There's a Contracts entry in your sidebar, and if you've been treating this game as pure PvP you have probably walked past it. It's the one part of the game where the target isn't another player.
This is the manual for it: what the board offers, what accepting actually puts on the map, and how the fight differs from a raid.
The whole thing in one line
Take a contract off the board, a hostile NPC site appears on the map at a distance set by its difficulty, you go and break it, and you claim a fixed Salvage and Ore payout for the kill.
The board
Four slots. The board tops itself up whenever you open it, so there's always something on offer. Each contract carries a title, a threat read, a tier and its payout in Salvage and Ore.
Offers sit there for about 24 game-hours and then lapse and are replaced. Accepting one is free and reversible - abandoning puts it back on the board, so there's no penalty for changing your mind before you commit a force.
There are three kinds:
Strike - a hostile force to destroy. Available from the start.
Sabotage - a defended site where the objective is a specific structure, not a wipe. Needs HQ level 5.
Intel - a site to infiltrate and read. Also HQ level 5.
The threat labels on each card are a rough read, not a stat: Light, Moderate and Heavy scale with tier, while Defended and Surveyed flag a sabotage or intel job.
Worth naming honestly: below HQ 5 there are only three distinct strike templates in the catalogue, so a low-HQ board sits at three offers and repeats itself. Sabotage and intel open the board up at HQ 5; there's one elite strike gated behind HQ 7.
Accepting puts a real place on the map
This is the part that makes contracts feel different from a mission menu. When you accept, the game spawns an actual site on the shared map - a hostile position at real coordinates that you have to travel to, on the same map as everyone's bases.
Where it lands depends on the tier. The game aims for a target distance from your home tile and picks the nearest unclaimed spot to it:
| Tier | Target distance | Garrison size | Region |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ~4 hexes | ~20 units | Your own region |
| 2 | ~9 hexes | ~60 units | Your own region |
| 3 | ~18 hexes | ~150 units | May cross into a neighbouring region |
| 4 | ~30 hexes | ~350 units | May cross into a neighbouring region |
Garrison sizes carry a ±15% wobble, and the site's defences scale with tier too: a wall from tier 1, a sentry from tier 2, flak from tier 3. The composition is one of four shapes - a glass cannon, a turtle, a balanced force, or a ranged-heavy line - picked deterministically from the contract, so the same contract always generates the same opposition.
The site itself lives for about 24 game-hours and then collapses. Higher tiers put the fight further out, which means a longer march, a longer window where that force isn't home defending you, and a real decision rather than a free button.
What you can see before you commit
Clicking the site on the map gives you the public read, and it's deliberately thin:
Force size - roughly how many units are in there.
Threat - a single power number.
Estimated reward - the Salvage and Ore you'd claim.
That's size and strength. It tells you nothing about composition - which units, which structures, where the weight sits. This is the same information ladder the world dispatch described for player bases: the map tells you whether something is worth a closer look, a spy tells you whether to commit.
Scout the site with an operative and the panel fills in with a proper garrison dossier, corroborated across every run you've made against it. The deploy screen says as much if you haven't: no intel, scout it first.
The fight
It's the same combat engine as a raid - the four stats, the counter triangle, lane attrition, seeded rolls, the full battle report afterwards. If you've read the combat dispatch, you already know how the maths resolves. Your force travels at the pace of its slowest unit, exactly as it does going after a player.
Three ways it differs from a raid, all worth knowing:
Win and the contract flips to claimable, the site clears off the map, and you collect from the board.
The espionage line into it
Sabotage and intel contracts are resolved by operatives rather than armies, and they hook straight into the systems the intel dispatch covered.
Intel contracts close when your operative gets out alive. Extraction is the objective; losing the operative loses the job.
Sabotage contracts name a specific structure - the site's most valuable one - and close when you land a clean disable on that exact target.
The genuinely interesting bit is that espionage prep carries into the strike. Run an operative at a site before you attack it and you can:
Suppress its defence - roughly a 20% cut across the whole garrison's stats, holding for about 6 game-hours.
Disable a structure - that sentry or flak emplacement is simply gone from the fight, for about 24 game-hours.
Both are single use. The next strike you land consumes the effect. So a tier-3 site you can't quite take head-on becomes takeable if you soften it first and arrive inside the window - which is the loop I most want people to find.
How to play it well
The honest caveat
Plenty here is strawman and I'd rather say so than let you find out by feel.
The rewards are unbalanced against effort - they were placed as placeholders and have not had a proper pass. The missing launch cost is the bigger hole: PvE strikes are cheaper to send than the equivalent PvP raid, which is backwards, and I expect to close that gap. NPC walls currently contribute no damage soak - the wall level is generated and then not applied in the fight, so sites are a little softer than their defences suggest. And the low-HQ board is thin, three templates deep, until sabotage and intel unlock.
There's also a rough edge to know about: an accepted contract whose site collapses before you get there leaves you holding a job you can't finish. Abandon it and it goes back on the board.
This is the foundation, not the finished thing. The wider PvE pillar - reasons to push into the world that aren't a contract card - is the next build. What I want from this one is whether the loop is worth repeating: does taking a contract change what you do with an idle army, or is it a button you press once? Tell me either way.
- The Dev
Play: play.breachlands.com · The world, if you want it: breachlands.com/lore