Cosmoteer: the Career progression path

Career is Cosmoteer's main mode, and it has an actual finish line: 10,000 fame, the LEGENDARY title. Everything else in a run — credits, blueprints, crew, ship size — exists to push fame up, because fame is what decides how many crew you are allowed to hire. This guide is the order to spend money and fame in, with the numbers attached.

Written for Cosmoteer 0.30.4c (May 2026), the current release as of this writing.

The ladder: fame is a crew cap, not a score

Fame is both a resource and the objective. Two rules govern it:

• You gain fame only from a mission that offers more fame than you already have, or from destroying an enemy ship whose fame is higher than yours. Farming the same easy missions forever does nothing.
• Fame cannot be reduced — with one exception: breaking a surrender truce costs fame.

Its real function is the maximum number of crew you may have simultaneously hired. That is the number that limits your ship, not your credit balance.

The wiki's own summary of the endgame: to reach maximum fame you have to progress to the hardest sectors of the galaxy, where the highest fame rewards are found. There is no way to grind your way up the table from one easy system — the table is a ladder, and each rung is gated behind missions that pay more than your current standing.

The Crew/Fame Ratio advanced game option (Maximum / Plentiful / Standard / Scarce) scales the crew column above; Scarce makes fewer crew available per fame level, so it is a difficulty setting in disguise.

Choose your economy before your ship

Two independent difficulty axes, both changeable mid-run via Settings → Current Game → Difficulty.

Combat difficulty:

Economic difficulty — this is the one that sets your progression speed:

The budget column carries the wiki's own note that it does not count the price of a starter ship. The four built-in starters are valued at 61,700 (Model-S, shield-focused), 62,300 (Model-M, mining laser instead of weapons), 63,848 (Model-C, slow and armoured, two cannons) and 64,200 (Model-L, three laser blasters, no defences). Custom designs can be used as a starter, but must fit inside the budget — and a starter ship's cost includes the cost of any blueprints it needs, which is a soft cap on what you can start with.

Leaving the difficulty sliders alone, the interesting advanced options are I Hate Crew Construction (builds and repairs complete instantly, no crew needed), I Hate Salvaging (requires the previous option; missions pay double credits, but ships can no longer be salvaged and ship modifications can be done anywhere for credits only), I Hate Exploring (reveals every ? point of interest), Galaxy Seed, and — added in 0.30.4 — Ironman Mode, which restricts you to a single save, auto-saves on exit, and deletes the save when all hands are lost.

The mission types that actually move fame

Missions are levels [1] to [18]; higher levels pay more credits, reputation and fame. You must hail a trade station to see its board, and each station has its own — some rewards can only be collected at the station that issued the mission.

This table is the single most useful thing in the guide: whether a mission pays fame at all.

So a career of "contact every station, run every delivery" climbs your bank account and nothing else. The fame-bearing families are combat, rescue, faction conflict, and the percentage-exploration missions. As of 0.30.1, pirate station missions are listed one difficulty tier higher than before, which pays better credits and fame.

Surrender rules matter because they feed back into fame:

• Hailing an enemy gives you the option to accept or deny its surrender; some damaged enemies offer a large sum of credits not to be destroyed. The mission still counts as complete either way.
• Guardians (ships protecting a station) never surrender, and since 0.30.0 police ships no longer surrender either.
• Breaking a truce costs you fame and makes other ships in the sector less likely to surrender. Since 0.30.1 A.I. ships are invincible for 2 seconds after surrendering specifically to stop accidental truce breaks.
• Surrendering to an enemy yourself costs credits and does not complete the mission.

Reputation: the discount that pays for your ship

Reputation is per faction and affects mission credit rewards, the prices you pay for resources, crew and blueprints from that faction's stations, the duration of Wanted status, and how many pursuit ships come after you. It goes down when you destroy ships or stations belonging to that faction.

Being wanted is self-inflicted: faction-conflict missions are the fastest fame in the game and they make you a target. Since 0.30.2, when wanted, only one faction hunts you at a time. Note the wiki's reputation page predates the current patch and even the 0.28 career changes, so treat the exact percentages as the wiki's figures rather than freshly confirmed ones.

Blueprint order

Blueprints are bought from any station's blueprints tab (every station sells the same list) and unlock parts for the ship editor. Each has an unlock cost in credits, and some require another blueprint first. This is the classic tree, with the prerequisites that matter:

Flight and control (buy first): Small Hyperdrive 1,000 → Medium Hyperdrive 10,000 → Large Hyperdrive 20,000 · Control Room 5,000 → Bridge 10,000 · Large Thruster 2,000 → Huge Thruster 5,000, Boost Thruster 3,000, Engine Room 6,000.

Weapons, the cheap tier: Laser Blaster 1,000 → Heavy Laser Blaster 3,000 and Disruptor 1,500 → Ion Beam Emitter 5,000 → Ion Beam Prism 5,000. Standard Cannon 1,000 → Large Cannon 2,500 → Deck Cannon 10,000. From Standard Cannon: Railgun 10,000, Chaingun 8,500, Flak Battery 7,000. Missiles: HE Missiles 5,000, E.M.P. Missile 10,000, Tactical Nuclear Missile 20,000, Proximity Mines 10,000.

The economy chain — the real milestone: Steel Smelter 15,000 → Coil Factory 15,000 → Hyper-Coil Factory 25,000. 55,000 credits total, and it is what turns mined copper into money (next section).

Power and production, after the chain: Medium Reactor Core 10,000 → Large Reactor Core 20,000. Cannon Ammo Factory 2,000 (requires Standard Cannon) · High-Explosive Missile Factory 7,500 · E.M.P. Missile Factory 10,000 · Nuclear Missile Factory 15,000 (requires Tactical Nuclear Missile and Uranium Enricher) · Mine Factory 10,000 (requires Cannon Ammo Factory and Proximity Mines) · Tri-Steel Smelter 35,000 (requires Hyper-Coil Factory) · Diamond Smelter 25,000 (requires Tri-Steel Smelter) · Processor Fabricator 40,000 (requires Hyper-Coil Factory) · Uranium Enricher 45,000 per the wiki's blueprint list (the enricher's own part page says 40,500 — the two disagree and I could not resolve which is current).

Defence and utility: Small Shield Generator 2,500 → Large Shield Generator 10,000 · Mining Laser 3,000 · Resource Collector 1,500 · Tractor Beam Emitter 10,000 · Sensor Array 10,000 · Hyperdrive Beacon 20,000 (requires Small Hyperdrive) · Explosive Charge 1,000.

A buying order that has the numbers behind it:

1. Small Hyperdrive (1,000). Without a hyperdrive you cannot leave the star system at all.
2. One offence you can afford to feed. Standard Cannon (1,000) plus Cannon Ammo Factory (2,000), or Laser Blaster (1,000) which needs no ammo.
3. Steel Smelter → Coil Factory → Hyper-Coil Factory (55,000). The copper-to-hyper-coil loop below pays for everything else.
4. Medium Reactor Core (10,000) and Crew's beds, so the crew cap you are earning can actually be used.
5. Medium Hyperdrive (10,000), to reach the higher-fame systems your next fame tier requires.
6. Then branch: Processor Fabricator (40,000) and Uranium Enricher are the parts that let you build reactors and advanced weapons without buying materials at retail.

Three caveats on blueprints, all current:

• Overclock modes are separate purchases. Since 0.30.0, each weapon's or system's overclock mode must be unlocked individually from a station's blueprints tab. The heat-management parts (Radiator 5,000, Heat Pipe 5,000) and the Thermal Resonance Lance (1,000, requires Ion Beam Emitter + Heat Management) are not in the older blueprint list; those figures come from the individual part pages.
• The wiki's blueprint page is stale. It still lists the removed Resource Collector, and it was last edited in August 2025, before the heat parts. Use it as the classic tree, not as a complete 0.30.4 price list.
• Launchers are effectively unusable as a starter ship. A known bug means a Creative-designed ship using launchers requires all four launcher blueprints to be unlocked to be used as a starter — 45,000 credits of blueprints before you launch.

The production chain and its ratios

Every recipe below is from the resource or factory page, all ratios as listed.

Raw resource prices, for reference: Iron 20, Copper 80, Sulfur 20, Hyperium 50, Tritanium 160, Carbon 160, Uranium 400, Gold 500.

Every factory gains +25% production speed per adjacent factory of any type, so factories are worth walling together rather than spreading out. Storage stack sizes: most raw resources hold 5 per m² of storage, but Hyperium holds 20; Steel, Coils, Hyper-Coils and Tri-Steel hold 40; Ammo 20; missile parts 10; Mine Parts 8; Diamonds and Processors 5.

Sell price is half the buy price at Architect (a quarter at Starwright, full at Builder). That one line decides whether manufacturing is worth anything:

• Buying ore and refining it always loses money. 2 Iron bought at 40 credits becomes Steel worth 12.5 credits at Architect sell. 4 Uranium bought at 1,600 becomes Enriched Uranium worth 1,000. 3 Gold + 5 Coils bought at 2,000 becomes a Processor worth 1,250.
• Mined ore is pure profit. That is the whole early game.

Early money: the copper loop, with real numbers

The wiki's own worked example of the copper-to-hyper-coil loop is the fastest start in the game, and it needs exactly three blueprints: Steel Smelter, Coil Factory, Hyper-Coil Factory — 55,000 credits. The Steel Smelter is bought only as a prerequisite; it is never used.

The arithmetic, from the wiki's example and the resource pages:

• 1 Copper (mined, free) → 1 Coil → at a 2:1 ratio, 0.5 Hyper-Coils (plus 0.5 Copper per hyper-coil).
• A single first-found copper asteroid held 31 Copper → 31 Coils → 15 Hyper-Coils (rounding down) → 15 × 150 credits = 2,250 credits at Architect sell price, from one asteroid the crew can strip in seconds.
• Compare: selling the same 31 Copper raw at Architect would fetch 31 × 40 = 1,240 credits. Refining roughly doubles it.
• Copper is the most abundant thing in every system: the belt and asteroid fields are full of it, marked with a Cu symbol.

Ammunition has a similar spread, in the wiki's words: the value of the Ammo produced by a Cannon Ammo Factory is double that of the required Sulfur, and one stack of Sulfur becomes five stacks of Ammo, which is also why factory setups beat plain storage for ships that fire cannons.

What is actually in a star system, and where

Every system has a star, an asteroid belt, and hyper-jump relays at the extreme edges pointing at neighbouring systems. Systems are dominated by one of the five factions (Cabal of Sol, Centauri Imperium, Fringe Systems Resistance, Monolith Cooperative, Great House Io), with other factions holding influence, which decides what ships and bases spawn. The galaxy is 75 star systems as of 0.30.0, up from 50.

Asteroid generation, by the numbers:

• The asteroid belt holds 750–900 asteroids; each asteroid field 75–100; the sun zone 25–50; plus 125–150 scattered loosely in the system.
• Common resources (Iron, Copper, Sulfur, Hyperium and plain rock) have spawn weight 1; rare ones (Carbon, Gold, Tritanium, Uranium) have weight 1/16, and every size step halves the weight again.
• Valuable Asteroid points of interest are always one of the four rare resources, usually XL, sometimes XXL.
• The sun zone's asteroids are always rare resources — but since 0.30.0 the star applies heat rather than direct damage (shields partially block that heat), and any crew member outside the ship in the sun zone dies instantly. Harvesting there is a tractor-beam-and-mining-laser job.

Points of interest, and what each is good for:

Two career-only system types exist as of 0.27.0: High Cloud Density (lots of gaseous and electron clouds) and Supernova Aftermath (no sun at all, dense ion storms). Of the hazards, electron clouds are the one that will strand you: they cut reactor output by 80% and prevent hyper-jumps in or out.

Crew: the build limit

Crew are hired by hailing a station or a friendly ship, and you need free beds first — Crew's Bunk holds 2, Crew's Quarters 6, Crew's Barracks 24. Beds need no blueprint (only the Moving Walkway does, at 2,500).

The cost curve is the important part: the price per crew member increases as you hire more, and decreases as your fame rises. So the correct order is to finish a mission and collect the reward first, then hire — never the other way round — and to hire only what the ship actually needs.

Movement numbers, if you are laying out a ship or wondering why a big ship feels sluggish:

• Base walk speed 3.2 tiles/second. Crew move orthogonally only, and carrying a resource does not slow them.
• Crew Speed is a per-part multiplier: Corridor 100%, Moving Walkway 200% forwards / 75% sideways / 25% backwards, Heat Pipe Crossing 80%, every other crew-accessible part 50%.
• Crew congestion (two crew in the same 1×1 tile) halves the multiplier, never below 30%. Fire drops it to one-fifth, never below 20%, and takes priority over congestion. Scorched parts are 50%.

Command Points (CP) are what stop a ship growing indefinitely: a Cockpit grants +50, a Control Room +250, a Bridge +1,000, while weapons and systems spend them (a Point Defense System uses 1, a Mining Laser 3, a Radiator 5, a Thermal Resonance Lance 8, most factories 1). A ship with more usage than capacity cannot be controlled.

Jumping, and why you have to move

Hyperium is bought at 50 credits and mined from asteroids. The hard limit: each hyperdrive can contribute at most 20 Hyperium to a single jump, so a jump costing 39 needs two drives. Efficiency is set by how much of the ship's hull the drive's coverage reaches — the greener the heat map in the editor, the cheaper both in-system and extra-solar jumps. In-system jumps are much cheaper, instantaneous, and can target hyper-jump relays or trade stations. Extra-solar jumps require flying to a relay, where the drive charges up before the jump; the game auto-saves first. Since 0.30.0 ships no longer have a minimum hyper-jump distance.

Twelve traps that eat the first ten hours

1. Grinding fame-poor missions. Fame only moves when a mission offers more than you have. Deliveries, "contact station" and "travel to a new system" pay no fame at all.
2. Staying in the starting system. The next fame tier lives in harder systems, and the wiki is explicit that the highest fame rewards are in the hardest sectors.
3. Hiring crew before banking the mission. Crew cost falls as fame rises; hire after turning in.
4. Spending 30,000+ on weapons before the 55,000 credit economy chain. Copper-to-hyper-coil is the reliable early income.
5. Breaking a surrender truce. It costs fame — the one stat you can otherwise never lose — and dries up future surrenders.
6. Becoming wanted carelessly. Faction-conflict missions are the fastest fame, but at Nemesis you pay +100% on purchases and face up to 7 pursuit ships. Since 0.30.2 only one faction hunts you at a time.
7. Expecting a besieged station to repair you. Since 0.30.4, stations under attack in rescue missions cannot repair the player until rescued.
8. Starting in the Model-C without watching ammo. The wiki's own warning: ammo costs money, and it is not hard to go bankrupt in the cannon starter.
9. Mining with crew alone on hard rock. Deposits buried in hard rock need a Mining Laser; crew EVA can only take soft-rock deposits.
10. Treating the sun zone like normal space. Pre-0.30 it was direct damage, now it is heat — but EVA crew still die instantly there.
11. Jumping without checking the drive count or the destination. Two drives are needed for anything over 20 Hyperium, and electron clouds block jumps in or out entirely.
12. Enabling Ironman Mode casually. One save, auto-saved on exit, deleted when all hands are lost.

Sources

All figures were read from these pages; the game version is 0.30.4c (Steam news, 9 May 2026 — "Hotfix 0.30.4c Patch Notes"; 0.30.4 itself, 17 April 2026, is where Ironman Mode, the rescue-station repair change and the current balance pass landed).

• https://cosmoteer.wiki.gg/wiki/Game_Modes (Career mode, difficulty tables, starting budgets, Creative/multiplayer modes)
• https://cosmoteer.wiki.gg/wiki/Fame (fame levels, crew caps, how fame is gained, the Legendary objective)
• https://cosmoteer.wiki.gg/wiki/Missions (mission levels 1–18, mission type and reward tables, surrender rules)
• https://cosmoteer.wiki.gg/wiki/Reputation (reputation levels, price and wanted effects)
• https://cosmoteer.wiki.gg/wiki/Blueprints (unlock costs and prerequisites, launcher starter-ship bug)
• https://cosmoteer.wiki.gg/wiki/Resources and the individual resource pages — Iron, Copper, Sulfur, Carbon, Tritanium, Uranium, Gold, Hyperium, Steel, Coils, Hyper-Coils, Tri-Steel, Diamonds, Processor, Enriched Uranium, Ammo, HE/E.M.P./Nuclear Missile Parts, Mine Parts (prices, stacks, recipes)
• https://cosmoteer.wiki.gg/wiki/Steel_Smelter, /Coil_Factory, /Hyper-Coil_Factory, /Tri-Steel_Smelter, /Diamond_Smelter, /Processor_Fabricator, /Uranium_Enricher, /Cannon_Ammo_Factory (factory resource costs, rates, adjacency bonus, ammo-vs-cannon ratios)
• https://cosmoteer.wiki.gg/wiki/Star_System and https://cosmoteer.wiki.gg/wiki/Asteroid (system layout, points of interest, asteroid counts and spawn weights, sun zone)
• https://cosmoteer.wiki.gg/wiki/Crew, https://cosmoteer.wiki.gg/wiki/Command_Points, https://cosmoteer.wiki.gg/wiki/Stations, https://cosmoteer.wiki.gg/wiki/Ships (crew speeds, hiring, ship classes by credit value, station services)
• https://cosmoteer.wiki.gg/wiki/Small_Hyperdrive, https://cosmoteer.wiki.gg/wiki/Hyper-Jump_Relay (jump mechanics, 20 Hyperium per drive, efficiency)
• https://cosmoteer.wiki.gg/wiki/Guides_Hub/Making_Money_With_Hyper-coils (the 31-copper worked example, the 55,000 credit prerequisite set)
• https://cosmoteer.wiki.gg/wiki/Guides_Hub/Menu_Screens (advanced game options, including Ironman-adjacent settings)
• https://cosmoteer.wiki.gg/wiki/0.30.0 and https://cosmoteer.wiki.gg/wiki/Version_History (heat management, overclocking, Great House Io, galaxy size 50 → 75, drop-rate and surrender changes)
• Steam news feed for app 799600: https://api.steampowered.com/ISteamNews/GetNewsForApp/v2/?appid=799600 (0.30.4c, 0.30.4, 0.30.3, 0.30.2, 0.30.1 patch notes — Ironman Mode, pirate station mission tier, single-faction manhunts, invincibility after surrender)
• https://cosmoteer.net/history.html (older Cosmoteer Modern changelog, for part-value history such as armour costing 200 credits)

Three things I could not verify, and did not guess at: the fame reward of any specific mission level; how mission level 1–18 maps onto the ship size classes 1–20 (the wiki states neither); and whether the Uranium Enricher blueprint is 45,000 (blueprint list) or 40,500 (part page). The reputation table's percentages are from a page that predates the 0.28 career changes, and the wiki's blueprint list predates the 0.30.0 heat parts — both are flagged in the text rather than smoothed over.