Running a contract

Take your first paid job: open the board, sign an offer, fly the rocket that meets its goal, and watch the reward land. One flight, and the starter rocket is enough for it.

What you need

At the end you will have signed a contract, met its goal in flight, and been paid an advance and a reward on top of everything the flight already earned you.

Sign the job

  1. Open the Space Center. From the hangar, tap Center. The title reads "Space Center · Earth" and a strip of buildings stands along the ground.
  2. Tap the Administration. It is the wide office block on the strip. A ring is drawn round it and its sheet opens underneath, with its level and the two figures that matter: CONTRACTS AT ONCE and CONTRACT TIERS.
    The Space Center strip on Earth with the Administration ringed and its sheet open below, showing CONTRACTS AT ONCE and CONTRACT TIERS and an Open contracts button.
    The Administration's sheet. Open contracts is the button on the left along the bottom.
  3. Tap Open contracts. The board opens over the Space Center. The line under the title counts what you hold and what is on offer, for example 0 / 3 under way followed by how many offers there are. Offers sit under the heading ON OFFER.
    The contracts board: a heading UNDER WAY over two signed contracts with their goals, then ON OFFER over the offers, each with a green pay line and an Accept button.
    Each offer gives the company, the brief, the pay and two countdowns.
  4. Read one offer properly. Take Canopy between 1 and 3 km from Skyward Canopies. Its brief reads "Open a Parachute in the air, between 1 and 3 km, and bring the data home." The green line on the right says +100 now · +460 done. The grey line at the bottom gives two different clocks: how long the offer stays on the board, and how long you would have to finish it once signed, which for this job is two days.
  5. Tap Accept. The button reads "Signing…" for a moment. Then the row moves up under UNDER WAY, its goals appear underneath it with an open circle each, and your credits chip is a hundred richer. The countdown under the row now reads how long you have left and what the job costs if you miss it.
  6. Tap Close. Then close the Space Center and go back to the hangar.
Note
Sign before you fly. Goals are counted from the launch, so a contract taken on after the rocket left the pad waits for your next one.

Fly the goal

  1. Check the rocket carries what the job needs. This one needs a Parachute, and the starter rocket already has one on top of the pod. A goal that names a part is a goal you lose by leaving that part off.
  2. Launch. Tap Fly, then STAGE on the pad. The rocket climbs, the tank empties, and it coasts up and over.
  3. Watch the altitude on the way down. The counter at the top left is what the goal is judged against. This job wants the canopy opened between 1 and 3 km, so let the rocket fall past its peak and wait until that number is inside the band.
  4. Open the parachute inside the band. Tap the chute on top of the pod and tap Deploy. The canopy blooms, the fall slows, and the goal is met the instant the part fires. A toast slides down: CONTRACT COMPLETE, the job's title, and what it paid.
  5. Check the board without leaving the flight. Tap ≡ for the flight menu and then 📋 CONTRACTS. The board opens read-only with only what is under way on it, and a met goal is green with a ✓ in front of it. It works the same on the map.
    The read-only contracts board over a flight, listing two contracts under way, one goal ticked green and one still an open circle.
    In flight the board is your mission list: ticks are goals already met.
  6. Land and recover. Set the rocket down, wait for it to stand still, then open the menu and tap ⬇ RECOVER. The reward was already paid when the goal was met; the recovery is the parts money on top.

What you should see

Back at the Administration, the board carries a new row under RECENT with a ✓ in front of the job's title and the reward beside it in green. The UNDER WAY count has dropped by one, so there is room to sign the next offer, and the offer you just flew may or may not ever be drawn for you again.

The contracts board with a CONTRACT COMPLETE toast over it naming a finished job and its credits, and two ticked rows under the RECENT heading below the offers.
A finished job leaves a ✓ row under RECENT with what it paid beside it.

What went wrong?

The goal never ticked. The condition was not met inside one flight. A height goal is judged on the altitude at the moment it happens, so opening the chute at 4 km misses a band that ends at 3 km. Fly it again; the contract is still under way until its deadline.

The Accept button is greyed out. Every slot on the Administration is full. Finish one, drop one, or extend the building. The line under the title says which.

The board says contracts are signed in the shared world. You are in sandbox. Leave it from the settings and open the board again.

The deadline ran out. The row moves into RECENT with a ✕, and the advance comes back out of your credits with a tenth of it on top. Nothing else is lost; sign another.

Next

Keep every slot full. Contracts pay best when one flight carries several of them, and a rocket that has an Engine, a Parachute and a Thermometer aboard can meet three companies' goals on one climb. When the first tier starts repeating itself, extend the Administration to open the next one. Read Contracts for how the board behaves and the contracts reference for what each tier pays.

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