The Rift branches Explained

The Rift branches is the core mechanic of CONTRABAND. Understanding it is key to playing well.

What it is

Every decision you make is recorded as a node on a visual branch. You can open the branch from the menu and see every choice you've made — the speaker, the scene, the option you picked.

The branch is not just a history log. You can click any past node to revisit from that point. When you do, the game state resets to just before that decision, and the current branch becomes a ghost branch — visible in the branch as a faded line, preserved but no longer active.

How revisiting works

When you revisit to a decision from three scenes ago, the game:

1. Saves the current state as a ghost branch
2. Reverts all flags, credits, items, ships, crew, location, and chapter progress to the state at that moment
3. Puts you back in the scene where you made the decision
4. You can now pick differently

The ghost branch still exists. You can see it in the branch — it branches off your active trunk. You cannot walk the ghost branch, but other characters (notably Vex, the Oracle, the Archivist) know about it and sometimes reference what you did there.

When revisit is limited

You can revisit as many times as you want, except:

• You cannot revisit past the prologue opening — that is the trunk's root.
• You cannot revisit a combat victory. The fight itself can be undone (revisit to before it started), but you can't keep the victory and undo other parts.
• Certain story scenes with the noRevisit flag cannot be revisited past. These are rare and marked in dialogue.

The free revisits mechanic

Revisiting has a "cost" — it creates a ghost branch, which adds weight to the trunk. Too many ghost branches and the trunk becomes unstable (narratively — the Guardians will warn you).

Some crew members grant free revisits. Echo of a Guardian gives 1 per chapter. Fragment of Oracle gives 2 per chapter. These don't count against the instability threshold.

Why revisit rather than just save/load

Save/load preserves only one state. Revisit preserves all states. If you save at point A, play to point C, then reload A, the path A→C is lost. With revisit, A→C is preserved as a ghost branch forever.

This means the game can reference what you did in a ghost branch. Vex saying "In the other version, you killed me" is only possible because revisit preserves history.

What this means narratively

The branch mechanic is the game's thesis. The world of CONTRABAND treats every choice as real. The version of you who took the bribe in the prologue still exists somewhere, living that life, even if you revisited and chose differently.

When you see Vex, and she seems to know things she shouldn't — it's because she remembers the branches you abandoned. When the Oracle says "you will have lost someone" — it's because in seventeen of her branches, you have.

The four endings offer four different attitudes toward this reality: prune it (one truth), embrace it (all truths), abandon yours for another, or destroy the whole tree.

Reading the branch UI

The Rift branches interface displays your decisions as a vertical spine with branches extending left and right. The central spine is the currently-active branch. Horizontal branches are ghost branches — paths you revisited away from. Clicking any node on the spine revisits to that point. Clicking a ghost branch does not reactivate it, but it reveals what happened there: dialogue snippets, flag changes, and items acquired are all visible in a tooltip.

Color coding in the UI indicates branch significance. Gold nodes are decisions that affected faction reputation by more than 20 points. Red nodes are decisions that triggered combat or death. Cyan nodes are encounters with branch-aware characters (Vex, Oracle, Guardians). White nodes are routine choices with minor or cosmetic impact.

Advanced: strategic revisit stacking

Veteran players exploit the revisit system intentionally. Two strategies are common:

• Item farming without consequence — If you receive an item from a scene, note its source. Revisit past the scene. Play differently. Revisit again. The first revisit's items remain in your inventory as long as they were legendary tier (legendaries persist across branches). This lets you farm the Guardian Fragment, Vex Prism, and Oracle Crystal in the same playthrough.
• Information scouting — Push forward into a dangerous encounter, learn what's there, then revisit and prepare. Because the Black Fleet AI reinforces to origin points, this strategy degrades in later chapters. Best used in Chapter 1 and 2.

Both strategies have limits. The game tracks total revisit count (visible in the Rift branches footer), and several late-game encounters change based on your cumulative revisit history. Players who have revisited more than 30 times before Chapter 3 will find that the Oracle recognizes them as a "heavy brancher" and charges a second memory instead of the first.

The instability threshold

Too many ghost branches make the trunk visually unstable in the UI — the spine begins to flicker, and the Guardian Archivist NPC will spawn in random systems to warn you. Reaching roughly 12-15 ghost branches is the threshold for this warning. Above 20, the Guardians' Chapter 2 dialogue changes to reflect their concern. Above 30, the Rift branches ending becomes slightly harder to reach because pruning a heavily-branched tree takes more time in-story.

The Burn ending is uniquely available to players with very high branch counts (30+). It is not otherwise gated; a clean-playthrough player can reach it. But heavy branchers find it telegraphed earlier in dialogue, and the game reads it as a thematically natural conclusion for their style.