Starter Protection

Nobody should lose their colony before they have learned where the build queue is. Every newly placed colony starts under starter protection: a window where other players simply cannot attack you. It is the game's guarantee that your first sessions are about learning and building, not about being farmed by whoever settled first.

What protection does

While starter protection is active, hostile squads cannot be sent against your colony. You are free to do everything else: build, recruit, scan, take outposts, join an alliance, and watch your neighbors. The world can see you, but it cannot touch your home.

Protection covers your colony, not everything you do. If you march out and pick fights, those fights are real, and ground you take outside your walls is contested like anyone else's. Protection shields the home you are building, not the wars you choose to start.

How long it lasts

Starter protection runs for 100 ticks from the moment you place your colony. The game warns you when about 20 ticks remain, so the end never catches you asleep. When it expires, you are a normal citizen of the realm: attackable, conquerable, and expected to have walls of your own by now.

Use the window deliberately. One hundred ticks of uninterrupted economy is a gift; a player who spends it stacking resource structures and a starter squad comes out of protection far stronger than one who idles through it.

Breaking it early

You can end your own protection at any time, and the game pays you to do it. Breaking early converts every tick you gave up into a temporary worker boost: your worker growth runs at +50% for as many ticks as your protection had left. Drop a 60-tick remainder and you get 60 ticks of boosted worker growth in exchange for becoming attackable now.

The trade is real on both sides. The boost compounds your economy exactly when compounding matters most, but it also opens your walls early, in a neighborhood you may not fully understand yet. Confident players in quiet corners break early and bank the workers. Careful players in crowded ones let the clock run.

Where you see it

Your remaining protection is shown in the Progression hub's overview, and an attack aimed at a protected colony is refused with the protection named as the reason, which is exactly the point: nobody wastes an army marching at a wall that cannot be hit.

See also: the New Player Guide for what to do with your protected ticks, Workers and Production for why the early-break boost matters, and Combat for what changes once you are attackable.