next story contract, or exactly why it is blocked (wrong planet, a skill, a tool, or Clearance), or the next unlock you can afford.
• Level-up cards. Each time your Clearance rises, a card lists everything that just opened.
• The Command Hub (Tab) puts it all on one screen: your progression path, your holdings (homes, land and builds), your fleet and inventory, and your clan’s army.

The Clearance ladder

Four skills

Skills level by doing, up to 99 each.

Gear tiers

Each tier of weapons and armour is forged from two worlds’ materials at a workbench:

• Frontier: Scrap Iron + Ember Resin. Clearance 1, Forge 1, ×1 damage.
• Rime: Rimesteel + Sunglass. Clearance 6, Forge 8, ×1.45 damage.
• Lumen: Lumen Crystal + Aurora Silk. Clearance 16, Forge 18, ×1.95 damage.
• Outerline: One from every world + a boss drop. Clearance 28, Forge 28, ×2.6 damage.

Ships & flying

Board your ship with E. W throttles, the mouse steers, Space and C climb and descend, Shift boosts and B brakes. Fly far enough in a straight line and you come back round: each planet wraps at 40 km. Once you hold a world’s permit, take off from one planet and set down on the next.

• Landing: jets set down anywhere. Out on the land the Atlas needs a cargo pad, the Leviathan a heavy cargo pad and the Odyssey a carrier pad (or any spaceport berth). See the pad table under Land & building.
• Garages: each home has a hangar with five bays. Press G in any hangar and the garage concierge brings one of your ships there.
• Cargo: your pack holds 60 kg. Ship holds run from 60 kg (Arrow) to 30,000 kg (Leviathan). Chests at home are safe; holds are not. Dock thieves work the public berths, and if you are shot down salvagers strip part of your hold.
• The Odyssey: a 232 m carrier. Fly it from the bridge, then press R to walk its decks: galley, lounge, quarters, armory, star-chart bar, bunks and a hangar with an airlock.
• Two-seaters: on a server, a friend can ride behind you in the Nomad or Tandem.

See every ship and its stats →

Land & building

Beyond the city edge the land is for sale. Survey first: it reveals a plot’s traits, like lakefront, a resin grove, storm country or how flat it is. Plots near town cost up to 1.5× more.

Pick a building from 45 designs across the three worlds, pay the credits, deliver the materials to the site, and wait out the build clock:

• House 4,000 CR · Trading post 12,000 CR · Claim mine 20,000 CR · Cargo port 30,000 CR · Business HQ 45,000 CR (needs a 25,000 CR business licence).
• Homes come with a workbench and storage chests (27 slots each; materials stack to 64). The workbench builds straight from the chests in the same room.

Landing pads

Build a pad and your ships have somewhere to set down out on your land. Bigger pads take everything smaller. Any pad but the fighter pad also works as a supply depot: a freighter landed on it supplies every build site within 2 km from its hold.

Claim mines

A claim mine (20,000 CR plus 220 Scrap Iron, 60 Rimesteel and 4 Frost Cores, on a smallholding or larger) builds a real mine-head: a headframe and a cage you ride down into your own private two-level mine, 46 m and 86 m deep. The ore depends on where you sink it: only that planet’s own materials, weighted by location, with the rarer ore on the lower level. A daily output bin waits at the headframe.

Building in the jungle

On Vanta the wild is giant rainforest. Survey and buy a plot inside it and the trees on that land are cleared, with a margin so no crown hangs over your builds. Under the canopy the floor is dark, so put up a work floodlight (350 CR, from the parcel decorations): it really lights the ground round your camp. More on the jungle →

Clans & territory

Found a clan at the Capitol in any city for 30,000 CR. Clans have up to six members, a 2–4 letter tag, and leader, officer and member roles; invite pilots and promote officers from the Capitol. Design a flag from nine field patterns, a colour palette and 17 emblems; it flies over your land.

• Clan Beacons and territory: a beacon (15,000 CR) flies your flag and claims the country round it. Your clan’s builds within 512 m of a beacon project territory; the strongest clan in each 64 m cell holds it, and you can see it on the territory map. Each beacon also supplies 10 power for defences.
• Defences: sentry turrets (8,000 CR, 2 power), heavy turrets with twice the reach (20,000 CR, 4 power), drone bays (25,000 CR, 3 power) that launch three patrol drones in clan colours to hunt raiders inside your territory, and mine fields (2,000 CR, 1 power): five pressure mines that outsiders only see within 6 m. Defences fire on raider drones and never on clanmates.
• Clan vault: one per clan per planet, inside your territory (30,000 CR). Members deposit materials and credits; the leader and officers withdraw.
• Walls & gates: 7 m high, 60 CR and 2 Scrap Iron a metre, with 8 m gates (4,000 CR + 40 scrap) that open for clanmates only. Up to 3,000 m per clan per planet, and both ends within 600 m of a beacon.

The Wall Planner and stake mode

Open the Wall Planner to draw a whole perimeter on the map: click the corners, drop gates onto any run, and the planner totals the length, the credits due now and the scrap due later before you commit. Or walk (or fly low) the line in stake mode: press E to drop each stake, Backspace to pull the last one and P to jump into the planner. You pay the credits as you plan; the walls go up as scaffolds and the scrap is delivered to them afterwards.

Exploration

Borealis ice caves

Lone mountain massifs stand on the Borealis snowfields, each with a mouth cut into a cliff face, 30 m wide and 28 m high. Fighters and smaller ships can fly straight in; freighters can’t. Inside is a cathedral hall of blue ice, a frozen lake, a collapsed-ice maze, a long descent to a deep grotto and hidden nooks to camp in.

Vanta’s giant jungle

Belts of rainforest cover Vanta’s wild hills: trees 27–36 m tall under one closed roof, with an open, dark floor. Fly a small ship between the trunks, climb out through the canopy, and harvest glowing lumen roots on the floor for Lumen Crystal (Harvest 20). More →

Drone foundries

Kestrel’s abandoned factory towns can be scouted at any level; their caches and vaults open at Clearance 12. See Raids below.

Raids

Drone foundries

Three abandoned factory towns lie deep in Kestrel’s desert, still building drones. They are the hardest content on the frontier, and every defence can be planned around:

• Turrets, laser tripwires (crouch under them), near-invisible mines, explosive barrels and drone hatches you can seal with a Ship-breaker Cutter.
• Hive flak shoots at ships: land outside and walk in.
• Hack a terminal to shut defences off for 90 seconds, or throw the breaker for five minutes. A stasis charge works like an EMP.
• Caches and vaults answer only to Clearance 12 and up (below it you can scout the site, but the locks won’t open). Shed caches pay 800–2,400 CR plus materials once a day; the vault pays 8,000–15,000 CR and rare materials, and refills three days after you crack it.

Hollowpoint

The bounty hunters’ den in Kestrel’s Outlaw Territory is a stealth job. Hunters patrol and watch from a tower; they see in a cone, hear you sprint, and everyone hears a gunshot. Hold C to sneak. Four chests refill every mining day.

The Dune Colosseum

Wave after wave of drones on the sand north of Solace, for a purse that grows with every clear.

Combat

• Guns: you start with the Frontier Blaster. Buy the Hornet SMG, Scatter Cannon or Longshot rail rifle, then forge better marks and tiers. Guns wear as you fire; repair them at a workbench.
• Throwables: pulse grenades and stasis charges, which freeze drones in place for five seconds.
• Ship weapons: twin pulse cannons come fitted; seeker missiles and the ion beam are upgrades.
• Armour: visor, vest and boots in each gear tier cut the damage you take. Medpacks (Q, 150 CR) restore 60 health; food heals too.
• Going down: you are rescued at the spaceport. Your credits and home storage are safe.
• Player vs player is coming soon, and only between clans at war: both sides Clearance 5 or higher, outside safe zones, after a 15-minute notice. As designed, a fallen pilot drops a quarter of their raw materials in a crate; credits and gear never drop.