Kill credit

Kill credit is the game's answer to who receives the destruction, not necessarily who dealt the fatal damage. Every active ship has a lastfired field holding the slot of its latest qualifying attacker, or -1 when no attacker is recorded. When the ship is destroyed, that field determines the credited killer. A credited killer may receive a kill count, points, and spoils; those are related but separate rules.

When credit is decided

Ship damage can reach the fatal threshold before the ship's destruction routine runs on its next update. During that interval, another qualifying hit can become lastfired. The game does not keep a ledger of each contributor or necessarily award the kill to the shot that first pushed damage over 100. For example, if A heavily damages B and C lands the last effective shot before B's destruction update, C can receive credit even if A dealt most of the damage.

There is no general timer that erases lastfired after a fixed period without combat. The separate cantexit timer restricts leaving the game after hostile activity; its expiry does not by itself erase attacker attribution. A ship damaged by A can escape, later crash into a planet, and still be credited to A if that attribution remains valid. Some events explicitly replace or clear the field, and ge-next checks whether the recorded owner has left play.

Which hits replace the attacker?

Event	Classic 3.2e	ge-next
Standard phaser contact	The integer damage calculation must reach at least 1 before `lastfired` is assigned. A shot that misses or truncates to zero cannot take credit.	Contact below 1 damage does not replace the attacker. This includes an unshielded hit described as “no damage” and a shielded hit displayed as “magnitude <1”. A qualifying hit can record an attacker even if raised shields prevent hull damage.
Hyper-phaser contact	A ship inside the beam and scanner range can be assigned as `lastfired` even when the calculated damage is zero. Thus a harmless hyper-phaser contact can take credit from an earlier attacker.	The same effective-hit rule applies as for standard phasers: a result below 1 does not replace `lastfired`.
Torpedo or missile impact	The projectile's stored firing slot becomes the attacker. An owner marked `255` becomes no attacker.	The owner is credited only if it still represents a participating ship. An ownerless impact sets `lastfired` to `-1`, rather than handing its eventual kill to a different ship that attacked earlier.
Mine explosion	The mine's stored layer slot replaces `lastfired`, including when a ship is hit by its own mine. The owner slot is not reliably cleared when its layer leaves play.	A mine with no active owner leaves existing attribution alone. A player's own mine also does not replace that player's previous attacker. Other owned mine hits can assign the active layer, subject to the game's faction rules.

ge-next also avoids letting a late phaser shot change credit after the victim is already at fatal damage, except that a user can replace an automated ship as the recorded attacker. This prevents a weak shot into an already-doomed ship from routinely stealing a player's kill, and makes it more likely that a user will receive credit for destroying a ship which that user AND an NPC are firing on. A hit that does not change lastfired may still have other effects, such as a combat delay or an NPC response.

Deaths without a new player attacker

Crashing into a planet or striking the galactic perimeter can destroy a ship without assigning a new attacker. If a valid prior lastfired remains, that earlier attacker can receive the kill; otherwise the death is uncredited. This is why kill credit should not be understood as a record of the immediate physical cause of death.

Not every environmental hazard preserves the previous attacker. A planetary ion cannon hit explicitly clears lastfired to -1 in both classic and ge-next, this cannot be assigned to the planet owner because they may not be playing the game at the time. The self-destruct shock wave likewise clears attribution on the ships it strikes, so a previous attacker is not credited for a blast victim. Classic also lets the exploding ship enter its own blast loop, clearing that ship's attacker; ge-next excludes it, so someone who damaged the self-destructing ship can still receive credit for that ship's death. Self-destruct covers the full sequence.

Ownership after a ship leaves

In persistent GE, destroying a ship or leaving play changes the owner of its still-flying torpedoes and missiles to “no user” (255). The projectiles can still hit, but an ownerless impact cannot award a kill to the departed user or to a later occupant of the same slot. ge-next additionally checks whether a projectile's recorded owner is still active when it hits. Its mines remain in the world after their layer is destroyed or departs, but become ownerless; classic keeps the stored mine slot, which can become stale. See mine ownership for the distinction.

The victim's own lastfired is a separate piece of state from an incoming projectile's owner. ge-next clears it when its recorded attacker is no longer participating. Classic does not perform the same routine owner-validity check, so its slot-based attribution can outlive the person who occupied that slot. The field is initialized to -1 for a new ship; it is not a permanent account history.

Destruction and scoring

The destruction routine refuses to award a ship its own kill: the recorded attacker must be a different valid slot. If it finds one, it announces the victor, increments kill statistics, and can transfer eligible cargo. An automated ship can be the credited killer too, without making it a player on the roster. If there is no valid credited attacker, the ship is simply reported destroyed and no ordinary player kill award or spoils are given.

Kill counts and score are not interchangeable. Classic bases the award on the defeated ship's class and can add a bonus from its stored roster position. ge-next has different bonus and loss rules, and a credited kill can yield no points under some conditions. The victim's point loss is likewise not merely a transfer of existing points to the victor. See combat scoring for the formulas and version differences.

ge-arena

ge-arena retains projectile and mine ownership through destruction because a player remains in the match and can score with weapons already launched after respawning. When that player actually leaves, those weapons become ownerless so a later user cannot inherit the credit. Leaving a live match with a valid lastfired can itself award the attacker a match kill. Arena modes then score the credited event according to their own rules; they do not use the persistent game's ordinary killem() scoring path. See ge-arena for mode-specific scoring and tiebreakers.