Courier Contract Guide — Reward, Collateral and Splitting

The shipper packs items into a plastic-wrapped package and posts a contract with four numbers: the volume to move, the reward paid on delivery, the collateral the hauler deposits, and the expiration plus days-to-complete window. The hauler pays the collateral up front, receives it back plus the reward on delivery — and forfeits it to the shipper if the package is destroyed or the timer runs out.

Collateral is the trust mechanism in this design. Set at or above the cargo value, it makes the shipper whole even if the hauler gets ganked or simply keeps the box. Set well below cargo value, it invites a specific scam: a hauler accepts, fails the contract on purpose, keeps loot worth more than the collateral they forfeit. Every number in this guide flows from that one constraint — collateral must cover what the box is worth.

ISK Scout's courier engine defaults to a 2% fee on cargo value, a 60,000 m³ cargo assumption (a typical deep-space-transport or freighter split), and a 500M ISK planning budget. But a flat percentage is only the starting point — the same 2% is generous for a 5-jump high-sec hop and insulting for a 30-jump route through a gatecamp corridor. What actually clears the market is reward per jump adjusted for risk.

From the hauler side, the reward has to beat the alternative use of the same time: if arbitrage hauling on that corridor pays 3M per jump, a courier contract offering 1M per jump only gets flown by pilots who did not do the math. From the shipper side, overpaying is wasted ISK but underpaying is worse — an unaccepted contract delays the goods it was supposed to move, and delayed goods are often the real cost.

The engine converts each route's danger score into an estimated failure probability. Danger aggregates per-system security status, recent ship kills, and kills per jump; a gatecamp flag is raised when a system shows a pod-to-ship kill ratio above 0.5 with meaningful kill traffic — the signature of a camp that catches haulers specifically. A route flagged this way carries a materially higher failure estimate than its raw security status suggests.

Collateral ROI — reward divided by the collateral you lock up — is the other half of the picture. Locking 2B ISK of collateral for a 10M reward is a 0.5% return on capital that could be trading elsewhere; experienced haulers filter by this number before anything else. ISK Scout surfaces both figures per route so neither side has to guess.

One 2B-collateral contract is structurally worse than three contracts around 700M each, even though the goods and route are identical. Fewer pilots can float 2B collateral, so the big contract's acceptance pool is a fraction of the small ones'. Risk exposure follows the same logic: one gank costs the hauler everything in the single-contract case, but at most a third in the split case — which is exactly why cautious pilots price big boxes higher.

The engine's split recommendation weighs collateral size against route danger and failure probability: safe short routes tolerate large single contracts, while long or flagged routes get a suggested split so each package stays under the pain threshold. The trade-off is real — each extra contract adds hauler-side docking and paperwork — so splitting below a few hundred million per package rarely pays.

A courier route built around an arbitrage spread has a shelf life: the margin that justifies the trip decays as other traders consume the same orders. ISK Scout estimates margin validity hours from the durability grade — how deep the order books are relative to the volume moved and how fast they historically refill. A route with 4 hours of margin validity fits an evening; one with 45 minutes should only be flown immediately after refreshing the data.