Beacons are locations within a sector. These locations can be planets, stations, checkpoints or other places and could contain ship or other encounters. Traveling between beacons is called an FTL Jump and requires a fully charged (ready) FTL Drive, operational ship engines and piloting systems, 1 fuel and a crewmember in the piloting room. The ultimate goal in a sector is to reach the exit beacon (except for the final sector, the Last Stand, where the goal becomes to protect the Federation base from the Rebel Flagship).
All beacons, except for a staring beacon of each sector, are initially unexplored. Some special beacons, called Distress beacons, and stores are marked when you are within a range of 1 FTL jump (i.e. adjacent) to them. The exit beacon, located at sector's opposite to the starting beacon side, is always visible.
Your ship can be equipped with different navigation-facilitating augmentations. The Long-Ranged Scanners augmentation provides additional, valuable, information about adjacent beacons: warns you of environmental hazards and can detect a ship presence. Beware, the Long-Ranged Scanners not necessarily provide you with the most accurate data on ship presence, and, sometimes, even the environment can drastically change due to the flow of an event.
Distress beacon[]
- Distress Beacon. Someone might need help.
Distress beacons are visible within 1 FTL jump range. Distress beacons will remain on the map till they get overtaken by rebels, so a player does not need to rush to visit these beacons in a hurry.
A distress beacon can have any distress event allowed by the sector specifics. Sometimes it is possible to determine or to exclude certain events with the help of the Long-Ranged Scanners augmentation and sector/events knowledge.
Store beacon[]
- Unvisited. Reported merchant location. / You previously found a store at this location.
Store beacons are visible within 1 FTL jump range. Some events have a possibility to spawn a store as a reward.
Stores allow you to repair your ship, buy resources, systems, crewmembers, and trade weapons, augmentations, drone schematics.
Since the Advanced Edition, many stores now have 2 pages, increasing their convenience significantly. It is marked on the map as 'STORE', with a gray border.
Quest (marker) beacon[]
- Unvisited. Quest destination.
Some events will trigger quests by picking certain options. To access the newly-spawned quest, you must navigate to a beacon marked 'QUEST', usually a couple jumps from your current position. Once spawned, quest beacons can be seen on the map from any distance away.
Quest beacons will normally be placed in the current sector ("Added a quest marker to your map!"). However, if you don't have many jumps left, the game will push the quest into the next sector instead ("Added a quest marker to the next sector!"): it will appear regardless of which sector you choose. If this happens in sector 7, the quest will be "cancelled", because quests are not allowed in sector 8 ("Upon examining your map, you realize you just won't have time and need to get to the Federation base! You leave the quest for another day.").
A spawned quest marker will replace another event at the beacon that it overwrites, unless it is a store, exit, or another quest marker. A quest marker cannot appear in nebula area: if the current sector event is bound to create a quest marker, while there is only nebula area to the right of the player ship or there are no suitable beacons to be overwritten, the quest marker beacon will be placed in the next sector.
Each sector type has a certain number of possible quest events, but the existence of these quest beacons on the actual sector map is not guaranteed (except for the special ship-unlocking quests in the Homeworlds sectors).
Exit beacon[]
- This is the exit beacon. Go here to travel to the next sector.
Sectors other than The Last Stand all contain an Exit Beacon. This allows navigation through the Sector Map to another sector. It is marked on the map as 'EXIT', with a green border, and is seen from the start from any distance.
This is possible even if the rebels have expanded their search to this beacon, however you will have to fight - or escape from - a powerful Rebel ship first with often Anti-Ship Battery present, to be able to access the beacon. Non-hostile exit beacon events can occur when rebels haven't expanded to this beacon, unless the beacon is contained within a nebula.
Repair station beacon[]
- Federation Repair Station. Repairs hull and provides supplies.
There are 3 repair station beacons in The Last Stand sector. Each of them provides 15 hull repairs and gives 22-44 scrap, 5 fuel, 4 missiles, 5 drone parts.