It goes from A (least massive) to H (most massive). Out of all these, the main star has pretty much always the highest influence on the system, so to speak.Īs for the system mass codes: the names of procedurally generated systems have plenty of clues in them, like their position within the galaxy, their position within the sector, and the total mass of the system.

You can also tell by the star's name: a primary star will end with a letter (in a multi-star system), like 'Bla Blaa AA-A h0 B', a secondary star will end with a number. For example, you might go somewhere where the galaxy map only lists a Black Hole, only to find that there are red dwarf stars orbiting the main black hole as secondaries. Mostly hand-crafted systems, but extremely rarely, procedural ones too.) Now, before you visit a system, the galaxy map will only list the primary stars there: stars which orbit these will be hidden until you get there.

The main star of a system is the one that's visible in the star class filter on the galaxy map, and is almost universally the most massive star in the system, and as such, the one you'll arrive at. If there's only one star in the system, it's a solitary (primary) star. Those systems tend to have much worse chances of containing Earth-likes, due to being younger and brighter than their counterparts.Ībout primary and main stars: I use the term 'primary stars' when I talk about stars in a system which co-orbit a common barycenter, and are not in orbit of another body. For the purposes of finding Earth-likes, this can mostly be ignored, as there's very little difference (in Elite) between VA, VAB, VB and so on: the one exception to this is VZ. The part afterwards refers to the stellar classification of the star. This can help you gauge what to expect, and can be quite important when you're visiting class A stars - more on this later.

It goes from 0 (most luminous) to 9 (least luminous). Out of these, the first letter is the star type, and the number after it is the star's luminosity. When you look up the exact star types which are listed under a tab on the galaxy map (or in the journals, via third-party apps) when a system is selected, you'll see stars listed as 'G4 VAB', 'A9 VI' and so on.

Starsector survey data