Ship landing beacon

The ship landing beacon tells imperial shuttles where to land. Four of them must be placed on the corners of a 9x9 or larger clear area to create a landing pad. Shuttles will use the cleared area if possible.

Acquisition[edit]

Ship landing beacons can be constructed once the Electricity research project has been completed. Each requires 40 Steel, 1 Component and 800 ticks (13.33 secs) of work modified by the construction speed of the builder.

Ship landing beacons will also spawn, in the correct orientation and on a floored landing pad, in Empire faction bases, often with an imperial shuttle on it about to take off.

Summary[edit]

When 4 beacons are placed in a rectangle of minimum size 9x9 and provided with power the area becomes a landing pad. Imperial shuttles will land there if possible for dropoff and pickup of characters for quests, including: the intro noble wimp quest, hospitality, ferried bandit camp and ancient complex, pawn lending, and the rescue shuttle for the shuttle crash quest. It does not work for the crashed shuttles themselves.

The landing pad must be clear of any objects you cannot build on top of such as trees, chunks and other buildings. Additionally, the interior area of the landing pad not including the rows and columns of tiles with the beacons themselves, i.e. a 7x7 area for the minimum size, must be unroofed for the pad to function. The tiles in all 4 cardinal directions of each beacon, and the beacons themselves, can be roofed without issue.

It has no mechanical interactions with passenger shuttles despite their similarity to imperial shuttles. It also does not interact with spacedrones, crashed mechanitor ships, or grav ships, despite its name and description.

Analysis[edit]

Ship landing beacons can be useful to allow imperial shuttles to land in a safer and more convenient location, saving time as pawns will need to walk a shorter distance to reach the shuttle. However, shuttles don't land very often, and it's normally trivial to have pawns walk the extra distance, so they should only be built once steel and components are no longer a concern.

Cover the landing area in flooring, such as concrete, to prevent tree growth from blocking the pad.

Trivia[edit]

Ancient nav beacons that can spawn as part of map generation bear a strong resemblance to ship landing beacons, though with visible damage. Similar to landing beacons, nav beacons will often spawn in the corners of partially incomplete, 11x11 areas of concrete, with anywhere between 1 to 4 ancient nav beacons being present - presumably representing ship landing zones.