Welcome to Ferion. This page gets you through your first sessions without dumping every mechanic on you at once — once you've found your footing, the rest of the wiki is right here for depth.
Ferion is a persistent, browser-based 4X space strategy game. The galaxy is live whether you're online or not:
- Days are the short tick — ships move on a per-day cadence.
- Weeks are the long tick — production builds, research advances, planets grow, taxes come in.
You don't have to "play" continuously. Log in, plan a few weeks of orders, log out, come back. The world ticks forward on its own. See Days and weeks for the full cadence, and Hours online limit for how time online is tracked.
Ferion has a built-in help system — use it. It's much better than memorising the wiki up front.
The first time you do something important — meet another empire, settle a planet, take fire, hit a particular menu — a tutorial popup appears explaining what just happened and what to do. There are dozens of these; they cover everything from the first contact handshake to your first Ringworld conversion to the end-of-game screen.
These popups only show once each. You can:
- Turn the tutorial off entirely under Settings → Disable help if you've played before.
- Turn it back on later — the tutorials get re-armed when the game starts a new run.
Many panels in the interface — population settings, production controls, terraforming, abandon, etc. — show a short help paragraph at the top of the card, right under the title. It's a one- or two-sentence explanation of what that specific control does. It's always visible (no click needed), so you can read what a slider does without having to leave the screen for the wiki.
Between the tutorial popups and these inline help notes, most of the surface-level "what does this do?" questions are answered in-game. The wiki is here for why things work the way they do.
When you create a new empire you get:
- A homeworld — a Medium planet of a random type (Lava / Desert / Temperate / Oceanic / Gas Giant / Ice Giant). Its type and size define the +50% match bonuses you'll chase for the rest of the game — settling and terraforming worlds that match your homeworld will always be better than the alternatives. See Settling & population.
- Four starter ship designs ready to go:
- Fighter — small frame, lasers, a basic armour + scanner. Your default warship.
- Bomber — small frame with nuclear bombs. Hits planets, not ships.
- Scout — small frame with a fission drive and Deep Space Scanner. Cheap, fast, reveals the galaxy.
- Colonizer — small frame with a Colonization Pod and a basic scanner. Settles uncolonized planets.
- Free starting ships — a couple of scouts and several colonizers, already built and at your homeworld.
- The basic ship components (small frame, rocket engine, basic shields, lasers, reinforced hulls, tactical array, colonization pod, nuclear bombs) — so you can also make your own designs.
You don't have to build anything new to start playing — your starter ships are enough to scout and settle for the first couple of weeks.
A solid opening looks like this:
- Get scouts moving early. You can see every star on the map from day 1, but the planets around a star stay hidden until something with scanners gets close — and you can't settle a planet you can't see. See Fog of War.
- Pick targets that match your homeworld. Matching the homeworld in type gives +50% to growth/production/science; matching in size is another +50%. A Lava player should grab Lava planets first, ideally Medium ones.
- Settle aggressively. Population is the only thing that matters for victory (see How to win), and population grows faster across many planets than it does on a few. Push colonizers out as soon as you have somewhere worth landing.
- Watch the first week tick. When the week passes, every planet you own runs its production, research, food, and population growth. The Planets view tells you whether each colony is actually doing something useful.
For the actual commands and how to chain them — Move, Settle, Explore, Follow, etc. — see Ship Commands. The in-game help will walk you through the click sequence the first time you try each one.
¶ Set up production and research
Once you have a few colonies:
- Queue something on every planet. A planet with an empty production queue is wasted income. Even cheap buildings (Hydroponic Farms, Ore Harvesters, Resource Silos) cost only 4–7 production and start contributing immediately. See Buildings and Production.
- Pick a research target. Open Research. Cheap early techs cost as little as 10 science — grab
nuclear_energy, advanced_optics, advanced_engineering early for foundations. See Research.
Sooner or later your scouts will trip another empire's scanners. You'll get a First Contact popup and you'll see them on the map. A few things to know:
- You're protected from much bigger empires. Ferion's Ranked Combat rules stop empires far above your rank from declaring war on you — only top-5 leaders, players above you, players within 2 ranks below, or inactive players are targetable. Most mid-rankers are safe from being stomped on.
- Don't insult AI players in chat. AI empires don't randomly declare war — they only retaliate. They will also retaliate against insults, and they read what you type. Be civil.
- Send a friendship request, then a NAP. Diplomacy is sequential — Neutral → Friend → NAP. Each step takes a mutual agreement and 300 days of expiry, so start the process early.
- Build a few more settlers. Colonise the other planets in your own star system first, then send settlers to the closest stars on the map. Early expansion is the most reliable way to build a population lead.
You've now got the basics — the rest of the wiki is reference material for when you hit a specific question:
- Settling & population — growing planets, match bonuses, the 30-pop cap.
- Production and Buildings — the queue, what to build, and why.
- Research — the tech tree, science income, how the queue handles prerequisites.
- Ship designs — design your own ships when you outgrow the starter set.
- Fleets and Ship Commands — moving multiple ships as a unit.
- Diplomacy — friendship, NAPs, war, Ranked Combat protection.
- How to win — the single victory condition: 50% of galactic population after day 500.
- Alliances — the underdog science bonus and shared maps.
Good luck — see you on the leaderboard.