Resources and energy

The three resources, the energy rule, and the storage ceiling.

Three resources, plus energy, plus one currency you cannot mine.

Ferrolite is structure: hulls, walls, the mass of everything. Xenogas is what moves and what burns. Data is the slowest and the scarcest, and it is what research eats.

Energy

Energy is not stored and not carried. A colony produces it and spends it in the same instant, and if the draw exceeds the supply every producer on that colony slows down together — the shortfall is shared, not queued. This is the first wall almost every new commander hits.

Storage

What you produce and what a fleet brings home both stop at the warehouse ceiling, and the rest evaporates. Raising it is rarely the exciting purchase and often the right one.

Dark Matter

The fourth currency, and the one no extractor produces. It accumulates slowly from a Particle Accelerator — which is why the Accelerator shows no resource output on the Buildings page despite being one of the most expensive things you can build: what it makes is not counted in the three.

It buys things the ordinary economy cannot. Four Dark Matter upgrades — the Lances, the Aegis, the Forge and the Veil — are priced in it alone, and they are bought in their own panel rather than in the tech tree, so scrolling the tree looking for them will not find them. It is also part of the price of some late building cores and of igniting a star.