Support · Step 02
Your first game
A game night happens in two places at once: this site, where your crew gathers and the mission is launched, and Empty Epsilon, where you actually fly. Here’s the whole sequence.
01
Sign in and open the bridge
Sign in on this site and go to My account → Play. That tab is the bridge: the lobby, your crew, the mission list and the voice chat all live there. Keep it open all evening — you’ll be switching between it and the game.
02
Create a room, or join your crew’s
The lobby lists the rooms currently open. Join one, or create your own and give it a name your friends will recognise. Whoever creates the room owns it, and only the owner can close it and launch the mission.
[ SCREENSHOT — the lobby: list of open rooms and the Create room button ]
03
Claim your station
Inside the room there’s a three-step strip at the top. Step one glows until you’ve picked your consoles — tap it and choose from the overlay. You can take more than one; on a short crew people usually double up. Step two is your contribution to the run, and it’s optional. Step three tells you whether you’re ready, and tells the owner whether everyone else is.
This is also where the room chat is, for the part of the evening where everyone argues about who gets Science. New to a console? Read its page before you sit down — it takes five minutes and saves twenty.
[ SCREENSHOT — the room: three-step strip, the crew list, and the station picker overlay open ]
04
Close the room and pick a mission
When everyone’s in, the owner closes the room — that’s what tells the system your crew is final. The mission list appears underneath. You’ll only see the missions your crew can actually fly: some need a minimum number of people present, and some only open up if somebody aboard earned the right to them in an earlier game. If a mission you were expecting isn’t there, that’s usually why.
05
Launch, and read the connection card
The owner hits launch. After a few seconds of assigning a server, the room shows a connection card with two things everybody needs:
Server address
game.umbraorbital.com:356NN
Game password
IN CAPITALS
Two things people get wrong here. The port changes from game to game — we run several games at once and yours gets whichever server is free, so copy the address off the card every time instead of trusting your memory or an old bookmark. And the password is case sensitive and always uppercase.
06
Join from Empty Epsilon
In the game: Join server → type the address from the card → enter the password → pick the ship, then your console. Take the station you claimed in the room — the game won’t stop you sitting somewhere else, but your crew is counting on the seat being filled.
[ SCREENSHOT — Empty Epsilon: the Join server dialog with an address typed in, and the station select screen ]
07
Turn on the voice chat
Back in the room, at the bottom, there’s a Room audio card: connect, allow the microphone, and you’re in the crew channel. No separate call to set up. It only runs while that page is open, so leave it open in a window beside the game — more on that here.
08
Ending the mission
Most missions end themselves when the story does. If you want to stop early — or the mission is done and nobody feels like flying home — there’s an End scenario button on one of the consoles. Either way the server tallies up what happened, writes it to everyone’s character and shuts itself down. The room then says the game is over, and the owner can reopen it for another run.
Don’t just close the game and walk away mid-mission if you can help it. Nothing catastrophic happens — but the story gets written down as you left it.
Two things about rooms
The ◀ Lobby button is just navigation — go and look at the room list, come back, nothing is lost. Abandon the room is the real exit, and if you owned the room it hands it to somebody else on the way out. It’ll warn you first.
And once a mission has launched, somebody has to actually turn up. If nobody connects from Empty Epsilon within twenty minutes, the server assumes the evening fell through, cancels the game and gives everyone their contribution back.