The Sirius Sector

How Sirius Came to Be

Eight hundred years ago, Earth was at war.

The Alliance and the Coalition — two great power blocs — fought a conflict that looked like it was ending human civilization. Before the Coalition could win, the Alliance launched five Sleeper Ships: massive colony vessels carrying the genetic, cultural, and technological seeds of five civilizations. They aimed at a distant system. They left.

The journey took 800 years. The ships carried their passengers in cryogenic sleep, tended by small crews on rotation. Not all of the journeys went smoothly — the conditions onboard each ship during those eight centuries shaped the cultures that eventually landed. Liberty's ship, the Mayflower, arrived intact and confident. The Hispania, the fifth ship, didn't make it to the planned destination at all.

When the ships arrived in the Sirius sector — so named in their charts, though no one on the ships had been awake long enough to confirm it — they found empty, habitable space. They landed. They built. Eight hundred years later, their descendants have the five houses: Liberty, Bretonia, Kusari, Rheinland, and the Outcasts of the border worlds.

The Coalition never followed. What happened to Earth is never confirmed in the base game.

The Geography of the Sector

The sector has three regions. Understanding them makes navigation make sense.

House space is the settled, policed core. Liberty's New York system is the starting point. Bretonian, Kusari, and Rheinland space each has its own dense cluster of systems connected by maintained jump gate networks. The Jump Gate Consortium and Ageira Technologies operate and maintain these gates — they're fast, safe, marked on every nav map, and the primary way of moving between systems in house territory.

House space has police. Traffic controls. Trade lane infrastructure maintained by Interspace Commerce. If your reputation with a house's police force drops badly enough, you lose docking rights — which matters because most equipment vendors, repair facilities, and mission boards are in house space.

The Border Worlds are everything past the edge of house control. The Omega, Sigma, Tau, and Omicron systems are ungoverned. No house maintains them. No trade lanes run through them — only jump holes, which are hidden and unmapped. Corsairs run the Omicrons. Outcasts hold Malta and the surrounding systems. Zoners occupy neutral ground in Freeport stations. The Order operates in deep border space.

The Border Worlds are where the game stops holding your hand.

Independent systems sit in between — systems that are technically accessible from house space but are contested or neutral. Some Sigma systems are mining territory without a clear house claim. Freeport stations are Zoner-run neutral ground that will trade with anyone.

Jump Gates vs. Jump Holes

This distinction matters more than it looks.

Jump gates are official infrastructure. They are large structures built and maintained by the Jump Gate Consortium and Ageira Technologies. Every gate appears on your nav map. You fly to it, enter the gate, and transit to the destination system. Fast, safe, marked. The price of speed and safety is visibility — the police know exactly where you went, and criminal cargo will be checked at certain gates.

Jump holes are natural wormholes. They are not built by anyone, not maintained, not marked on the standard nav map. They exist because space is strange. Finding them requires flying through a system looking for the visual effect — a subtle distortion in space — or being told where they are. Bartenders tell you. Rumours in bars point at them. Other players tell each other in forums and guides.

The practical consequence: jump holes connect places that the official gate network doesn't. The best ships in the game are sold in Border World space, reachable only through jump holes or through dangerous gate routes that require specific faction reputation to use. If you want the Sabre or the Eagle, you need to know where the jump holes go.

This is the game's reward system for exploration. The official route is safe and limited. The unofficial route is dangerous and opens everything.

Faction Alignment Overview

The sector has four broad layers of faction allegiance. Each layer interacts with the others.

Lawful factions — house police, house military, corporate entities like Ageira and Interspace Commerce. These factions control the infrastructure. Good rep with lawful factions means free movement through house space, access to the best legal equipment markets, and lower prices on repairs. Bad rep means police hostility and docking lockouts.

Independent factions — the Zoners, Independent Miners Guild, Bounty Hunters Guild. These factions are neutral to most conflicts. Zoners in particular are valuable — their Freeport stations are trading posts that don't require house alignment, and their space in the border worlds is safer than Corsair or Outcast territory.

Criminal factions — pirate organizations, smuggling rings, organized criminal enterprises in each house. These factions sell the best equipment and pay the highest rates for contraband. The trade-off: raising your rep with them damages your rep with their lawful counterparts. You cannot be fully welcome in both Liberty Police and Lane Hacker space simultaneously.

Alien factions — the Nomads. Special rules apply. The campaign deals with them directly. They do not bribe.

For more on how reputation works mechanically, the Factions & Reputation article has the full picture.

Why Exploration Matters

The campaign takes you through Liberty, pieces of Bretonia and Kusari, Rheinland, and eventually into the border worlds along the campaign path. It is a guided tour of a specific route through the sector.

The rest of the sector doesn't wait for you to arrive. It's there. The Omega systems are there. The Sigma gas fields are there. The Omicron systems — deep in Nomad territory — are there. The game does not require you to visit any of them.

But the best Very Heavy Fighters are in border world space. The Sabre, the Eagle, the Titan — all of them require getting off the campaign path and into territory that the trade lanes don't reach. The rarest equipment is in the stations that criminal factions run, accessible only with the right reputation and the knowledge of where the jump holes are.

The bar system points you in the right direction. Bartenders have rumours about hidden caches, profitable routes through jump holes, stations the police don't know about. None of this is required. All of it is there.

Freelancer's design philosophy is consistent: the official path is safe and limited. The reward for going further is everything worth having.

Sector Overview Table

Sources

• Freelancer game files — system and faction data (community documentation via the-starport.com and Freelancer Wiki)
• The Starport forum — Freelancer universe documentation: https://the-starport.com
• Freelancer Wiki (community): https://freelancerwiki.net
• Discovery Freelancer documentation: https://discoverygc.com (for reference; note this covers expanded content)