Factions & Reputation

How the Chain Reaction Works

Freelancer's reputation system is not a simple meter. Every faction has allies and enemies, and your actions ripple through the entire network.

Here is a concrete example.

The Lane Hackers are criminal — ex-Ageira employees who turned pirate in Liberty space. The Liberty Police Inc. considers them enemies. When you kill Lane Hackers, two things happen simultaneously: your rep with Liberty Police goes up, and your rep with the Lane Hackers goes down. That's the obvious part.

The less obvious part: the Lane Hackers are allied with the Liberty Rogues. When your Lane Hacker rep drops, your Liberty Rogue rep also drops — because you've been killing their allies. Do this enough and the Rogues turn hostile. The Liberty Rogues are allied with the Xenos. Eventually the whole criminal network in Liberty space starts treating you as a threat, not because you shot at them, but because of who you shot at.

The chain works in reverse too. Kill enough Liberty Police and your rep with the Lane Hackers goes up — they're happy to see you making trouble for their enemies. But your Liberty Police rep is now damaged, and the police start treating you with suspicion. Damage it enough and they become hostile, which means docking lockouts in policed stations. That matters.

The practical lesson: every fight has political consequences. "I'll just shoot this one pirate" is never just that. Understand the alliances before you pull the trigger.

The Bribe System

Every station's bar has NPCs who will sell you a reputation boost with a specific faction — for a price.

The bribe cost scales with how badly you've damaged the relationship. A faction that's merely annoyed with you is cheap to fix. A faction that's been shooting you on sight is expensive. The cost can become prohibitive if you've done serious damage.

There's a floor. Bribing can bring your rep back from hostile to neutral, roughly, but it cannot make a faction love you if you've been killing them enthusiastically. The game distinguishes between "hasn't done anything to us" neutral and "actually likes you" positive. Bribeable recovery caps at neutral or near-neutral. Getting to genuinely positive rep requires actually doing things those factions approve of — which for criminal factions usually means killing their enemies.

One practical note: if you're running a legitimate trader route and accidentally drop a police faction into hostility through some reputation chain consequence, bribing is the fastest recovery. Find the bar, find the bribe NPC, pay the fee. It's not as clean as never damaging the rep in the first place, but it works.

Mutual Exclusivity — Pick a Side

This is the system's central trade-off and the thing most players don't fully reckon with until it bites them.

Take Liberty as the example. The Liberty Navy and Liberty Police Inc. are fully lawful. The Lane Hackers are fully criminal and consider Liberty's corporate structure an enemy worth fighting. These two sides are at war with each other.

You can build positive rep with the Liberty Navy by running combat missions against pirates and criminal factions, completing campaign missions in Liberty space, and staying on the right side of their patrol interdictions. Your Liberty Police rep benefits similarly.

But every Lane Hacker you kill for those Navy missions is pushing your Lane Hacker rep down. And Lane Hacker missions — which pay well and give access to unique equipment — require positive or neutral rep with them to access. If your Navy rep is maxed, your Lane Hacker rep is in ruins, and vice versa.

The choice matters for access. Criminal factions sell the best ships and the highest-end weapons. The Sabre is sold in Corsair-adjacent space. The Anubis requires Order rep, which is antagonistic to the houses. If you want the top-tier equipment, you need to be willing to accept that some house factions will shoot at you.

Traders who want safe passage in house space prioritize lawful factions. Combat specialists who want the best weapons accept criminal faction access. Explorers build Zoner rep for neutral passage everywhere and Order rep for deep space access. Most players end up somewhere in the middle with one or two factions they've written off.

Faction Tier Overview

Tier 1 — House Military and Police

The most impactful on moment-to-moment gameplay. Liberty Navy, Liberty Police Inc., Bretonian Armed Forces, Bretonian Police Authority, Kusari Naval Forces, Kusari State Police, Rheinland Military, Rheinland Police. Hostility with any of these in their home territory creates docking lockouts and active patrols hunting you. These are the reps that determine whether you can land in a house.

Tier 2 — Corporate Factions

Ageira Technologies, Interspace Commerce, Cryer Pharmaceuticals, Samura Industries, Kishiro Technologies, Republican Shipping, Kruger Minerals. These factions control specific trade route access and sell certain mid-tier equipment. Damaging their rep is less immediately punishing than police hostility but closes off vendors.

Tier 3 — Independent Factions

Zoners, Independent Miners Guild, Bounty Hunters Guild, Planetform. Easiest to maintain neutrality with — they're generally not in open conflict with other factions and won't be affected much by lawful or criminal kills. Zoner rep specifically is valuable for safe passage in border world Freeport stations.

Tier 4 — Criminal Organizations

Lane Hackers, Liberty Rogues, Xenos (Liberty), Mollys, Gaians (Bretonia), Blood Dragons, Golden Chrysanthemums, Hogosha (Kusari), Red Hessians, Unioners, Bundschuh (Rheinland), Corsairs, Outcasts (Border Worlds). These factions require specific effort to build positive rep — usually by killing their enemies, which damages lawful rep. The payoff is access to unique equipment markets.

Tier 5 — Alien

The Nomads. Special rules. Campaign-governed. Not bribeable. Their rep is handled differently from every other faction.

Practical Strategies by Playstyle

Trader: Keep all four house police and military factions at neutral or better. You need to dock in house space freely. Run trade jobs that don't involve criminal faction cargo. Bribe when needed — it's a cost of doing business. Avoid killing police accidentally through mission chains. The Bounty Hunters Guild rep is worth maintaining — they're neutral, run in most systems, and their missions are clean.

Combat Specialist / Bounty Hunter: Military and police rep is worth maintaining early — it keeps your base of operations accessible. Accept that running combat missions against specific pirate factions will damage those factions' reps. Prioritize the factions whose equipment you want access to. For end-game ships, accept criminal space alignment in the Border Worlds and maintain a separate Liberty/Bretonia base for resupply.

Explorer: The Zoners are your most important non-story faction. Zoner Freeport stations are trading posts in the border worlds — neutral ground where you can dock regardless of criminal faction conflicts around you. Build Zoner rep by completing Zoner missions and avoiding Zoner kills. The Order is the key faction for deep Omicron access — you need positive or neutral Order rep to reach the systems where the Nomad storyline's roots are and where certain unique equipment is sold.

Complete Faction Table

Sources

• Freelancer game files — faction rep values and alliance networks (community documentation)
• The Starport forum — rep system documentation and guides: https://the-starport.com
• In-game faction descriptions and bartender dialogue (primary source)