Recruit Handbook

01Your first hour

Imperium is a conquest server. You hold a rank in a branch, you are paid, and what you do feeds a galactic map that can be won or lost. Nothing below is optional reading, but this section is the part you actually need to start.

The keys that matter

02Branches & ranks

Five branches are open. Your branch decides your uniform, your rank ladder, what equipment you may draw, and which parts of this handbook apply to you. Every branch starts at Cadet.

Regiment strength

Each branch has an authorised strength — a cap on how many characters it can hold. When a branch is full it is locked in the character creator until somebody leaves or a commander raises the cap.

/Regiments                    strength of every branch
/RegimentStrength <branch> <n>   set a cap (commanders and staff only)

Being promoted

Rank is given, not bought. It comes from command, and it is the only one of the four progression tracks you cannot advance yourself — see Progression. What rank buys you is authority: access to equipment, to commands, and to parts of the ship.

/CharGetRank [name]     rank, service number and commendations
/CharRankList           the ladder for your own branch
/Skills                 your proficiencies and progress to the next rank

03Making a character

The creator runs in four steps: enlistment, identity, appearance and assignment. You can back out of any step before you confirm.

Species

Humans and a range of non-human species are available. Human characters choose from several faces; most non-human species have a fixed head and no further customisation, which is deliberate — a Togruta’s montrals and a Devaronian’s horns rule out helmets and leave nowhere for hair to sit, so those controls are hidden rather than shown and ignored.

Your uniform is issued

You do not choose your uniform in the creator, and you cannot change it afterwards. It is resolved from your branch and rank by the dress code — an ISB officer wears ISB charcoal because they are ISB, not because they picked it. The same rule fits your rank plaque and code cylinders automatically as you are promoted.

What you can change

• Face — human characters pick from several faces
• Hair and facial hair — where the head supports it
• Cybernetics — implants and augments, chosen at creation
• Helmet — toggled in-game with /Helmet, not fixed at creation

Eyepatches and other worn cosmetics are not here — those are bought from the quartermaster. See Uniform & kit.

/Appearance         report your current look and everything available to it
/AppearanceSet <slot> <value>   change one slot
/Helmet             put your helmet on, or take it off

04Progression

Four separate things advance a character, and they deliberately answer different questions. Confusing them is the most common mistake new players make.

Levels and the qualification tree

Level runs 1 to 50 and grants a skill point every other level — thirty points against a tree of fifty-six ranks. That gap is the whole balance of the game: you can complete one branch of the tree and put a dozen points into a second, but you cannot have everything. A character buys ×1.20 damage or ×1.20 survivability, never both.

Blocked nodes tell you why they are blocked rather than what they do, because somebody looking at a node they cannot buy is asking exactly one question.

/Perks              the tree, grouped by branch, with what blocks each node
/Train <node>       spend a point
/Respec             withdraw everything and take your points back, for commendations
/Character          your level, armour and resolved stats
/Loadout            your fully resolved stats and what they cost

05Weapons & armour

216 blasters, five armour slots, six rarity tiers and an eight-point attachment budget.

Rarity

Runs common → uncommon → rare → legendary → exotic → ascendent. Higher tiers roll more and better modifiers. Exotic and above attune to you on first wear and cannot be traded afterwards, so think before you equip something you meant to sell.

Armour

Five slots — helmet, chest, gauntlets, greaves, undersuit. These are stat-only: nothing in the armour system changes how you look. Protection scales with condition, wear lands on one random piece per hit, and set bonuses key off the lowest tier you are wearing, so one neglected piece drags the whole set down.

Attachments

Attachments are fitted against an eight-point budget shown as pips on your character sheet. Fitting something costs points; removing it gives them back.

/Attachments        what you own, and what fits what
/Fit <slot> <id>    fit an attachment  —  /fit primary reflex
/Unfit <slot> <id>  remove one and reclaim its points

06Uniform & kit

Pauldrons, webbing, belts, kamas, packs and helmet fittings, bought and worn at the quartermaster’s terminal. These are cosmetic — they change how you look, never your stats.

How you get them

Some are purchased with credits, some are issued by rank, and most are both: a pauldron is bought and earned. Anything you buy is tracked as unlocked against your character — it does not take up an inventory slot.

07Combat

Blasters here fire travelling bolts, not hitscan. They build heat rather than running dry, and they have recoil patterns you can learn.

Bolts travel

Lead your target at range. A bolt takes time to arrive and a moving target will not be where you aimed. This is the single biggest adjustment for players coming from other servers.

Heat

Weapons overheat rather than reload. Sustained fire builds heat; venting takes time. The seven weapon archetypes — sidearm, carbine, rifle, sniper, repeater, scattergun, machine pistol — are separated by falloff, heat and handling rather than by raw damage.

Fire modes

Most weapons carry more than one. Press E + R to cycle, or bind sw_firemode to a key of your own.

08Casualty & medical

Fatal damage does not kill you. It puts you down — prone, disarmed, and on a bleed-out clock everyone around you can read.

What anyone can do

Anyone can stabilise a casualty and buy them seconds. You do not need to be a medic and you do not need an item. Reviving properly needs a medpac in the rescuer’s pockets — medicine is a customer of the economy, not a free service.

Wounds

A revival leaves a wound matched to what put you down, and each wound has its own treatment item. Using the wrong item is supplies wasted. Serious trauma can only be cleared in the medbay.

/MedRecord <name>   read a character's medical file

09Field equipment

Three slots on G, H and J. Equipment with cooldowns, not spells.

Everything these spawn is a real entity that fights, blocks and dies by the same rules as everything else on the map. The E-Web’s bolts can hit you; the barrier will block your own fire as readily as the enemy’s.

10The enemy

The Continuity is hostile AI that walks into the room. How many of them appear comes from sector threat; how good they are comes from how strong the players actually are.

An elite is not a health sponge — it carries +45% health, but the real upgrade is much better accuracy, morale that holds where the rest break, and a weapon from the strongest quarter of the arsenal. They are named and marked, because an enemy far more dangerous that looks identical to the others is an unexplained death rather than a difficulty curve.

11Credits & requisition

You are paid by rank. You spend at requisition terminals, which are gated by rank rather than by credits alone.

Pay scales across the ladder — a Stormtrooper Cadet earns 18 a cycle, a Commander 120; a Navy Cadet 20, an Admiral 175. Rank does not just unlock better equipment, it pays for it.

Requisition terminals issue standard Imperial equipment. What you may buy is checked against your rank on the server every time, not just when the screen opens. The first two mining tools are requisitionable so a new player can get onto the extraction ladder without crafting anything.

12Mining & refining

Six ores, one per rarity tier: Ferrocarbon, Agrocite, Quadanium, Phrik, Beskar, Kyber. Each refines into an ingot.

What a seam gives up

Tool condition wears your luck and never the ceiling, so a seam never quietly stops producing for a reason nothing on screen explains. Bare hands still pull common ore — nobody is locked out of the first rung by an item they do not own yet.

Five tools, from the Mining Laser to the Resonance Excavator. The first two are requisitionable; the rest are crafted, which is where the economy starts asking for something other than credits.

Refining takes the highest tier you have three of.

13Crafting

226 schematics — one for every ported weapon, armour piece and tool. Schematics are found, not bought.

You build at a manufacturing station out of ingots, at a tier you declare. Six beskar ingots make an exotic weapon. The roll centres on what your materials paid for and moves at most one step either way: a strong upgrade chance from manufacturing proficiency, and a small failure chance that reaches zero as proficiency climbs.

Higher tiers demand more proficiency as well as more material — otherwise a day-one technician handed six beskar could produce an exotic and the ladder would exist only to be skipped. Affixes roll fresh every time, so two players crafting the same schematic at the same tier get different weapons.

/Schematics         what you have learned, grouped by category
/Craft <id> [rarity]   build it  —  /craft wpn_k_a280 rare
/Reroll <id>        re-roll a held item's modifiers, for commendations

14Salvage runs

A squad of up to six takes a 15-minute hull-breach window inside a derelict. Lights out, fires burning, scavenger crews in the rooms.

Loot caches are only yours once you carry them back out. Two rules make that mean something:

• Death drops everything you took this run, where you fell.
• The breach timer closing treats everyone still inside as dead.

15Storage & trade

Footlockers

Footlockers are personal. One prop in a barracks serves everybody, because opening it shows you your own private inventory — so your belongings follow you to any locker on the map. 125 slots, sized against an arsenal of 216 weapons, 12 materials, 226 schematics and five armour slots per set.

Faction armouries

Shared per faction and much larger, because they hold what a whole regiment contributes rather than what one person carries.

Trading

Two-sided and confirmed — both parties see the full offer and both must accept. Remember that exotic and ascendent items attune on first wear and cannot be traded after that.

16Galactic conquest

The galaxy map is the point of the server. Sectors have control and threat, and what everyone does moves them.

The sector panel in the top-right of your HUD shows where you are, whether it is garrisoned, its control and threat percentages, and the standing of Imperial authority there.

/Galaxy             open the galactic conquest map
/SectorStatus       the state of the sector this garrison holds

17Garrisons

Faction outposts planted on captured worlds, tied directly to the galaxy map.

A garrison is founded on a sector you control, run by whoever founded it, and upgraded by spending its coffer. Garrisons hold a large shared stash — what a regiment contributes rather than what one person carries.

/Garrisons          every garrison and who runs it
/FoundGarrison      establish one on a sector you control
/GarrisonInvite <player>   bring somebody in
/GarrisonUpgrade    spend the coffer on raising its grade
/GarrisonLeave      leave your garrison

18Command

Doctrine, standing orders and the fleet — and a permanent record of who ordered what.

Doctrine

Each sector carries a standing posture that shapes how the war is fought there.

Standing orders

An order is issued against a job, with a quota. It tells a branch what command wants done and tracks whether it happened.

The fleet

Hulls are laid down with credits and materials from the armoury, assigned to sectors or held in reserve, and refitted to change what they are good at.

/Doctrine [sector] [posture]   set a sector's doctrine, or list the postures
/Order <job> <quota>    issue a standing order
/Orders                 list the standing orders
/Fleet                  the fleet's disposition
/FleetClasses           hull classes and what they cost
/FleetBuild <class>     lay down a new hull
/FleetAssign <hull> <sector>   order a hull to a sector, or to reserve
/FleetRefit <hull> <refit>     fit a refit, or list what is available
/CommandRecord          who set what, and how the fleet and orders stand

19The ship

Alert conditions, subsystems, damage control — and ship-to-ship battles where every player aboard has a station.

Alert conditions

The condition banner at the top of your screen is the ship’s state. Green is routine. Amber and red mean something is happening and you are expected to respond.

Subsystems

The ship runs on subsystems that take damage and need repairing at their consoles. Engineering owns this, but in a real engagement everyone helps.

Action stations

A hostile contact appears — on arrival in a sector, or by dropping out of hyperspace mid-transit — and every player aboard is called to a station. Each station is a real job with a real minigame. Each round of the engagement is resolved from how the crew actually did, and the ship on the other side shoots back until one hull gives.

20Campaigns & eras

The war runs in eras that can be won or lost. When one concludes, the galaxy is reseeded and the result is written into the record permanently.

/Era            the standing of the current campaign
/Chronicle      the history of this galaxy

The chronicle is the server’s memory. Eras that were won, eras that were lost, and who was there.

21The Security Bureau

Sedition, evidence, and the people whose job it is to find both. There is a real insurgency on this server, and some of it is played by other characters.

For the Bureau

/Sweep              search the immediate area for physical evidence
/Forensics          where to process what you collected
/Warrant <name>     sign a warrant against a suspect whose file supports one
/Arrest <name>      detain a wanted person — hold position beside them
/AccessLog          pull the nearest keypad's access history
/Scan               sweep for frequency traffic nearby

For everyone else

/Scrub              clean a compartment of anything you left in it
/Recruit <name>     approach someone about the cause

22Doors & keycards

A Star Destroyer where every door opens for everyone is a corridor with rooms attached. Doors here are locked, and keycards are real objects.

Keycards are items — carried, lost, stolen off a body, forged. Each is stamped with a clearance level (1–5) and the name it was issued to. Keypads bind to doors and remember every presentation.

/Doorcode <code>    speak a door code at the nearest keypad
/Slice              attempt to slice the nearest keypad — slow, and loud if it goes wrong
/AccessLog          the nearest keypad's history (Bureau only)

23Comms

Encrypted channels — and the people trying to listen to them.

Tune your comlink to a frequency and you are talking to everyone else on it, in a room nobody else can hear. The Bureau can sweep for traffic, and a signal sweep can capture encrypted traffic while it lasts.

/Tune <frequency>   tune your comlink — no argument clears it
/Intercept          run a signal sweep
/Scan               sweep for frequency traffic nearby (Bureau only)

24Quarters

Instanced personal quarters and faction billets, bought from the billeting officer.

Your quarters are yours and instanced — you can furnish them from what you have bought, and invite people in for a few minutes at a time. Faction billets hold what a whole unit contributes rather than what one person carries.

/Stores             open your quarters' stores to place what you have bought
/HouseInvite <name> offer somebody your quarters for a few minutes
/HouseLeave         leave, from anywhere, whatever state you are in

25The wardroom

Games tables. Dejarik and a second table game, playable, wagerable, and — the part that matters — recorded.

Standings persist. A wardroom win is a thing that happened, not a way to pass ten minutes. There is also a standing challenge board.

26The proving ground

Timed, scored target courses: pop-up plates, some of them moving, a run clock and a persistent board.

The record holder’s ghost runs the course beside you, which is what makes a leaderboard number something you can actually chase rather than just read.

Clearing a course with a given archetype in hand opens that archetype’s mastery track — so the range is also how you specialise in a class of weapon.

27Work & droids

Workstations

Stations around the ship give you something productive to do, run as a passive activity loop. Some replace the progress bar with an actual minigame.

/StopWork           stop the activity you are performing
/StationTypes       the station types activities are registered against

Astromechs

A droid is built from a schematic — the largest single material sink in the crafting economy. It follows you, carries a small overflow cargo, and works one job chosen at commissioning: prospecting, subsystem repair, or hauling. It gains proficiency alongside you.

/DroidName <name>   name your astromech

28Service record

Your dossier: proficiencies, commendations, decorations and service history. Other people can read it.

/Dossier [name]     open your service record, or inspect another character's
/Medals             your decorations, and what is still outstanding
/Journal            the matters you have been involved in

The roster on Tab shows service cards for everyone currently on the sector, grouped by branch.

29Every command

Everything a player can type. Admin-only commands are not listed.

Character & progression

Appearance

Kit & crafting

The war

Garrisons & quarters

Command staff

Security, doors & comms