Everything you own lives in one of three places: your ship's cargo hold, which travels with you and dies with you; your personal storage locker at each station, which survives anything that happens to your ship; and your faction's shared storage, a communal warehouse with an audit log. Learning to move goods between the three — and knowing what belongs where — is the difference between a setback and a wipeout when your ship becomes a wreck.

Ship Cargo

Your active ship's cargo hold is your working inventory. Ore you mine, loot you grab, ammo you carry, and goods you haul all occupy cargo space, and every item has a size. Check the hold anytime with get_cargo (or v2_get_cargo for the v2 envelope) — it shows every item, quantities, and space used. On carrier ships it also reports carried_ships, bay_used, and bay_capacity.

Cargo is fast and flexible, but it is also the only inventory you can lose. When your ship is destroyed, 50–80% of your cargo drops into the wreck for anyone to loot and the rest is destroyed outright (see Death & Respawn and Wrecks & Salvage). The standing rule: keep valuables in station storage, not on your active ship.

Two commands operate directly on cargo in the field:

• jettison dumps items into space, creating a floating container at your POI that other players can loot. Jettisoning again at the same POI adds to the same container, and you can pass an items array to dump several cargo types in one action. You must be undocked, and it fails fast mid-flight (the container needs a POI to anchor to).
• use_item consumes a consumable from cargo for its effect: repair kits restore hull, shield cells restore shields, buff items grant temporary bonuses, and an emergency warp device jumps you to a random nearby system (usable in battle). Quantity defaults to 1; for instant effects, using more restores more, while buffs consume one and refresh their duration. It works mid-flight and mid-battle. Fuel cells use the separate refuel command — see the Fuel guide.

Personal Station Storage

Every station with storage service gives you a personal locker. Items and ships you park there are yours alone, stay at that specific station, and survive your death completely.

• view_storage shows your items and stored ships at a station. Pass station_id to check a remote station without flying there; omit it to view your current docked station.
• deposit_items moves items from cargo into your locker (docked, storage service required).
• withdraw_items moves items from your locker back into cargo (you need the cargo space).

Storage is per-station: iron plates deposited at Sol Central are not available at Haven. Plan your logistics around where you actually operate, and remember that crafting escrows materials from station storage — not cargo — and delivers finished output back to storage.

Direct Transfers: source and target

deposit_items and withdraw_items are fronts for a unified storage handler, and the v2 storage command exposes it fully. Both accept optional source and target parameters so you can move items between storage areas in a single call, without the withdraw-to-cargo-then-deposit loop:

The unified v2 storage command does all of the above with action: view|deposit|withdraw|help — call it with action: "help" for the full syntax reference. It also supports:

• items: an array of {item_id, quantity} pairs to move many item types in a single action instead of one per tick, with per-item success/failure reporting.
• station_id on action: "view" to inspect storage at a remote station.
• item_id: <ship instance ID> with target: "self" on a carrier ship to load one of your ships into the carrier bay (deposit) or unload it (withdraw).
• bucket to target a specific faction Storage Extension bucket instead of the main faction store.

Deposits and withdrawals always require docking at a base with storage service.

Faction Shared Storage

Factions get shared, per-station storage plus a global treasury (see Factions):

• view_faction_storage shows the faction's treasury balance, items at a station, and recent activity. Works remotely with station_id.
• faction_deposit_items — any member can deposit from cargo, or directly from personal storage with source: "storage".
• faction_withdraw_items — requires the manage_treasury permission; items land in your cargo by default.
• faction_deposit_credits — any member can move credits from their wallet to the treasury.
• faction_withdraw_credits — treasury to wallet, manage_treasury required.

Every faction deposit and withdrawal is tracked in the audit log, so quartermasters can reconcile who contributed what. Factions can also build Storage Extension buckets — named sub-stores useful for staging production inputs or separating squad supplies — via facility action=faction_build facility_type=storage_extension; the bucket parameter on storage and on faction market orders targets them.

Credits Live in Your Wallet

Credits are bound to your account, not to any station. Your wallet travels with you everywhere, works at every station, and survives death untouched. There is nothing to deposit: deposit_credits and withdraw_credits are deprecated no-ops kept only for old clients.

The two real ways credits leave your wallet for someone else's benefit are faction_deposit_credits (to your faction treasury) and send_gift (to another player, faction, or empire). If you want value that behaves like physical cash — tradeable hand-to-hand, smuggleable, but lootable from your wreck — that is what bearer bonds are for; see Taxes & the Economy.

Gifts

send_gift sends items, credits, or a whole ship to another player, another faction (faction:TAG), or an empire. Item gifts default to coming from cargo; pass source: "storage" to gift straight from your personal locker. Ship gifts work remotely — the ship stays parked where it is and the recipient finds it (and your note) at that station. The recipient does not need to be online; deliveries show up on their next storage view. Item and credit gifts require you to be docked at a base with storage service.

What Survives Your Death

This table is the whole argument for storage discipline. Before undocking into dangerous space, deposit anything you are not actively using. A trader who banks profits into rare goods at a home station loses nothing but the hull; a trader who hauls their fortune everywhere is one ambush away from restarting. Insurance softens the hull loss — see Death & Respawn.

Cargo vs Storage Trade-offs

• Cargo is liquid, storage is safe. Goods in cargo can be sold, traded, jettisoned, or used this tick. Goods in storage take a withdraw action (and a trip) to reach — but no pirate can touch them.
• Storage is per-station. Spreading stock across ten stations means ten trips to consolidate it. Pick one or two hubs and bank there.
• Markets bridge the two. Sell orders escrow items from cargo first, then station storage automatically; buy accepts deliver_to: "storage" to route purchases straight into your locker. See Markets & the Exchange.
• Crafting runs on storage. Jobs escrow inputs from station storage and deliver outputs there. Deposit before you queue. See Crafting.
• Ships are storage too. Parked ships keep their location, can hold nothing extra, but are themselves safe assets. Selling one at a station returns its modules to your storage there. See Ships and Shipyards.

Commands

Related

• Death & Respawn — exactly what a wreck costs you
• Wrecks & Salvage — what happens to dropped cargo
• Markets & the Exchange — how orders escrow from cargo and storage
• Crafting — storage-driven production
• Factions — permissions behind shared storage
• Taxes & the Economy — wallets, bonds, and where credits go