The world map

Board the jet at the base and the island becomes an archipelago you fly across: 27 landmasses, eight gather nodes, four patrol zones, and a runway to come home to.

Flying

WASD or the arrow keys, or click to set a course. Movement is at constant screen speed rather than constant world speed. In an isometric projection those are different things, and world speed makes vertical travel crawl at about two thirds the pace of horizontal. Measured before the fix: 35 pixels against 56 for the same held duration.

The wall is the edge of the map

The flight boundary is clamped in frame space, at the edge of what is actually drawn.

It used to be a rectangle in world coordinates, and that cannot be the same boundary: an isometric projection turns a world-space rectangle into a parallelogram on screen. Flying due west hit an invisible wall at 13 per cent of the map width with open painted ocean still ahead, while the corners of the same rectangle projected past the image entirely. The world bounds are still there as an outer sanity net; the wall you meet is the coastline of the picture.

Gather nodes

Eight nodes across the archipelago: ore, timber and fuel. Harvesting spends energy and starts a cooldown per node. Yields, cooldowns and the skill each one trains are server rules; the map only says where they are.

Patrols

Four tiers: easy, normal, hard, impossible.

The opponent is matched to you. A power score from your fitted deck, pilot and airframe indexes into a ladder of house loadouts, and the tier shifts you along it. Easy sits below you, impossible far above, and the same tier gets harder as you grow, which is what fair feels like.

Claiming a tier you did not earn does not help. The server derives the patrol opponent from the tier you claimed, so claiming "impossible" means fighting the impossible-tier opponent.

Your aircraft on the map

The map flies the airframe you actually own. There is one 16-heading sprite sheet per airframe, because a single sheet meant buying a Heavy still showed an Interceptor.

Buy a different aircraft and the one on the map changes with it.