Editing Commercial Shipping (section)

==Civilian contracts==

You can make [[civilian contracts]] to use the civilian shipping fleets to ship your own installations (such as mines and factories) between worlds. To do this, you must set up two contracts: a Supply contract for a good on a colony with that good, and a Demand contract for the same good on a colony where you want the good to be sent to. Contracts can be set up in the Civilian tab of the [[Population_and_Production|Economics]] window. Upon completion of the contract, your empire will pay the fleet a fee.

For example, to have the civilian ships move mines to Mars, add a supply of 50 mines on Earth and a demand of 50 on Mars. The civilian freighters will begin shipping mines to Mars now. The contract list will be updated to show how much goods are still waiting. You will be notified if a ship tries to pick up freight that is not available on the planet. If more than one colony has demand for a certain item, you cannot control which one is served first.

Colony ships (ships with cryogenic chambers or passenger modules) will automatically pick up colonists from Colonist Sources and transport them to Colonist Destinations. The colonist status of a colony can be set from the Civilian tab of the [[Population_and_Production|Economics]] window. The options are Source, Stable, and Destination. Colonies with a population less than 25 million will be set at Destination until they exceed 25 million colonists, at which point you can choose the colonist status. (Note that colony ships can cause infrastructure-based colonies to become overpopulated. To prevent this, you may want to set your homeworld as Stable once the colony nears its capacity.)