# PvP

> Where player combat happens, the difference between ordinary PvP and lootable PvP, and why the second one deserves your full attention.

Source: https://www.entropiacentral.com/guides/advanced/pvp
Last updated: 2026-07-30

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Player versus player combat exists in designated areas rather than everywhere. Outside those areas you cannot be attacked by another player, which means the overwhelming majority of the game is safe from it.

Inside them, there are two very different situations.

## Ordinary PvP

In standard PvP areas, players can fight each other. Being killed means the usual: you revive, you lose the time and whatever the fight cost you, and you carry on.

This is competitive play with a normal cost of failure, and it is the version most people mean when they say PvP.

## Lootable PvP

In lootable PvP areas, being killed means the player who killed you can take what you were carrying.

This is a real loss of real value. It is not a penalty mechanic, it is a transfer of your property to someone else, and the game intends it to work exactly that way.

Lootable areas include parts of space, which is why interplanetary travel deserves care. See [Travel and space](https://www.entropiacentral.com/guides/world/travel-and-space).



## The one rule

**Do not carry into a lootable area anything you are not prepared to lose.**

That is the whole of the practical advice, and people learn it the expensive way with impressive regularity. The corollaries:

- Value held as PED in your account does not travel with you.
- Sell before you travel, buy after you arrive, when the route crosses lootable space.
- If you are running an activity in a lootable area, run it with equipment you can replace.

## Piracy is a playstyle

Players who hunt other players in lootable space are playing the game as designed. They are not exploiting anything and they are not going to be sympathetic.

This is worth stating plainly because new players sometimes assume being robbed in a lootable area is a bug or a rules violation. It is neither. The areas are marked, the mechanic is documented, and entering is a choice.

## Why anyone enters

Lootable areas exist because they come with something worth the risk. Resources, creatures, or the shortest route between two places. The risk is the price of the access.

For most players, most of the time, the correct answer is to stay out. For players who have decided this is what they want to do, it is one of the more genuinely tense experiences in any game, precisely because the stake is real.

## PvP on Entropia Central

Recorded PvP activity, including kills, is tracked and visible here. The [data explorer](https://www.entropiacentral.com/tracking) shows PvP actions alongside globals and trade activity, and avatar profiles carry their recorded PvP history.

That data exists because it is part of the game's public record, in the same way globals are. See [How globals are tracked](https://www.entropiacentral.com/documentation/globals/how-globals-are-tracked) for how recording works generally.

## If you want to try it

Sensible progression:

1. Start in ordinary, non-lootable PvP where the cost of losing is time.
2. Learn how combat between players differs from combat against creatures. It differs a lot.
3. Only then consider lootable areas, and go in the first several times carrying nothing that matters.

The players who do well at this have decided to do it properly. Wandering into it is how the game's most memorable losses happen.