Seven new guides: Exocomps, Elite Solo Outposts, the Signal Observatory, combat basics, Away Teams, Wave Defense, and the Mirror Universe

The seven Helpshift "Tricorder check" mechanics flagged in the last coverage-sweep round as real and guide-worthy but left unpublished on time -- now written up. Each is a genuinely uncovered mechanic, not a duplicate: Elite Solo Outposts and the classic 5-player Wave Defense both sit next to existing guides on the same broader topic (Solo Wave Defense/Outposts, and the NSEA Protector) without overlapping them -- Elite Outposts covers the higher late-game tier specifically, and this Wave Defense guide covers the original team-based mode plus the recent Terran Empire encounters and Field Repair ability, distinct from the solo variant already on site.

Research pages: real per-level cost, time and effect strength

Research pages showed max level and the level-1 requirements, but nothing about what levels 2 and up actually cost, how long they take, or how strong the effect gets as you go -- a documented, deliberately-unresolved gap from earlier this session. Same fix as buildings' "Upgrade Cost by Level" table (v2.41.0): the per-entity detail endpoint (research/{id}.json) has research time, hard-currency cost, resource cost and the effect-value progression for every level, which the bulk endpoint never carried. Backfilling all ~2,578 research nodes now via a resumable importer; nodes fill in as it completes, same as the building rollout did.

Officer rank-up rewards now link to the resources they cost

Officer detail pages list what each rank-up costs and rewards (currencies like Independent Credits, badges like Command Badge), but those names were plain text -- unlike ship build costs, mission rewards, system mining nodes, hostile drops and research costs, which all link to their /resources page since the Materials & Resources glossary shipped. Flagged in the last QA round as a real, fixable gap: every non-empty currency/badge name matches a real resource name. Wired up the same cross-link treatment -- officer rank rewards now resolve to /resources/{slug} the same way the others do.

QA audit: leftover Unity rich-text markup cleaned up site-wide

Independent QA pass over everything shipped in the last few releases (ships, hostiles, systems, buildings, the Materials & Resources glossary). Found unstripped Unity rich-text tags (<color=...>, <b>, <i>, <link=...>) and raw HTML entities surfacing as literal text in several places the existing cleanup pass had not reached: 12 resource names, 2 resource descriptions, 13 hostile names, 42 system names, 2 building descriptions, 792 building per-level stat names, 12 officer rank-up rewards, 3 ship specialty blurbs, and 16 mission objective descriptions -- 895 rows total. All corrected in place; the underlying importers were also fixed so this cannot recur on the next data refresh. Everything else audited (image links, resource cross-links, the ship tier/level upgrade calculator, docs row-count claims) checked out clean.

Three new guides, one updated: Officers, USS Athena, and station safety

Helpshift help-center coverage sweep: cross-referenced all sections against research/_registry/helpshift_processed.json and found three sections never assigned to a merge agent -- Officers, "Previously on STFC," and "Tricorder check (start-up kit)." Most of the 47-article Officers section is a repetitive per-crew shard-farming reference better suited to a future database column than a guide, but its "Officers Guide" overview article had real, entirely uncovered mechanics content (Below Deck Abilities, Captain's Maneuvers vs Officer Abilities, trait tiers, Officer Laurels). The USS Athena and a new Fleet Commander (Benjamin Sisko) were both real, unpublished ships/mechanics found in "Previously on STFC" -- the Ra'Ul Reaver from the same section turned out to already have a full, better-sourced guide from the official announcement. Peace Shields, Ceasefire and Station Combat (from "Tricorder check") merged into one new-player defense guide.

Building pages: real upgrade cost and build time

What it costs to build or upgrade a starbase building, and how long it takes, has been an explicitly unresolved gap since early this session -- stfc.space shows it, but no bulk data.stfc.space endpoint has it. Same fix as ships/hostiles/systems/missions/resources earlier today: a per-entity detail endpoint exists (building/{id}.json) with the real per-level cost and build time. All 109 buildings now have it.

Materials & Resources: what every item on the site actually does

Every ship cost, mission reward, mine and hostile drop on the site named a resource with zero explanation -- what is a Contraband Chip, an Eclipse Heist Token, a Command Badge? stfc.space's own translation data (the same materials.json already used for resource names) carries an official resource_description for 2662 of 2697 resources -- what it is, how you earn it, what it's for. New database section with search and rarity filtering, and every resource mention elsewhere on the site (ship build costs, the ship upgrade calculator, mission rewards, system mines and entry costs, hostile drops, research reputation requirements) now links to it.

Systems and missions get the same per-entity detail treatment

Systems and missions were still built from stfc.space's thin bulk summary files. Both also have per-entity detail endpoints: system/{id}.json carries real per-node mining data (resource, size, rate, count -- not just "this resource exists somewhere"), planets, player-structure plots and entry costs; mission/{id}.json carries the objective list and the mission chain (what unlocks this, what it leads to). System pages are rebuilt around this; the mining filter now checks real per-node data instead of two loosely related facts glued together, and shows real counts and max sizes per resource. Mission pages gain an objectives list and a chain graph.

Resource icons: DB rows were live, image files weren't

resources.image_path was already populated for 2680 resources (from a subagent's work), but the actual image files never made it into a commit before that agent hit the account's spend limit -- so every resource icon referenced from the v2.38.0 ship upgrade calculator was a live 404. The files exist on disk; this just gets them into git.

Ship pages get an interactive tier/level upgrade calculator

Earlier this session, ship per-tier combat stats and an interactive upgrade slider were investigated and declared impossible -- but that conclusion only checked stfc.space's bulk ship/summary.json. It also has a per-ship detail endpoint (ship/{id}.json) with a full tiers[]/levels[] breakdown: every component's stats, and its build/repair/scrap cost, at every tier, plus XP/shield/health at every level. All 115 stfc.space ships now carry this. Ship pages get a live slider: pick a tier and level range and every stat (grouped into Attack / Defense-Health / Utility) and cost list recomputes instantly, client-side, from data embedded once in the page -- no reload, no request per move.

Hostile detail pages: real weapons, firing pattern and power breakdown

Hostile pages only ever showed the same thin summary data (class, level range, strength range, a flattened drop list) that the whole site was originally built from. data.stfc.space also has a per-hostile detail endpoint with the full combat breakdown stfc.space itself shows -- per-weapon stats, a precomputed Power/Attack/Defense/Health split, and base XP -- fetched and verified field-for-field against a live page before it went anywhere near the database. All 407 hostiles now carry this detail, snapshotted at their highest encountered level and labelled as such.

New guide: Galactic Anomalies, the tiered late-game system modifiers

The site had nothing on Galactic Anomalies -- the rotating, per-system buffs and penalties Update 92 introduced and Update 93 expanded to four types across G6/G7 FKR and Assimilated space. Built from the official Update 93 patch notes for every tier and percentage, with a community walkthrough (Rev Deuce) embedded for the crewing trade-off it creates against Disrupted Energy Shields.

Merged a duplicate guide

QA found "Ops 39 to 40: what the wall is made of now" and "Update 93: the Ops 39 wall is now a research gate" were near-duplicates from the same source post, processed independently by two concurrent sessions. The narrower guide is retired in favour of the fuller one, which covers everything it did plus more (Elite Assassin counters, Battle Pass changes, the Raided state).

Forbidden Tech now shows what each item is for

forbidden_tech.class had been empty since the table was designed -- docs/database-schema.md listed it as a dead end, "no name-mapping for the type/subtype enums." Re-checked stfc.space's own translations/en/forbidden_tech.json and found forbidden_tech_subtype_name, a category the earlier pass missed: subtype (1-8) resolves cleanly to MINING/EVASION/DEFENSE/ARMADAS/STATION/OFFENSE/HOSTILES/EXPLORATION for all 59 real items.

Missions now show Officer Shard rewards

mission/summary.json carries 7 reward "type" values but the importer only ever kept type 3 (resources) -- 21% of all reward line items were silently dropped. Checked each remaining type against every known entity id space (migration 042): type 11 resolves cleanly against officers (762/772 rows, 98.7%) as an Officer Shard reward. The rest (types 1/5/6/8/12) don't match any known id space and stay unimported rather than guessed.

17 new guides: Alliances, Armadas, Events, and Spock's Wisdom

Merged Scopely's official Helpshift help-center articles from the Alliances, Armadas, Events, and "Spock's Wisdom" (common questions) categories into 17 original guides. The publishing agent finished writing every guide and pushing its images before hitting a session limit partway through its own verification pass, so this release closes out the batch: registry entries, changelog, and a live-image spot check.

Guide source attribution and video embeds now render

Every guide already carried a source_ref and (where found) a video_embed_url in the database, but templates/guides/detail.php only ever read them into the invisible JSON-LD block. The visible "Sourced from" footer link and embedded YouTube player are now on the page, so every Helpshift-merge guide shipped since v2.32 shows where its information came from.

34 new guides: ships and crew combos

Merged all 48 of Scopely's official Helpshift help-center articles from the Ships and Crew & Ship combos categories into 34 original guides — ship mechanics, a single Shipyard 1-80 unlock-order reference instead of seven near-duplicate pages, 27 individual ship spotlights, and one merged crew-combos-by-situation guide.

Five new guides: the factions, Territory Capture, and your station

Merged 35 of Scopely's official Helpshift help-center articles into five original guides, rather than 35 thin ones — the three founding factions and their shared reputation ladder, the seven newer factions, Territory Capture and the Isogen Refinery, and the station's core and late-game buildings.

Hostiles now show Scout and Outpost type

The datamined hostile data flags 11 of 407 hostile families as Scouts or Outposts (checked consistent across every raw instance of a family before trusting it). Both now show as a TYPE row on the hostile page and a marker in the hostiles list.

Systems: regional space, planets, mineable and galaxy coordinates

The datamined system data carried five fields the importer never read: whether a system is regional space, whether it has planets, whether it has any mineable node at all, and its galaxy map coordinates. All five are now stored and usable — three as new /systems filter toggles, all five shown on every system page.

Research now links both ways to the ships and buildings that gate it

A research node requiring a specific building or ship showed that as plain text with no link. Ship and building pages now also show which research nodes they gate, closing the loop the other three research relationships (prerequisites, unlocks, ship-build-requirements) already had. Also cleaned up 158 names/descriptions across research, hostiles, systems and buildings that were showing literal Unity markup like "<color=#fac710>" instead of rendering as plain text.

25 more factions were being mislabeled Independent

A hardcoded 11-faction list (the major playable ones) was being used for every faction reference on the site. Ships, systems and missions belonging to any of the other 25 real factions — Dominion, Xindi, Borg, Q-Continuum, Breen, Krenim Imperium, Transogen and more — were silently falling back to "Independent". 178 systems alone are affected.

Research trees: 2,029 nodes were missing their tree entirely

A hardcoded 3-tree lookup (Combat, Galaxy, Station) left 79% of research nodes with no tree at all. The game actually has 56 trees — Starships, Ascension, Away Teams, Artifact, Mirror, and dozens more — all resolvable from the source data. Also fixes a badge-visibility bug this surfaced: card badges without an explicit colour class rendered as dark text on a dark image, effectively invisible.

Wide tables no longer lose columns on mobile

Every table on the site clipped its rightmost columns off-screen on narrow phones instead of scrolling to them — data was there, just unreachable. Fixed site-wide.

Hostiles: colour-coded class badges

Hostiles have no in-game artwork available (checked — no art_id, no CDN entry for any hostile), so the class column is now a colour-coded badge matching the class-triangle explanation above the table, instead of plain text.

Search now covers buildings, research, hostiles, missions and forbidden tech

Site search only ever looked at officers, ships, guides, crews and systems. Five sections that have existed in the database for a while — some since the very first import — were never searchable.

The home page finally links to everything

Buildings, Forbidden & Chaos Tech, Missions, Syndicate & Emerald Chain and PVP Bands existed on the site but were never linked from the home page — the only way in was the MORE menu. The Knowledge Portals grid now covers all twelve sections, with a real thumbnail wherever one exists.

Missions linked to where you actually pick them up

Mission pages now say which system you get them from, and system pages list the missions available there — 845 missions cross-linked to 1,453 (mission, system) pairs. Also fixes a recurring migration footgun for good: a semicolon inside a migration comment could break the whole file with a confusing error nowhere near the actual typo.

Real images across the database, and a full systems filter

The biggest visual update since launch. Research, buildings and Forbidden/Chaos Tech now show real thumbnails from the game — 2,703 images across three sections that were plain text before. Buildings gained a full per-level stat table (30,690 data points). And Systems now has a real filter: name, level, warp, faction, mining resources, hostiles present, hazards, wave defense, surge systems, outposts and player containers.

New: PVP Bands

A new database section — PVP matchmaking bands. At your level, the range of opponents you can be matched against, shown as a visual range bar rather than a plain table.

Research: ship-tier and reputation requirements

Two more research requirement types resolved: 146 nodes need a specific ship at a specific tier, and 109 need a faction reputation threshold. Both were sitting in the source data unread.

The research tree is now an actual tree

Research nodes previously stood alone — no page said what unlocked them or what they led to. Each node now shows the building it requires, which other research it depends on, and what it unlocks in turn, all linked, so you can trace a path through the tree instead of browsing a flat list.

Every hostile now says where to find it

Hostile and system pages are now cross-linked: a hostile page lists the systems it appears in, and a system page lists which hostiles you will meet there. This was hand-transcribed for one hostile in a guide last round — it now works generically for all 407.

Systems tagged for missions, outposts and Wave Defense

Three more system flags that were sitting unread in the source data: whether a system has missions to run, whether it can be claimed as an outpost, and whether it participates in Wave Defense-style events. Each answers a real "should I go here?" question.

Some ships are locked behind research, and now say so

23 ships need a specific research node unlocked before they can be built at all, not just a drydock level. That requirement was in the source data from day one but the importer only recognised the other kind of requirement (a building level) and silently dropped this one. Those ships now show exactly which research unlocks them, linked straight to the node.

Systems show how far away they are

Warp distance is the first thing you need to know about a system — it decides whether you can reach it at all. It was in the source data all along and never imported. All 2,596 systems now show it, along with deep space and hazard flags.

Research nodes explain what they do

All 2,578 research nodes were listed by name and maximum level only — nothing on the page said what any of them actually did. They now carry the in-game description and the Operations level that reveals them, and the list is ordered so it reads in progression order.

The Syndicate ladder is real data — all 65 tiers

The Syndicate page showed five invented rows split across two made-up "tracks". The real thing is a single 65-tier loyalty ladder, and each tier now shows the exact points threshold and which permanent buff it unlocks.

Finished events are archived instead of disappearing

Events that have ended were removed from the calendar in 2.8.1 so they could not headline the forecast, but that left their pages reachable only by direct link. The Event Calendar now ends with a "Recently ended" table, so past events stay findable without cluttering what is live.

Hostiles have names, strength and drop lists

The last section still showing placeholder names is fixed. All 407 hostiles now show their real name — Orion Slaver, Nausicaan Outlaw, Pakled Thief — along with the strength range you will face and what they drop.

Removed four unverified guides

The Guides section launched with six articles carried over from the design prototype — placeholder text that read like real strategy advice. Two have been rewritten from sourced material. The remaining four are removed rather than left standing, because nothing in the game data or any current source backs up what they claimed.

Every officer now has their biography

All 278 officer pages had an empty "About this officer" section. They now carry the in-game biography — where the character comes from, what they did, and why they are on your crew — pulled from the game data and cleaned up for reading.

Two more prototype guides replaced with sourced ones

The Guides section shipped with six placeholder articles copied from the design prototype. Two more are now real: a starter guide to what each Operations level unlocks, built entirely from the game data, and a rewrite of the Ops 39 guide around the research gate that replaced the old resource wall in Update 93.1.

Forbidden & Chaos Tech is real data now

The Forbidden Tech section had been showing five hand-written example rows from the design prototype. It now lists all 59 real augments with their rarity, what each buff does, and the in-game description including unlock and max values.

Buildings, missions and resources finally have real names

Three parts of the database had been shipping placeholder text since launch: buildings were "Building #12", missions were empty entirely, and nearly every resource showed its internal key like "Resource_Parsteel". All three are fixed — 109 buildings, 4,127 missions and 2,667 resource names, all from the source data.

Ship pages gained build data, and the Ra'Ul Reaver arrived

Ship pages now show how long a ship takes to build, how far it levels, and which drydock level it needs — three fields that were in the source data all along but never imported. The refresh that surfaced them also brought in the Ra'Ul Reaver, the Grade 6 Sigma raider from Update 93, plus a guide on how it actually works.

First real guide, and the Alliance Tournaments return

The Guides section had been running on placeholder text copied from the design prototype since launch. It now has its first researched guide, covering the change that turns the jump to Operations 40 into a research gate. Alliance Tournaments, announced for August 10th, are on the calendar.

The event calendar shows events that are actually running

The Event Calendar and the home page were listing finished events alongside live ones, and because the calendar sorts soonest-ending first, the finished ones sorted to the top — the featured slot had been headlining a month-old arc labelled both "ACTIVE ARC" and "ENDED" at the same time. Both pages now only show events that are still running.

Guides can show pictures, and there is finally a safe way to publish one

Guide pages now render a hero image and an optional screenshot with a caption under each section, instead of being walls of text. Behind the scenes, guides got the same locked-aware publishing script events already had, so writing one no longer risks being overwritten by the placeholder seeder.

Beyond The Preset List: why a crew works, and situation filtering

Crew Library's "Beyond The Preset List" section now explains why each computer-generated crew scores the way it does, guesses more situations (including PvP) from the fuller officer ability text stfc.space provides, and actually respects the situation filter chips instead of always showing everything unfiltered.

Officer page fixes: no-CM title/icon, synergy placement, rank names

Fixes three issues found on real officer pages right after 2.6.0 shipped: officers without a real Captain's Maneuver were missing their title and icon, the Synergy Bonus breakdown was separated from the Captain's Maneuver it belongs to, and Rank Bonus tables showed abbreviated R1-R5 instead of the real rank name.

Officer pages get ability titles, rank bonuses, and synergy officers

Officer detail pages are enriched from stfc.space's own officer database — ability titles and icons, per-rank bonus tables, a 3-way Synergy Bonus breakdown, extended rank rewards, per-trait level-up costs, and a Synergy Officers list, cross-checked against our existing data rather than blindly overwriting it.

Crew Library discovers crews beyond the preset list

Crew Library no longer stops at the curated preset matrix — it now searches the officers you actually own for strong combinations the preset list never covered, scored with the same strength formula.

Away Teams planner & profile hub

The Crew Builder gained a full Away Teams module and a real account layer: every mission from the ATA planning sheet is now scored against your roster, and your profile keeps avatar, KPIs and preferences in one place.

Crew strength index

Pre-set crews are no longer an unordered list — every crew you can field is scored 0–100 and ranked, and the optimizer picks a hero crew per task with ranked alternates.

Data refresh & mobile fixes

Ship and hostile tables re-synced with the current game build, plus a handful of layout repairs on narrow screens.

Crew Builder beta

First public build of the Crew Builder: sign in, import your roster, and see which pre-set crews you can actually field.

Navigation rebuild

The wiki moved from a flat page list to a sectioned database with a More menu, a unified header and full-text search across every entry type.