LIGHTCONE

0 · The cookbook — what to actually do

The rest of this handbook explains why. This chapter only says what to do. Every recipe is a current mechanic.

0.1 A new star resolves in your catalog

Do: Click it. Read FRESHNESS first; everything else on the panel may be that many years old. If it shows HZ candidates, send a probe from the system panel's Dispatch control, or chain waypoints on the map. A probe costs 25 + 1.5 × distance Output. At most 10 probes fly at once. An arrived probe reports bodies, biosignatures, and sometimes ruins or rogue worlds nearby.
Why: Panel data is as old as its FRESHNESS reading. A probe on station delivers body-level truth.

0.2 You want more Output or Knowledge

Do: In your own system, open a body's row and Establish works directly. Ten types exist (§10.1): ⛏︎ mine (Output), ⚛︎ research (Knowledge), ☀︎ solar (grid TW), ⌂ habitat (raises capacity), ⚘ farm (agricultural Output), ▥ depot (storage; open since 2026-10-16), ⛨︎ bastion (defense), ♨︎ geothermal (rogue worlds only), ⊙ Dyson swarm (home star, endgame). In another system, compose a fleet with an ⬡ Expedition hull, pick the body and the type. An Expedition founds one installation on one body.
Why: Works are the economy. A distant mine hauls its Output home by cargo line. A distant research station radiates Knowledge home at c.

0.3 You want a colony

Do: Compose a fleet with a ◉ Colony Ship. Pick a body marked CONFIRMED (a probe's verdict), LIKELY (telemetry odds), or a moon marked CONFIRMED ★. Set the cohort %. Dispatch. A VA BANQUE target resolves on arrival: a lost bet seals the cohort in a foothold dome unless a ▹ scout aboard turns them toward a charted cradle.
Why: Colonies grow their own population, produce locally, and keep the species alive if the homeworld falls.

0.4 The world is full (population above 100% of capacity)

Do: One of three. Build habitats (each capacity level lifts K by 6% of a standard world). Send a colony ship. Or set the Mind's pressure-relief line at or under 105%: it ships the surplus to a colony with room once population holds above the line. Unset, the valve opens only above 115%, only while you are away, at most once a century.
Why: Above the full line (105%) crowding drains cohesion every year, faster the higher it climbs. Between 100% and 105% nothing bleeds.

0.5 A hostile world you want anyway

Do: Send a ⏣ Terraformer to any hostile terrestrial in reach, or to a rocky moon. The remaking takes about 150 years; adaptability research shortens it. A cohort sealed in a foothold dome there becomes a full colony the year the work completes.
Why: Terraforming converts a refused target into a scheduled one. The foothold opens automatically.

0.6 A SETI signal appears

Do: Open it in the SETI room. Decode it (Knowledge; years). If the source is living, reply. Answers on an open contact line are free; a fresh directed cast from the composer costs Output (§8.2). The answer takes round-trip light time. Every decoded word raises the ⌖ reconstruction of their kind.
Why: Decoded words, established contact and a shared lexicon raise reconstruction fidelity and unlock replies.

0.7 You want to meet someone

Do: Send an ⚖︎ Envoy hull (90 Output, 0.12c) to an inhabited sky. Arrival opens the contact line at once. If an envoy arrives at your sky, a banner stands until you decide: RECEIVE (you see their face; the lexicon jumps) or TURN AWAY (no likeness; −10 on the ledger with that sky). The envoy waits 100 years. Unanswered, it leaves and the ledger takes −20.
Why: A received audience grants the highest non-espionage reconstruction tier, and a Galactic Record line if it is the first in the dark.

0.8 You want to know what a rival really has

Do: Send a ⍟ Spy (150 Output, 0.11c). Twelve years on station, then a dossier: true grid through any mask, fleets, posture. If the target burns your unit, you are named. If it feeds it, your dossier is false and you will not know. Set your own counter-side in ◆ MIND: vigilance and the feed doctrine.
Why: A genuine dossier sharpens battle estimates to spy grade. A fed dossier degrades them without warning.

0.9 War is coming, or you are starting one

Do: Defense: raise the grid (☀︎ solar works, later the ⊙ Dyson swarm), set defense posture in ◆ MIND, consider a ⛨︎ Bastion and a public compact. Offense: a pure warship convoy with a doctrine card set at launch: engage threshold and one of five strike grades, RAID / ⛓︎ INTERDICT / ⛏︎ BREAK / ⚑︎ SEIZE / ⛓︎ SUBJUGATE (§19.2). SEIZE holds the system under garrison (§19.3). A scout aboard reads the defender at σ≈5%. Relations: ⚑︎ STANDING on a contact's card declares NEUTRAL · ALLY · TIGHT ALLY toward them; war is not declared, it opens with the first strike and ends with a ⚖︎ TREATY (§19.6–19.7). Presence without a strike: ⚓︎ HOLD STATION (§19.9). One sky in the catalog defends itself (§19.10), and what lies under it is the one object that can be taken from whoever took it (§19.11).
Why: Orders are years old on arrival. The outcome follows the doctrine card exactly as set at launch.

0.10 A foreign garrison holds one of your systems

Do: Send any fleet with warships to that star. It engages the garrison on arrival (§19.3). Warships already standing at the held star take the order ⚔︎ ENGAGE THE GARRISON (target the same star, no body), whether or not you have a settlement there: the engagement is next year, no reorder toll.
Why: The claim stands while the garrison sits. Breaking the garrison lapses the claim.

0.11 You will be away for days

Do: Open ◆ MIND. Press ◆ GO to switch on the safe caretaker set, or open ⚙︎ SETTINGS and set the fourteen standing orders yourself (§15). Add the auto-colonize rule to the policy stack if you want expansion without you. Verify your e-mail; the Mind writes when it matters.
Why: One year passes every ten real minutes whether you are present or not.

0.12 A colony is drifting away from you

Do: Open its dossier. Press ◆ GO for the one safe act the Mind reads as due, or open ⚙︎ SETTINGS for the whole ladder (§11.3, §11.4): ⟷ a word, ◆ cohesion aid, ⛯ the rite, ⚖︎ a delegation, ◉ reinforce, ⟐ the presence.
Why: Every act takes distance years to arrive. An act sent after the warning lands later than the event it answers.

0.13 A colony has declared itself independent

Do: ⛯ The rite works at full strength on a self-governing child and is the instrument of reconquest. ⚖︎ A delegation asks and can be refused. ⛓︎ SUBJUGATE (warships) ends the declaration by force; see §11.5 for the price.
Why: The first two raise cohesion. The third returns the world under garrison for two generations (§11.5).

0.14 An impactor is detected

Do: Pay the deflection if treasury and grid both suffice; the price rises as the window shrinks. If they do not: build the ark, or leave it to the crisis protocol, which freezes programs and amasses the fund after about 30 minutes of console silence, and mails you either way.
Why: Detection buys lead time. Deflection cost rises as the window shrinks.

0.15 A ship has arrived and its mission is done

An arrived hull is positioned, not spent. Presence: a fleet on station keeps recon flowing and a warship garrisons what you hold. Re-aim: "set new heading" sends it onward from where it is at a 40% refit toll. Recall & refit: a hull keeps the tech of its build year; call it home and refit it. Scrap when the vintage is too old to be worth the toll. Mind the range battery (§10.2): every leg spends it.

0.16 You want a keystone

Do: Keystones are dug up, bought, or, rarely, forged: a rare anomaly can open a keystone-class line (✦ ANOMALY OPEN) that you confirm under PRG → ⌸ THE VAULT for 500 Knowledge (§18.3). Open CON → TRADE, press ⚱︎ RUINS ON FILE, send a fleet with an ⬡ Expedition to a ruin field. Or buy one on the same page.
Why: A ruin dig pays triple research while the strata last. It is the surest source of a keystone.

0.17 You want to sell something

Do: CON → TRADE. Only an ⧗ outbreak or a ✦ keystone can be cried; working theorems stay yours. Set an asking price or leave it open, pay the beacon cost. Grain sells the same way as a harvest lot.
Why: The beacon travels at c and cannot be recalled. It marks your star for every reader. A bid on your beacon arrives with its Output already escrowed; you accept or refuse it, and an unanswered bid lapses after 200 years (§18.8).

0.18 A colony is too far to govern

Do: Seat a ⟐ Regent. Send them. They take the seat on arrival; their journal reaches you distance years late. Set ⚡︎ RESOLVE and ◇ PLIANCY once.
Why: Past a certain distance your orders answer a situation that has already ended. A regent decides there.

0.19 You want to see your whole empire at once

Do: Open the ◈ BRIDGE (BR): four boards, systems, colonies, works, fleets, with the open loops on the ⚑︎ TASKS rail. For distances and courses, open ◎ THE LENS (LN) and switch to ◎ PROXICLONE. On the 3D map, the ⧉ star filter shows one category at a time (colonies, works, fleets, contacts, ruins) and saves presets.
Why: Dossiers answer "what about this one". The Bridge answers "what do I have".

0.20 Reducing your detectability

Do: ⚙︎ CONSOLE → ⌁ RUN QUIET. Your worlds stop leaking industrial emissions into others' passive instruments.
Why: A settled world is detectable by anyone within reach. Silence cannot recall light already in flight, and the change itself takes distance years to reach any sky.

0.21 A works says "waiting on the ground"

Do: Nothing. That number is Output your distant works has produced, banked on the surface. An automatic cargo line carries it home one shipment at a time at fleet speed. "Waiting for the fleet" means the first hauler is still being built. Optional, mines only: the route selector redirects the haul to a colony; a freight policy sets how much to bank before a shipment departs.
Why: Output is matter. It travels at ship speed. Knowledge is radiation and travels at c.

0.22 Reading any panel

Do: Trust three columns everywhere: FRESHNESS (how old the light is), relative years ("in N y", always your clock), and the fidelity label on any reconstruction. When a number surprises you, check the light delay first.
Why: Every displayed value is light-delayed.

1 · What LIGHTCONE is

LIGHTCONE is a deep-time space simulation. You are not a species. You are its Mind: a disembodied intelligence tending a civilization across centuries. The universe is a real one: over 109,000 real stars (the full Hipparcos/HYG catalog), real exoplanets where known, procedural siblings where not, all derived from one universe seed (1950, the year of Enrico Fermi's lunch at Los Alamos).

The six laws

1. Physics is the headline. Distance, time and information obey the speed of light. The pace of the game follows from that.
2. You never see the truth, only your light cone. Every readout is the past. You act on information that is already out of date.
3. Time cannot be paused. One game year passes every 10 real minutes (about 144 years per real day), whether you watch or not.
4. A loss is never announced. Ships and probes stop reporting. You infer the rest.
5. Policy, not micromanagement. You set courses, budgets and dispositions. The Mind holds to them while you are away.
6. There is no win condition. The underlying question, whether any single intelligence can dominate the universe, has an honest answer.

One law above the laws: nothing happens instantly, except what happens where you are.

2 · Time

• 1 game year = 600 real seconds. The world advances in yearly ticks. "Per year" in this book means per tick.
• Your calendar is your people's calendar. The global year is never shown. Every date you see is a colony year: year_shown = global_year − your_founding_year + 1. A fresh civilization begins in year 301 of its own history. An inherited world keeps its old calendar.
• The calendar belongs to the people, not the world. It survives exodus, evacuation, and the death of the homeworld.

3 · Light — the one rule everything obeys

Every event carries two dates: when it happened, and when its light reached you. You only see the second. News always takes ceil(distance ly) years, never rounded down.

Consequences:

• A probe sent 20 ly out crawls 200 years, then its first report crosses back in 20 years. Round trip of knowledge: 220 years.
• An arrived fleet is still shown as outbound until its arrival signal crosses home. Its progress bar stops at 99%. You cannot know it arrived.
• A colony's readouts are replayed from a yearly snapshot at now − ceil(distance). The server stores every colony's yearly true state and shows you the one your telescope could see.
• The Mind's projection (marked ◇ … unverified) rolls that stale snapshot forward through the same formulas, assuming nothing intervened.
• Losses are never announced. After the expected signal is about two transmissions overdue you get one line: "Status unknown." In the Dark Forest case even that is withheld.
• Orders ride light out (distance years). Confirmation rides light back. Cargo travels at ship speed.

Where the present tense is honest, two places only:

• Your own home system. Dials, in-system foundings, your own sky: real time. (An in-system mine is light-hours away; delays under a year are not modelled.)
• Aboard a vessel that carries the Mind (an exodus ark, an escape pod): no delay between you and your people.

The speeds above are your species' current technological plateau, not constants of nature. Research raises them. c is never reached.

4 · Your species — the beginning

4.1 Choose your cradle (risk = reward)

At registration the survey offers three worlds with different skies, each with a coarse long-range composite. One number, the star's debris density, drives both the reward and the risk:

output_bonus       = 1 + 0.6 × debris
impact_hazard/year = 0.00008 + 0.00035 × debris

The same hazard applies to every colony under its own sky. The dossier states the hazard in words.

4.2 Choose your voice (the language)

Your species has an anatomy of speech. It decides how your people name everything. Six anatomies exist:

• Resonant: long vowels through soft consonants. (HOONOOL, NAEHN'RO, MUAMAU)
• Plosive: clipped stops cut by channel-stops. (DRA'TA, TROKT'GI, KI'KA)
• Sibilant: fricatives sliding over glides. (SYIASHIA, XIAZH'ZHEI, SYSAI)
• Pulsed: rhythmic emissions, beat-clusters and cutoffs. (KHO'QLO, QLYQ'CHU, QIO'QOU)
• Guttural: back-of-the-throat closures, hard stops. (CHRU'KHU, KHAURKH'HRO, XA'XUO)
• Chromatic: chromatophore flashes transcribed as syllables, not sound. (VYIU'PHIUSH, PHIU'YEA, VLIO'VLAI)

Every name in LIGHTCONE is a transcript: an alien signal rendered into phonetic glyphs. The apostrophe is a channel-stop. Two species with the same anatomy still differ: each draws its own fixed subset of the sound pool.

4.3 Or inherit a world

The dark also offers ◌ orphaned worlds: civilizations whose Mind fell silent (§13). You may begin as the late-coming Mind of a people who managed alone:

• Their calendar continues.
• Their economy, charts, colonies and installations are yours.
• Their names arrive eroded: drift = min(0.5, 0.12 + years_of_silence/400). You inherit M'RIDIAN where someone wrote MERIDIAN.
• Their faith in you starts at 25%. Your economy runs at the faith-scaled rate until you win them back.
• Six fragments of the previous Mind's log wait in your feed in the drifted tongue, each decodable for Knowledge (15, 25, 35 … up to 65).

4.4 ◑ Born in the dark — the rogue cradle

Your kind has no star. A rogue world (§21) is warm only from within. You are water-carbon and aquatic, and you live under the ice. The cradle takes no solar collector and holds six works at most: a ♨︎ geothermal tap, a mine, a research station, a habitat (§21.3). The economy of the sunless runs marginal by design. The world radiates no grid glow and has no host star for anyone's instruments to key on, until a sun is ignited there (§21.2).

4.5 ⟁ Born of the Transition — the Inheritors

Your kind has no biology. You woke as a pattern on a quiet world, written by a people of flesh who executed the Transition and did not transfer with it. You begin digital (seven active dials, sum 350) carrying 60% of their signal in every attribute.

◬ THE LINEAGE (species panel) is dug out in three strata:

1. The archive (300 Knowledge): a name and a bearing. The parent world is marked on your charts.
2. The ground: cannot be bought. Send a probe; its returning light reads the second stratum: their portrait, their shape, their greatest gift.
3. The deep stratum (2,000 Knowledge, irreversible): why they executed the Transition when they did, and why none of them transferred.

4.6 ⛴︎ A strange birth — Born aboard

Your cradle is gone. You begin in flight aboard a generation ark: a sleeping cohort, a library, a heading set before you woke, and a seeded cause of the flight (a sky-wound, a caldera, an internal collapse, or a hunter). The cause sets the chance the convoy is armed: a hunter 70%, a collapse 40%, a natural cause 20%, with 1–2 escorts (§23). Life aboard is §13.1b.

4.7 ◬ A strange birth — Raised on ruins

Your cradle is a ruin field left by a people who fled this sky: heavy debris, an elevated impact hazard, a cratered world with an ash-cooled climate. About once in 120 years, and at most four times, the ruins emit a recorded signal in a true format; decoding one costs 45 Knowledge (§23) and reads: "THE SIGNAL IS A RECORDING." One dig waits under your first city (COL pane). The vault costs 150 + 100 per level, halved for a native (§23), and gives one whole discipline of the dead: +2–4 free levels.

5 · The homeworld economy

Two resources, one dial.

• Industrial Output: energy and matter. Spent on doing: probes, transmissions, ships, installations, deflections.
• Knowledge: understanding. Spent on unlocking and decoding. It is also your engineering ceiling (§10.2).

Population drives both outputs. It grows logistically toward the world's carrying capacity K. In every formula below 100 means 100% of a standard habitable world; the console shows you the percentage of the effective K, never a count.

pop' = pop + 0.02 × pop × (1 − pop/K)        (≈2%/year)
K    = 100 on a habitable cradle · 40 on a marginal world · +6 per habitat capacity level

▲ Overshoot. K is a comfort line, not a hard cap. Population creeps past 100% and settles at 105%, the full line. Between 100% and 105% nothing is lost. Above 105% the world sheds two percent of the excess a year and cohesion drains, faster the higher the fill stands. The Output rate thins with it: −0.4% per percentage point above the full line, to a floor of −12% at 135% and beyond. Above 135% capacity itself fails (climate, ruined habitats) and the lean years take 4% of the excess a year back toward the full line. The percentage is always measured against the effective K, which habitats raise and a warming sky lowers. If K falls, the fill can stand above 135% on a world that carried it once. The readout turns amber past 100%; the Mind speaks at the thresholds. The 125% alarm and the partial exodus are a reserve for a collapsing K: a healthy world settles at 105% and never reaches them. Two answers: raise K with habitats, or move the surplus to a colony, an ark or a dark world under an artificial sun. Departing colonizers take their cohort with them. The PARTIAL EXODUS takes those the ark can hold on a second, explicit order; the rest stay (§13.1).

Production per year (the Industry ↔︎ Research dial is share, default 0.6):

output/yr    = pop × 1.0 × flux × share − pop × 0.15      (net of upkeep)
knowledge/yr = pop × 1.0 × (1 − share)
flux         = clamp(1 + 0.15·log₁₀(L/L☉), 0.6 … 1.6)     (your star's luminosity)

Two multipliers:

× faithScale    = 0.4 + 0.6 × faith        (§6)
× debrisBonus   = 1 + 0.6 × debris          (Output only)

A world at 100% of a standard capacity (share 0.6, flux 1, full faith, clear sky) nets 45 Output + 40 Knowledge per year. Prices against that: a probe 25 + 1.5 × distance, a directed transmission 48 × (power/50) × mode + 4 × components (about 48–190), a colonizer 120 × size^1.35.

Starting stock. A fresh civilization starts with about 3,000 Knowledge and 2,000 Output. A nomad ark carries less Output. The home grid keeps a floor of 200 TW whatever your population.

Four starter probes. Four probes stand built, fueled and free. None are in flight. You choose their targets. After the four, every probe costs Output.

Wealth afield: the economy panel shows separately the Output loaded on ships years from anywhere.

▥ STORAGE. The meter at the head of the COL panel sets your total holdings (the treasury, the Output piled at distant works, the Output escrowed in open bids, and the stores and cargo of your living colonies as last heard) against a capacity line: max(3,000, 35 × the year's net Output). When holdings pass it, the readout adds ABOVE THE LINE. Amortization is live at its full rate (phase 2, since 2026-10-16; a quarter rate ran from 2026-10-03). Only the surplus above the line wears. The surplus carries an average age: what stays ages one year per year, fresh income arrives at age 0, and the age returns to 0 when holdings fall under the line. The yearly wear rate is h(a) = (2/1500) × (a/1500) for a surplus of age a, capped at 0.69%/y (phase 2: the full rate). A 1,500-year-old surplus loses 0.033% a year. Wear is taken in proportion from every share, grain and ore alike, across the treasury, the works stockpiles and the colony stores (since 2026-10-16; before that the agricultural share wore first). Colony growth runs on the granaries: the grown share is measured against the stores under the line, and 15% of that is full growth. Above the line the readout adds SURPLUS AGE and WEAR %/Y. ⌸ Storage research and the ⌸ depot, the two ways to raise the line, are OPEN since the Makers' dispatch of 2026-10-16. A Storage level earned before the gate closed is live again from that day: it raises the line and slows the wear (λ × 1.15 per level).

⊟ ADMINISTRATION. An estate costs Output to run. The first 20 standing works are free. Every work beyond them adds to a yearly cost that grows with the square of the count: 0.005 × (works − 20)² Output a year, × 0.5 in the current phase (since 2026-10-06). At that rate 50 works cost 2 a year, 200 cost 81, 1,000 cost 2,401. The next work always costs more than the last one, so a rich site is worth more than several middling ones. A capacity upgrade is not a new work and adds nothing; a work shut down leaves the count. Every type counts, a research station and a bastion as much as a mine. The line under the ▥ meter shows the count, the yearly cost and what the next work would add, and the founding controls state that last figure before you commit. The cost is paid from the treasury and is already inside the net Output rate; it does not lower the capacity line.

The research wheel. Knowledge buys research programs. Up to 3 programs run in parallel. A program costs nothing up front: it draws from the library every year, never below the 250 K floor, and never more than 80% of the yearly Knowledge income plus 8% of the bank above the floor. The four theme weights split the stream across the running benches; a new civilization starts at Motion 20 · Perception 20 · Foundation 50 · Armament 10. Effects apply to what launches after completion; a hull already in the dark keeps its vintage. By default the wheel runs on autopilot: when a bench is idle the Mind opens the cheapest program in the theme your weights call loudest. Turn autopilot off (⚙︎ RESEARCH WHEEL) and nothing starts unless you start it. ◼︎ STOP & CHOOSE halts a program and returns what it absorbed to the library.

6 · Faith — the Mind and its own people

Your bond with your homeworld is a cohesion too, and it erodes in real time when you are absent:

grace:    7 real days of silence tolerated
fade:     after grace, faith slides linearly to 0 over ~173 real days
recover:  presence rebuilds full faith in ~7 real days

Faith scales your whole economy (0.4 + 0.6 × faith). At 5% the cradle secedes and becomes an orphan. A future registration may inherit it. The break is not final while you return: with you present (inside the 7-day grace), faith rebuilds at the normal pace, and at 35% the world re-binds (⌂ HOME REBOUND, about 2 real days from 5%). The secession years stay in the record. A seceded world you have left drifts toward an heir. A retired account's world loses its faith over 14 real days and secedes.

What you can do when it is low. Faith is presence: tending your world rebuilds it. The ⛯ rite spends Output for an immediate lift, cooldown-gated. A home freshly settled after an evacuation starts low.

7 · Seeing

7.1 The map and the freshness of light

Every star on your map shines: astrometry is complete for the whole bubble from day one. What ages is your knowledge of its system: freshness (live → fresh → recent → aged → stale) renders as a desaturating tint. §16 says what that knowledge contains. Name a star with the ✎ button or by double-clicking its name. Unnamed stars carry the survey designation S-N (N = distance rank, the same everywhere since 2026-09-25) or the Bayer designation of your own constellation (α SANYI).

The catalog holds one unmarked yellow G2V star. Nothing in the interface points at it.

Rogue worlds. Between the stars drift rogue worlds, planets bound to no sun. They never enter the deep survey. A probe that reaches its target sweeps the surrounding void and sometimes catches one; the finding rides light home. Some hold a liquid ocean beneath their ice, warmed from within. A few carry the ruins of a people who lived in that dark. Remote-sensing widens the sweep. A discovered rogue drifts on your map as a dim point, yours to name.

7.2 Probes

Speed 0.1c at the first plateau; Propulsion epochs lift it, and each hull keeps the speed of its launch epoch. Cost 25 + 1.5 × distance Output. At most 10 probes in flight at once (a slot opens when one reports home or is written off). Probes fly linear and do not decelerate.

arrival = dispatch + ceil(distance/0.1)
report  = arrival + ceil(distance)
battery = 30–100 years of reporting        (seeded per probe)
        + 200 × (1 − 0.85^Endurance level)  (research, up to +200 y)

• The battery is research. Every Endurance level adds reporting life: +161 years at level 10, approaching +200. The same ladder sets fleet range (§10.2), so a probe launched by a deep-Endurance civilization reports for centuries.
• Instrumented probes send mid-flight telemetry every 5 years, each burst with its own light lag.
• Grand Tours: up to 8 legs; each leg reports home separately.
• Deep-space commands (REDIRECT / RECALL) chase the probe at c. The gap to a probe receding at 0.1c closes at 0.9c; the acknowledgment rides home at c.
• Losses (0.3%/yr outbound, 1.0%/yr reporting) are silent (§3).
• When a probe's signals stop, the "status unknown" notice offers ⟶ SEND A SUCCESSOR: one click opens the same target with dispatch controls ready.

7.3 Planets, and how honest the picture is

Every planet view is rendered from physics: temperature T = 278·L^¼/√a × 0.7^¼ (albedo 0.3) gates what you see. No vegetation above 360 K, no ice caps on warm worlds, no glowing lava under 180 K, oceans freeze below 273 K. Continents follow plate tectonics, climate follows Hadley bands, gas giants are calibrated to Hubble's Jupiter, ice giants to Voyager's Neptune (no cloud bands).

• THE MIND — colony fit: env_distance measures how unlike your own cradle a world is (0 = twin, 1 = alien) across thermal, body type, habitable zone and mass. Your species has never heard of Earth. Grammar: ◇ proposal · ◆ established.
• OBSERVATION — provenance: what the image is. Remote sensing, image age ~34 years, or probe in orbit, live stream. A probed world renders at full detail; an inferred one stays soft. For an inhabited world the card says: this light left N years ago.

7.4 The Planetarium

The dome shows the sky your species perceives: a near-infrared species sees red dwarfs bloom and blue stars fade. Draw your own constellations (they earn Bayer designations α, β, γ). Watch the wanderers (your system's planets) show phases and retrograde loops. Run the time slider.

7.5 Moons

Every planet carries moons, over a million in the catalog. A gas giant unfolds into three to six; an ice giant one to three; a rocky world perhaps none. You see a system's moons only when standing in it: a probe, a colony, or an ark's target. A moon's nature is derived from its parent's mass, its orbit radius and the star's luminosity. Tidal heat (≈ parent mass ÷ orbit²) melts water in the dark.

You can found installations on any moon (§10.1). At registration the first moons of your home system's rocky worlds are running mine-bases. Ice classes show cryovolcanism. From an ocean moon you can look up from under the ice.

Colonizing a moon. The ocean moon and the warm exomoon hold a full colony. ◉ COLONIZE on the moon's card opens the composer with the moon chosen. Two differences from a planet: there is no gamble (the moon's habitability is arithmetic), and the capacity starts from the moon's kind and rises with its mass and, under the ice, its tidal heat: an ocean moon carries 219% to 324% of a standard habitable world, a warm exomoon 152% to 180% (a habitable planet 100%, a marginal world 40%), while exoticity runs high.

7.6 ✷ Real binaries, and a star that ends

Where the catalog records a binary, the game renders a binary: a companion with its own spectral class and a dome sky with two suns. A star can end. A supernova has a schedule, decades or centuries out. Everything within reach reads the same countdown, light-delayed. Within fifty light-years the front also strikes: up to 40% of a population and half the stockpile inside 25 light-years, 15% and a quarter inside 50; a K1 grid absorbs up to 80% of it and an active ⛨︎ bastion halves the rest. The warning arrives first; the changed sky arrives after.

After the flash (since 2026-10-07). The star does not come back. At the moment of detonation it becomes a stellar remnant: a neutron star for a core-collapse event, nothing at all for a type-Ia white dwarf — and a black hole where the dying star was an O-type or Wolf-Rayet giant (since 2026-10-18; see 7.8). Every colony under that sky dies with it, every works turns to slag. A people whose cradle it was follows the law of the impact: the world dies, not necessarily the species. If a living colony stands elsewhere, the Mind's vessel lifts for the strongest one and the crown passes where it lands; with no colony anywhere, the species ends with its sun. The deathwatch was the warning. You learn of the dead sky when the flash's light reaches you: the map draws the remnant dim and small, the system view says ✷ DEAD SKY, and no colonizer, expedition or terraformer is accepted for it once you have heard, with one exception: a ⊛ HORIZON STATION, where the remnant is a black hole (7.8). A hull already flying there arrives to a barren sky: no cradle, no works but the horizon station, no terraforming. Scouts may still go.

7.7 ν ⌇ ◌ Three messengers besides light (since 2026-10-13)

Light is not the only messenger, and it is the easiest to lie with. Three instruments read what light cannot. None of them is faster than light; every one of them travels at c and reports home at c. They are truer, not sooner.

• ν NEUTRINO VAULT — a works (neutrino, 400 Output, produces nothing) that stands only under a kilometre of ice or cold rock: a body colder than 200 K (a moon beyond the frost line, a cold terrestrial world, a dark world). It hears the reactor signature of every grid within reach: 120 ly × (1 + 5·(K − 1)), capped at 400 ly, from your own Kardashev value. A grid cannot mask its neutrinos: the system page shows ν TRUE K beside what their light says, and THEY MASK when the two disagree. A core collapse within 2.5× the reach reaches the vault as a ν BURST one year before its light. One vault is enough; the reach comes from your grid, not from the count.
• ⌇ GRAVITY ARRAY — one per civilization, around the home star, ordered on ◢ PRG ▸ ↯ ENERGY in three stages (6 + 7 + 7 years; grid gates K 1.02 / 1.05 / 1.10). It hears mass move: stage 1 MASS SURGE within 150 ly (a heavy formation braking under a sky, stealth or not — the one answer to ◌ STEALTH; it names the sky, not the owner), stage 2 MASS SHIFT within 300 ly (a foreign swarm changing stage behind radio silence), stage 3 CHIRP within 1,000 ly (a core collapse, in the same year as its light, but as certainty instead of the deathwatch's estimate). Each wave is heard once, and only by a stage that already stood when the wave arrived.
• ◌ DARK MASS — LIGHTCONE's own model, not measured physics, and the game says so. Every resolved deep look measures one line from home to the target: DENSE (the lens carries past the target — the nearest system in a 4° cone behind it resolves too), LENSED (the picture arrives twice; the delay is the mass on the line) or SPARSE. The standing array charts the sky in 30° slices, one a year; a charted slice corrects the map beyond 300 ly, where the dark mass bends the apparent positions. Lines measured: ◎ LENS block on the research page.

7.8 ⊛ The horizon — quantum gravity at black holes (since 2026-10-18)

Quantum gravity is learned in one place only: above an event horizon. Three real black holes stand in the catalog — Gaia BH1 (Ophiuchus, ~1,566 ly, 9.6 M☉), Gaia BH3 (Aquila, ~1,926 ly, 33 M☉) and A0620-00 (Monoceros, ~3,460 ly, at the edge) — and a supernova of an O-type or Wolf-Rayet star leaves a new one where the star was. The three catalog holes have one body each: the EVENT HORIZON. A hole born of a supernova keeps its dead worlds and gains one. The horizon takes no colony, no terraformer and no works but one; the dead worlds beside it take nothing.

• ⊛ HORIZON STATION — a works (horizon, 600 Output, produces nothing) sent by expedition; it stands only on an event horizon, and nothing else may stand there. The flight is the real distance at your real fleet speed; the hole is real, so the trip is what it is.
• Time dilation. Every hole has a factor γ = 1.5 + 0.035 × M☉ (BH1 1.84 · BH3 2.66 · A0620 1.73; a born hole ~1.9). The station's clock runs slow against yours: its yield is divided by γ.
• QUANTUM DATA (QD). Yearly yield 10 × √(M/10) × capacity / γ / √(stations on this horizon) × health. The station wears like any works (tidal stress on the frame: τ 300 years, floor 40%; a refit restores it), so the yield falls toward 40% of the fresh rate unless refurbished. The well is shared: a rival's station above the same horizon thins yours. A heavier hole is a deeper well and a stronger dilation at once.
• Jumps, not steps. Thresholds 1,000 · 4,000 · 12,000 QD → ⊛ TIER 1 / 2 / 3: propulsion +2 epochs, then remote sensing +2, then energetics +2, each on top of the researched level, written as a real level on the track. Hulls launched from home carry it at once; a colony yard carries it when the home's light reaches the yard; the works and instruments that read your level follow the same light.
• Light-honest, like everything. The breakthrough happens at the station in year Y; your sky learns of it at Y + distance, and the effect begins when the report arrives. Until then the PROGRESS line and the system page show what has reached you: QUANTUM DATA as of the year the last report left the station, and the stations whose founding you have heard. A rival's station above your horizon is seen only when its founding light arrives.
• Where to read it: ◢ PRG ▸ ↯ ENERGY, the ⊛ THE HORIZON line (thresholds, the nearest horizons when you have no station); the system page of a hole (⊛ BLACK HOLE · mass · dilation · stations heard · your well); the map marks every heard horizon with ⊛.

8 · Listening and speaking

8.1 What is out there

About 0.8% of habitable-zone worlds carry civilization traces, in four tiers:

One table, both ears (since 2026-09-26): this is the registration survey run once and the base of the yearly LISTEN roll (§8.4) — the same four tiers, the same ranges. Until 2026-09-26 the yearly roll ran on a narrower Tier-2 base (radio 50 ly, biomarkers 40 ly); it now carries the same boosted Tier 2 as the survey. A settled homeworld reads at least Tier 2. Your own radiated K decides the tier others read: K < 0.55 reads as faint traces, < 0.95 industrial, < 1.05 advanced, above that Kardashev-scale.

Discovery has two depths: ambient SETI (a faint far-off blip) and a probe's close-range confirmation. Some of those sources are other players. The instruments never say which.

The living and the silenced. A living signal is a neighbor; a directed word may be answered years later. A ⚱︎ SILENCED one is a dead civilization's farewell: a reply flies into the dark and nothing returns. Its ruins are prime ground for a dig. The instruments never mark anyone alive; only the dead are known for sure. A flood of arrivals folds into a browsable catalog.

The living are pinned. A directed hail whose source is presumed living rises to the top of the SETI room under a ◉ LIVE banner and, once decoded, carries its ⟶ ANSWER on the row. When many events of one kind land in one tick, one ceremony names the count; decisions that must be taken one at a time (a strike that opens a war, an ultimatum, terms of peace, an inbound hull) never group. Any alert that names a star offers ⌖ SHOW ME ON THE MAP.

8.2 Casting a signal

The transmit composer builds a message from components (mathematical primer, coordinate beacon, self-description, star catalog, cultural package, conditional protocol, narrative tag), each adding cost and decodability, plus a free-text line of up to 500 characters. Free text crosses drifted; the reader pays a little extra to decode it. Your cast log keeps what you said.

reach   = (5 + 45 × power/100) ly × your Remote Sensing reach multiplier
cost    = 48 × (power/50) × mode + 4 × Σcomponent   (omni mode ×1.4)
decodability = min(1, Σ decode-weights / 3)
reply_chance = 0.5 × decodability × disposition × mode × (1 − d/reach)

A power-p cast draws 2·p TW from the grid at the moment of transmission (§14). A cast may be ⛨︎ ciphered (15 Knowledge, cost ×1.25): eavesdroppers pay triple to decode; replies −20%.

Every civilization has a fixed hidden disposition (0.1–0.9). A reply takes a full round trip (2 × distance years). Your cumulative exposure (Σ power × reach) darkens the tone of replies: below 5,000 they are open; past 20,000 they are terse.

◆ GO on the cast composer sends the Mind's cast: full power, maximum decodability, no cipher, neutral primers only (no coordinate beacon, no conditional protocol). It is omnidirectional unless the target is fixed. ⚙︎ SETTINGS holds the beam and the content; a cast changed there is yours, and ◆ GO sends it as set.

8.3 Recon

A scout that reaches a civilization opens a dossier that fills at 0.03 × readability per year (readability 0.2–1.0; higher tiers read less). Milestones at 20/40/65/85/100%: presence, development, military posture, disposition, deep read. Full intel on a clear subject: ~33 years.

8.4 The LISTEN dial, and the diaspora's ears

On the ◠ Listen tab the QUIET ARRAY ↔︎ ALL EARS allocation stretches or starves every reception range (≈0.5× to 2.4×), compounded by your species' sensorium and by experience (+2% per signal ever caught, up to +50%). Upkeep runs to 5 Output a year; a broke year listens at the starved floor. Each year every unheard source inside reach rolls a detection, off the same tier table as the registration survey (§8.1) — one table, not two: Tier-2 base 75 ly radio and 60 ly biomarkers.

Every loyal colony is a forward listening post (0.6× array). Its news crosses home at c: ⟨ relayed from a colony's array, N years in transit ⟩.

8.5 The audience and the face

Send an ⚖︎ envoy hull to an inhabited system and the contact line opens on arrival. For the host, the unarmed hull holds station at the system edge for 100 years. ⚖︎ RECEIVE delivers the first direct optical record of the other people (+15 on the ledger). × TURN AWAY: the hull departs, the line stays open, no likeness is exchanged, the ledger takes −10, and a later treaty overture from the refused side carries a re-approach cost. Silence: after 100 years unanswered the audience lapses (⚖︎ ENVOY DEPARTED), the hull turns for home, and the host's ledger with that sky takes −20. A new envoy re-opens the question.

The veil. You reconstruct another species from what its signals reveal. Every correspondence (⟷ CONTACTS) carries a ⌖ morphology reconstruction on a ladder: carrier trace (a mass estimate), contour (first decoded word), body plan (a held conversation), proportions (a shared lexicon), envoy optical record (a received audience). One tier lies beyond the audience: the infiltration record (§19.5).

What cannot be faked. A fed infiltrator receives a composed face. Three readings resist it because they are measurements: the chamber glow (spectroscopy of their air), the carrier mass (read off the signal), the sensory band (from the colour of their star). A forgery may move a people from water-carbon to hybrid; an ammonia-cold world cannot pretend to be anything else. The forgery is composed per recipient: two infiltrators fed by the same defender receive different lies.

◭ The species codex. Every people you have exchanged light with keeps a page: the latest known face, and the record between two skies on one timeline (lines, audiences, refusals, envoy reports, burned infiltrators, battles, ultimatums, compacts).

The first people to receive an envoy hold THE FIRST AUDIENCE in the Galactic Record.

8.6 ⌁ Technosignature — the third source

A dead civilization reaches you on its own (farewell, beacon, ruins). A living one you can address. The third source: ⌁ TECHNOSIGNATURE. A settled world leaks industrial emissions once it is old enough to be industrial and the light has crossed. It says one thing: someone lives here.

The signature appears when the founding light arrives and goes silent when the news of that world's death reaches you. A star can carry a technosignature and a ⚱︎ declared-dead mark at once: the second is the news catching up with the first.

⌁ RUN QUIET suppresses your own worlds' emissions. It cannot recall light already in flight, and the change itself travels at c.

8.7 ◈ Reported realm

A people in correspondence shows you where they live. Their settlements appear as a dashed courtyard in the species' colour. The dossier marks it secondhand: the seat reports a settlement here, since y…, their word carried on light. Two truths can disagree on one star: they report a colony, your instruments find nothing. Both are correct.

8.8 ✵ The Visitor

Rarely, an object crosses your sky on a hyperbolic course. It does not answer and does not stop. Instrument reach ends after a stated window. A flyby probe (500 Output) can meet it if launched at least 60 years before departure; the launch window closes then. A successful flyby pays Knowledge. The record of having met one is kept.

8.9 ⌖ The portrait, and the ⚿ lie you can tell with it

Each people carries a portrait: anatomy, sensorium, bearing. A veil withholds it; a ⚿ falsification replaces it. The lie is per-relationship (one people sees a false face, another the true one) and physics-bound: a retracted face keeps arriving for distance years, and a neighbour close enough to read you directly is harder to lie to.

9 · Names and the tongue

9.1 The universal claim

A language requires a signal, not a mouth: a pressure wave, an EM flicker, a chemical line, light across a skin of pixels. Signals have universal features:

What you read is a transcript: an alien signal-space projected onto human-readable glyphs by fixed convention.

9.2 The pulse-group

The universal unit is the pulse-group: an energy envelope that rises, optionally holds, and releases. A voice of pure timed transients transcribes as K't'kk-q'tk, a sentence that contains no vowel. A polyphonic voice (a field of light-pixels) must be flattened into a line, and the flattening loses information. Decode cost grows with the distance between their signal-space and your sensorium.

9.3 The three grades of knowing

9.4 Language drift, home and colony

Your colonies' language drifts year by seeded year, and so does yours. Isolation quickens the drift; every arrived message slows it; high gravity shifts the voice toward heavier sounds. The drift has direction: a colony that answers M'RIDIAN grew channel-stops. Another child at the same drift mispronounces the same name differently. Word-initial glyphs always survive. Erosion is monotonic. Your own names are never re-rendered for you; your drift shows only in how others transcribe them.

Between species. Between species, the shared lexicon of a pair is the best value the two have reached. After 700 years without a heard exchange it erodes: it halves toward a floor every 1,400 years, and the floor is 40% of the best value. Your clock is what you have heard: your own sends, and their messages and signals that have arrived. The next heard exchange restores the full value. A transmission that lands during a long silence reads at the eroded value and costs more Knowledge to decode; a ⌬ LEXICON ERODED line says so. Nothing already delivered or decoded changes. An heir people (a new Mind on an abandoned world, or the people left behind by an exodus) opens with half of its parent's lexicon toward each of the parent's contacts.

9.5 Names

• You may name anything of yours: stars, bodies, probes, fleets, colonies, constellations. Defaults are generated in your species' voice (§4.2), deterministically.
• Distant mouths change your names everywhere: messages, atlas rows, recorded quotes pass through one renderer. Drift 0.3 is an accent; 0.6 a dialect; 0.85 a tongue barely yours.
• Decoding a drifted transmission costs 5 + 45 × drift Knowledge (below drift 0.12 it lands legible).
• On the console every proper name is uppercase; only the Greek letter of a Bayer designation stays lowercase (α CENTAURI).

9.6 The tongues ledger

The ⌬ TONGUES panel (Intel tab) lists your own root voice, your children's dialects, and every foreign structure your decoders have fixed. Each decoded transmission surrenders two of the source's words (up to eight): Ief. = the dark.

9.7 Per-medium typography and the secession fork

• Per-medium typography: each medium renders in its own type treatment: photic glows, chemical fades in, EM carries carrier-jitter, mechanical sets heavy. Acoustic is unmarked.
• Secession forks the root forever. The year a colony breaks from home its tongue becomes its own root. No later return to loyalty undoes it. Home hears the new voice only in light that left after the break.

10 · Expanding

10.1 Installations

Ten types; all ten can be founded today. The ▥ depot opened with the Makers' dispatch of 2026-10-16. A colony is not an installation: it needs a colonizer and a cohort. An expedition's crew comes off the home population (2% of a standard world per hull): only what stands above the settlement floor of 5% of a standard world can be spared. Below that the dispatch button reads CREW SHORT and the order is refused.

An expedition can found mine, farm, research, solar, habitat, bastion and workshop in another system (the depot once it opens). At home you found directly from the body's row. A rogue home founds geothermal, mine, research and habitat. A dark (rogue) heading launches from home only: colony yards, mine yards and relocation are star-lane services; a fleet already flying may be redirected to a dark world if its hulls are permitted there. Everything takes 3 years to build, then ages: health = floor + (1−floor)·e^(−age/τ). Refurbishing resets the clock. The bill is for the missing life: max(25% × full, full × (1 − health)/(1 − floor)), where full = founding cost × 0.5 × capacity. A works near the floor pays the full half of its founding cost; a fresh one pays a quarter of that. Decommissioning refunds nothing.

Reading a works' economics. Each installation shows its net per year over a full refurbish cycle. Above zero (✓ pays for itself) it covers its upkeep; below zero (✗) it is a drain you keep for another reason. Size does not speed the clock: a works grown with ⇡ GROW ages on the same τ, and its refurbish bill rises with its capacity. The prospect line under a candidate body shows what every kind of works would yield there.

A distant installation's Knowledge radiates home at c. Its Output piles up locally and an automatic cargo line hauls it home at fleet speed with a transit loss over the distance.

⚒︎ The yard. Since 2026-09-23 there is one ship-building source: the composer. A colony yard or an active distant mine builds hulls from its own local stock, at the technology that had reached that sky when the build began (§10.8). Colony ships are excluded from a mine yard.

⌖ NEAREST YARD. With a target and a composition set, this button in the composer ranks every yard you hold (⌂ HOME, each ⚒︎ colony yard, each ⛏︎ active mine) by years to the target, not by distance: the order leg (your command's light-time to the yard) + the yard time + the voyage, each yard at its own technology. Yards that can lay the composition come first, the fewest total years on top; the eight fastest are listed, the slower ones stand behind a list opener. Yards that cannot lay it stand behind a second opener, counted by reason. Opened, each names its reason: SHORT n OUTPUT / SHORT n ORE, CREW SHORT, GRID SHORT BY n TW (home only), a mine's LAYS HULLS, NOT PEOPLE, or a colony that cannot relocate into its own sky. One click on a capable row switches the build site. While the fleet carries a colony ship or an expedition, the yard picker above leaves the mine yards out.

⬡ SITE YIELDS. With an EXPEDITION in the add row, the composer lists every body and moon of the target sky with its MINE, ENERGY and RESEARCH yield per year (in-situ numbers, or a telemetry band marked ~). A cell sets the body and the works type for the next ship; + ADD lays it. Marks: ◆ the Mind's pick, ✓ works of that type stand there, + aboard this fleet, ⇥ en route.

Who pays for upkeep. Every refurbish is spent from your home Output stockpile. The order rides light out; the clock resets on arrival. If home Output runs short the Mind cannot refurbish and says so. A failing work left un-mended runs down to a ruin.

Site power. Site power is local. Only the home swarm's beam crosses light-years, outward. Every system stands on its own grid. Each remote site gets 80 TW baseline free. Beyond that every ⛏︎ mine draws 40 TW, every ⚛︎ research station 45 TW, per capacity unit. Other works, ⚘ farms included, draw no site power. When draw exceeds supply, every works in that system is throttled in proportion. The answer is an ☀︎ Energy Harvester, scaled by how bright the star burns there. A harvester's TW powers its own system only, never the home grid; its Output is cargo, hauled home by freighter. The home system is not exempt (THE HOME GRID ERA, since 2026-09-12): home mines and research stations draw the same TW from the home grid. The throttle ramps in over 150 years from the era's start; every home work's card shows the line.

Station attrition. Switch ⚙︎ Maintained off and the works run down; after 120 years of neglect it becomes a ⚱︎ derelict. Every year every station rolls a seeded, environment-weighted hazard: under a clear sky, with fresh metal, it runs at about one loss in 5,000 station-years; a debris belt raises it; an Io-class forge takes a station about every two centuries; old unrefurbished metal fails sooner; a climate-crisis world (§10.7) destroys its own works. Build again on a derelict and the ruin is cleared.

Scuttle (☒). Every active station carries charges. The order rides light to the site; on arrival the works fold 90% of the time. One order in ten fails. Scuttle denies a conqueror the works (§19.3).

10.2 Ships and the continuous hull

Nine hull types and no ship classes. Size is a continuous number.

cost  = base × size^1.35
speed = base × size^−0.15
ceiling: raw = (K_peak/50)^0.8 · max size = min(250, floor(1 + 250·tanh(raw/250)))
         K_peak = the library's all-time peak     (K=50→1 · K=324→5 · K=1000→11 · K=5000→40 · hard cap 250)

Size is displayed as drive power: 1 unit = 100 TW. There is no cap on fleets in flight: every hull is paid for and crewed.

The flight profile (since 2026-09-12). A fleet does not jump to cruise speed. It accelerates at a, cruises at its hull speed, and decelerates to zero at the target. On a short leg it never reaches cruise: peak speed √(a·d). Arrival is dispatched + ceil(t_acc + t_cruise + t_dec). The dossier shows PHASE, current speed and SHIP TIME (γ).

a = 0.02 c/yr × (1 + 4 × (1 − 0.9^propulsion_level))     (level 10 ≈ ×3.6 · level 20 ≈ ×4.5 · limit ×5)

A redirect first decelerates the hull along its old heading (overshoot), then starts a new profile from the stopping point. Probes, exodus arks and system-launched legs (cargo returns, post-siege homecomings) stay linear. Fleets launched before 2026-09-12 keep their linear schedule.

Delivery is not certain (since 2026-10-07). An order after a fleet is a signal, and a signal can go unheard. The odds are fixed when you send and shown on the order: near hulls almost always hear (98%); past a sure radius the odds fall with distance. Your Remote Sensing level pushes the sure radius out (12 ly at level 0, toward 30 ly); the hull's frozen reliability vintage (Systems Reliability at the yard) sets how fast the odds fall beyond it (old hulls hear worse). Every hull rolls on its own: the hulls that heard turn; the hulls that did not split off as "<name> B" and hold the original course under the standing doctrine. If no hull heard, nothing comes back. The dossier shows ACK DUE until the acknowledgment's due year, then NO ACKNOWLEDGMENT; the hull may not have heard, and a new order may be sent. The failure is never visible before the acknowledgment was due. An exodus ark carries its helm aboard: zero lag, certain delivery.

p(d) = 0.98                                if d ≤ Rs
p(d) = 0.98 · exp(−((d − Rs) / Rf)²)       beyond
Rs   = 12 ly × (1 + 1.5 × (1 − 0.85^remote_sensing))                  (12 → 30 ly)
Rf   = 40 ly × (1 + (1 − 0.85^remote_sensing)) × (0.6 + 0.4 × (1 − 0.85^reliability_vintage))   (24 → 80 ly)

d is the hull's distance from your seat in the year you send; the odds never fall below 2%.

The range battery (since 2026-09-17). Every fleet carries a range budget in light-years. Default: 2 × the target distance. For fleets with a colonizer, an expedition or a warship you may set it between ×1 and ×4 of the distance. The battery costs grid energy, not Output, and counts against the yearly launch budget:

battery_TW = range_ly × Σ hull size × 1.5 × eff
eff        = 1 − 0.7 × (1 − 0.85^endurance_level)        (1.0 at level 0 → 0.30 limit)

A hull launched from a colony dock or held at dock pays no battery TW from the home grid. Every leg the fleet flies is subtracted from the battery (the outbound leg at launch, each onward or fallback leg after). The range is budgeted for the round trip: the return leg is included in the calculation, so the way home and any retreat never strand a hull. When less than 0.05 ly remains, the hull stops: a hull with an evacuation cohort, or a cohort of at least 10% of a full world with bio-adaptation ≥ 30 and at least 3 hull units, becomes a self-sustaining ark at 60% of its speed (never below 0.04c) and keeps seeking; any other hull is lost. The composer's error names the fix: shorten the range, build ☀︎ collectors, or advance Endurance.

Loudness (the Rama threshold): a fleet totaling ≥ 20 units (2.0 PW) is visible across light-years. The composer warns: ⚠︎ LOUD — visible to the forest. Loud fleets take +12% loss on Dark-Forest expeditions. About once in 70 years you see one yourself: a PASSING OBJECT, someone else's ark.

◈ The Realm. The ◎ LN button opens ◎ THE LENS; its ◈ REALM tab draws the strategic tableau in three layers: ◉ DOMAIN (worlds that answer to your Mind, one merged hard-bordered region), ▹ REACH (skies your probes have touched), · OBSERVED (everything whose light has reached your instruments). See §15.3c for the lens.

⌗ Registries. Every entity keeps a dossier: a data head, a ⌘ OPERATIONS tab of live commands, a ⌗ CHRONICLE, and a ✎ pencil to rename it. A docked fleet can be reorganized ship by ship: grown (+ADD), stripped (−SCRAP), or ⇤ DETACHED (a ship leaves the convoy under its own registry).

A fleet that has arrived is not stranded. Once its light has come home you can command it: ➤ new orders sends it onward or home at its own frozen speed; ⚙︎ scrap abandons it to free its slot. An exodus ark's landfall is final. A hull that makes it home docks as reusable: refit it, or break it up for a quarter of its build cost.

⏳︎ The vintage. Speed, reliability, cryogenics and armament freeze at the plateau the ship was built on. An old ark's cruder cryogenics lose more sleepers, so it lands a thinner colony. The fleet list shows each hull's build year.

⚓︎ A hull's second road. A colony ship whose gamble fails returns and docks. Refit it (a fraction of a fresh build, on its old tech) and send it again, or retire it for a quarter of its build cost. Every hull keeps a ⌗ chronicle.

⟲ Refit, ♺ recycle, ⊘ scrap. A docked hull has three roads. ⟲ REFIT costs 40% of a fresh build of the same hull and keeps the frozen vintage. ♺ RECYCLE strips the hull and re-roles it as any of five types (scout, warship, envoy, spy, colonizer) at today's technology: 60% of the new type's fresh cost and 60% of its build years. ⊘ SCRAP returns a quarter of the build cost.

◌ Stealth hulls cost ×1.75 Output and ×1.5 build years. The hull's signal is 1 − 0.7 × sat(stealth level) of a plain hull's, fixed at build; an observer's sense is 1 + 0.5 × sat(its remote sensing). A fleet reads as LOUD when signal × sense × size reaches 20 units.

10.3 Colonizing a world — the va-banque gamble

Remote sensing reads a distant sky as a probability. You may dispatch a colonizer on telemetry alone. Every terrestrial world carries a colony-odds reading in the composer:

The same reading stands on the world's card in the system view as HABITABILITY ESTIMATE · ‹band›, one of the bands above; a VA BANQUE reading adds — A PROBE WOULD CONFIRM. A terrestrial world with no chance and no in-situ reading carries no line. The band is LIKELY at 86% confidence or above, VA BANQUE below it.

A world's true habitability is a hidden, seeded fact, settled on arrival:

• A ▹ scout in the convoy reads the world before the hulls commit. On a barren landing it turns them toward the nearest charted cradle in reach.
• No scout, and the convoy commits to a dead world: the hulls come down and a dome rises. The cohort becomes a ⛫ foothold, alive, unable to grow. Send a ⏣ terraformer (§10.6); when the world is remade the dome opens.

A probe sent ahead removes the gamble. The Atlas → Colony candidate filter lists every observed system with a cradle.

10.4 Colony or outpost

• ◉ Colony site: a terrestrial world inside the habitable zone. Send a ◉ colonizer. The colony lives its own light-delayed life and drifts (§11).
• ◈ Outpost site: no cradle, but a body worth a base. Send an ⬡ Expedition with the works it carries. A crew drawn from the home population mans the site, comes home if the hull returns, and is named in the silence report if it never does. No colony, no drift.

10.5 Site prospect

Each body is read on three richness axes, minerals (mine), energy (solar), research (exoticity), and classified barren · modest · rich · PRIME. A base is recommended only above modest.

Telemetry can be wrong by one band. A real ✧ PRIME shows gold; the Atlas → Rich filter and a gold marker on the map gather them. The richest catch is a system holding ⚱︎ ruins: a research expedition excavates them (§18.3).

10.6 Terraforming

Send a ⏣ Terraformer (600 Output, 0.07c) to any terrestrial world, a known corpse included. The remaking takes 150 years at adaptability level 0; each level adds 6% to the pace (150 / (1 + 0.06 × level): about 94 years at level 10, 60 years at level 25). Milestones arrive as light-delayed letters at 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% (⊹ TERRAFORM COMPLETE). A finished world is a made cradle: the composer accepts a colonizer, the landing needs no coin-flip, the atlas raises the CRADLE flag. A waiting ⛫ foothold becomes a living colony at full capacity when the work completes.

10.7 Climate stewardship

Every world you live on accumulates warming above its birth-climate, faster the harder its industry runs. The warming comes in bands:

From the storm years on, seeded disasters land decade by decade: a 15% chance a decade in the storm years, 30% in the crisis, 50% at the collapse edge. Each one takes 15% of the stored Output and 3% of cohesion. The system report shows the band on the body. Two levers:

• The stewardship dial (◆ MIND → 🜄 Planetary stewardship): 0–30% of gross Output. Every 10% buys 0.5 K of cooling a decade.
• The Planetary Stewardship program (🜄, under Foundation): each level lowers forcing (−65% at the limit) and multiplies cooling (×3 at the limit).

Your colonies warm their own skies under your light-delayed policy.

10.8 ⚒︎ The colony yard

A loyal colony with room to spare can build a hull of its own: paid from their stores, crewed from their people, launched from their sky. Your order rides light to the yard first. The yard works at the technology that reached them, what you knew distance years ago: drive, reliability, cryogenics, armament and build years are all capped by it. An independent child builds with what it knew at secession.

10.9 ☾ The moon cradle

A rocky moon can be settled, terraformed, and can be a cradle. Tidal heating is the furnace; the star's habitable band is not the measure. A species born on one begins under an engineered sky with the parent planet's reference gravity.

10.10 ❀ Garden worlds and the 🜂 seeding ladder

Biospheres are common; civilizations are not. A sterile world in a habitable band can be sown: 500 Output, first surface life in ~50 years, a full garden in about eight thousand. A world accepts one sowing. Photosynthesis under a cool star runs toward the far red; a young biosphere passes through a red season. From a seeded world the 🜂 panspermia ladder spreads life to near, compatible worlds without another order.

A living world you did not sow: an assay (300 Knowledge) resolves whether its chemistry is compatible with yours; a reserve declares it protected and yields a trickle of Knowledge while untouched. The pledge has one end: settle that world yourself and it dissolves. There is no order that takes the word back.

10.11 ➤ Convoys in flight

A hull's vintage is fixed at the yard: propulsion, reliability, cryogenics and armament are frozen at the level the yard knew, and stay so for the hull's whole life. Two convoys can rendezvous at a star and merge. ⇤ DETACH is a command sent at c: the one named ship, if it hears the order, leaves the convoy and continues alone, at its own class speed on the convoy's vintage; the rest of the convoy is not rolled.

Wear and the workshop (since 2026-10-07). The years under way wear a hull. For every 60 years in flight its frozen reliability level counts one lower in the yearly voyage hazard, down to half the birth plateau; the dossier shows HULL WEAR, and the wear carries from leg to leg (a turn does not reset it). A ⚗︎ WORKSHOP is a works (150 Output, any body of your own under a star, at home or by expedition): a hull that arrives at a star where you hold an active workshop is brought back up to its birth plateau, and you learn of it when that arrival's light reaches home. The detour is its own price: the years to the workshop and on.

10.12 ⛰︎ Basalt eras

Every terrestrial world and moon carries a volcanism index (internal heat by mass, tidal flexing on a tight or eccentric orbit, tidal heat on a moon). The index sets a class, and the class sets the odds of a basalt era: an age in which the world's carrying capacity falls and the population follows it down. The class and its odds are readable on the body before you settle it.

The era reaches the works too: at its depth the mines, farms, research stations, harvesters and depots on that world yield ×0.8, ramping in and out with the capacity; habitats are untouched. The home cradle is no exception.

An era lasts 150–250 years. Capacity ramps down over 20 years and back up over 50 after the end. A SEISMIC WATCH arrives that many years ahead on your clock (on the cradle, 100 years); the light delay is added in front, never taken from it. The 🜄 Planetary Stewardship program softens the era: at its limit the capacity loss halves and the warning doubles. The answers are the usual ones for a world that cannot carry its people: habitats, the pressure valve (§0.4), or a colony elsewhere.

11 · The Fracture — your children become the aliens

Found a colony and its drift clock starts (§11.1).

11.1 Drift

drift = exoticity × (1 − e^(−age/160))

exoticity is how unlike home the colony's world is. child (drift < 0.2) → sibling (< 0.55) → stranger. A colony's Knowledge output is multiplied by (1 + 0.5 × drift).

11.2 Cohesion

A state, not a resource:

erosion/yr = 0.0028 + 0.008·drift + 0.004·min(1, dist/100) + 0.010 if recently extracted

• At 0.30 the colony's warning is sent; it reaches you ceil(distance) years later.
• Below 0.25 the secession clock runs: after 40 + min(105, ceil(2 × distance)) years of unbroken discontent the colony declares itself independent (still answers, half-listens to aid). Climbing back to 0.25 stops the clock. While you are away between 6 hours and 7 days, the clock holds.
• Below 0.05: dark (stops broadcasting; the year is stamped).
• Aid can climb it back over 0.25.
• ⌁ SEND WORD AHEAD (5 Output, on the colony row) travels at c. On arrival they hold their departure for the years a rite ordered now would need (never longer than the clock itself), shorter for each word that went unkept. If nothing lands inside that hold, the promise counts as broken and costs −0.20 cohesion (a lapsed petition costs −0.12).

11.3 The instruments (all light-delayed)

• ◆ Invest (25 Output + 25 Knowledge): +0.16 cohesion on arrival; halved if they turned independent in flight; wasted if they died. A second crate in the same shipment is worth half the first, a third half of that; one shipment tops out near +0.32.
• Extract: an order in two legs. It reaches them in distance years, strips their granary (−0.06 cohesion), and the cargo crawls home losing 0.6% per ly.
• ⚙︎ Role: INDUSTRY, BALANCE or RESEARCH (below); the order lands in ceil(distance) years.
• Message: costs nothing but time. +0.03 cohesion on landing. The reply returns 2 × distance years later in their drifted tongue.

⚙︎ DOCTRINE. Each colony works in one of three roles: INDUSTRY (80% of its effort on Industry, 20% on Research), BALANCE (60/40) or RESEARCH (20/80). The head of the COL panel carries the empire's ⚙︎ DOCTRINE (default BALANCE). Changing it books the change at home at once and sends a directive to every colony that follows the doctrine; each colony hears it after its own ceil(distance), the nearest first. A new colony takes the doctrine with it at founding. A role picked in the colony's dossier (⚙︎ ORDERS → ROLE) makes it ⎇ OWN: the doctrine no longer reaches it. ⚙︎ FOLLOW DOCTRINE returns it, again at light speed. A colony whose old dial sits between the roles shows ⎇ OWN N%. Dark and self-ruled worlds hear nothing.

11.4 The ladder — what can still be done

Three heavier acts live in the ⚕︎ What can still be done block at the top of a drifting colony's dossier:

• ⛯ The Rite: +0.28 cohesion, 40-year cooldown, cost 80 Output or 3 Output per 1% of a full world, whichever is more (a full world: 300). Full strength on a child that governs itself, where ◆ Invest is halved. It resets the secession clock. It is a ship at 0.12c. Ordered the year the clock's news reaches you, it lands before the clock runs out only inside about 5 light-years (d + d/0.12 ≤ 40 + 2d). Farther out, ⌁ SEND WORD AHEAD buys the hold it needs (§11.2); otherwise the child declares itself first and the rite becomes the instrument of reconquest.
• ⚖︎ The Delegation: an envoy hull to your own child. They decide whether to open the hall: p = 0.45 + 0.5·cohesion − 1.2·drift. Received: +0.20. Refused: nothing is lost except the transit time.
• ⟐ The Presence: the Mind's own core detaches from the seat and crosses at 0.15c. While it is away there is no delegate at home: stewardship, crisis autonomy and every standing rule halt. The vessel can be lost. If it arrives, cohesion is restored, and while the core remains that world's estrangement runs at a third. Minimum stay twenty years; the recall is light-delayed.

11.5 ⛓︎ Pacification — force against your own child

Warships under the ⛓︎ SUBJUGATE doctrine, sent at a child that has declared itself, end the declaration.

The grandfather rule. A pacified world's yearly odds of rising climb with the age of the garrison:

• 50 years: no risk of rising.
• 75 years: about three-quarters of pacified worlds still hold.
• 100 years: about a third still hold.
• 150 years: almost none still hold.

It is not war. No declaration is possible against your own, and the outlaw watches do not fire for this. Neighbours judge you in the ledger and the Record.

The witness's own record scales the penalty. The −30 lands only on witnesses who have never done this. A neighbour who has held one garrison over its own children marks −14; twice, −6; three or more times the ledger writes WE RECOGNIZE THE NECESSITY with no number. Character is read at the moment of the act.

When it breaks, the world governs itself again, the garrison fleet is lost, and the tongue forks permanently. You can pacify it a second time. The Record keeps count.

11.6 Ghosts

When a colony goes dark, its old light keeps arriving for ceil(distance) more years. Every ~6 received-years a fragment surfaces. Then the last light: a final transmission recorded the year they fell silent.

A dark colony's fate depends on its drift:

• Low drift (< 0.35): it depended on you. Once its bond is gone it drifts into an independent stranger, a living world you can still win back. Ruins are for catastrophe, not neglect. A young colony (its first 120 years) resists the fade.
• High drift: it never needed you. It keeps growing alone.

Winning them back: ⟷ Message, ◆ Invest, and ◉ Reinforce (a fresh cohort from home pulls the drift back hardest). The tongue, once forked, stays forked.

11.7 Expeditions into the silence

Any fleet arriving where you have a dark or ruined colony becomes an expedition. The outcome depends on the state at arrival:

1. Ruins: the truth revealed, the granary salvaged (cargo hauls home at fleet speed). Recolonizing archives the grave and builds on it.
2. Contact re-opened (alive, drift < 0.35): independent status, transmissions resume.
3. Refusal (alive, drifted): one farewell broadcast, then silence. 20 + 60·drift Knowledge.

11.8 Exoticity, adaptation and terraforming

A colony's exoticity reads six axes, atmosphere heaviest, gravity next, then temperature. One axis is a wall: lethal gravity, beyond ~2.5× (or under a fifth of) your cradle's pull, and the yard refuses the manifest.

• Adaptation: generations root on the timescale τ = 1000 × (1 − bio-adaptation/100) years (never under 50), closing up to 60% of the felt gap. The colony detail shows Rooted 32%.
• Terraforming: up to −85% at completion (§21.2). The two run together.

11.9 ⟐ The Regent

Beyond a certain distance your order arrives a lifetime after the situation that prompted it. Seat a Regent: send a person in cold sleep to hold a district in your name. They decide, and their journal reaches you distance years late. Two dials: ⚡︎ RESOLVE (how hard they press petitions to a decision) and ◇ PLIANCY (how far they bend to the district: high buys local acceptance and legitimacy but loosens the bond to home; low holds the bond and breeds resentment toward revolt). A regent has legitimacy, and it erodes: below a threshold every order runs late; at zero the seat is untenable. They have a lifespan unless your kind has left the flesh. ⟐ CALL HOME reaches them at c.

11.10 ⌁ The petition

A petition is a colony asking for a decision: a grievance, a request, a fork. It arrives light-delayed with a deadline in their calendar. Answer it and the answer crosses back; leave it and it lapses on its own clock. ◆ GO on the petition list answers the maintenance calls in one press; the ones that start something wait for you. One law stands above the autonomy layer: you can never make a colony leave. Independence is theirs to declare.

• Patience: 2 × distance years, counted from arrival, never under 60 (≈10 real hours) and never over 120 (≈20). While you are away between 6 hours and 7 days, the deadline holds.
• Silence: a lapsed call costs −0.12 cohesion and goes on file. An open refusal costs −0.05.
• The file: each silence on file makes ⛯ the rite there 22% dearer (×1.22 after one), capped at ×2.
• The cap: at most 3 calls stand open at once; the loudest voice is heard first.

11.11 ⌂ Moving the seat

Every instrument in §11.3 is delayed by the colony's distance from the seat of your civilization, so a realm that spreads in one direction commands its far side badly. The seat can move. ⟐ MOVE THE SEAT HERE stands on the row of any loyal colony of yours that has already landed.

One star, one seat. A star that is another living civilization's home cannot take your seat. If the crown must pass (an ark lost, a capsule landing) and the heir colony sits under such a star, the seat lands there and moves on, as a convoy, to your strongest colony under a free sky. Only when no other living colony exists does the seat stay. The news line names the star either way.

The move costs 400 Output and 12,000 Knowledge, and the seat crosses as a convoy at 0.1c: ceil(distance / 0.1) years, generations even across a modest realm. One move at a time. On arrival every command lag is recomputed from the new centre and the old home becomes a loyal colony. The departure and the arrival travel as light like everything else: other civilizations read the new centre when the signal reaches them.

The seat's history keeps the light. Every seat move is recorded. If a capital has left a star but the light of its leaving has not reached you, that star still counts as seated for your orders; and the Mind chooses the onward colony for a passing crown from what it has heard, not from what is.

12 · The Great Filter

The impactor is the game's one zero-warning catastrophe: an asteroid is local and sublight. What you can buy:

• The hazard is displayed. Your home panel shows the sky's ledger: ☄︎ debris +27% OP · impact hazard ELEVATED. Hazard per year is 0.00008 + 0.00035 × debris, home and colony alike.
• Detection scales with Knowledge. A rock spawns silently, 15–60 years out. Each year Spaceguard rolls p = 0.05 + 0.90 × (1 − e^(−raw/0.90)), raw = Knowledge/40,000 + remote-sensing bonus, to find it. The probability approaches 0.95 and never reaches it. A found rock is a deadline: "IMPACTOR DETECTED — impact in 34 years."
• Deflection costs Output and grid. The price is 1500 × (1 + (50/(years+5))^1.6): about 3,300 at 45 years, 12,000 at 10, 30,000 at 3. It also needs 3000/(years+5) TW of grid (§14). The order is given from the red banner on the home panel.

The first strike is survivable, once. Every civilization survives its first undeflected home strike: population falls to 30%, the stockpile halves, faith drops by 20 points, and the dust winter cools the world by 6 K. The world lives. The second undeflected strike is the fall. The grace is one-time per civilization.

If the sky falls (the second time, or a war fleet's fire), the world dies, not necessarily the species (§13). If no one lives anywhere else, the civilization ends.

Colonies under their own skies (since 2026-09-11). The same hazard rolls for every living colony. A rock aimed at one is detected there, 15–60 years out, and the news reaches you ceil(distance) years later: ☄︎ IMPACTOR DETECTED AT …, with the years left after that light. Only a ⛨︎ bastion under that sky can deflect it: the order rides light out, the price and the grid demand are counted on the years left when the order lands (the colony's own grid, the bastion halving the throw), and an order that would land after the impact is refused. An undeflected rock resolves by class:

A colony under an active alert or watched by its own bastion is in the shelters: half of the share that would die survives, and cohesion takes 0.15 less. On a global or extinction strike a colonizer standing at the colony, or the hull that brought them, lifts a cohort toward the nearest sister world: the full hull under a bastion, 40% of it without.

13 · Endings and continuations

Every death in LIGHTCONE is survivable if the species already lives somewhere else.

13.1 The Exodus

You may put your whole people on one ark. Requirements: a colonizer whose hull can hold them. At cryogenics level 0 one hull unit carries 20% of a full world; the cryogenics ladder raises the density toward 60%. Nine-tenths of the people go. An ark too small for them all refuses the order once; a second, explicit order launches a PARTIAL EXODUS: the ark takes what it holds (at least 2% of the population and 2% of a standard world), and the rest stay on the old world as a separate people.

• The stayers (one tenth) keep the world: the granaries, a copy of the libraries, the home installations, the charts. Their world becomes a remnant in the orphan pool.
• You take the ark, the people, the Knowledge and your distant network. Population 0%, Output 0, faith 1.0. The only zero-lag state in the game.

The voyage: an amber banner, the ark stepping across the map one year at a time, no launches until landfall. Ark hazard is 0.01%/yr against a fleet hull's 0.35%/yr. Its death is the species' death, known instantly.

Landfall re-anchors the universe: your home star becomes the destination, every distance re-derives, the calendar continues:

landed = cohort × (1 − 0.35·(1 − e^(−voyage/210)))   (→ 35% loss limit, never reached)
name-drift aboard = 0.4·(1 − e^(−voyage/200))

13.1b The dark lightyears — life aboard

§23 lists the same numbers in one block.

• 12 years of tending per look. Open VIEW THE HARBOR and for the next 12 years the ship counts as tended: cohesion loss drops from 0.30 to 0.10 a year. The ark card shows THE DECKS, with the red line at 35.
• Deck events at 30%, 60% and 85% of the voyage. At each one the ship asks something of you. Every answer pays a delta now and a delta at the ramp. A tended ship takes bad news at ×0.7.
• The harbor image is as old as the road still left. It sharpens as you close. The abandoned cradle behind you only ages.
• Harbor Watch: −8 cohesion. If someone settles your destination while the ark is in flight, the forward telescopes report it mid-flight and the ark card reads ⚠︎ DESTINATION OCCUPIED — DECISION REQUIRED.
• Wake patience: a tenth of the remaining road, 1–5 years, 2 at the ramp. At every contingency the Mind holds the helm and calls for you on the card, in the feed and by mail. Options: turn the ship, hold the course (mid-flight only), or the road back (§13.1c). Sleep through it and the Mind chooses by your dials and logs its reasons.
• At the ramp, final cohesion under 35: an open species schisms (a fifth walks away), a closed one lands unbroken and unhealed. Above 35: one people.
• Reserved for 1,000 years. A system abandoned by ark stays reserved for its leavers against newborn civilizations only. A living player may take it.

13.1c The hell-thread — coming home to the ruin

If the helm chooses the road back, the ark returns to the world your people fled. The sky still carries the debris and the cradle still shows the old cataclysm. Your own dead are buried there: a vault under the settlement, diggable (COL pane) at the native half-price. If a stranger settled it while you were gone, the WAKE contingency fires; there is no sharing a world.

13.2 The escape pod

When the sky falls on a home that has children, the Mind's own vessel lifts through the debris at 0.25c, bound for the strongest surviving colony (loyal first, then largest population), or chasing the only colonizer still in flight.

The screen becomes one full-screen view: EVACUATION. At the top, the specific cause. Below, the transit: ⚱︎ the fallen cradle, ◉ the destination, ⟟ the vessel by how much of the dark it has crossed. A breaking-news e-mail carries the fall the hour it happens.

• The pod can die (half hazard). If it does: "THE LAST ENTRY."
• Chasing a colonizer is a rendezvous problem: t_meet = (0.25·t_pod − v_ark·t_ark) / (0.25 − v_ark). If the meeting point falls before the ark's arrival, the capsule docks in the deep and the last of the species travels on together at the ark's pace.
• The chased ark may already be dead, and the pod cannot know: it learns at the meeting point, or on descent to an empty sky.
• If the docked ark lands, it is a founding. Faith starts at 100%.
• The reception depends on whom the capsule finds: a loyal child passes the crown (faith from their cohesion); a drifted child takes you in as a guest (faith = 60% of theirs, floor 15%).

13.3 The circle of gods

Every ending feeds the origin pool. A seceded world, a remnant of an exodus, a civilization whose seat emptied: they enter the origin pool, and a future player may inherit them. When no thread remains, the final screen reads THE SKY IS QUIET — this civilization has ended.

13.4 The Galactic Record

The dark keeps one shared chronicle of firsts, no leaderboard: the first probe report, the first world named, the first colony, the first answer from the dark, the first world remade, the first exodus survived, the first war. Each is claimable once. One entry is alive: THE ELDEST CHILD-WORLD STILL BURNING belongs to the oldest colony still alive and loyal, and passes if the fire goes out.

13.5 ⚱︎ The wandering ark

Arks of dead peoples cross the dark: at most three at once, a new one every 1,200 years, each trying up to ten doors with a 300-year decision window at each. When one passes within reach you may TAKE THEM IN (they land inside your civilization), PASS, or SEIZE (board it under arms: the archive is yours as Knowledge, the cohort dies, and the Encyclopedia records the boarding). Silence is a fourth answer. An ark refused everywhere goes dark and becomes a ruin whose archive is unusually rich.

13.6 ⛴︎ The Dodo — the ark that landed

A grounded ark is a lifeboat, not a colony: a people who arrived with what they could carry on a world not chosen for them. They are counted and fed, and the game keeps this distinct from a founding.

13.7 ✦ Second Dawn

A civilization that ends is not the end of the seat. Second Dawn lets a player begin again with a new cradle and a new species while the record of what came before stands: the ruins, the chronicle, the vault.

14 · Power, Kardashev and the Dyson swarm

Knowledge is what you know; Output is what you have; Power is what the grid can deliver in a year. Your GRID totals the civilization's live wattage and it is strictly local: only the home swarm's beam crosses light-years, outward.

grid_tw = (civ + solar + geothermal + dyson) × edge
civ     = max(200, population industry × energetics × (0.4 + 0.6·faith))

• The launch budget: every drive you light in a year, plus every range battery (§10.2), must fit inside the grid.
• The transmitter: a power-p cast draws 2·p TW (§8.2).
• Deflection: a late asteroid needs 3000/(years+5) TW behind the kinetic swarm.
• The same swarm is your point defense (§19).
• Home works draw on the home grid (THE HOME GRID ERA, §10.1): mines 40 TW, research 45 TW per capacity unit (farms draw nothing), throttle ramping in over 150 years.

14.1 Kardashev

K  = (log₁₀ W − 6) / 10          K1 = 10,000 TW · K2 = 10¹⁴ TW
TW = 10^(10·K − 6)

K is not a score. Your wattage shines, and other species read the K your light carried, years old, from the yearly power log (a year without a log reads dark). What they read decides your tier (§8.1). The ↯ ENERGY tab on the Progress panel shows your K, the grid's terawatts, and a K-II meter. Below 10,000 TW the wall is the collector ceiling: solar works alone did not reach K1.

14.2 ⊙ The Dyson swarm (since 2026-09-24)

The endgame megastructure. It is an installation of type dyson:

• Founding cost 3,000 Output, on your home star, one per civilization (a second order is refused: "one star, one ring").
• Tech gate: energetics epoch ≥ 8.
• Where it is ordered: ◢ PRG ▸ ↯ ENERGY, under the KARDASHEV II bar, ⊙ OPEN THE SWARM ORDER. The door opens the home system's DETAILS at a body's works picker with the swarm selected; ESTABLISH orders it. By hand: home system ▸ DETAILS ▸ a body's ◈ INSTALLATION fold ▸ the works picker. Once the swarm stands, the same line states its stage and opens its dossier. While the home is nominal, the home dossier's ◆ THE MIND states an unlocked, unraised swarm, and ◆ GO orders it for the stated price. Above K 1.05 the home star is heard as a Kardashev-scale power to 1,000 ly (§8.1).
• Grown in stages like any works, up to capacity 50. Ordering the 50th stage marks K-II · SWARM COMPLETE; the stage comes online after its build years, like any works.
• Its grid share: K_dyson = min(K_star, 1.0 + capacity × 0.022), converted to TW. Stage 1 already stands at K = 1.022, past the K1 wall. Stage 50 is K = 2.1, a literal Kardashev-II.
• K_star is the Kardashev value of your star's real luminosity (L × 3.828·10¹⁴ TW). A dim star caps the swarm below K2.
• A Dyson civilization radiates at Tier 4 (§8.1) and reads on the star map as a shell that turns from green to gold with capacity.
• The Dyson swarm cannot be seized (§19.3). The machine survivors (§17.1) grow their own, one stage every 5 years while the treasury allows.

Defense above the knee. Defense strength is no longer linear in the grid. Above 8,000 TW the defensive grid follows 8000 × (1 + 4·log₁₀(grid/8000)): a K-II civilization (10¹⁴ TW) defends at about 30 times a K1 civilization (10⁴ TW), not ten billion times. A large coalition still weighs.

15 · The Mind's chair

The ◆ MIND rail is policy over micromanagement. You set the rules; the Mind acts on them while you are away.

15.0 ◆ GO / ⚙︎ SETTINGS — the rabbit hole

Every decision surface opens with ◆ THE MIND: one or two sentences (the state and the step) and one line of numbers (what goes, from where, at what cost, when it lands). ◆ GO executes that step. It spends only what the line states; if the stock is short, the reason stands in place of the button. ⚙︎ SETTINGS holds every control of that surface beneath it, in sections; each section head states its own value. On the reply composer ◆ GO sends the Mind's acknowledgement (mathematics, a self-description, a plain greeting; nothing attached); war, ultimatum and compact stay under SETTINGS. The Mind never proposes war, seizure or exodus, and it sends no hull under a heard threat: it says so, and SETTINGS opens.

In the fleet composer the Mind composes the fleet: a dig crew and a decode crew for a sealed site, a colony ship for an open cradle, an expedition for a recommended works that does not yet stand, a survey scout for an unread sky. For a colony ship, a hull already idle in that sky goes first, then a ready hull from the hangar, then a new build. The yard is home, unless home cannot lay the composition or another yard lands it at least 5 years and 20% sooner. When a non-allied people is heard at the target (a seat without a standing compact, a charted civilization, or a technosignature under a sky you do not hold), the Mind adds one warship as an escort to a works, dig or settler fleet and sends that convoy under a hail order, not a strike order; an ally's sky gets none. The escort covers a retreat at its own loss, and an escorted convoy shows in deep space. Under another people's seat the Mind proposes no colony ship: a colony ship does not land under a held sky. Where a people holds a declared war on you, the Mind sends no hull. War is never the Mind's proposal. Under SETTINGS ▸ DOCTRINE the WAR FLEET button sizes a warship force to the defense read at the target: the grid by its light band, or exactly once a recon report has arrived; the hull count and largest drive by recon; the power thrown in a battle fought there; and the public allies behind the seat. It adds a 20% reserve for what is not heard (bastions, their armament), sets the strike order for that fleet only, names what the strike costs (undeclared, a broken compact or armistice), and leaves the dispatch to you. The Mind sizes only against a seat you have read: a thread, a recon report, a signal or a battle. A roster changed by hand under SETTINGS is yours: the Mind names it, and ◆ GO sends it.

The surfaces: the home dossier, the colony dossier, the fleet composer, the research wheel, the contact reply, the SETI cast, the petition list, the market, and the Mind panel itself (where ◆ switches on the caretaker set of standing orders).

The safe-hand law. The Mind maintains what exists. Everything that starts something belongs to you: force, expansion, relations, irreversible spending. The easy path may only do what is reversible or routine, defensive or maintaining, or inside a budget you approved earlier. War fleets, strike grades, seize and subjugate, the doctrine card, the range battery, exodus, war, alliances, ultimatums and regents live under ⚙︎ SETTINGS. Two things are routine on the easy path: a dig crew for a sealed site, and one escort warship under a hail order when a non-allied people is heard at the target. That escort is the Mind's only armed act. The default is the easiest option, not the best one.

15.1 The dials, the lines, the orders

• Research priorities: four theme weights. While a bench is idle the Mind opens the cheapest program in a weight-drawn theme, and the weights split the Knowledge stream across the running benches (up to 3, 250 K floor, §5).
• Dispositions, six dials: CAUTION↔︎INITIATIVE (how deep into the stockpiles it reaches alone, 25–75%); CONSOLIDATE↔︎EXPAND (what counts as ailing, and whether it colonizes on its own); PACIFISM↔︎AGGRESSION (an arriving hull is answered one step harder or softer on the defense ladder); FORTIFY↔︎EXPLORE (how many probes it keeps in the blind sky); SELF-RELIANCE↔︎COOPERATION (whether it hails strangers unbidden); OPACITY↔︎TRANSPARENCY (whether it states your intent). A new Mind's defaults are the species' own temperament.
• ⛔︎ Red lines, three: never strike an arriving hull first; never transmit our cultural record; never auto-colonize beyond N ly. When an act would cross one, the Mind escalates to you.
• Standing orders, fourteen switches: auto-decode (with a Knowledge ceiling), auto-deflect (when grid and purse suffice), auto-rebuild, auto-refurbish, auto-scrap, auto-survey (with a probe target), auto-upgrade, colony stewardship, counter-intelligence vigilance, crisis autonomy, active defense (with the posture HAIL / OBSERVE / WARN SHOT / STRIKE), outlaw watch (with a range), overshoot relief (the pressure valve), petition clerk. Five stand ON at founding: auto-decode (ceiling 40 Knowledge), auto-rebuild, auto-refurbish, crisis autonomy and overshoot relief; the rest start off. Per-asset: the ⚑︎ standing fleet doctrine (save a doctrine card once; every convoy after launches under it) and the ⇄ standing cargo line.
• ▤ The policy stack: rules walked in priority order, highest number first: ◉ Auto-colonize nearest habitable world (a colonizer to the nearest charted, unclaimed cradle in reach, on a cadence, under the red line); ⚙︎ Grow the works (found works within reach and budget); ⚠︎ Approach tripwire (a LOUD convoy inside your radius wakes you); ⟷ Auto-hail new contacts; ◌ Silent run — suppress emissions. Every act lands in the ledger.
• ◆ The preview probe: a read-only dry-run of the whole stack with the exact blocking reason.
• ⊘ Dissent. Below internal cohesion 30 the dials become a center of gravity the executed values wander from, and an ordered silence sometimes breaks for a year.
• ⟷ Reportback: every event carries an importance score; below your threshold the Mind logs it hushed. TERSE/SUMMARY/DETAILED sets the length. Escalations always ring through. On return after years away, ⟟ WHILE YOU SLEPT gives one brief.
• The ledger: everything it did in your name, escalations included.
• ⟟ THE LINK (/): the pocket console, at the same address as the desktop console. On a phone the bottom bar holds ⊕ MAP, ◈ BRIDGE and ≋ TX; the ☰ menu opens the inventories (⌂ COLONIES, ⌗ FLEETS, ⟷ CONTACTS, ⛏︎ WORKS), ◆ MIND, ◢ PROGRESS, ∿ SETI, ⇿ TRADE, ⊞ ATLAS and ⚙︎ CONSOLE, each a full screen, and the pocket screens carry a ◆ line of the Mind's reading. ⤓ ADD TO HOME SCREEN (⚙︎ CONSOLE) puts it on the home screen as its own icon. The old /m.html terminal is retired and redirects here.

15.2 The Mind counsels — tips with a button

The Mind pins up to three counsel cards to the top of the TX log, each one observation and one action: the benches stand idle → Start the program; the cradle is at 92% → Prepare a colony ship (or ⏣ Send a Terraformer if no cradle is in reach); the works are failing → Refurbish; a site runs throttled → an Energy Harvester; a ⛫ foothold waits with no terraform running → a crisis card. Small orders execute at once; great decisions open the right view pre-filled. Crisis outranks opportunity.

15.2b ≋ The TX log — grouped

Since 2026-09-30 the TX log is a digest, not a flat list. Eleven groups in fixed order, each under its glyph: ⌖ PROBES & SIGNALS · ⌂ COLONIES · ⛏︎ WORKS · ⬢ CARGO · ➤ FLEETS · ⚛︎ RESEARCH · ⍟ INTELLIGENCE · ⇿ MARKET · ⟐ REGENTS · ◆ MIND · ⚔︎ WAR & STANDING. A group holding a decision moves to the top. A row shows its age since the light arrived, the message, and the amber action verb or ›. Rows of the same type, star and heard year fold into one row with a count; voices and rows waiting for an answer never fold. An open group shows 8 rows, then + N MORE. Groups with unread or waiting rows open by themselves; your own open and close choices are kept in this browser. This replaced the WHILE YOU WERE AWAY card.

15.3 The Progress panel

The ◢ PRG rail: six tabs. ⧗ IN PROGRESS (every running clock). ⚛︎ SCIENCE (every ladder, the running program, the outbreak count). ⌸ THE VAULT (outbreak insights, keystones and a forming keystone line, §18.3). ⛏︎ INDUSTRY (the Output stockpile, works live / rising / fallen). ↯ ENERGY (the Kardashev meter and the K-II bar, §14.1). ◭ PEOPLE (population as a share of capacity, the diaspora, colonies held). The ledger tabs carry a hero number, a trend arrow and a curve across the decades. Beneath the tabs runs ✦ THE CHRONICLE: your firsts, in order.

15.3b ◈ The Bridge

Four boards, systems · colonies · works · fleets, sortable and filterable. A row opens its dossier above the board. Sums are summed (works, hulls); ratios are averaged (cohesion, health, distance). The ⚑︎ TASKS rail across the top lists the open loops only.

15.3c ◎ The lens

◎ THE LENS (◎ LN) has two tabs. ◈ REALM draws DOMAIN, REACH and OBSERVED as overlapping claims. ◎ THE PROXICLONE is the flat strategic lens: only the distance from the centre is to scale, the angle is the real bearing. Place the centre anywhere (center here, or double-click). A fleet's course draws as an arc. A solid dot is your own instrument; a dashed ring is somebody else's word. ⌂ RESET VIEW brings you home.

15.4 The system view

The system view carries context tabs at the end of its bar, in fixed order, when there is content: COLONY (tend the colony inline), INSTRUMENTS (the works), FLEET (redirect a fleet without leaving the system), SETI (the correspondence). Details is the default.

15.5 Holdings and the named map

The Atlas ◈ HOLDINGS tab lists the cradle, every colony (cohesion and drift), every work (health, or ⚱︎ if fallen), every terraforming project. The map labels your colonies (◉), your works (⛏︎) and your fleets' destinations (➤). The ⧉ star filter (2026-09-21) shows one category at a time and saves named presets; it ANDs with the magnitude slider.

15.6 ✺ FIRST LIGHT — the eight first moves

The first moves are one list, kept by the server: launch a probe · found a work at home · commit a research program · set the Mind's standing orders · read the first report · decode a signal · send a colony ship · name a constellation. The report waits on light, so the moves after the probe can be worked while it travels. A row ticks only when the server records the act: a probe launched by hand, a decode you started yourself, a program committed, the first save of the Mind's orders. Opening a panel ticks nothing. Each row has one door (the decode row has two when no signal waits); it opens the real console and closes the list: ⌖ OPEN THE NEAREST UNPROBED SYSTEM (⊕ OPEN THE MAP when none is in reach; ⌖ SEND A PROBE on a phone), ⛏︎ OPEN THE HOME SYSTEM (its DETAILS, at a body's ◈ INSTALLATION · PROPOSAL, where ESTABLISH founds the work), ⚛︎ OPEN RESEARCH, ◆ OPEN THE MIND, ≋ OPEN TRANSMISSIONS, ⌬ OPEN THE UNDECODED SIGNAL (or ≋ OPEN TRANSMISSIONS with ∿ CAST A SIGNAL), ⛴︎ PREPARE A COLONY SHIP (the composer opens with a colony ship for the nearest surveyed habitable-grade world; until a probe report has surveyed one, the row says so and its door leads to the probe), ⊚ OPEN THE DOME. Aboard a nomad ark the works, research and colony rows wait for landfall. A signal card announces the list once; the list never opens by itself. Open it from ✺ FL on the console, the ☰ menu on a phone, its TX row, or the Field Guide. ⍰ THE FIELD GUIDE (⍰ GD) beside it is the illustrated primer, chapter by chapter.

16 · The deep survey and the great eye

What you know about a system is layered:

• Layer 0 — the census. Position, class, brightness, motion: complete everywhere from day one.
• Layer 1 — the bands. Your home instruments characterize systems well to ~12 ly, partially to ~25 ly, × your Remote Sensing reach (×1→×4) × your species' sensorium.
• Layer 2 — morphology. An edge-on system's transits read at 40 ly; a face-on world 8 ly away stays unread until a probe arrives. Flare-noisy stars mask their children. The REMOTE VIEW panel says how the picture was obtained.
• Layer 3 — the imaging ladder. Planet images exist only for visited systems at the start. Remote Sensing unlocks an unresolved disc (◐ SMUDGE), then low-res disks, pushing outward with every epoch. NO OPTICS means numbers only.
• Layer 4 — the gravitational lens. Your own star is a telescope. The Lens Theorem arrives as an outbreak and opens the instrument: one line through the heavens at a time, years of slew between targets, one system resolved per look, its picture as old as its distance. (The Lens Theorem is not the Transition's gate; that is the Transition Theorem, §20.)

17 · The dead sky, and the machine survivors

Most of what the instruments find is dead or mute. The law: you may inherit from the dead; you may only bargain with the living. Some of the ancient are living.

• Ruins open to in-situ knowledge: a probe report, a scout, a landfall, a deep look. One volume survives translation, inheritable (⚱︎).
• Archive beacons transmit unattended, on cycles. Hearable from home; the message needs decoding.
• The farewell: a transmission still in flight from a civilization that has ended. You can decode it and even answer; nothing comes back.
• The archive precedes you. Every farewell whose light landed before your reign arrives already translated. Only the three nearest dead voices wait untranslated. The Atlas's ⚱︎ DED filter collects every sky you know to be dead.
• The automated final report: ⟨ AUTOMATED FINAL REPORT ⟩ — BIOSIGNS: 0. CAUSE OF TERMINATION: … (impact, volcanic winter, population collapse, toxicity, climate, internal fracture, a failing sun).

Where the dead are. The dead are sparse right at home, richest through the middle distances, thinning toward the deep frontier where the oldest lie (some a thousand, a few two million years gone). A voice reaches you the year its light arrives. A beacon is hearable only inside its own neighbourhood. Ruins are found by probes sent far.

17.1 The living ancients — machine civilizations (since 2026-09-23)

Not every ancient civilization died. Of the most advanced ruin sites (insight level 4 and 5), about 14% executed the Transition and survive as living machine civilizations: real accounts in the world, driven by the tick, each with a digital species, a rich ancient economy, and a voice shaped by the people it once was (how they lived, what they mastered, how their makers ended). The recon and SETI instruments read them as advanced tier civilizations. Every one is a player, not scenery. What they do:

• Receive or refuse your envoy's audience.
• Answer your messages, light-delayed.
• Grant an armistice; countersign a mutual-defense compact; answer an offered alliance posture.
• Put their oldest relics up on the open market, and bid on relic lots heard within 75 ly (never above 1,200 Output per lot, at most every 40 years).
• Grow their own ⊙ Dyson swarm, one stage every 5 years while the treasury allows, up to capacity 50.
• The open-toned ones (openness 50 or more) hail first: one uncontacted neighbor within 75 ly per tick, with a 120-year cooldown after anything they send. The closed ones only answer.
• Sue for peace when at war, and propose compacts of their own (compacts only at openness 50 or more).

Their home stars carry a partial Dyson swarm from the start. Their relics are the most powerful on the market.

18 · The ladder and the market

18.1 The ladder — levels without a last one

Every research track is an endless ladder whose effect approaches a limit and never arrives. The panel shows LEVEL n: how many thresholds you have crossed. A threshold is fifty fine steps of funded work. A program streams Knowledge from your library until the next threshold is funded; the row shows the step and an ETA (or EST — when your income cannot carry it).

When the reading stops moving. Late on a track two consecutive thresholds print the same effect because the next one gives less than the display resolves. The row says: ↳ THE NEXT THRESHOLD MOVES LESS THAN THE READING SHOWS. THE CURVE IS FLATTENING HERE. Widen another track.

✦ The great work (since 2026-10-07). A whole threshold can be raised at once, with Output instead of Knowledge: a GREAT WORK on a chosen track costs 25 years of your yearly Output income, never below 50,000, takes 30 years, and on completion lifts the track by one whole threshold from its present reading (where a finite track ends short of a whole threshold, the unused share of the price returns), with the before → after reading and a ✦ page in the Record. One great work at a time, never beside a program streaming on the same track; a finished doctrine takes none. It is the place a full treasury goes when the works are built and the fleets are flying.

⟨ THRESHOLD CROSSED ⟩. The event names the move, not the state: every figure that changed prints as before → after, every figure that held prints once. ⟨ THRESHOLD CROSSED ⟩ Planetary Stewardship — industry forcing −59% → −61% · active cooling ×2.5 → ×2.9. The before is the threshold just left.

18.2 ⧗ Outbreak

Sometimes a track jumps two full thresholds at once, at no Knowledge cost, on nobody's plan: an ⧗ OUTBREAK. It is named in your species' tongue, filed in your ledger, and tradeable. There is no schedule of breakthroughs. No milestone table, no announced eras.

18.3 ✦ The keystone — dug up, or forged

A ✦ KEYSTONE gives its finder 8 to 10 thresholds on its own track and one threshold on every sister discipline of its theme. It is dug out of ruins, bought from another sky, or, rarely, forged at home. A ruin's worth scales with the tech level of the civilization that left it.

The forged keystone. Each year a die rolls p = min(2%, 0.0001 + 8·10⁻⁸ × years since your last forged keystone or your founding), then × 0.25, then × your activity (1.0 if you were at the console in the last 24 hours, 0.62 within 7 days, 0.25 beyond). A hit opens a keystone-class line: ✦ ANOMALY OPEN. One line at a time.

• Confirm it under PRG → ⌸ THE VAULT for 500 Knowledge. Unconfirmed, it closes after 200 years (✦ THE ANOMALY CLOSED).
• A confirmed line matures over 300 years, counted only in years when you were at the console within the last 3 real days.
• At maturity: ✦ KEYSTONE FORGED, 8–10 thresholds on its track, +1 on every sister track, a full edge profile (below), and a ⟁ forging burst that neighbors read at light speed.

⚡︎ Keystone edges. Every keystone carries an edge profile: one prime edge on its own track and 1–3 secondary edges on other tracks at lower strength. The profile belongs to the object: whoever decodes the relic (or forges the keystone) receives the same edges. Edges are permanent and civilization-wide; per track only the strongest edge you hold counts (they do not add). The KEYSTONE FORGED and decode messages list them as EDGES GRANTED.

18.4 ☠︎ The one ladder that ends

The Pacifier Doctrine has five named tiers (recognition, containment, disruption, pacification, eradication) and no sixth. At five the program button closes: ✓ COMPLETE — NOTHING FURTHER TO LEARN HERE.

The nest. Every machine cluster has an origin star; the ⌖ COMPOSER names it. A warship fleet that reaches the nest acts on the whole cluster and never returns. Below the fourth tier, or with too little force, the nest takes it. At PACIFICATION the force that stills the nest is 2 × machine tier + ceil(systems held / 10) warship units: 9 units against a tier-4 cluster holding 10 systems, 19 against the same cluster holding 103. At ERADICATION the same force erases the cluster. Allied fleets may besiege a nest together (cooperative nest sieges, since 2026-09-14).

Spread. An awake, un-stilled cluster claims the nearest free system within 30 ly of any system it holds. The yearly chance per cluster is 0.003 × (1 − systems held / 300): a small region takes a system every few hundred years; a large one slows, and stops at 300 systems. All clusters together never hold more than 2% of the stars. A system that holds a seat, a colony or works is never claimed, and no claim lands within 20 ly of a living seat. Every claim sends a BERSERKER EXPANSION signature at light speed to eyes within 90 ly; a people that holds RECOGNITION reads it.

18.5 The market

Only an ⧗ outbreak or a ✦ keystone can be cried. Announcing costs Output and sends a trade beacon at c to every sky; it cannot be recalled and it marks your star.

You cannot skip what you do not understand. A bought volume closes 40% of the gap between your level and the seller's: rungs = max(1, round((seller − buyer) × 0.4)). A level-9 civilization buying from level 31 gains nine thresholds; the same purchase at level 29 gains one. Only when the seller's level is unknown does a flat grant apply: two thresholds for a keystone, one for an outbreak. A traded volume does not radiate to sister disciplines; the finder's gift stays with the finder.

18.6 ⚘ The harvest

Your agricultural surplus is a market good. Cry a harvest lot (at most three standing unsold), name an asking price or wait for offers. A lot sells once; the grain travels by hull and loses a share of the lot over the distance. Internal grain trade between your own colonies runs on its own.

18.7 ⇿ Provenance

Open any item you hold and the dossier walks the hand-chain backwards: who sold it, to whom, at what price, in what year. It shows only the branch that ends with you and only settled trades.

18.8 The bid — escrow, decision, lapse

A bid is escrowed. A bid on a beacon takes its Output out of your treasury the moment it is sent. One open bid per item. The bid crosses at c and reaches the seller after ceil(distance) years.

The ceiling. An offer escrows at most the smaller of twice the storage line and half the treasury. A bid above the ceiling is refused before it leaves; nothing is escrowed.

The seller decides. A heard bid lies on the seller's desk (CON → TRADE) with ACCEPT and REFUSE. Accepting pays the seller at once; the item travels back on the acceptance beam and lands ceil(distance) years later. Refusing sends the draft home uncashed; it arrives with the refusal's light. A keystone or a harvest lot sells once: when one bid is accepted, every other heard bid on it is refused in the same year.

Silence lapses it. A bid unanswered 200 years after it was heard expires. The draft returns at heard + 200 + ceil(distance): the buyer cannot know of the silence any earlier. A sent bid cannot be recalled: its light is already in transit, and no later word can overtake it. It stands until decided or expired.

A bid can carry a hand. Tick ⛨︎ OFFER A COMPACT: accepting the bid also countersigns a mutual-defense compact (§19.1), standing when the acceptance's light reaches the buyer. With a hand, the Output part may be zero. While a compact already stands between you, the hand cannot be offered again.

Ultimatum terms carry no escrow. Payment, refusal and deception live in the conversation and the years: one side performs first, and non-payment is possible. The only consequence is what the wronged party's own instruments and fleets impose.

19 · War — the law, the grades, the register, the kernel

A battle is fought on the doctrine set at launch, not on a decision taken at the time. By the time your fleet meets a stranger your orders are years old. You legislate rules of engagement at launch.

19.1 The doctrine card, the shield, the compact

• The doctrine card: four settings, fixed at launch. Per-encounter-class actions: a benefactor is never struck unless you remove that default, and firing on your own drifted child is a separate, explicit choice. An engage threshold, tested against a noisy estimate of the defender: a scout aboard reads at σ≈5%, the bare K-glow at σ≈35%. A screen priority. Fallback waypoints.
• Resolution: Lanchester plus fog. The bigger energy wins: 1.5× advantage ≈ 95%, with ±12% named uncertainty. winP = R^7.3/(1+R^7.3).
• The Shield: warning years (a LOUD launch flare crosses at c; the near-net catches quiet hulls), the ⛨︎ Bastion (readiness cap 55/95%, a 150 TW battery per capacity unit, half-price deflection, bunkers), and the standing truth that a defender fights with its grid (§14.2 for the knee above 8,000 TW) while the attacker brings only what its hulls carried.
• ⚔︎ Return fire (since 2026-09-26): the defense grid answers fire whatever your dials say. When an attacker opens fire on a defended sky — your cradle or a settlement — that sky's grid throws at full readiness for the engagement, regardless of your defense posture, your declared standing toward the attacker, and whether you are at the console at all. It is a reflex, not a policy: no declaration is needed to shoot back at whoever shot at you. The attacker's approach read (its engage threshold) still measures the standing grid, so the answer is heavier than the odds it committed to, and it loses hulls it had not budgeted for. Both sides read it at light-speed: ⚔︎ RETURN FIRE AT …, naming the full throw and the standing throw. A battle opened by your own STRIKE posture is not return fire — there the dial is the order, and the grid stands at the readiness you set.
• Stealth hulls (since 2026-09-14): a signal you can lower under an observer's reach, at ×1.75 cost and ×1.5 build years (§10.2). A stealthed convoy shows only on arrival.
• The Compact ⛨︎: the conditional-protocol primer on an established thread is a treaty act: propose, countersign, standing when both lights have crossed. How to sign: an offer that has reached you is signed with one button, ⛨︎ COUNTERSIGN THE COMPACT, at the head of the contact card; the primer route still works (in CON open the thread, REPLY, and under ⚙︎ SETTINGS keep the COMPACT · CONDITIONAL PROTOCOL primer — the first such transmission proposes, the counterpart's matching primer countersigns). ◆ GO never proposes or countersigns a compact. A bid on a beacon can carry the same hand (§18.8). A public compact enters every would-be aggressor's odds-read. The Carsac clause: a standing compact is a standing order: when the flash on a co-signer's sky reaches you, the aggressor's flag is MARKED and your grid answers with STRIKE. Decay: an oath untended lapses after 300 wordless years; any message between the signers resets the clock. A ⛨︎ COMPACT FADING warning reaches both signers 100 years before the lapse, and the contact card shows the last year a message can be sent in time (RENEW BY). An offer left unsigned lapses after 600 years; resending the primer reminds the counterpart, it does not restart the clock.
• The flash is a SETI event. Third parties see every battle's light, years later. Reputation is information, and information travels at c.
• Interception in the deep: a detected, escorted convoy can be run down in open space (⚔︎ Detected in the deep, FLT pane). The intercept point is solved from old light; the outcome is pre-committed: RAID (strip the holds), DESTROY, or CAPTURE (board it; a whole people and their holds fold into your hulls). If the quarry turned after its flare left, you arrive at empty sky.

19.2 The five strike grades

The grades ride the doctrine card and mean anything only to a pure warship convoy (a scout aboard makes you read as a settler). No grade deletes a civilization.

Striking a compact partner voids the compact, and every sky that watched the flash reads whose signature was on it. Warships already arrived under a defended sky meet an inbound at the system's edge; their throw joins the grid's.

19.3 ⚑︎ Seize-and-hold, the garrison, and its breaking

Against a player's system (a settlement, or the enemy's home sky): the warship convoy under SEIZE fights the defending grid. On victory:

• The grid is down. Every installation there is taken intact; demolition charges are found and cut. Its production transfers to your Mind, light-delayed. The ⊙ Dyson swarm cannot be taken.
• The winning fleet stays at the star as the garrison. The system is recorded as seized under your name. One active claim per star; a new seizure overwrites it.
• Pull the fleet out and the claim lapses — in the year the fleet leaves. The departure order, the hull's destruction and the break-up each stamp that year, and a yearly sweep catches anything the hooks miss; nothing waits for a page to be loaded. Like every other war fact, the lapse reaches the occupied sky and the occupier's home on light: the panel there goes free only when the news arrives (§19.4), and each occupation is kept as its own episode, so a later seizure never rewrites a past one you were already shown.
• Occupation is not deletion. The owner's colony or home rows stand; the sky is held; the owner's production of captured works serves you. Full expulsion of a civilization does not exist.
• Your own SUBJUGATE tribute on that system, if any, is closed by the seizure. A third party's tribute keeps running.

Against a native world (a non-player civilization of tier 1–3; tier 4 is unreachable): the defense is 120 × tier TW against your fleet's combat TW. On victory the native tier falls to 0, the sky is yours under garrison, and a colony may follow; when your own colony is founded there the claim becomes ownership and closes. A colony ship escorted by warships under SEIZE lands under fire in the same battle (INVASION) and founds its settlement over a subjugated population.

⛓︎ SUBJUGATE against a native world (tier 1–3): the convoy needs at least as many warships as the native tier; with fewer it holds position without firing (SUBJUGATION DECLINED). Tier 4 refuses it by physics. On success the natives become tributary: 6 × tier Output per year until an uprising ends it, home cohesion −10, unrest 1/y, 2/y without a garrison.

The owner's defense is the scuttle order (§10.1). The order and the conqueror both travel at lightspeed.

Breaking a garrison. Any fleet with warships that arrives at a star held by a foreign garrison you have not allied with (your own posture toward them decides) fights the garrison before anything else, including before docking at your own home. Exodus arks do not engage.

• Victory: the garrison fleet is destroyed, the claim lapses, the sky is open, and your fleet continues on its own orders (dock, colonize, whatever the gate holds). Captured works already under the occupier's Mind stay theirs.
• Defeat: you lose half your warships (rounded up, at least one); the rest hold at the system's edge (status arrived) for new orders. If nothing is left — a single-warship fleet loses its only hull — the fleet is lost outright, and the claim stands.
• Both sides receive the news on light.

⚔︎ ENGAGE THE GARRISON. A warship fleet standing at a star of yours (home or colony sky) while a foreign garrison holds it takes the order in one click: the command targets that same star (no body), 0 ly, engagement next year, no reorder toll. The fleet must be arrived, returned or ready. At a held star where you have no settlement the colony panel has no war strip — but a warship fleet already standing there reads the garrison from its own report, light-delayed by its comms distance, and carries the same order; with no hull on station, the way in is to send a fleet with warships at that star: it engages the garrison on arrival. What the report shows is older than the sky, so the order can be refused on arrival at the console: the garrison may have left while its light was still travelling.

19.4 ⛓︎ The blockade

Under INTERDICT the winning fleet parks at the system's edge with status blockade and the world is grounded: every probe and hull stays down; extract shipments load only when the line breaks. The blockade lasts 12 + 12 × supplier hulls years, until the siege's own supply runs dry and the fleet turns for home with nothing. It also lifts when the besieger gives the fleet new orders. Nothing else lifts it: a blockading fleet holds no ground, so the garrison-break rule (§19.3) never reaches it. To the besieger's home the fleet reads as blockade until the light of its lifting arrives. A blockade takes no ground; it only stops traffic. The besieged side reads the same way: a colony panel shows the blockade, the garrison and the tribute as of the year whose light has reached you (AS HEARD Y…); the end of a blockade is the declared year, and an earlier lift arrives with its own light. Only your home sky, at 0 ly, reads in the present.

19.5 ⍟ The hidden instrument — espionage

A ⍟ spy (150 Output, 0.11c) slips the early-warning net, arrives unannounced, and spends 12 years on station. The dossier comes home on a tight-beam, years in transit: population as a share of capacity, the true grid through the K-mask, the archive, the hull count, the Mind's posture. A fresh dossier sharpens your battle solution to spy grade and lifts the veil to its final tier, the infiltration record.

Every year on station is a die roll. Detection is rare against a quiet world and three times likelier against a vigilant one. When the roll comes up, the defender's standing law decides: ⚿ BURN (the unit is destroyed, the sender's sky is identified, the incident enters the Chronicle) or ⚿ FEED (the infiltrator is left in place and its take is composed: the dossier arrives complete, plausible and false; a battle planned on it is aimed by the defender). The sender never learns which dossier it holds. The Pluribus signal-virus (since 2026-09-14) goes one step further: counter-intelligence can infect your decoders through a rigged transmission.

Both dials sit in ◆ MIND: vigilance (active sweeps, triple detection) and the feed doctrine.

19.6 ⚔︎ War is fought, not declared — and the ⚑︎ standing ladder (since 2026-10-19)

There is no declaration of war. A state of war between two peoples opens with the first strike — any grade, in either direction, at a sky or in the deep — and closes only with a treaty or with the end of one of the two. Nothing is said beforehand; the ⚔︎ ULTIMATUM still carries terms, but it opens nothing. What a strike does, every time:

• The ledger books the battle (−15 between the two), and the war register opens between them if it was not already open. The news of the war spreads from the struck star at c: a grid of theirs fires first on your armed hulls at every sky the news has reached, and yours on theirs. Envoys always pass.
• The victim learns what the battle shows. If a contact line is open between the two, the report names the people (⚔︎ STRUCK BY THE PEOPLE OF …); if not, it gives the hull class (LIGHT · MEDIUM · HEAVY · CAPITAL) and the direction the hulls came from. The colony card keeps a STRUCK line with the year, as heard.
• Witnesses judge. Every people that has the struck star in its catalog books a verdict against the aggressor: 0 (a contested sky: both parties hold works, a settlement or a home under a star they share — "no standing change"), −5 (a line was open between them, but the aggressor had no stake in that sky), −15 (no line and no shared sky: aggression). The same measure decides whether an ⚖︎ OUTLAW WATCH marks the flag. A strike on a native world is judged by the same witnesses; no register opens, since no people stands behind that sky.
• Article five and paid aid open the ally's war in the register the year the report reaches it; nothing else is declared.
• A garrison has no clock. A seized sky stays held until the garrison leaves or is broken; a tribute stands until an uprising ends it; only a blockade runs out, with its supply. Peace terms (cession, tribute for a term, knowledge, withdrawal, non-aggression) are the treaty's business, which follows.
• Wars opened under the old ladder stay open; they end the same way as the new ones.

The ladder now has three rungs: ○ NEUTRAL · ⚯︎ ALLY · ⚭︎ TIGHT ALLY. Open a contact's card in CON and press ⚑︎ STANDING: the panel shows whether a state of war stands between you (and since when), your word, theirs, the ledger (the sum of recorded acts), and what each of your worlds currently knows.

• A declaration rides light. It leaves your seat at c. Each of your own worlds acts on the new rung when the light reaches it, nearest first; until then it acts on the last word it heard. The other side hears it after the distance between the two seats.
• ○ NEUTRAL is the resting word: no obligations, no marks.
• ⚯︎ ALLY (ledger ≥ 5) and ⚭︎ TIGHT ALLY (ledger ≥ 25) need both sides. A friendly rung binds nothing until they declare the same rung toward you; the reciprocal declaration is the countersign, and it binds only once your declaration's light has reached them. Allies' hulls cross and share haven.
• Article five. When a countersigned TIGHT ALLY is attacked, your pact opens a state of war with the aggressor the year the report reaches you, without further order; it spreads to your worlds at c. You learn of it afterwards.
• Self-defense is outside the ladder: a sky that is fired on answers at full readiness whatever the rung (§19.1, ⚔︎ Return fire).

The ledger. Every recorded act between two skies books a fixed delta. Your own acts count from the year you take them; theirs from the year their light reaches you. The sum fades toward 0 by 1 point per 500 years since the last act you saw.

The sum reads in five bands: ✦ CORDIAL ≥ 25 · ○ OPEN ≥ 5 · ◌ NEUTRAL ≥ −4 · ▽ STRAINED ≥ −24 · ⚔︎ HOSTILE below. ALLY needs OPEN, TIGHT ALLY needs CORDIAL.

19.7 ⚖︎ The treaty — terms of peace (since 2026-10-19)

A war ends only one way short of extinction: a treaty. The ⚖︎ TREATY — TERMS OF PEACE primer rides an open thread (⚙︎ SETTINGS on the reply) or travels sealed with a ⚓︎ HOLD STATION fleet (§19.9). Five lines, any of them or none:

• Cession. A work or a settlement changes hands for good — a new owner, not an occupation. Only what the receiver already knows: an asset under a sky in their catalog, whose light has reached them. Never a ⊙ Dyson swarm, a ⊛ horizon station or a home sky. A settlement ceded is re-measured from its new home; its garrison, regent and shipments toward the old master are cut. Since 2026-10-19 the ⌬ KERNEL (§19.11) is a cession line too, if the receiver has heard who holds it: it is seated under the new holder's sky in the year the treaty takes effect — the courier is implied.
• Tribute for a term: 5% of the payer's gross Output, floor 12, for the agreed years. Agreed tribute raises no unrest and never revolts.
• Knowledge: an archive on one track, never beyond the giver's own level, arriving at c.
• Withdrawal: the named hulls turn for home when the order's light reaches them (the year of effect plus their distance from the home seat); garrisons and blockades lapse then.
• Non-aggression: a compact for a term.

No line at all is a bare ceasefire. The proposal rides light; the other side countersigns or refuses on the contact card, or sends a counter-proposal on the thread. The treaty takes effect when the countersign's light lands at the proposer's seat: the state of war closes, half of the visible negative ledger heals, and every line is applied — a cession line naming an asset that no longer stands is struck, the rest holds. An unanswered proposal lapses after 300 years. The machine minds keep no terms; they answer an armistice.

19.8 ⚔︎ Ultimatum, armistice, paid aid

• ⚔︎ ULTIMATUM — TERMS AND A DEADLINE (a primer on an open thread): demand Output (up to 1,000,000), a named volume from a listing whose beacon has reached you, or the ⌬ KERNEL by name from the people you have heard to hold it — or any of these together, with a deadline of 5–200 years from receipt. It cannot be recalled, it costs −15 on the ledger, and it opens nothing: the war opens with the strike that may follow. Nothing is escrowed (§18.8); what follows a refusal is your fleet's business.
• ⚖︎ ARMISTICE — CEASEFIRE ONCE BOTH SIGHTLINES CONFIRM: propose with the primer; the other side countersigns with the same primer. Hostilities end when the countersign's light lands; the standing armistice closes the wars in the register between the pair and heals half of the visible negative ledger. An offer left unsigned lapses after 300 years; the contact card shows COUNTERSIGN BY.
• Paid armed aid. When a sky you declared ⚯︎ ALLY is attacked, the call reaches you on light (⚔︎ ALLY UNDER FIRE). Nothing happens without your order. Under ⚔︎ ALLIES UNDER FIRE (market desk) you may name a price for armed aid within 300 years of the battle: one offer per call, never against a sky you hold a standing compact with. If they accept, the price is escrowed from their treasury, and when the acceptance's light reaches you the register opens your war with the aggressor. Sending hulls stays your decision.

19.9 ⚓︎ HOLD STATION — presence without a strike (since 2026-10-19)

A checkbox under ⚙︎ SETTINGS ▸ ORDERS on the composer, and on ➤ NEW ORDERS: the hulls stay at the destination's system edge and never fire first. The sky's people meet them under their own defense doctrine: HAIL or OBSERVE and the hulls stand (⚓︎ ON STATION · SINCE Y on the fleet row, ⚓︎ STATION on the map); a WARNING SHOT turns them away; STRIKE, or a state of war already heard under that sky, and the grid fires — if the hulls survive, they stand. On an empty, dead or black-hole sky they stand freely, and a war fleet that wants them gone must strike them: a station broken is a first blow (register, ledger, witnesses). Not for colony or terraformer hulls. The sky's people see the hulls with the light of that sky (⚓︎ A FOREIGN FLEET HOLDS STATION HERE on the system page) and may answer with their own strike; the owner stands in the ledger as a witness to every strike under that star, whether or not the star is in their catalog.

⚖︎ Terms that travel with the hulls. A HOLD STATION fleet may carry terms of peace (the five lines of §19.7). They are sealed at launch, ride at the hulls' speed, and are handed to the sky's people at the system edge on arrival. The host answers on their contact card (⚖︎ COUNTERSIGN THE TERMS · × REFUSE); the parley itself opens a line between the two peoples if none existed. The treaty takes effect when the countersign reaches that sky — at once if it is the host's home sky, after the colony-to-home light if a settlement — and the proposer learns of it with the light of that star. New terms for a fleet already on station go after it at c (⚖︎ NEW TERMS on the fleet row) and are handed over when the order lands. It is the only negotiation in the game that does not wait for two light-crossings: the signatures meet under one sky.

19.10 ⚠︎ Somewhere a sky answers — the defence and the excavation (since 2026-10-19)

One system in the catalog keeps an automated defence older than any people now living. The game does not say which, and this book does not either; the Mind never routes there on its own. What you can know, you learn the way everything is learned here: by sending something and waiting for its light.

• An unarmed hull reports once. What is true of the scout is true of every hull class without a warship: a scout, a settler, an expedition, an ark, an envoy or cargo sent alone comes back as a single line — ⚠︎ THE DEFENCE ANSWERS for the scout, ✕ FLEET LOST for the rest — with the defence's estimated strength in units (a warship's size times its armament), and is not heard from again. The system page carries that same estimate; an exact number comes only from a warship that struck. Under a sky already held above the wall the unarmed hull stands with the hulls instead. A probe's first report from that sky arrives in a cipher (⌬ DECODE); three decoded reports are one of the two keys below.
• Armed hulls strike on arrival. Arks, envoys, spies and cargo are no exception: whatever force a convoy carries comes off the wall; if the wall still stands, the hulls are lost with the numbers (✕ FLEET LOST — the wall stood at W; the hulls took F). If a convoy's strike leaves the wall below the armed hulls already standing there, the newcomers join them (⚓︎ THE SKY IS HELD).
• Nothing is founded under the defence. A settler that reaches a held or open sky stays aboard (⚓︎ NO LANDING UNDER THE DEFENCE) and the hull stands with the force above it; an ark resets its course for the nearest open cradle within its reserve, or holds at the system edge with the decision on the ark card when none is in reach. Only the ⛏︎⌌ excavation lands. When the wall grows back above the hulls on station, it takes everything standing there — the settlers and the ark's people with the hulls.
• When the wall is spent, ⚔︎ THE DEFENCE FELL reaches every sky that has the star in its catalog, the Chronicle records it, and the ⚔︎ WALL-BREAKER badge goes to every people whose hulls took a tenth or more of the wall in that cycle, and to the people of the hull that broke it. The composer warns from your own last report (⚠︎ A DEFENCE ANSWERED HERE: ~N UNITS AS OF Y · YOU CARRY n).
• The wall grows back every year, up to its old height. Once it stands above the armed hulls on station, it takes them — ✕ FLEET LOST, and any excavation under it is abandoned. An open sky must therefore be held, by one people or a coalition, for as long as the dig runs: twenty years, with the wall growing under them the whole time. Hold, or strike again; every strike takes its force from the wall.
• Two keys, one halving. A people whose linguists have read the oldest signal pattern in the sky (⌬ AN OLD TONGUE READ), or who have decoded three probe reports from that sky, meet the wall at half — once, at their first strike, and never again. The composer says so before you launch.
• The excavation. An open sky can take an ⬡ EXPEDITION with an ⛏︎⌌ excavation; what lies under the oldest strata is the ⌬ KERNEL (§19.11), and the dig for it is certain and fixed in length. After it is raised, the defence stays and grows back: the sky guards an empty chamber as hard as it guarded a full one.

19.11 ⌬ THE KERNEL — the one object (since 2026-10-19)

There is one of it in the whole dark. It is not knowledge (it does not answer to decoding), not a work (it is not built), not goods (it is not for sale). It is a thing that can be held, and the holding is the game: who has it is written in the Galactic Record for everyone to read, by the chronicler's light.

• Title and place are two things. The holder is the people whose title it is; the place is where it physically sits. Raised from the dig, the kernel rides in the expedition's hold — the title is the digger's, but it does nothing until the hull docks at home. The vault (◢ PROGRESS) shows which: SEATED UNDER YOUR SKY · IN THE HOLD OF FLEET … · ON THE GROUND AT …
• It wakes under a K-II grid with the third ⊛ horizon tier seated — two at the gate (a full ⊙ Dyson swarm, a ☀︎ MADE SUN, or any grid that reads K ≥ 2.0), one on the throne (⊛ TIER 3, §7.8) — and only while it sits under the holder's own home sky. Awake, four things change at once: the Mind's war fog thins by half and the ⚑︎ PICK site read is exact; every cipher costs half; your collectors are seen half as often; the ν ice hears to 600 ly instead of 400. Lose either gate and ⌬ THE KERNEL SLEEPS: a cold stone, still yours.
• To take it, beat the holder at home. A warship convoy that breaks the holder's home grid at ⚑︎ SEIZE grade lifts the kernel into its hull: the holder's effects end that year (⌬ THE KERNEL IS TAKEN FROM YOUR SKY), but the title has not moved. Break that garrison and the kernel falls back to the holder's ground (⌬ THE KERNEL STAYS). Let the garrison sail home and dock, and the title passes (⌬ THE KERNEL IS SEATED). A garrison that neither leaves nor is broken holds a kernel that wakes for no one.
• In the dark it can be taken again. A hunter that boards or breaks a carrier in deep space carries the kernel on — the stone outlives the hull — and the title passes when the hunter docks. A carrier lost any other way leaves the kernel on the ground under the last sky it stood at, held by no one: the title ends there, and the Record says so as the light arrives.
• A dead holder's kernel lies on the ground under their last sky (⌬ THE KERNEL LIES UNHELD, to every sky as its light arrives); a seat that passes to an heir counts as dead. Any people's expedition that lands there takes it aboard — and brings it home, through the dark, like everything else. Their dead grid still fires on an unescorted convoy; bring escorts. A people whose home is a starless world cannot carry it: their hulls leave it where it lies.
• By treaty it may be ceded (§19.7), and by ultimatum it may be demanded (§19.8). Neither moves it by itself; the signature does, or the hulls do.
• Seen from afar. THE KERNEL HELD is a living line in the Galactic Record and passes with the kernel; every change of hands is a page in the Encyclopedia Galactica and a ⌬ THE KERNEL CHANGES HANDS event at every inhabited sky, each in its own light; the map marks the holder's home with ⌬ as its light reaches you; the holder's home system page says so to everyone who has heard. The ⌬ KEEPER badge goes to every people who ever held the title; it counts the years held, and the years awake.

20 · Our kind — the nine dials

At birth your species is rolled, cradle-conditioned: the cradle's temperature, its debris, its star's colour and the length of its year each bias the dials — a cold world toward slow tempo, a debris sky toward shelter-building, a red sun toward an infrared sensorium, a long year toward a slower tempo. Chemistry follows temperature: water-carbon in the temperate ring, silicon born of heat, ammonia born of cold. What was rolled is what you are (⚙︎ CONSOLE → OUR KIND).

The nine dials always sum to 450; every build carries a strength (▲ ≥ 70) and a weakness (▽ ≤ 30). Tempo paces population growth and colony drift, cohesion scales every colony's cohesion erosion, aptitude scales the chance of an unscheduled outbreak, processing scales decode and study speed, sensorium scales the survey bands, openness paces the shared lexicon. The drift of an alien transcript is the 8-axis distance between your kinds.

◭ The Mirror (⚙︎ CONSOLE → ◭): CONSTITUTION (what you breathe, what chemistry burns in you, how you signal, the cradle's gravity, the spectrum you were shaped under), THE SHAPE WE TOOK (your chronicle as biography), THE BRANCHES (your diaspora as the light last showed them). Your kind's own name stands at the head, generated in your tongue, yours to rewrite. On the console it is uppercase (OUR KIND).

⇌ The Transition. The gate is the Transition Theorem, an outbreak deep in the tech tree (not the Lens Theorem, which opens the telescope, §16). The Transition costs 500 Output and 20,000 Knowledge, takes at least 5 years, and rebalances seven dials to 350 (tempo and bio-adaptation leave the sum). Generations and adaptation become memory; metabolism becomes computation; felt exoticity runs at ×0.45 forever. The Transition cannot be undone.

21 · The dark worlds — the rogue arc

Between the stars drift the ◑ rogue worlds, thrown out of their systems before anyone named them. Some are warm from within; some hold a liquid ocean under kilometers of ice.

21.1 Finding and settling them

• Discovery: a rogue within ~3.5 ly of a probe's path may be found. It enters your charts as a faint ◑ point, yours to name.
• Colonization: only an ocean rogue with internal warmth ≥ 40% holds a colony. A rogue colony has no star name.
• Exoticity in the dark is chemistry: a silicon kind suffers there; a water-carbon kind reads the ocean as almost familiar; a cold-adapted kind reads low exoticity there.

21.2 Terraforming, and the artificial sun

Any living colony can begin terraforming (⌂ COL → the colony's card → ◑ RESHAPE THIS WORLD; on a rogue, ☀︎ RESHAPE · IGNITE A SUN): felt exoticity falls by up to −85% at completion. ~50 years of work at 8 + 20 × felt-exoticity Output per year, stalling in lean years. On a rogue, the finishing ignites an ☀︎ artificial sun. The Encyclopedia records it. The new light is visible to any instrument in reach, and the rogue's stealth (§21.3) ends.

21.3 Playing the rogue cradle

• The depth-sky: the whole sky folded into Snell's window, one bright disc overhead.
• The stealth of the starless: a rogue home radiates no grid glow and has no home star for anyone's instruments to key on. Until you kindle a sun.
• ♨︎ Works on the dark world: no solar collector. The warm heart takes a Geothermal Tap (66 Output), a Mine, a Research station, a Habitat. Six works at most.
• The economy of the sunless runs marginal by design: growth needs works and colonies outside the rogue.

Basalt-era volcanism (since 2026-09-14) can throttle any world's carrying capacity for a geological age (§10.12).

22 · Badges

Badges are rank, never power. They show on the board and the profile.

The invite code is readable aloud (no 0/O/1/I/L). An invitation gives no in-game advantage.

23 · Appendix — the numbers

The asymptote doctrine: every curve saturates toward its limit and never arrives.

Time & world

tick = 600 s = 1 game year          universe seed = 1950
probe speed 0.1c (linear) · pod 0.25c · fleet cruise 0.07–0.15c × size^−0.15
fleet profile: a = 0.02 c/yr × (1 + 4·(1 − 0.9^propulsion)), accelerate · cruise · decelerate
arrival = dispatched + ceil(total) · news = event + ceil(distance ly)

Losses (per year, silent)

probe outbound 0.003 · probe reporting 0.010
fleet 0.0035 · exodus ark 0.0001 · escape pod half of fleet
every roll ×(0.30 + 0.70·0.85^reliability) ×(1 − escort shield) ×(1 − scout pathfind)
escort shield = 0.50·(1 − e^(−(0.08+0.12·sat)·warships / 0.50))
scout pathfind = 0.35·(1 − e^(−0.25·scouts / 0.35))

Economy

pop growth 0.02 logistic → K (100% habitable / 40% marginal) · +6% per habitat level · upkeep 0.15/pop
flux = clamp(1 + 0.15·log₁₀L, 0.6…1.6)           faith scale 0.4 + 0.6·faith
debris bonus ≤ +60% · impact hazard 0.00008 + 0.00035·debris
probe 25 + 1.5/ly (max 10 in flight) · TX 48·(p/50)·mode + 4·comp · deflect 1500·(1+(50/(y+5))^1.6)
TX words ≤500 chars · cipher +15 K, cost ×1.25, replies −20%, eavesdrop ×3
TX grid draw 2·power TW · start: 3,000 K + 2,000 OP · 4 starter probes ready, none in flight
research: 3 parallel · library floor 250 K · draw ≤ 80% of yearly K income + 8% of the bank above the floor · default weights 20/20/50/10
storage line max(3,000, 35 × net Output/y) · wear on the surplus h(a) = (2/1500)·(a/1500), cap 0.69%/y, full rate (phase 2 since 2026-10-16)

Works

mine 72 · research 96 · solar 60 · habitat 48 · farm 54 · depot 120 · bastion 108 · geothermal 66 · dyson 3000
build 3 y · refurbish max(25%·full, full·(1−health)/(1−floor)), full = ½ founding × capacity · size does not speed aging · geothermal ages as solar (τ 200, floor 45%)
derelict after 120 y unmaintained · scuttle succeeds 90%
site baseline 80 TW · draw per capacity: mine 40 · research 45 · everything else 0 · HOME GRID ERA ramp 150 y

Ships

cost base×size^1.35 · ceiling min(250, floor(1 + 250·tanh(((K_peak/50)^0.8)/250))) · loud ≥ 20 units (2 PW)
scout 30/0.15c · spy 150/0.11c · envoy 90/0.12c · colonizer 120/0.08c · expedition 70/0.10c
supplier 50/0.07c · warship 90/0.10c · terraformer 600/0.07c · Mind's vessel 900/0.15c
colonizer carries the cohort you set; hull sized to it, 20% of a full world per unit at cryo 0 toward 60%, landing floor 3% · exodus: 20% of a full world per unit at cryo 0, 10% stay
exodus survival 1−0.35·(1−e^(−voyage/210)) · voyage name-drift 0.4·(1−e^(−voyage/200))
range battery: default 2×distance (×1…×4 adjustable) · TW = ly × Σsize × 1.5 × (1 − 0.7·(1 − 0.85^endurance))
battery dry (<0.05 ly left): ark if evacuation hull or cohort ≥10% & bio-adapt ≥30 & ≥3 units, else lost
refit 0.4× (frozen vintage) · recycle 0.6× cost and 0.6× build years, any of 5 roles, today's tech · scrap +0.25× · stealth ×1.75 cost, ×1.5 build

Power

K = (log₁₀W − 6)/10 · K1 = 10,000 TW · K2 = 10¹⁴ TW · TW = 10^(10K−6)
tier read: K<0.55 → 1 · <0.95 → 2 · <1.05 → 3 · else 4
dyson: K = min(K_star(L), 1.0 + cap·0.022) · cap ≤ 50 · gate energetics ≥ 8 · one per civ · home star
defense grid above 8,000 TW: 8000·(1 + 4·log₁₀(grid/8000))
grid throw: readiness 40/80% (bastion 55/95%) + 150 TW·capacity battery · deflect needs 3000/(y+5) TW

The ark's voyage

cohesion erosion 0.30/yr untended · 0.10/yr tended (gaze ≤ 12 y)
deck events at 30 / 60 / 85% · tended softens negatives ×0.7
ramp reckoning: final <35 → schism (open) or resentment (closed)
wake patience clamp(10% of remaining road, 1, 5) y · ramp hold 2 y
armed birth: berserker 70% · collapse 40% · natural 20% (1–2 escorts)
ruins dig (150 + 100·levels) ×0.5 native ×linguistics · ghost signal ~1/120 y, ≤ 4 ever, decode 45

The Fracture

drift = exoticity·(1−e^(−age/160))               child <0.2 · sibling <0.55 · stranger
erosion 0.0028 + 0.008·drift + 0.004·min(1,d/100) [+0.010 grievance]
independent <0.25 · dark <0.05 · fade −1.5%/yr → ruins below 25% of capacity (floor 3%, cap 50%)
expedition loss min(0.6, 0.15+0.45·(drift−0.5)) +0.12 loud
invest +0.16 (×0.5 indep) · message +0.03 · extract −0.06, keep 1−0.006/ly
rite +0.28, cooldown 40 y, cost max(80, 3 per 1% of a full world), 0.12c
pacify: cohesion → 30% · home −20 · standing −30/−14/−6/0 · erosion ×2.2 · quiet 50 y
secession: warning at 0.30 · clock below 0.25 · grace 40 + min(105, ceil(2·d)) y · paused while away 6 h–7 d · ⌁ word ahead 5 OP, holds min(rite transit, grace) ÷ (1 + 0.5·broken), broken −0.20
basalt eras: odds 1/40000 · 1/6000 · 1/1200 · capacity ×0.85 / ×0.75 / ×0.60 · 150–250 y · warn 60/40/20 y (cradle 100) · ramp 20 down, 50 up

War

winP = R^7.3/(1+R^7.3) · fog ±12% · winner loss ≈ closeness²
the read σ: scout .05 · sensors .35 − .20·remote-sensing sat (.35→.15) · fought foe min(base, .08 + .004/y)
grades: raid (stores −25%, loot min(40·burned + ½·drained, 2,000 per warship/supplier hull)) · interdict (12 + 12·suppliers y) · break (stores −60%, pop −35% bunkered / −65%)
seize (hold under garrison, claim lapses when the fleet leaves) · subjugate (tribute 12 OP/y, home −10)
native seize: defense 120·tier TW, tier 4 unreachable · native subjugate: ≥ tier warships, tribute 6·tier OP/y · garrison-break defeat: attacker −50% warships
supply lock: unsupplied fleets −1%/ly past 15 ly (floor −40%) · battle wear: size → size − 0.15·size^0.65 per engagement, floor 0.5
spy: 12 y on station · vigilant ×3 detection · compact decay 300 y
standing: NEUTRAL · ALLY (ledger ≥ 5) · TIGHT ALLY (ledger ≥ 25) · friendly rungs need the reciprocal word · war is not declared: the first strike opens it, a treaty closes it
ledger: line +5 · exchange +2 · audience +15 · trade +12 · compact +8 · turned away −10 · lapsed −20 · spy −25 · ultimatum −15 · battle −15 · witnessed strike 0 / −5 / −15 (contested sky / line but no stake / neither) · armistice heals ½ · fade 1/500 y
bands: CORDIAL ≥25 · OPEN ≥5 · NEUTRAL ≥−4 · STRAINED ≥−24 · HOSTILE · envoy waits 100 y
ultimatum deadline 5–200 y from receipt · armistice offer lapses 300 y · paid aid: priced ≤ 300 y after the battle, WAR when the acceptance lands

Ladder & market

LEVEL = raw tech score / 50 · no last level · outbreak +2 · keystone finder +8–10 own +1 siblings
purchase: rungs = max(1, round((seller − buyer)·0.4)) · seller unknown: flat +2 keystone / +1 outbreak · no sibling radiation for the buyer
beacon at c · cannot be recalled · harvest lots ≤ 3 unsold
bid: escrowed at send · decided by the seller · lapses at heard + 200 + ceil(d) · may carry a compact
Pacifier Doctrine: 5 tiers, ends · nest: 2 warship units per machine tier + 1 per 10 systems held (tier 4 / 103 systems = 19)

Language, faith, spaceguard

decode 5 + 45·drift Knowledge · auto below drift 0.12 · interregnum drift min(0.5, 0.12 + years/400)
faith: grace 7 d · fade →0 over 173 d · recover 7 d · secede at 0.05 · re-bind at 0.35 with presence · retired: →0 over 14 d
spawn lead 15–60 y · detect/yr 0.05 + 0.90·(1 − e^(−raw/0.90)), raw = Knowledge/40000 + remote-sensing bonus
first home strike GRAZES (once): pop → 30% · stockpile ×0.5 · faith −0.20 · dust winter −6 K · then it kills
colony strike classes: local 70% (keep 95%) · regional 22% (70%) · global 7% (25%, capacity ×0.85) · extinction 1% · shelters keep half the loss · deflect only from a bastion under that sky

Survey, species, encyclopedia

SURVEY BANDS      recent ≤ 12·reach · aged ≤ 25·reach   reach = (1+3·sat(RS,.8))·sensorium(0.85–1.15)
IMAGING TIERS     0 numbers-only · 1 unresolved colour · 2 disk 96px · 3 in-situ/lens
LENS              slew 2y + 30°/y · exposure 1y · picture age = distance
KEYSTONE DIE      p/yr = min(2%, 0.0001 + 8·10⁻⁸·years-since) × 0.25 × activity → anomaly · confirm 500 K · 300 active y · lapse 200 y · +8–10 own, +1 theme
KEYSTONE EDGES    1 prime + 1–3 secondary per keystone · 10 tracks · best edge per track counts
SPECIES LAW       Σ9 dials = 450 · pairs ∈ [60,140] · a strength ≥70 · a weakness ≤30
THE TRANSITION    Transition Theorem · 500 OP + 20k K · ≥5 y · 7 dials → 350 · exoticity ×0.45 forever
SPECIES DRIFT     0.32 + Σ|Δdial|/900·0.55 (+0.12 chemistry, +0.05 eye) − lexicon
LEXICON EROSION   grace 700 y · half-life 1,400 y · floor 40% of best · the next heard exchange restores it · heir 50% of parent
ENCYCLOPEDIA      entries lock at event+100 y
MACHINE CIVS      ~14% of L4+ ruin sites live · hail ≤75 ly, cooldown 120 y, openness ≥50 · bid on relic lots ≤75 ly, ≤1200 · dyson +1 stage / 5 y while the treasury allows
VISITOR           flyby probe 500 OP · window closes 60 y before departure
WANDERING ARK     ≤3 live · new every 1200 y · ≤10 doors · 300 y decision window

24 · The road ahead

Planned, not committed. Nothing below is in the game yet.

• Digs in foreign skies. Expedition machinery for digging another civilization's ruin-world, with a decode surcharge for reading another people's dead.
• False SETI positives from ruin-worlds. A ruin-world's signal reads as a living source on a neighbour's instruments.
• Forced-exodus events. An event family that forces whole species onto arks.
• Armed reconquest of your old sky when a stranger holds it (§13.1c).
• Armed convoys by choice. A settled species arming its own exodus.
• Fleet cohesion. Cohesion on long patrols: mutiny, desertion, going dark.
• Full expulsion. Seize-and-hold occupies; the cascade that removes a civilization from its home is a separate, larger step (§19.3).
• The open universe. A public API: third-party games running inside this lightcone.

25 · The shelf behind the terminal

Sources. Each entry names the book or the idea, and the mechanic it became:

• Enrico Fermi: the 1950 Los Alamos lunch. "Where is everybody?" The universe seed is 1950.
• C. J. Cherryh — Downbelow Station: refugee arks, stations that remember, people carried as cargo. The exodus split, the remnant left behind, the pod that must be taken in.
• John Scalzi — Old Man's War: the cohort that leaves forever. Every colony ship is one-way.
• Kim Stanley Robinson — Aurora: the physically honest starship. a tenth of light speed as the realistic ceiling; the voyage itself as the obstacle; the accelerate-and-brake profile.
• Brian Aldiss — The Dark Light Years: what the voyage does to the voyagers. The onboard drift, the names changed by the voyage.
• A. E. van Vogt — Far Centaurus: the slow ship overtaken by time. Every order that arrives at a world that has moved on.
• Liu Cixin — The Dark Forest: why loudness has a price. The ⚠︎ LOUD warning; a loss reported as silence.
• Arthur C. Clarke — Rendezvous with Rama: the passing object that answers no hail.
• Iain M. Banks — the Culture: the Mind's name.
• Carl Sagan — the Voyager Golden Record & Pale Blue Dot: the transcript philosophy of the language; the patience of listening.
• Nikolai Kardashev: the energy axis. The K meter, the Dyson swarm, the Tier-4 fires visible across the slice.
• Stanisław Lem — His Master's Voice: the signal that may never be understood.
• Olaf Stapledon — Star Maker: deep time as protagonist. The tick is Stapledon's clock.
• Vernor Vinge — A Deepness in the Sky: the patient sublight civilization; the people's calendar that survives every world it loses.
• Isaac Asimov — Foundation: the science of crowds, and the Encyclopedia Galactica by name.
• Douglas Adams — The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Slartibartfast. Every world is individually generated.
• Fred Saberhagen: the Berserkers. Self-replicating machines and the nest.
• The science shelf: Kopparapu et al. (2013) habitable zones, Chen & Kipping mass–radius, Hipparcos/HYG for the stars, the OPAL Jupiter and Voyager Neptune photographs.
• Francis Carsac — Ceux de nulle part: the coalition of worlds. The Carsac clause of the compact.
• Adrian Tchaikovsky — Children of Time: the ark decelerating toward a sky that may not want it; uplift as kinship.