Sector Expansion & Rift Gates

New in v0.14.0 — “The Restaurant at the Edge of the Sector.” The home galaxy grew from five sectors to eight, every one re-themed to a race from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and the way you open them changed completely. The old “Unlock Sector” buttons — and their research / mega-project / stockpile gates — are gone. You now tear your way forward through rifts.

A sector is still a claimable belt of asteroids with its own risk tier, signature resources and trait modifiers (see Sectors). What changed in v0.14.0 is the frontier: each locked sector now sits behind a rift gate crewed by that sector’s own alien race, and the only way through is to fight.

The Rift-Unlock Loop #

The expansion spine is now a combat loop, not a checklist:

work your frontier sector  →  find a rift (≈10% per expedition)
  →  dive it to a FULL CLEAR (all 10 levels)
  →  roll to tear open a corridor to the NEXT sector
  →  on success: next sector unlocks + 2 free starter asteroids

Rifts appear on the sector map as animated, clickable swirls. Fully clearing a rift (its first complete clear) rolls once to break through to the next sector. If the roll fails the rift’s corridor “collapses before it can stabilise” — clear another rift to try again.

The Unlock Chance Halves Each Tier #

The break-through chance starts at 50% and halves with each sector you are deep, never dropping below a 10% floor so the deepest sectors stay attainable:

chance = max( 0.10 , 0.50 / 2^sectorIndex )

A successful break-through bypasses the old gates entirely and seeds the freshly-opened sector with 2 free starter asteroids (charted automatically and named in your comms log). These values (SECTOR_UNLOCK_BASE 0.5, SECTOR_UNLOCK_FLOOR 0.10, 2 starter asteroids) are first-pass and subject to tuning.

The legacy research / mega-project / resource-stockpile gates still exist in the sector data as flavour and as a soft prerequisite spine, but the rift clear is what actually opens the corridor.

The Gate Model — Whose Fleet Guards What #

Every locked sector is fronted by a rift gate crewed by that sector’s own race. So the corridor into Beta is held by the Vorgon; the corridor into Gamma by the Betelgeusians; and so on. Push past the frontier and the next race’s gate fleet is waiting.

There are seven race rift rosters. The Vorgon roster arrived with Rift Combat 3.0 (v0.13.0); v0.14.0 adds six new ones — full enemy fleets, named capital flagships and per-race ability decks. Each roster runs the standard 5-wave rift structure with a wave-5 boss capital and a chance of a mid-wave elite capital. (For the per-race enemy lineups, see Rifts & Fleet → Per-Race Gate Fleets.)

The Eight Sectors #

Five sectors were re-themed and three are brand new. Each non-human sector is a complete vertical slice: a race, a rift gate fleet, an alien material (raw + refined), a race station, a sector research branch, and a unique race drone.

Alpha is “mostly harmless” and gate-free; Theta sits behind the reassembled Wikkit Gate as the endgame wall. Each sector holds 5 claimable asteroids (mostly discovered via expeditions now).

The Per-Sector Slice #

Alien Materials & the Xeno-Refinery #

Each non-human sector adds two materials — a mined raw ore and its refined form — for 14 in total. The raw ores cannot be sold; the refined alloys carry a market value that climbs steeply by sector (70 → 800 credits).

All seven refine recipes run on a single new building: the Xeno-Refinery (alienRefinery). One rig handles every alien recipe — you simply enable the one matching the ore your sector produces. It tops out at Lv 5 (throughput 4 → 24 input/sec, output ratio 0.8 → 1.2, and up to 3 parallel recipes at Lv 5), and unlocks once you have a Refinery Lv 1 and a race station in-sector.

Refined alien materials are the lifeblood of each race’s tech: they pay for that sector’s race station, fabricate its race drone, and fund its research branch. (See the Data Tables for the full material list and values.)

Race Stations #

Every new sector has its own race-flavoured station that works exactly like a Sector Station — same storage caps (25,000 → 1,000,000), same mining/refining bonuses (+10% → +38%) and module slots — but themed to its race and built with that sector’s refined alien material. They are buildable the moment you hold an asteroid in the sector; they gate nothing beyond the usual shared-pool economics.

Sector Research Branches #

Owning a new sector reveals a sector-scoped research branch that appears only once you hold the sector. There are seven such branches (35 nodes, five each), costing Research Points plus that sector’s refined alien material. Their nodes grant the usual economic boosts (mining yield, offline income/generation, population cap, expedition slots, station connections) — and each branch contains one node that unlocks that sector’s race drone:

Krikkit’s single unlock node delivers two ship classes, so the seven branches add eight new race drones to your fleet. These slot in alongside the four starter drone roles as deeper, sector-specific screening units.

Related Pages #

• Sectors — sector traits, the shared-pool economy, asteroids
• Rifts & Fleet — the rift dungeon loop and the per-race gate fleets
• Data Tables — alien materials, race stations, race drones, rift tiers
• Expeditions — how rifts and asteroids are discovered
• Research Tree — the core research branches
• Progression Path — the overall expansion spine