Contracts

Contracts are written in the contract form in the game’s sidebar. That is the only place they can be written, because the form reads your install as you fill it in: the player list, the parts a restriction would cover, the body a target sits on. Neither Discord nor this website can see any of that, which is the same reason neither of them can receive a submission.

A contract carries:

• A contractor. A specific player, picked from a searchable list with favourites. You cannot send one to yourself.
• A mission text. Written in plain language. It is also what the constraint extraction reads, so “no nuclear engines, under 40 parts” is not just flavour.
• A payment and a fine. The payment is debited from you when the contract is sent. The fine is what the contractor pays if they fail it.
• A deadline. Either a duration in hours or a date from the calendar picker.
• A part restriction, optionally. See the table below.

A restriction says which parts the contractor may build with. It is declared by the issuer as a mode rather than as a list, because a list of part names written by hand is wrong the moment either side changes mods.

On the contractor’s side, an active contract that sets a restriction can arm the editor enforcer, which limits the VAB and SPH part list to what is permitted. It is a switch in the inbox rather than something forced on you, so you can still open the editor for unrelated work.

Beyond the mod restriction, the mission text itself is parsed for harder limits, which the submission is then checked against. These land on a fixed vocabulary rather than free text, so the game can enforce them:

• Required and forbidden specific parts.
• Required and forbidden propellants.
• Required and forbidden engine categories, and part categories.
• Minimum and maximum part count.
• Minimum and maximum delta-v.
• Minimum and maximum crew, where a maximum of zero means fly it uncrewed.
• Crew professions, matched on the exact profession string so a contract written on a modded install still means something on one without it.

Extraction is done by the AI where it is available and by keyword heuristics where it is not, and the result is the same shape either way. See AI Integration for what happens when the model is unavailable.

1. 1

   Pending

   Created and offered. The payment has already left the issuer’s wallet and is held. The contractor has not answered yet.

2. 2

   Active

   Accepted. It appears on the contractor’s active list in Discord, on this website and in the game’s inbox, together with any part limits it carries. Declining or cancelling at this stage returns the escrow.

3. 3

   Submitted

   The contractor submits from inside KSP. What goes with it depends on the kind: the craft file and a rendered blueprint for a build, the live vessel telemetry for a flight, screenshots either way. None of that exists in a browser, which is why submitting is the one contract action this website cannot do for you.

   A flag design is the exception, and it is uploaded here or in Discord rather than in the game: its whole deliverable is an image, so there is nothing for the game to read. The issuer reviews a watermarked, downscaled copy; the clean full-res file is handed over only when they accept, and lands in their in-game flag picker.

4. 4

   Completed, or disputed

   The issuer reviews. Accepted releases the escrow to the contractor and delivers the craft, crew or flag into the issuer’s save. Refused opens a dispute rather than simply ending.

A refused submission puts the contract into dispute, where the contractor picks how to resolve it: settle on the agreed penalty, ask the issuer for more time, or escalate to the moderators for a human decision.

Left alone, a dispute does not sit there forever. The fine collects itself three days after the dispute opened, because a dispute that never closes would be a free way to dodge the penalty. That clock runs from the moment the dispute opened and does not pause while a settle or extension request is pending, since pausing it would hand back the same loophole through another door.

A contractor gets one extension request per dispute. Submitting again and being refused again opens a new dispute, which resets that count.

Suing and reporting are different things, and picking the wrong one wastes everybody’s time. Sue asks a moderator to decide a contract: was this delivery what was asked for? Report is about a person: an abusive mission text, a deal somebody refuses to honour, a contract written to be impossible so the fine collects itself.

Report sits on the contract in KSP and on the website’s Contracts page, in every state: a mission text does not stop being abusive once the contract has finished. It opens a private ticket in your own server with a moderator pinged, carrying the contract, both accounts and what you wrote. The other party is named in it but is not given access.

One report per contract per person, so filing the same complaint twice does not make it louder. Weekly missions cannot be reported, since the bot is not somebody a moderator can take it up with. If a weekly mission itself is broken, that is a bug report, from the mod’s Tools tab.