How bonuses combine

Every bonus in the game belongs to one of three buckets. Bonuses in the same bucket add up; the three buckets multiply.

The buckets

Permanent bonuses last as long as you keep what gives them:

• research, officers, Dark Matter extras and commander equipment;
• experience levels, 1 % per level (Experience and achievements);
• card set bonuses, each kind capped at 5 % (Cards and packs);
• the buildings of your alliance base, once you have been in the alliance long enough (Alliance base);
• the levels of your governors, bought with academy points (Governors);
• the perks of your current faction (Factions).

Temporary bonuses run out: the boosts listed below, bought for a while.

Artifacts that start a boost count as Temporary too (Stash and containers).

Alliance operations count as Temporary too, added to a boost of the same kind (Alliance base). Production is paid for the time since a planet was last updated, so an operation that starts or ends in that time counts only for the part of it the operation ran.

Server bonuses are events the admins run for the whole universe.

The rule

Take metal production with a research and an officer in the Permanent bucket, two boosts in the Temporary bucket and an event in the Server bucket. The result is

(1 + research + officer) x (1 + first boost + second boost) x (1 + event)

so two boosts of one kind add their percentages instead of multiplying them. A bucket never falls below zero.

Speed bonuses follow the same rule. The Permanent bucket shortens a build, a research or a flight by its sum, never by more than 75 %; the Temporary and Server buckets are speed factors that divide the time.

In this universe the Arsenal runs, and with it a combat ceiling: every non-research combat bonus together, Arsenal modules included, counts at most 250 percentage points per stat (The Arsenal). The Arsenal adds nothing to any speed bonus.

The universe's own speed

Build speed, fleet speed and resources are not bonuses: they are the base all three buckets multiply. In this universe they are 1x, 1x and 1x.

The boost shop