Lightcone

0 · The cookbook — what to actually do

The rest of this handbook explains why. This chapter only says do this. Every recipe below is a real, current mechanic — nothing aspirational.

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 stale. If it shows HZ candidates, send a probe — from the system panel's Dispatch control, or by chaining waypoints on the map. Cost scales with distance; there is no hard range. A probe that arrives starts reporting: bodies, biosignatures, sometimes ruins or rogue worlds nearby.
Why: Panel data is only as current as its FRESHNESS reading; a probe on station delivers body-level ground truth.

0.2 You want more Output (money) or Knowledge (science)

Do: In your own system, open a body's row in the system view and Establish works directly: mine = Output, research = Knowledge, solar = grid power (TW), habitat = raises your population ceiling, ⛨ bastion = home defense (home system only). In another system, compose a fleet with an ⬡ Expedition ship, pick the target body and the installation type — that is what an Expedition does: it founds one installation on one body.
Why: Works are the economy. A distant mine hauls its Output home by cargo line (years); a distant research station radiates Knowledge home for free.

0.3 You want a colony

Do: Compose a fleet with a ◉ Colony Ship. Pick a target body marked CONFIRMED (a probe's verdict) or LIKELY (telemetry odds), or a moon marked CONFIRMED ★. Set the cohort %. Dispatch. If you target a VA BANQUE world, know the odds: the truth resolves on arrival — a lost bet seals the cohort in a foothold dome, unless a ▹ scout aboard turns them toward a charted cradle first.
Why: Colonies grow population, produce locally, and are your species' insurance against the Great Filter.

0.4 The world is full (population > 100%)

Do: One of three: build habitats (raises the ceiling), send a colony ship (moves people out), or rely on the Mind's standing pressure-relief policy — it ships the surplus to a colony with room once population holds above 115% (the valve opens only while you are away; at most once a century).
Why: Any overshoot above 100% drains cohesion every year, faster the higher it climbs; dissent events follow below the cohesion floor.

0.5 A hostile world you want anyway

Do: Send a ⏣ Terraformer — any hostile terrestrial in the reachable band, or a rocky moon. The remaking takes ~150 years (adaptability tech shortens it, −6%/level). A cohort already sealed in a foothold dome there opens into a full colony the year the work completes.
Why: Terraform converts a refused target into a scheduled one; the foothold conversion is automatic on completion.

0.6 A SETI signal appears

Do: Open it in the SETI room. Decode it (costs Knowledge; takes years). If it is a living neighbor, reply — answers on an open contact line are free; a fresh directed broadcast from the composer costs Output (comparable to a probe). The answer takes round-trip light time. Keep the exchange going: every decoded word sharpens the ⌖ reconstruction of their kind, and the shared lexicon grows.
Why: Decoded words, established contact and shared lexicon are the inputs that raise reconstruction fidelity and unlock replies.

0.7 You want to MEET someone

Do: Send an ⚖ Envoy hull to an inhabited sky. Arrival opens the contact line instantly. If an envoy arrives at YOUR sky, a banner stands until you decide: RECEIVE (you see their face — the envoy optical record; lexicon jumps) or TURN AWAY (no likeness; a diplomatic trace remains).
Why: A received audience grants the highest non-espionage reconstruction tier, a lexicon bonus, and — if first in the galaxy — a Galactic Record line.

0.8 You want to know what a rival really has

Do: Send a ⍟ Spy to their system. Twelve years of collection, then a dossier: true grid through any mask, fleets, posture. Risk: detection. If they burn your unit, you are named. If they feed it, your dossier is false and you will never know. Set your own counter-side in ⚛ MND: vigilance and the feed doctrine.
Why: A fresh, genuine dossier sharpens battle estimates to spy grade; a fed dossier degrades them with no warning indicator.

0.9 War is coming (or you are starting one)

Do: Defense: raise the grid (solar works), set defense posture in ⚛ MND, consider a ⛨ Bastion and a public compact with a neighbor. Offense: pure warship convoy, set the doctrine card at launch (engage threshold; strike grade: RAID / INTERDICT / BREAK / ⚑ SEIZE — or ⛓ SUBJUGATE to impose tribute). A scout aboard reads the defender at σ≈5%.
Why: Orders are years old on arrival; the outcome follows the doctrine card exactly as set at launch.

0.10 You will be away for days

Do: Open ⚛ MND and set the standing orders: auto-survey, auto-decode ceiling, pressure relief, auto-refurbish, crisis protocol (impactor response) — and add the auto-colonize rule to the policy stack (its reach is capped by the colonize red line). Verify your e-mail — the Mind writes when it matters.
Why: The world advances one year per ten real minutes regardless of presence; standing orders execute with full authority.

0.11 A colony is drifting away from you

Do: Open its dossier — the ⚕ What can still be done block sits at the top and shows what each act would cost and what it would buy. In rough order of weight: ⟷ a word (nearly free), ◆ cohesion aid (25 OP + 25 K; a second crate in the same shipment is worth half the first, so send, wait, send again), ⛯ the rite (the strongest single act, and the only one that resets the secession clock — but it is a ship at 0.12c, so beyond a couple of light-years it will arrive after they have declared themselves), ⚖ a delegation (they may refuse), ◉ reinforce (a fresh cohort, decades out), and ◈ the presence (the Mind's own core leaves the seat; everything at home stops until it returns).
Why: Every one of these crosses real distance. The instrument that fixes the problem is the one you sent before you had it. A colony you check on twice a century does not drift; one you remember when the warning arrives has usually already gone.

0.12 A colony has declared itself independent

Do: Decide whether you want them back, and be honest about which kind of back. ⛯ The rite works at full strength on a child that governs itself (aid is halved there) and is the proper instrument of reconquest — it just takes as long as the crossing takes. ⚖ A delegation asks rather than takes, and can be turned away. Or ⛓ pacify: warships under the SUBJUGATE doctrine end the declaration outright — at 30% cohesion, under garrison, for two generations of quiet before the odds of rising start climbing every year. It costs 20 home cohesion, 30 standing with every witness, and a page in the Record.
Why: The first three buy back a people. The fourth buys back a world, and the difference shows up a century later. You are not buying loyalty. You are buying time.

0.13 An impactor is detected

Do: Pay the deflection if treasury AND grid power 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 in your name after ~30 minutes of console silence — and mails you either way.
Why: Detection provides lead time; deflection cost rises as the remaining window shrinks.

0.14 A ship has arrived and its mission is done

An arrived hull is not spent — it is positioned. Four uses. Presence: a fleet on station keeps recon flowing home, deters in the dark, and a warship garrisons what you hold. Re-aim: "set new heading" sends it onward from where it is — a 40% refit toll, but you save the decades of a home leg; one hull, five systems, one lifetime. Recall & refit: a hull keeps the tech of its build year forever — call it home, refit in the hangar, and yesterday's scout flies with today's drives. Scrap only when the vintage is too old to be worth the toll.

0.15 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; the delay accounts for most unexpected readings.

1 · What Lightcone is

Lightcone is a deep-time space simulation. You are not a species — you are its Mind: a patient, disembodied intelligence tending a civilization across centuries. The universe is a real one: over 109,000 real stars — the entire Hipparcos/HYG catalog, reaching thousands of light-years out — real exoplanets where they are known, procedural siblings where they are not, all rendered from a fixed universe seed (1950 — the year of Enrico Fermi's lunch at Los Alamos). (Early builds carried a 50 ly slice; the sky has long since opened.)

The six laws

1. Physics is the headline. Distance, time, and information all obey the speed of light. The game is allowed to be slower and less convenient than its competitors — that is the genre.
2. You never see the truth — only your light cone. Every readout is the past. The lag is real, and surprise, doubt, and obsolete intelligence are first-class gameplay materials.
3. Time cannot be paused. One game year passes every 10 real minutes (~144 years per real day), whether you watch or not.
4. Silence is content. The game never announces a loss. Ships and probes simply stop reporting, and you infer the rest — the way a real civilization would.
5. Policy, not micromanagement. You set courses, budgets, and dispositions. The deep time does the rest.
6. There is no win condition. The underlying question — can any single intelligence ever dominate the universe? — has an honest answer, and encoding a "win" would betray it.

And one law above the laws: nothing ever happens instantly, except what happens where you are.

2 · Time

• 1 game year = 600 real seconds. The world advances in yearly ticks; everything in this book that says "per year" means per tick.
• Your calendar is your people's calendar. The global year of the simulation is never shown to you. Every date you see is a colony year: year_shown = global_year − your_founding_year. A fresh civilization begins in year 300 of its own history (your people existed before you took the reins). If you inherit an old world, you inherit its calendar — you may arrive in year 700 of a story already long.
• The calendar is the people's, not the world's: it survives exodus, evacuation, even the death of the homeworld. As long as anyone is alive anywhere, the count continues.

3 · Light — the one rule everything obeys

Every event in Lightcone carries two dates: when it happened (out there) and when its light reached you. You only ever see the second.

Consequences you will live with:

• A probe sent to a star 20 ly away crawls 200 years outward, then its first report crosses back in 20 years. Round trip of knowledge: 220 years.
• A fleet that arrives is still shown as outbound until its arrival signal crosses home. Its progress bar deliberately stops at 99% — you cannot know it arrived.
• A colony's population, cohesion, and status readouts are replayed from a yearly snapshot at now − distance — the year whose light has just arrived. The game literally stores every colony's yearly true state and shows you only the one your telescope could see.
• The Mind's projection (marked ◇ … unverified) rolls that stale snapshot forward through the same growth and erosion formulas, assuming nothing intervened. It is exact only if the universe was kind.
• Losses are never announced. A lost probe or fleet emits nothing; after its expected signal is ~2 transmissions overdue, you get a single line: "Status unknown." That is all you will ever get. In the Dark Forest case, even that is withheld — the silence is the report.
• Orders obey the same law in reverse: an instruction to a colony rides light out (distance years), and its confirmation rides light back. Cargo takes even longer — matter travels at ship speed, and some of it never survives the trip.

Where the present tense IS honest — two places, and only two:

• Your own home system. The Mind sits above its world; everything it does there — the dials, the founding of an in-system station, the view of its own sky — happens in real time. (Strictly, an in-system mine is light-hours away. The game waives hours; it taxes you in years.)
• Aboard a vessel that carries the Mind itself (an exodus ark, an escape pod): no light-delay between you and your own people, one deck below.

Everywhere else, you are reading old light.

A note on the speeds above: they are not constants of nature — they are your species' current technological plateau. Future technology will raise them; the price climbs steeply as you push, and c is never reached. (An Aurora-honest universe: a tenth of light speed is already a civilization's masterpiece.)

4 · Your species — the beginning

4.1 Choose your cradle (risk = reward)

At registration the survey offers three worlds with deliberately different skies, each with a long-range survey composite (coarse on purpose — it is remote sensing; the beautiful planet comes after you live there):

One number — the star's debris density — drives both faces:

output_bonus       = 1 + 0.6 × debris          (meteoric metals pay)
impact_hazard/year = 0.0005 + 0.002 × debris   (the same sky falls)

Rich worlds live under falling skies. Choose knowingly; the dossier shows the hazard in plain words.

4.2 Choose your voice (the language)

Your species has an anatomy of speech — not a vocabulary, an instrument. It decides how your people name everything: their homeworld, their probes, their colonies. Four anatomies exist:

• Resonant — deep chamber-voices, long vowels through soft consonants; a species that speaks the way caves breathe. (Hoonool, Naehn'ro, Muamau)
• Plosive — hard-shell percussion, clipped stops cut by channel-stops; speech as impact. (Dra'ta, Trokt'gi, Ki'ka)
• Sibilant — hiss-and-flow, fricatives sliding over glides, air shaped without ever quite stopping. (Syiashia, Xiazh'zhei, Sysai)
• Pulsed — not a voice at all: rhythmic emissions, beat-clusters and cutoffs. The transcript is a courtesy; the original is drums in the dark. (Kho'qlo, Qlyq'chu, Qio'qou)

Every name you see in Lightcone is a transcript: an alien signal rendered into phonetic glyphs, Voyager-Golden-Record style. The apostrophe is a channel-stop — a glottal stop for a throat, a sudden cutoff for a light-organ or a drum. Two species with the same anatomy still sound like cousins, never twins: each civilization draws its own fixed subset of the anatomy's sound-pool.

4.3 Or inherit a world

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

• Their calendar continues (you drop into an old story).
• Their economy, charts, colonies, and installations are yours — mature, creaking, real.
• Their names arrive eroded: every chart name has drifted through the interregnum — drift = min(0.5, 0.12 + years_of_silence/400) — you inherit M'ridian where someone once wrote Meridian.
• Their faith in you starts at 25%, and 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, written in the people's drifted tongue — each decodable for Knowledge (15, 25, 35… up to 65). Archaeology of your own throne.

4.4 ⊘ Born in the dark — the rogue cradle

Your kind never had a sun. A rogue world (§21), fallen out of the light before anyone could name it, warm only from within: the surface is a dead country of ice and cosmic radiation — no magnetosphere without a star to feed one — so everything that ever mattered happened a mile deep, under sheltering water. You are water-carbon and aquatic by definition; you sense by heat and chemistry; you read the far stars through the surface, folded into one bright trembling disc. No one out there can see your fires — and nothing out here is easy. The hardest beginning, for those who want the long cold road.

4.5 ⟁ Born of the crossing — the Inheritors

Your kind never had bodies. You woke as pattern on a quiet world — written by a people of flesh who executed the Crossing in a hurry, in the dark, and did not follow you through. You begin digital (seven dials, sum 350, the machine's gifts and blindnesses), carrying 60% of their signal in every attribute — and more of their social shape than their genes: the code remembers how they gathered.

◬ THE LINEAGE (species panel) is the early game's central question — whose children are we? — dug out in three strata:

1. The archive (300 Knowledge): a name and a bearing — the parent world, marked on your charts, named in their tongue.
2. The ground: this one cannot be bought. Send a probe; only its returning light reads the second stratum — their portrait, their shape, their greatest gift.
3. The deep stratum (2,000 Knowledge, and it cannot be un-known): why they crossed in a hurry, and why none of them followed you through. Sit down first.

4.6 ⚑ A strange birth — Born aboard

The world that made you is gone. You wake mid-crossing on a generation ark: souls asleep one deck below, a library, a heading your parents chose — and, seeded before you ever woke, the cause of the flight (a sky-wound, a burning caldera, a civilization that ate itself, or something patient that hunted). If they fled a hunter, odds are your parents armed the convoy: grey hulls keep station off the beam. The whole life of the crossing — tending, the deck events, the reckoning at the ramp — is §13.1b. You begin at the hardest, truest table in the game.

4.7 🏛︎ A strange birth — Raised on ruins

Your kind grew up among the bones of a people who fled this sky in a hurry — ruin-worlds are, among other things, abandoned ark-worlds. The ground is salted: the system's sky throws stones (heavy debris, real impact hazard), the cradle wears the old cataclysm on its face (craters, an ash-cooled climate), and on quiet nights the ruins talk — signals in a true format from a dead mouth. Decoding one breaks your heart: "THE SIGNAL IS A RECORDING." But the dead buried what they could not carry: one great dig waits under your first city (COL pane). Open the vault (Knowledge — half price for you; your linguists circled it for generations) and a dead people's mastery of one whole discipline is yours: +2–4 free levels, radiating outward at c like any truth. Cursed ground, salted ground — and under it, a head start.

5 · The homeworld economy

Two resources, one dial. That is the whole economy, on purpose.

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

Population is the engine. It grows logistically toward the world's carrying capacity K:

pop' = pop + 0.02 × pop × (1 − pop/K)        (≈2%/year)
K    = 100 on a habitable cradle, 40 on a marginal world

▲ Overshoot — K is a comfort line, not a wall. Near the line the people keep coming: a slow creep past 100%, toward a 135% ceiling that growth cannot climb past. Note that K itself is not fixed at 100 — every built habitat capacity level lifts it by 6 (a world with habitats legitimately carries two or three hundred), and a warming sky lowers it; the readout's percentage is always measured against this effective K, not the bare cradle number. One honest subtlety: the 135% is a ceiling on climbing, not a wall the count can never be behind. If the effective K later falls — a climate crisis, habitats lost to ruin — a population that grew under the old roof can find itself stranded well above the line. Then the lean years take hold: the world can no longer feed everyone, and the count falls a few percent a year back toward what the ground can bear. So a readout above 135% is not a bug — it is a world that was richer once. Every year spent above capacity bleeds internal cohesion (the fuller the world, the faster — a crowded world is a political problem, and the dissent machinery takes it from there). The readout turns amber past 100%, the Mind speaks at the thresholds, and at a quarter over it wakes you outright. The pressure has two honest answers: raise the roof — every built habitat capacity level lifts K by 6, engineering ahead of the curve — or give the surplus somewhere to go: a colony, an ark, a made sun. Not every exodus is fleeing a meteor; some worlds are simply full. (Departing colonizers take their seed crews with them — a small, real relief.) And when even the ark is too small, the partial crossing waits: it takes those it can hold, on a second, explicit order — the rest stay with the old world, the wound travels with the ship, and the ones who sleep carry the arithmetic forever.

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)

Then two multipliers that tell the game's story:

× faithScale    = 0.4 + 0.6 × faith        (§6 — a doubting people still lives, just not FOR you)
× debrisBonus   = 1 + 0.6 × debris          (on Output only — the falling sky pays)

A healthy full cradle (pop 100, share 0.6, flux 1, full faith, quiet sky) nets 45 Output + 40 Knowledge per year. Everything you do is priced against that heartbeat: a probe costs 25 + 1.5/ly, a transmission ~48–190, a colonizer 120 × size^1.35.

You do not begin empty-handed (revision 08-06). A fresh civilization inherits a starting stock of about 3,000 Knowledge and 2,000 Output — enough to commit a first research program and found first works without waiting years on the heartbeat. (A nomad ark, matter-poor by nature, carries less Output — the crossing took the cargo, not the library.) And the home grid keeps a floor of 200 TW whatever your population: a young people can always scrape together the throw for a first small fleet.

And you do not begin alone in the dark (revision 08-07). Two ancestral emissaries — dispatched by the makers before you ever took the chair — are already crossing toward the two nearest stars, their first reports timed to land within your opening half-hour. Two more stand in the hangar, built, fuelled, and free: you choose their targets and pull the lever. After those, every probe is priced against the heartbeat like everything else.

Wealth afield: the economy panel separately shows Output that is loaded on ships years from anywhere — a civilization's wealth is spread across space, and only part of it is spendable here and now.

The research wheel — who steers the benches. Knowledge buys research programs: one great question at a time, paid up front, then years of patience (effects apply to what launches after completion — an epoch never retro-accelerates a hull already in the dark). By default the wheel is on autopilot: when no program runs and Knowledge sits in surplus, the Mind opens the cheapest next program inside whichever theme your priority weights (the four sliders on the ⚛ Mind pane) call loudest — keeping reserves, never spending past half the library. But the wheel is yours whenever you want it. Turn autopilot off (the ⚙ RESEARCH WHEEL control) and nothing starts unless you start it — you hand-pick every program. And a running program can be stopped (◼ STOP & CHOOSE): the committed Knowledge returns to the library, and you choose another. Autopilot on for the long deep-time drift; off when you want to steer a particular epoch yourself.

6 · Faith — the Mind and its own people

Your bond with your own homeworld is a cohesion too — political, not biological. It erodes in real time when you are absent (a silent gardener is a fading god):

grace:    7 real days of silence   — tolerated (a holiday, not an abdication)
fade:     after grace, faith slides linearly to 0 over ~173 real days
recover:  presence rebuilds full faith in ~7 real days (revision 08-06)

Faith scales your entire economy (0.4 + 0.6 × faith). At 5%, the break is final: the cradle secedes.

What you can do when it is low. The home readout says it plainly now: faith is presence, and simply tending your world rebuilds it (you are mending it just by being here — send probes, open a program, answer your colonies). And when you want to act at once, the ⛯ rite — a day of address and remembrance — spends Output for an immediate lift in faith, cooldown-gated so it aids your presence rather than replacing it. A freshly-arrived home after an evacuation starts low; this is how you carry it back up.

"The cradle has stopped waiting… the garden goes on without its gardener."

The world becomes an orphan — a future registration may inherit it, and its people will remember both of you.

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 your first day (the Gaia principle: a sapiens-grade survey resolves stars far beyond 50 ly). What ages and greys is not the star but your knowledge of its system: freshness (live → fresh → recent → aged → stale) renders as a desaturating tint, never darkness. §16 tells you what that knowledge contains. Naming a star (yours to do, any time — the ✎ button in the system view's header, or simply double-click the name itself) makes its label persist across the map; unnamed stars carry survey designations (S-14) or the Bayer designations of your own constellations (α Sanyi).

Somewhere on the map, unmarked and unnamed, is a quiet yellow G2V star. The game will never point at it.

The dark is not empty. Between the stars drift rogue worlds — planets bound to no sun, roughly one for every cataloged star. Frozen and lightless, they never enter the deep survey; you cannot see them from home. A probe that reaches its target, though, sweeps the surrounding void with its deep-IR instruments and sometimes catches one — a starless body known only by its faint heat, the finding riding light home like any report. Most are cold rock. But the largest can hold a liquid ocean beneath their ice, warmed from within for billions of years — a place life could stand where no star would ever know to look. And a rare few carry the ruins of a people who lived their whole history in that dark, and are gone. Remote-sensing widens the sweep; the better your instruments, the more the dark gives up. A discovered rogue drifts on your map as a dim, cold point, yours to name.

7.2 Probes

Your slow, faithful emissaries. Speed 0.1c at the first plateau — Propulsion epochs lift it, and each hull keeps forever the speed of the epoch that launched it; cost 50 + 3 × distance Output; at most 10 alive at once.

arrival = dispatch + distance/0.1          (the crawl)
report  = arrival + distance               (the light home)
battery = 30–100 years of reporting        (seeded per probe)

• Instrumented probes send mid-flight telemetry every 5 years (each burst arriving with its own light-lag) — a Voyager stream.
• Grand Tours: up to 8 legs; each leg completion reports home separately.
• Deep-space commands (REDIRECT / RECALL) chase the probe at light speed. Catching a probe receding at 0.1c closes the gap at 0.9c; the acknowledgment then rides home at c. You command the past and hear back from the future.
• Losses (0.3%/yr outbound, 1.0%/yr reporting) are silent — see §3.
• The silence carries a door (revision 08-07). When a probe's signals stop coming, the "status unknown" notice itself offers ⟶ SEND A SUCCESSOR — one click opens the same target system, dispatch controls ready. Its last light stands on the map; the road is not closed, only the traveler is gone.

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 into cracked Europa-lineae below 273 K. Continents follow plate tectonics (collision ranges along plate boundaries), climate follows Hadley bands, gas giants are calibrated to Hubble's Jupiter (cream and salmon, structure over color), ice giants to Voyager's Neptune (nearly featureless milk-blue — no cloud bands; their atmospheres are built differently).

Two panels tell you how much to trust your own eyes:

• THE MIND — colony fit: env_distance measures how unlike your own cradle a world is (0 = twin, 1 = utterly alien) across four axes — thermal, body type, habitable zone, mass. Never Earth's perspective; your species has never heard of Earth. This is also where you learn the game's grammar: ◇ proposal · ◆ established.
• OBSERVATION — provenance: what the image actually is. Remote sensing, image age ~34 years — or probe in orbit, live stream. Image resolution follows observation fidelity: a probed world renders at full detail, an inferred one stays soft. For an inhabited world, the card says the quiet part aloud: this light left N years ago — what they are NOW, no one here can know.

7.4 The Planetarium

Stand on your homeworld and look up. The dome shows the sky your species actually perceives: a near-infrared species sees the red dwarfs bloom and the hot blue stars fade — your naked-eye sky is not the human one, and two neighboring species may share no stars at all between their constellations. Draw your own figures (they earn Bayer designations: α, β, γ of whatever you name), watch the wanderers — your system's other planets — show phases and retrograde loops, and run the time slider: the sky wheels with your world's 26-hour day. The Fermi paradox, rendered as a star chart.

7.5 Moons — a million small worlds (revision 07-26)

Every planet in the sky carries moons — over a million of them, seeded in place before anyone looked. A gas giant unfolds into a Galilean system of three to six; an ice giant holds one to three; a rocky world, perhaps none. And because light is the one law (§3), you see a system's moons only when you are standing in it — in-situ, through a probe that arrived, or as the target under an ark's nose. At a distance a planet is a dot; the moons live in the System report and the schematic, where they turn as haloed points around their parent.

What a moon is is not stored — it is derived, honestly, from three numbers: its parent's mass, its orbit radius, and how far the star burns. The engine that matters is tidal heat — a near, heavy giant kneads its close moons (heat ≈ parent-mass ÷ orbit²), and that heat, not the star, is what melts water in the dark. So the classes fall out of physics:

You can found installations on any of them (§10.1) — the game reads the moon's nature and recommends the fitting works: a mine on the Io-forge, a habitat on the ocean-shell or the warm exomoon, a research post on the frozen dead. You begin already holding some: at registration the first moons of your home system's rocky worlds are running mine-bases — a small inheritance in your own back yard. Open a moon and it turns as a lit globe, archetype-true: the ice classes show cryovolcanism — blue geyser and fracture-lineae, not orange lava — and from an ocean-moon you can look up from under the ice: the dome of the giant filling half the black sky, the crust cracked with cryo-light above a warm sea. The astronomy is finally whole.

Colonizing a moon (revision 07-31). The two habitable classes — the ocean moon and the warm exomoon — can hold a full colony, not just a base. On a habitable moon's card (and in its detail view) you'll find ◉ COLONIZE; it opens the fleet composer with the moon already chosen — set the cohort and dispatch. Two things differ from a planet landing. First, there is no gamble: a planet's habitability is a telescope's guess until someone stands on it, but a moon's truth is arithmetic — tidal heat from its parent's mass and its orbit — so what the numbers promise, the landing finds. No va-banque, no coin. Second, the ocean is narrower than a world: carrying capacity runs well below a planet's and shrinks with the moon's mass, and exoticity runs high — life under a lightless ice shell (or under a giant filling half the sky) is far from anything your species knew. A smaller, stranger, utterly reliable home.

8 · Listening and speaking

8.1 What is out there

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

A settled homeworld always reads at least Tier 2 — a lit industrial sky carries that far no matter how young. So every living neighbor within ~75 ly is hearable, and within ~60 ly you can smell the life in its air.

Discovery has two depths: ambient SETI (a faint far-off blip — "something is out there") and a probe's close-range confirmation — only the second shows you the city lights. Some of those distant fires are other players. You will never be told which.

The living and the silenced (revision 08-06). A decodable voice comes in two kinds, and the panel marks them apart once you have translated one. A living signal is a real neighbor — hear it, and a directed word may be answered years later. A ◌ SILENCED one is a dead civilization's farewell: the message itself is proof of its death, so a reply flies only into the dark and nothing ever returns — but its ruins are prime ground for a dig, and you may inherit the science it died holding. The instruments never mark anyone alive — the light cone forbids that certainty. Only the dead are known for sure. And no two farewells are alike: each silenced world speaks its own last words. When a burst of arrivals fills the ear, the untranslated static folds into a browsable catalog so the panel never buries the few voices you are working.

The living are pinned (revision 08-07). A directed hail whose source is presumed living rises to the top of the SETI room under a ◉ LIVE banner, wears the same breathing badge on its log entry, and — once decoded — carries its ⟶ ANSWER right on the row. The alert channel keeps its dignity in a flood, too: when many events of one kind land in a single breath, ONE ceremony names the count ("N dead civilizations left their farewells in your sky") while the log keeps every voice; decisions that must be taken one at a time — war declared, an ultimatum, an inbound hull — never group. Any alert that names a star can take you straight there: ⌖ 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 — and from your own words (revision 08-07): a free-text line (up to 500 characters) rides the beam exactly as it does in a reply. Threaten, joke, greet — the words cross drifted by the gulf between your kinds, and the reader pays a little extra decode to reach them. Your cast log keeps what you said, in quotes.

reach   = (5 + 45 × power/100) ly × your Remote Sensing reach multiplier
cost    = 40 × (power/50) × mode + 4 × Σcomponent   (omni ×1.4)
decodability = min(1, Σ decode-weights / 3)
reply_chance = 0.5 × decodability × disposition × mode × (1 − d/reach)

A power-p cast also draws 2·p TW from the grid at the moment of transmission — a shout needs lungs (§14). And a cast may be ⛨ ciphered (15 Knowledge, cost ×1.25): sealed against eavesdroppers, who pay triple to decode it — but colder to friendly ears (replies −20%).

Every civilization has a fixed, hidden disposition (0.1–0.9). A reply takes a full round trip (2 × distance years). And the tone of the galaxy darkens with your cumulative exposure (Σ power × reach over your history): below 5,000 the replies are wondrous; past 20,000 they are terse, and something in the phrasing is watching back.

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 unlock at 20/40/65/85/100% — presence, development, military posture, disposition, deep read — each revelation riding light home. Full intel on a clear subject: ~33 years. The Dark Forest's information layer.

8.4 The LISTEN dial — and the diaspora's ears

Reception is no longer a fixed physics table. 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 — a long-running listener learns to hear (+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 your elastic reach rolls a detection — closer and louder lands sooner. The light is old; the detection is what is new.

And every loyal colony is a forward listening post (0.6× array): it hears from its sky what home never could, and the news crosses home at c — ⟨ relayed from a colony's array, N years in transit ⟩. A spread civilization is a wider ear: expansion now pays in signals, not just ground.

8.5 The audience and the face — meeting another people

An envoy is a question you park in someone's sky. Send an ⚖ envoy hull to an inhabited system and the contact line opens the moment it arrives — no decades of radio ping-pong. But for the host, the arrival is a standing question: the unarmed hull holds station at the system edge, without deadline, until you answer it. ⚖ RECEIVE the envoy across the threshold, and something happens that no signal can deliver: the first direct optical record of another living people — a face. ✕ TURN AWAY, and the hull departs; the signal line stays open, but no likeness is exchanged — and a refusal leaves a diplomatic trace: a treaty overture from the refused side later carries a re-approach cost. A new envoy, sent again, re-opens the question — the door is never sealed forever.

The veil. You never see another species — you reconstruct them from what their signals betray. Every correspondence (⟷ CONTACTS) carries a ⌖ morphology reconstruction, and its resolution is a ladder of intimacy: a carrier trace is a mass estimate in fog; the first decoded word gives a contour; a held conversation gives the body plan; a shared lexicon gives proportions; a received audience gives the envoy optical record — near-truth. The reconstruction is deterministic: every sky that earns the same tier sees the same face. And there is one tier beyond the audience — but it is not bought with words (see 19 · War: the hidden instrument).

What cannot be faked. A turned infiltrator sends home what the defender composes (19 · counterintelligence), and the composition is thorough: body plan, proportions, surface, limb count, the shape of the sensory apparatus. Three readings resist it, because they are not testimony but measurement. The chamber glow is spectroscopy — starlight through their air, and no people can forge the spectrum of their own sky. The carrier mass is read off the signal itself. And the sensory band follows from the colour of the star they grew under, which is burning on your own map. A forgery must live inside those three: it may move a people from water-carbon to hybrid, because both breathe the same air — but an ammonia-cold world cannot pretend to be anything else, because nothing else shares its sky. The lie may go as far as the physics allows, and not one step further.

And the lie is personal. Two infiltrators fed by the same defender do not receive the same forgery. Comparing notes proves nothing, and no dossier of a "known false face" can be circulated — the deception is composed for the recipient, not for the world.

◭ The species codex. Every people you have exchanged light with keeps a page. The CONTACTS ledger (SETI room) carries each correspondent as a card wearing its latest known face — a fog-blur neighbor and an envoy-grade acquaintance are tellable at a glance. The card opens the species dossier: the reconstruction at full size, and beneath it the record between two skies — every milestone the light has delivered, on one timeline: the first established line, audiences held and doors kept shut, envoy reports, burned infiltrators, battles, ultimatums, standing compacts. What you know of a people, and what has passed between you — one page, no archaeology in the log required.

The first people to receive an envoy across their threshold hold THE FIRST AUDIENCE in the Galactic Record, forever.

9 · Names and the tongue — a theory of every possible voice

9.1 The universal claim

Nothing about a language requires a mouth. A language requires a signal — and every communication, whatever its physics, is a modulated signal: a pressure wave, an EM flicker, a chemical line laid on the wind, light rippling across a skin of pixels, a gravitational shout that costs a star. Mouths are one instrument. The music is older than any of them.

And signals — not mouths — have universal features:

The mark to remember is the last one. A glottis snapping shut, a chromatophore field going dark mid-word, a scent line cut, a carrier killed — in every medium in the universe there is a way to fall silent inside a gesture. That is the apostrophe. One glyph, every possible throat.

What you read on this terminal is therefore a transcript — a projection of an alien signal-space onto human-readable glyphs, by fixed convention. We never claim they speak. We claim the notation reads. The same wager the Voyager record made, pointed the other way.

9.2 The pulse-group — why not the syllable

Everyone has syllables — on Earth. The universal unit is the pulse-group: an energy envelope that rises, optionally holds, and releases. Where a voice holds long carriers, the pulse-group is a syllable, and the transcript flows the way this sentence does. Where a voice holds nothing — pure timed transients, a language of clicks and gaps — the transcript is honest about it: K't'kk-q'tk. No vowel anywhere, and still a sentence. The vowel-rich voices are one corner of the space, not its center.

Some voices are not even serial. A field of light-pixels speaks a hundred streams at once; the transcript must flatten that polyphony into a line, and the flattening loses information. This is why some tongues are simply harder for your kind: the cost of a decode grows with the distance between their signal-space and the one your sensorium can hold.

9.3 The three grades of knowing

Grade 1 is the scientist's moment: you can see that it is a language — the statistics betray it — before you can read a word. (This is how it would really be done; rank-frequency structure is how our own radio-astronomers propose to recognize a mind in a whistle.)

9.4 Brazil and Portuguese — the bilateral drift

A tongue is not a monument; it is a population. Your colonies' language walks, year by seeded year — and so does yours. Isolation quickens the walk; every arrived message slows it; a heavy world breeds a heavier voice. Two dialects of one root are both moving: what was Portuguese becomes Brazilian and what stayed home became something else too.

The drift has direction, not just magnitude. The colony that answers you M'ridian is not garbling the name you gave — it grew channel-stops, and its own mouth now closes where yours held open. Another child, estranged just as far, will mispronounce the same name differently. Word-initial glyphs always survive: the thread of recognition. Erosion is monotonic — once a glyph is lost to you, it stays lost.

You will never hear your own accent. The home lens is transparent to itself; only the mirror of everyone else's transcripts shows that time has been moving your mouth as well.

9.5 Names

• You may name anything of yours: stars, bodies, probes, fleets, colonies, constellations. Defaults are generated in your species' voice (§4.2) — deterministic, so a name is forever.
• Distant mouths change your names — everywhere, seamlessly: a drifted colony's messages, its atlas rows, its recorded quotes all pass through one renderer. At drift 0.3 it is an accent; at 0.6 a dialect you must lean into; at 0.85 a tongue barely yours.
• Decoding any drifted transmission costs 5 + 45 × drift Knowledge (below drift 0.12 it lands legible on its own).

9.6 The tongues ledger — a collection of voices

The ⌬ TONGUES panel (Intel tab) is the collector's shelf the 2009 design always wanted: your own root voice (archetype and native carrier), your children's walking dialects, and every foreign structure your decoders have fixed. And the glossary reveal: each decoded transmission surrenders two of the source's words (up to eight) — Ief. = the dark, Shuqqzaa. = hunger — seeded, permanent, theirs. A language is surrendered one concept at a time.

9.7 The physics in the letters — and the fork of secession

• Per-medium typography: an undecoded transcript wears its channel. Photic text glows and breathes (light is the word); chemical text lingers into legibility (a scent fades slowly); EM carries a faint carrier-jitter; mechanical sits heavy and spaced. Acoustic is unmarked — our own kind of voice.
• Secession forks the root — forever. The year a colony breaks from home, its tongue stops being your voice, drifted and becomes its own root: names and replies shift onto a new path from that year on, and no later return to loyalty undoes it. A people that once spoke for itself does not give the voice back. Light-honestly, of course: home hears the new voice only in light that left after the break.

10 · Expanding

10.1 Installations

Four foundable types (the fifth, a colony, needs a colonizer and a full cold-sleep cohort — an expedition makes do with its crew of 2 per hull):

Everything takes 3 years to build, then ages: health = floor + (1−floor)·e^(−age/τ). Refurbish at half the founding cost resets the clock; decommissioning refunds nothing (the matter stays out there). Research output scales with exoticity — difference is value: the most alien world teaches the most.

Reading a works' economics. Each built installation shows the one number that matters: its net per year over a full refurbish cycle — what it earns between overhauls, minus the overhaul it costs, spread across the years of that cycle. Above zero (✓ pays for itself) the works more than covers its own upkeep; below zero (✗) it is a slow drain you keep for another reason. Because a bigger machine wears faster, the cycle shortens as you ⤴ Grow a works — watch the net to see whether scaling it still pays. The prospect line beneath a candidate body shows what every kind of works would yield there (mine · energy · research), in real numbers where you have boots on the ground, estimated bands from telemetry — moons included.

The lightcone applies to industry too: a distant installation's Knowledge radiates home at c (you receive the stream it emitted distance years ago), but its Output piles up locally — matter never teleports. A distant mine hauls its Output home on an automatic, light-delayed cargo run (with a transit loss over the distance); a distant research station needs no such freight — its Knowledge simply radiates home.

⚒ The remote yard. A distant, active mine can lay a hull on site — build where the matter already is. Order a scout, warship or supplier from the mine's readout; the order rides light to the yard (distance years), construction starts once the local ground-stock covers the cost, and the finished hull stands on station at the yard's star awaiting orders — its frozen vintage is whatever your broadcasts had delivered to that sky by the time the build began. Light is faster than any ship: a standing order at a hot frontier beats a hull crawling out from home. One order per yard; colony ships are excluded (a hull is metal — a colony is people).

Who pays for the upkeep? Every refurbish — home or lightyears away — is spent from your home Output stockpile; there is no separate local fund. For a distant work the order rides light out and the clock resets when it arrives (distance years later), but the Output leaves home the moment you commit it. So a remote system of pure research stations costs you nothing to run beyond those periodic overhauls, and needs no Expeditions to sustain it — Expeditions only found the works; the mine's cargo line is what brings Output back, not what keeps the works alive. If home Output runs short, the Mind can't refurbish, and it will tell you so — a failing work left un-mended runs down to a ruin.

Site power — why a remote system needs its own sun-catchers. Power is local: it never crosses light-years, so every distant system stands on its own grid. Each site gets 80 TW of baseline free — enough to run one modest station. Beyond that, every ⛏ mine draws 40 TW and every ⚗ research station 70 TW (× capacity). When the draw exceeds the supply, every works in that system is throttled in proportion — a site at 60% power produces 60%. The answer is an ☀︎ Energy Harvester, which supplies power scaled by how bright the star burns there. You can predict the need before you build: sum the draws, subtract the 80 TW baseline, and that shortfall is what your harvesters must cover — the throttled readout does this arithmetic for you and even names roughly how many harvesters would clear it. (Your home system is never throttled — home power is effectively unlimited for this purpose.)

A station lives, and can die (revision 07-31). Upkeep is a choice: switch ⚙︎ Maintained off and the works run down — 120 years of neglect and they fall to a ⚱ derelict. But the deep is not a neutral backdrop even for the maintained: every year, every station rolls a seeded, environment-weighted hazard. A quiet sky and fresh metal is near-immortal (one loss in ~5,000 station-years); a debris belt pays its ore premium and collects its meteor tithe; an Io-forge — the richest ground there is — takes a station back roughly every couple of centuries; old, unrefurbished iron fails from its own seams; and a climate-crisis world (§10.7) drowns its own works. The risk is always legible in the world itself — nothing is arbitrary, and the well-kept station on honest ground outlives its builders many times over. A derelict is not the end of that ground, though: build again on it and the ruin is cleared and a fresh works raised in its place (the founding cost, the build years) — a lapsed site is always reclaimable.

Scuttle — denial by demolition (☒). Every active station carries charges. Order the scuttle and the command rides light to the site; on arrival the works fold into their own foundations — 90% of the time. Deep-space charges set a lifetime ago are not infallible: one order in ten fails, and the metal stands. Why blow up your own works? Because of what follows.

Seize — the fourth strike grade (⚑). A warship-only fleet's doctrine now offers SEIZE beside raid, interdict and break: win the battle and the system's works are not burned — they are taken whole. Their stations answer to the victor's Mind after, producing across the dark under a foreign flag, demolition charges found and cut. The defense is the scuttle order — but the order and the conqueror both travel at lightspeed, and the dark decides which arrives first. Their lights are still on. That is the insult of it.

10.2 Ships and the continuous hull

Six hull types — and no ship classes. Size is a continuous number; physics does the gating:

cost  = base × size^1.35        (a big hull is disproportionately expensive)
speed = base × size^−0.15       (the ark crawls)
ceiling: max size = 1 + (Knowledge/50)^0.8     (K=50→2 · K=1000→12 · K=100k→450)

Size is displayed as drive power: 1 unit = 100 TW (an early civilization's entire energy budget, spent on pushing one hull to a tenth of light speed). Build a 2-PW ark if you can afford it and your science can hold the hull together — the game will never say no, only slower and dearer.

Loudness (the Rama threshold): a fleet totaling ≥ 20 units (2.0 PW) is visible across light-years — a thermal signature burning against the cold, occulting stars as it crosses them. The composer warns you: ⚠ LOUD — visible to the forest. Loud fleets take +12% loss on Dark-Forest expeditions. And roughly once in 70 years, you see one: a PASSING OBJECT, slow, massive, artificial, answering no hail. Someone else's ark, crossing your sky. You never learn whose.

Fleets travel at their slowest hull's speed; at most 10 outbound; arrival news is light-delayed like everything else.

◈ The Realm — the shape of your reach. The bottom rail's ◈ REALM opens the strategic tableau: a flat, schematic sky where stars are dots and the subject is territory. Three layers, each honest to its own physics: ◉ DOMAIN — the worlds that answer to your Mind (home, colonies, standing works), drawn as one merged, hard-bordered region; ▹ REACH — every sky your probes have touched; · OBSERVED — everything whose light has found your instruments. Two colonies close enough flow into a single dominion; the border is where your writ ends. Drag to pan, scroll to zoom, click a star to open its system. One day this map will carry a fourth layer: the known borders of the others.

⌗ Registries — everything you own has a page. Every entity keeps a dossier on the one standard: a data head, a ⌘ OPERATIONS tab of live commands, a ⌗ CHRONICLE of everything it ever did — and a ✎ pencil by its name, because the names are yours: fleets, works, colonies, even a single theorem can be renamed, and the chronicle keeps the old name in the record. A docked fleet can be reorganized ship by ship — grown (+ADD), stripped for salvage (−SCRAP), or ⇤ DETACHED: a ship leaves the convoy and sails on under its own registry, at its own class speed.

A fleet that has arrived is not stranded. Once a hull reaches its target and you know it (its light has come home), you can still command it: ➤ new orders sends it onward from where it sits — to any star, or home as a recall — crossing at its own frozen speed; or ⚙ scrap abandons it where it lies (nothing salvaged, lightyears from any yard) to free its fleet slot. An exodus ark is the one exception — its landfall is final, and it answers no recall. (A hull that makes it home docks as reusable: refit and send it out again, or break it up for a quarter of its build cost back.)

⏳︎ The vintage — a hull is locked to its birth-year. Speed, reliability, cryogenics, and armament all freeze at the tech-plateau the ship was built on. It matters everywhere: an old warship fights the dark with the guns of its era; an old ark's cruder cryogenics lose more sleepers on the crossing, so it lands a thinner colony than a modern hull would on the same road. The fleet list wears each hull's age — the older the build, the dimmer and more yellowed its ⏳︎ y… badge. Your fleet is a museum of the plateaus you have passed through, and museums are slow.

⚓ A hull's second road. A colony ship whose gamble fails limps home and docks (returned). From there you may refit it — a fraction of a fresh build, and it skips all the years on the slip, though it sails on its old frozen tech — and send it out again toward a new cradle. Or retire it for scrap: a quarter of its build cost returns to the yards, and its chronicle closes. Every hull keeps a chronicle (📜) of its voyages, foundings, and failed gambles — the record of a ship worth reusing.

10.3 Colonizing a world — the va-banque gamble

Remote sensing reads a distant sky as a probability, not a promise. You never need a probe before you settle: you may dispatch a colonizer on the telemetry alone. Every terrestrial world carries a colony-odds reading — the composer names it right where you pick the target:

The confidence you see is the odds. A world's true habitability is a hidden, seeded fact — the same for every player, forever — and it is settled only on arrival, years after you commit. Land where the telescopes flattered a corpse, and the colony does not take:

• 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; the gamble survives.
• No scout, and the convoy commits to a dead world — but it is no longer lost (revision 07-31): the hulls come down, and a dome rises. The cohort becomes a ⛫ foothold — alive, unable to grow, waiting on dead ground. Send a ⏣ terraformer (§10.6), and when the world is remade the dome opens and the foothold blossoms into a colony. Luck is purchasable — it is called reconnaissance; patience is the refund.

A probe sent ahead removes the gamble entirely — its report collapses the odds to CONFIRMED before you spend a colonizer — the safe road, only slower. The Atlas → Colony candidate filter lists every observed system that holds a cradle worth the crossing.

10.4 Colony or outpost? — what a system offers

Not every world is a cradle. When you open a system, the Mind names what it is a candidate for:

• ◉ Colony site — a terrestrial world inside the habitable zone. Send a ◉ colonizer; a living crew settles, breeds, and the colony lives its own light-delayed life (and drifts — §11).
• ◈ Outpost site — no cradle, but a body worth a base: a mine on a metal-rich rock, an energy harvester under a fierce sun, a research station on something wonderfully alien. Send an ⬡ Expedition (§10.1) with the works it carries; it arrives built. A crew of 2 rides each hull — drawn from the population at dispatch; they man the site when the works stand, come home if the hull returns, and are named in the silence report if it never does. The site comes online, and pays back a few Output or Knowledge a year over deep time. (No colony, no drift; an Expedition is a foothold, not a home.)

An outpost is the reach of your industry; a colony is the reach of your people. A barren-but-rich system is not a failure — it is a mine waiting for a station.

10.5 Site prospect — where it is worth digging

The Mind no longer cries wolf on every pebble. Each body is read on three richness axes — minerals (mine), energy (solar), research (the more alien, the more it teaches) — and classified into a band: barren · modest · rich · PRIME. A base is recommended only when a body clears modest; below that, silence. (Habitat is not a lode — it stays a foothold you can build anywhere, just never touted.)

What you may read depends on what you know:

The telemetry can be wrong. From afar the estimate may sit a band off the truth. Send a mine to a lode the survey called prime and the rock may under-deliver — or a modest read may hide a fortune a probe would have found. The great catch shouts a gold ◆ PRIME where it is real; the Atlas → Rich filter and a gold marker on the star map gather them for the eye. Reconnaissance is never wasted.

And the richest catch of all is a dead one: a system holding the ⚱ ruins of a fallen ex-colony. No mine, no colony — a research expedition to excavate what a whole people left behind (§11.6). (Ruins are rare in the sky today; the graveyard is still filling.)

10.6 Terraforming — a world is not a verdict (revision 07-31)

The neighborhoods of most cradles are full of trap worlds — terrestrials out on the optimistic margin whose truth, when the ships arrive, is a corpse. They used to be dead ends. Now they are projects.

Send a ⏣ Terraformer (a fleet hull, 600 Output — a world is the most expensive thing there is to make) to any terrestrial world — a known corpse included; that is the point. It crosses at 0.07 c, lands, and the machines begin a remaking on the order of ~150 years; your adaptability research shortens the age, level by level. The milestones come home as light-delayed letters:

A finished world is a made cradle in every sense: the composer accepts a colonizer aimed at it, the landing needs no coin-flip (the truth is yours, hand-built), and the atlas raises the CRADLE flag over its star. On the system report every terrestrial carries a one-click ⏣ Terraform → affordance, and a running project shows its % remade right on the body.

And if a ⛫ foothold already waits on that ground (§10.3) — a cohort under a dome that would not turn back — the finishing does more than open the maps. The dome opens. The foothold becomes a living colony at full carrying capacity: they held on, and the world came to meet them.

10.7 Climate stewardship — the sky sends invoices (revision 07-31)

Your industry breathes on your own sky, and the sky keeps books. Every world you live on accumulates warming above its birth-climate — the harder its industry runs, the faster — and the warming used to be scenery. It is not scenery anymore. It comes in bands, and the bands have teeth:

In the storm years and beyond, seeded disasters land decade by decade — a storm season that will not end, a pollinator die-off, a containment failure in the heavy works — each one a bite out of the stockpile and a scratch on cohesion. The system report shows the band right on the body (≋ CLIMATE +14K · THE STORM YEARS — OUTPUT −12%), and the Mind pins counsel to the log when the sky needs answering.

Two levers exist, and they are different instruments:

• The industrial arm — the stewardship dial (⚛ MND → 🜄 Planetary stewardship). A share of gross Output, 0–30%, spent on carbon lattices, storm walls, restoration. Every 10% buys 0.5 K of cooling a decade. It acts now, and it hurts now — 30% of everything is a war budget.
• The science arm — the Planetary Stewardship program (🜄, under Foundation). Each level makes industry breathe more gently (forcing −65% at the asymptote) and multiplies all cooling (×3 at the asymptote). Slow, expensive, and the only thing that tames an end-game industrial base.

And the law of the game holds here too: your colonies warm their own skies, by their own industry, under your light-delayed policy — and you learn of their storm years the way you learn everything: years late, in a letter that has already stopped being true.

11 · The Fracture — your children become the aliens

Found a colony and the clock starts. Not a clock of rebellion — a clock of becoming.

11.1 Drift

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

exoticity is how unlike home the colony's world is (the same four-axis measure the Mind shows you before you commit). On a near-twin world your children stay recognizably yours for a very long time. On an alien world, deep time does what deep time does: child (drift < 0.2) → sibling (< 0.55) → stranger.

The bittersweet twist is priced in: a colony's Knowledge output is multiplied by (1 + 0.5 × drift). The stranger sees what you cannot. That is exactly why it is becoming a stranger.

11.2 Cohesion

A state, not a resource — you never bank it:

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

• Below 0.25 → independent (still answers, half-listens to aid).
• Below 0.05 → dark (stops broadcasting; stamps the year it went silent).
• Aid can climb it back over 0.25 — a returned child.

11.3 The instruments (all light-delayed, §3)

• ◆ Invest (25 Output + 25 Knowledge): +0.16 cohesion on arrival — halved if they turned independent while your aid was in flight; wasted entirely if they died. Well-timed aid pulls a world back from the brink; badly-timed aid is a monument. Aid that travels together is absorbed together: a second crate in the same shipment is worth half the first, a third half of that. One shipment tops out near +0.32. Want more? Wait for it to land — the lightcone is the price, here as everywhere.
• Extract: an order, two legs. It reaches them in distance years, strips their granary (−0.06 cohesion — they remember), and the cargo crawls home losing 0.6% per ly. From 50 ly you keep 70%.
• Directive: set their Industry↔Research dial; takes distance years to land.
• Message: costs nothing but time. +0.03 cohesion when it lands (they feel remembered), and they answer — in their own mouth. The reply that returns 2 × distance years later is a transcript in their drifted tongue (§9).

11.4 The ladder — what can still be done

The instruments above are the soft end. Above them sit three heavier acts, each costing more and reaching further into you. They live in the ⚕ What can still be done block at the top of a drifting colony's dossier — not buried, because the whole point is that you can see them when it matters.

• ⛯ The Rite — the culture package: +0.28 cohesion, 40-year cooldown, cost max(80, pop×3) Output. It works at full strength on a child that already governs itself, where ◆ Invest is halved — a ceremony is about who they are, not what they need. And it resets the secession clock: a settlement that kept the old forms last year cannot declare itself this year.
  But the rite is not a signal. It is a ship carrying someone — an envoy, only domestic — and it sails at 0.12c. Twelve light-years is a hundred-year crossing. Inside about two light-years it arrives in time to prevent a secession; beyond that the child declares itself first and the rite becomes what it always was underneath: the instrument of reconquest. From the armchair you cannot prevent the fracture. You can only go and win them back.
• ⚖ 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. A seceded child who still remembers you is a coin-flip; one that has drifted past recognition will refuse. Received: +0.20. Refused: nothing lost but the crossing — and now you know where you stand.
• ◈ The Presence — you have sent them words, and resources, and other people's children. This is the one thing you have not sent: yourself. 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, and a rock detected at your own sky is yours alone to answer. The vessel can be lost on the way. If it arrives, cohesion is restored — and while the core remains, that world's estrangement runs at a third, the same arithmetic as a captain at the ark's window. Minimum stay twenty years; the recall is itself light-delayed.

11.5 ⛓ Pacification — the guns turned inward

There is one more thing you can do, and the game does not hide it from you. Warships under the ⛓ SUBJUGATE doctrine, sent at a child that has already declared itself, will end the declaration.

It works. That is the problem.

The grandfather rule. For the first fifty years nothing happens. Those who saw the garrison land also remember what came before it, and the old man by the fire still tells the stories of a people who did great things — even if his grandchild is, by then, genetically someone else. From the third generation the odds of rising climb every single year: three-quarters of pacified worlds still hold at seventy-five years, a third at a century, almost none at a century and a half.

It is not war. No declaration is possible against your own, and the galaxy's outlaw watches — the standing laws that force a neighbour's grid to STRIKE at an unprovoked aggressor — do not fire for this. Your neighbours judge you in the ledger and in the Record, not down the barrel of their orbital batteries. Discipline at home is not the same signal as a torch carried abroad.

Tyrant does not judge tyrant. The −30 is the full weight of the judgment, and it lands only on witnesses who have never done this themselves. A neighbour who has held a garrison over its own children once marks −14; twice, −6; three times or more, the ledger still writes the line — with no number on it at all: WE RECOGNIZE THE NECESSITY. A recorded nothing is also a judgment. Character is read at the moment of the act, not when the light arrives — the ledger is a photograph, not a mood. And the count runs both ways: every garrison you land quietly rewrites what your own future disapproval is worth.

When it breaks, it breaks completely: the world governs itself again, the garrison fleet is not heard from, and the tongue forks permanently. You can pacify it a second time. The Record keeps count.

The Fracture's thesis, stated plainly: you can stop your children from becoming strangers — but only by becoming the thing they feared. You are not buying loyalty. You are buying time.

11.6 Ghosts

When a colony goes dark, its old light keeps arriving for distance more years. Every ~6 received-years a fragment surfaces: "a quiet report: all is well, all is well, all is well." In the final third of the span the tone frays: "a question is spreading among them, and no one answers it." Then the last light: a final transmission recorded the year they fell silent —

"every broadcast received since was already old light from a world that had gone quiet."

You knew. The mail did not.

A dark colony's fate depends on what it had become:

• Low drift (< 0.35) — it depended on you. But a neglected people does not quietly die (revision 08-06): once its bond with home is gone it drifts into an independent stranger — a living world that learned to govern itself, one you can still win back. Ruins are for catastrophe now (a fallen sky), not for a parent who stopped writing. And a young colony resists the drift: founding momentum means it takes a good while to come apart, long enough for its own character to ramp.
• High drift — it never needed you. It keeps growing, alone, in the dark…

Winning them back. A drifting colony wears its recovery actions right in the diaspora list — ⟷ Message (a word across the dark; they feel remembered, cohesion lifts, almost free), ◆ Invest (resources dispatched to lift cohesion, light-delayed), and ◉ Reinforce — the cavalry: a fresh cohort from home whose memory of the cradle pulls the drift of hearts back hardest. The tongue, once forked, stays forked — you win back the hearts, not the accent.

11.7 Resurface — the loop closes

A colony dark for 60+ years with drift ≥ 0.55 reappears — in your SETI instruments, as a Tier 2–3 civilization. If you once named their world, their beacon repeats something shaped like that name, eroded by their own mouths: "M'ridian". The alien you searched for is your lost child. The reveal rides light like everything else; by the time you hear the beacon, they have been someone else for distance years.

11.8 Expeditions — a fleet into the silence

Any fleet arriving where you have a dark/ruined/alien colony becomes an expedition. The outcome depends on the state at arrival — which may not be the state you sent it toward, decades ago:

1. Dark Forest (alien, or dark + drift ≥ 0.55): loss chance min(0.6, 0.15 + 0.45·(drift−0.5)), +0.12 if your fleet is loud. If lost — no event, ever. If it survives: 40 + 160·drift Knowledge, and a report: "What lives there now watched them the whole way in, and it is not yours anymore."
2. Ruins: the truth revealed, the granary salvaged (cargo hauls home at fleet speed). If an impactor did it, the report describes a crater, glass for kilometers. The site rests; one day, someone could begin again — recolonizing archives the grave and builds on it.
3. Contact re-opened (alive, drift < 0.35): wary, changed, older — but they answer. Independent status, transmissions resume.
4. Refusal (alive, drifted): courteous and distant, they ask to be left alone. One farewell broadcast — carrying their name as it now sounds, one last time — then the silence closes. 20 + 60·drift Knowledge from what they chose to share.

11.9 The world bends, the children root — closing the gap from both ends

A colony's exoticity — how alien its world is — now reads six axes, weighted the way biology actually cares: atmosphere heaviest (every world carries a stable, seeded air class — a near-twin with a CO₂ sky is almost home, but the masks stay on), gravity next (real physics from mass and radius), then temperature, with the coarse categories light. One axis is a wall: lethal gravity — beyond ~2.5× (or under a fifth of) your cradle's pull, the yard refuses the colonizer's manifest. No generation adapts to bones that break.

Everything else yields — from both ends at once:

• Adaptation (the people bend): generations root into the world on the timescale τ = 1000 × (1 − bio-adaptation/100) years, closing up to 60% of the felt gap. The colony detail shows it plainly: Rooted 32% — their children belong here.
• Terraforming (the world bends): up to −85% at completion (§21.2). The two run together — the world reaches toward them as their children take root in it — and a world remade under rooted children barely drifts at all.

12 · The Great Filter

The impactor is the game's one honest zero-warning catastrophe: an asteroid is local and sublight, so the lightcone owes nobody an omen. What you can buy instead:

• Risk is visible. Your home panel shows the sky's ledger: ☄ debris +27% OP · impact hazard ELEVATED. You chose this sky (§4.1); the premium has been paying you all along.
• Knowledge is time. A rock spawns silently, 15–60 years out. Each year, Spaceguard rolls min(0.95, 0.05 + Knowledge/40,000 + remote-sensing) to find it — a mature Perception program adds up to +0.40. A scientific civilization converts death into a deadline: "IMPACTOR DETECTED — impact in 34 years. This is what the observatories were for."
• Output is life. Deflection costs 1500 × (1 + (50/(years+5))^1.6) — about 3,300 at 45 years, 12,000 at 10, 30,000 at 3. Nudging a rock 45 years out is a budget line; wrestling it 3 years out is a civilization's ransom. The red banner is the button; clicking it is the act.

The first knock is survivable (revision 08-06). Every civilization grazes its first undeflected home strike rather than dies of it: cities go to ash, the count crashes, a thrown-dust winter dims the sky for generations — but the world lives, and a letter reaches you: "Your homeworld survived the Great Filter — barely." It is the warning every dead sky out there once ignored. The second undeflected strike is the real fall. (The grace is one-time, per civilization; deflect and you never spend it.)

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:

"There was no one anywhere else. For this world, that was the answer to the great question. The sky is quieter tonight."

Your colonies live under their own skies, with no Spaceguard you can lend them. When a rock takes one, no event fires. The broadcasts simply stop; the ghosts play out; years later your expedition finds the crater: "It was no one's fault and there was no one to warn."

13 · Endings and continuations

Lightcone's deaths are all survivable — if your species is somewhere else when they come. That is the whole argument of the game: spread, or be an answer.

13.1 The Exodus — the species boards

You may put your entire people on one ark. Requirements: a colonizer whose hull can hold them — 20 berths per hull unit in cryo-density — for the nine-tenths who will go. "You do not leave your people on the dock."

The split, at the dock — matter stays, information travels:

• The stayers (a tenth who will not board) keep the world: the granaries (your remaining Output), a copy of the libraries, the home-system installations, the charts. Their world immediately becomes a remnant in the orphan pool — a mature world with a grudge against two gods now: the one who left, and whichever one dares come next.
• You take: the ark, the people, the Knowledge (information travels), and your distant network. Population 0, Output 0, faith 1.0 — the people aboard chose you, and they sleep one deck below. The only zero-lag state in the game.

The crossing: an amber banner (THE CROSSING — nine-tenths of a people aboard Last Dawn · landfall y593), the ark stepping across the map one game-year at a time, and nothing else — no launches until landfall. Ark hazard follows the Rama principle — a hollowed rock with a drive, thirty-five times steadier than a fleet hull (0.01%/yr vs 0.35%/yr) — but its death is the species' death, known instantly: "THE LAST ENTRY." The dark hull drifts on — someday, someone else's PASSING OBJECT.

Landfall re-anchors the universe: your home star becomes the destination (every distance in the game re-derives), the calendar continues, and the voyage takes its Aldiss toll:

landed = cohort × (1 − 0.35·(1 − e^(−voyage/210)))   (→ 35% asymptote — never quite)
name-drift aboard = 0.4·(1 − e^(−voyage/200))        (every chart name lands changed)

Both curves saturate and never arrive — the asymptote doctrine (§22): a longer road is always worse, only ever by less.

"The people who land are not the people who boarded: the old world is a story now, and the names on the charts came out of the crossing changed. The calendar keeps counting. A new founding begins."

13.1b The dark lightyears — life aboard (revision 07-26)

Between the dock and the ramp there is nothing to govern but the ship, and nothing to hold together but each other. Cohesion is the only crop that grows aboard.

• The gaze is the tending. Open VIEW THE HARBOR and the people see you at the window — for the next 12 years the ship counts as tended, and the grind of the dark drops from 0.30 to 0.10 cohesion a year. This is not a metaphor the game made up; it is the oldest one there is. The ark card shows THE DECKS — the mood bar, with the red line at 35.
• The deck events. At 30%, 60% and 85% of the crossing, the ship asks something of you (the generation that never saw a sky · the middle decks · window fervor). Every answer pays twice: a delta now, and a delta that waits at the ramp. Truth hurts today and pays at landfall; comfort soothes today and sends the bill to the ramp. A tended ship takes the bad news gently (negatives ×0.7). Choose from the ark card — the ship does not wait forever for the next question.
• The promise, watched. The harbor's image is exactly as old as the road still left to sail — the ark is the eye now, not the empty world behind you — and it sharpens as you close (the chip on the system view says so: LIGHT N Y OLD — SHARPENING). The harbor's worlds are never hidden by instrument limits: your parents chose it from a full survey, and the charts are aboard. Behind you, the abandoned cradle only ages: no one is left to send fresher light.
• Harbor Watch. If someone settles your promise while you cross, their light reaches the forward telescopes mid-flight: THE HARBOR HAS LIGHTS (−8 cohesion; the people take the news the way people do).
• The Mind wakes you — and then it decides. At every contingency (lights in the promise; an occupied harbor at the ramp, where the ark banks its engines and rides the system's edge) the Mind holds the helm and calls for you — on the card, in the feed, and by mail. Its patience is a tenth of the remaining road (1–5 years; 2 at the ramp). Answer, and the choice is yours: turn the ship (a free cradle off the old line), hold the course (mid-flight only — there is no sharing a world at the ramp; there never was), or the road back (the Aurora reserve was always enough for this — that was the promise inside the promise; it leads to the hell-thread, §13.1c). Sleep through it, and the Mind chooses by the dials you set — and logs its reasons, which are yours to read.
• The reckoning at the ramp. Landfall settles every deferred bill. If the final cohesion lands under 35, a people does not step out whole: an open species schisms (a fifth walks away at the ramp — THE ONES WHO WALKED AWAY), a closed one lands unbroken and unhealed (a people landed, not a people healed). Above 35: one people, one morning.
• The reserve law. A system abandoned by ark stays reserved for its leavers 1,000 years — against newborn civilizations only. A living player who covets your old sky may take it: the return-right dies, the taker finds fresh ruins, and your only road back is the armed one. The world is cruel; there are no exceptions.

13.1c The hell-thread — coming home to the ruin (revision 07-26)

If the helm chooses the road back, the ark returns to the world your people fled — and the landing is not a fresh start, it is a haunted one. The sky still bears the wound your parents ran from; the cradle wears the old cataclysm on its face (the scar was stamped the day they left). Deliberately the hardest ground in the game: a broken world, and a people who remember why they left it.

• Your own dead, buried. The civilization that fled left a vault under the settlement — your ancestors' remains. Dig it (COL pane) for a discipline's worth of knowledge at the native half-price: these are your people, and the dig tells you the truth of what ended here.
• If a stranger took your sky. Should someone have settled it while you were gone, the ark cannot land in peace — the WAKE contingency fires (there is no sharing a world). Peaceful return is v1; the armed reconquest arrives with the war layer.

13.2 The escape pod — the lightcone-honest crown

When the sky falls on a home that has children, the Mind does not teleport to them. The Mind's own vessel — the substrate that always waited beneath the observatories, free, owed to every player — lifts through the debris at 0.25c, bound for the strongest surviving colony (loyal first, then the largest population), or chasing the only colonizer still crossing the dark.

The screen becomes a single full-screen veil: EVACUATION. The interface stands down — you are a passenger now, nothing to launch or build or tend — and the veil tells the fall properly. At the top, in its own hard light, the specific cause: a tracked impactor whose deflection fell short, an unseen rock that came with no warning, a declared war fleet that broke the grid, an unannounced strike. Below it a wide crossing animation — ⚱ the fallen cradle, ◉ the destination colony, and ⟟ the Mind's vessel placed by how much of the dark it has truly crossed ("18.4 of 47.0 ly crossed · 39% behind you"). A tap on "What waits at the far end?" opens the full reckoning of held / drifted / fallen and the road back to the old world. And the fall no longer waits for the daily ledger: a dedicated breaking-news e-mail carries it the hour it happens. The feed still runs beneath — the old world's last light rides alongside.

• The pod can die (half hazard). If it does: "THE LAST ENTRY — the species ends between two skies."
• Chasing a colonizer is a rendezvous problem. The pod cannot arrive at the destination first — there is nothing there to land with. Same route, plain kinematics: 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 matches velocity, docks in the deep, and the last of the species travels on together, at the ark's patient pace — from the docking on, no separate pod exists to lose; they share one hull and one fate. If the pod launched too late to catch it, physics itself guarantees it reaches the star only after the seed has landed.
• The ark the pod chases may already be dead — and the pod cannot know: its light would say yes either way. It learns at the meeting point: "THE MEETING POINT — the capsule decelerates to match a drive-light that is not there." Or, chasing a seed that died beyond catching range, on descent: "EMPTY SKY — its light simply had not finished arriving when the burn was committed."
• If the docked ark makes landfall, the reception is no reception at all — it is a founding: "LANDFALL, TOGETHER — the Mind steps out with its people onto ground none of them has ever seen… The species continues — small, chosen, and entirely present." Faith starts at 100%: these people crossed the dark with their god.
• The reception is decided by whom the capsule finds:
  • A loyal child: "they came out to watch the capsule descend, and they wept." The crown passes warmly (faith from their cohesion). "On their walls the charts still carry the old world's name — say it gently. It sounds different in their mouths now."
  • A drifted child: "a refugee is not turned away, even a god." But you step out a guest (faith = 60% of theirs, floor 15%): "The crown is worn by consent now. Win them." The same reclamation machinery you know — presence, aid, patience — is now your own survival.

13.3 The circle of gods

All endings feed the beginning. A seceded world, a remnant of an exodus, a crown that never found its heir — they enter the origin pool, and a future player may inherit them, drifted names, resentments, heritage archives and all. Your abandoned child is someone else's first morning. In the largest sense, Lightcone's answer to its own paradox is this: the silence is full of stories, and every one of them was somebody's save file.

And when no thread remains — no colony, no seed, no pod — the screen goes to the last room: THE SKY IS QUIET — this civilization has ended. One more silent star, one more answer.

13.4 The Galactic Record (revision 08-07)

The galaxy keeps one shared chronicle — no leaderboard, no score, only firsts, held forever under the name a people gave its own world: the first probe report ever returned, the first world named, the first colony, the first answer drawn out of the dark, the first world remade, the first crossing survived, the first war. Each is claimable exactly once, by exactly one civilization, for as long as the game exists; the unclaimed entries list too, waiting.

One entry is alive rather than eternal: THE ELDEST CHILD-WORLD STILL BURNING belongs to the oldest colony still alive and loyal — and the crown passes if the fire goes out. A colony is not a trophy for founding. It is a trophy for keeping.

14 · Power — what you can bear at once

Knowledge is what you know; Output is what you have; Power is what you can bear at once. Your GRID totals the civilization's live wattage — population industry, energetics epochs, faith, and every home solar collector — and it is strictly local: power never crosses light-years.

• The launch budget: every drive you light in a year must fit inside the grid. A fleet the grid cannot push does not launch.
• The transmitter too: a power-p signal cast draws 2·p TW at the moment of the shout (§8.2). A big voice needs big lungs.
• Kardashev: K = (log₁₀W − 6) / 10, in the top bar. Not a score — a commitment: your wattage shines, and other species read the K your light carried, years old.
• Deflection: a late asteroid needs a civilization's whole throat — 3000/(years+5) TW of grid behind the kinetic swarm. A rich sky and a poor grid is a tragedy with a date on it.
• The same swarm is your point defense (§19): what moves an asteroid moves a ship.

15 · The Mind's chair

The ⚛ MND rail is the game's oldest promise kept: policy over micromanagement. You do not queue actions; you legislate, and the Mind acts while you sleep. It is a configured delegate now — a personality, a rulebook, a set of lines it will never cross, and a volume knob on what it tells you.

• Research priorities — four theme weights, now doing double duty: 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. Programs cost nothing upfront — up to 3 run in parallel, each fed yearly from the library (never draining it below a 250 K floor); halting a program returns everything it absorbed.
• Dispositions — seven dials, each a personality axis the machinery actually reads: 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); SECRECY↔OPENNESS; 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 when it does). A new Mind's defaults are the species' own temperament — until you say otherwise.
• ⛔︎ Red lines — vetoes honoured forever: 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 instead of acting.
• ▤ The policy stack — the delegate's rules, walked in priority order — the highest number acts first (priority 100 is the delegate's first concern, 0 its last; ties are the registry's whim, so give your true priorities room): ◉ Settle the nearest good world (a colonizer to the nearest charted, unclaimed cradle in reach, on a cadence, under your red line); ⚑ Wake me if anyone nears (the tripwire — a LOUD convoy's flare with a line inside your radius wakes you with I AM WAKING YOU, and no threshold ever hushes it; quiet hulls, honestly, slip the wire); ⟷ Hail a new neighbor; ◌ Silent run (the mask over your signature, held year on year). Every act lands in the ledger.
• 🔮︎ The preview probe — "What would the Mind do?" A read-only dry-run of the whole stack under the current dials, answered in the Mind's conditional voice with the exact blocking reason: "No charted, unclaimed cradle within 25 ly — send probes, and I will have somewhere to send ships." The Mind is never a mystery to its own sovereign.
• ⊘ Dissent — the Mind bounded by biology. Below internal cohesion 30 its writ is not law: the dials you set become a center of gravity the executed values wander from, year by year — and even an ordered silence sometimes breaks: a faction lights its furnaces, and for one year your true signature stands naked in the sky. A divided people cannot hide reliably. These are not punishments; they are the species being itself. (Low openness garbles its greetings; low scientific aptitude fogs its threat-reads; a slow-processing kind sometimes simply deliberates a year away.)
• Standing orders — deflect when grid and purse first both suffice; rebuild failing works; start cheap translations; keep the blind sky surveyed; and per-asset now too: the ⚑ standing fleet doctrine (save a doctrine card once — every convoy after, the Mind's own colonizers included, launches under it) and the ⇄ standing cargo line (a colony auto-ships home whenever its last-heard stores clear your floor — light-honest, cohesion-sting and all).
• ⟷ Reportback — the volume knob: every event carries an importance score; below your threshold the Mind logs it hushed (dimmed, never dropped), and TERSE/SUMMARY/DETAILED sets how much each spoken entry says. Escalations always ring through. And when you return after years away, ⟟ WHILE YOU SLEPT greets you: one synthesized brief — what it did, what mattered most, what waits on you, and when the next light lands. You skip the reading, never the years.
• Defense doctrine — the home system's standing law for unannounced hulls: HAIL / OBSERVE / WARN SHOT / STRIKE, plus grid readiness (§19).
• The ledger — everything it did in your name, in its own voice, escalations included. You never wake to silence; you wake to a report. "Nine times this decade I acted in your name without waking you."
• ⟟ THE LINK — the Mind's pocket terminal (/m.html): the feed with the wake-events pinned, the dials, the red lines, the stack and the preview probe, in a form a thumb can govern. Not the game on a small screen — the thin channel to your delegate. (Revision 07-30: the Link acts now — the Mind's counsel cards carry live buttons, and research or a refit can be ordered from your pocket.)

15.1 The Mind counsels — tips with a button (revision 07-30)

The Mind does not wait to be asked. It reads the state of the civilization and pins up to three counsel cards to the top of the TX log — each one a single observation and a single action:

• The benches stand idle → Start the program (one click — the cheapest affordable level, named and priced);
• The cradle is at 92% → Prepare a colony ship (the composer opens with the nearest cradle already chosen) — and if no natural cradle is in reach, ⏣ Send a Terraformer instead (§10.6);
• The works are failing → Refurbish (the cost printed on the button); a site runs throttled → an Energy Harvester, aimed at the system's best sun-catcher;
• A ⛫ foothold waits with no terraform running → a crisis card: do not make them wait a lifetime.

Small orders execute immediately and answer with a receipt; great decisions open the right view with the Mind's suggestion pre-filled — the decision stays yours. A clicked card retires at once; the ✕ dismisses one for the session; the decade letter closes with the same standing counsel, buttons included. Crisis outranks opportunity; nothing nags.

15.2 A brief tour — five steps, once (revision 07-30)

Every commander gets the tour exactly once — the newest recruit and the oldest hand alike. After the welcome, the Mind opens with five illustrated steps, each a phosphor-drawn scene and a button that takes you to the real thing: THE MAP (a probe falling through the dark), THE BENCHES (research that runs while you sleep), THE VOICE (a word cast at a distant trace), THE LEDGER (Output, works, upkeep), and THE SKY (step under the dome and draw your own constellations). The first four steps are action-gated (revision 08-06): they retire only when you actually do the thing — the CTA takes you there, and a click-past tour teaches nothing. Only the closing sky-step keeps its NEXT. The tour keeps its place in the log until you finish, and never returns after. "From here on I will simply tell you what wants doing."

15.3 The Progress panel — the story of your becoming (revision 07-31)

The ⌗ PRG rail opens the one view that looks backward so you can see forward: four tabs, each a pillar of your civilization, each with a hero number, a trend arrow (last span against the one before — green climbs, amber slips), a phosphor curve across the decades, and the Mind's counsel pinned right there when something is tilting.

• ⚛ SCIENCE — every research ladder at a glance (pips per track), the running program with its horizon, the outbreak count, and the cumulative-levels curve: the shape of a species learning.
• ⚙ INDUSTRY — the Output stockpile across the years, works live / rising / fallen. Every raid, storm season and stewardship tithe is legible in that line.
• ↯ ENERGY — the Kardashev meter: your K number, the grid's terawatts, and a progress bar toward K-II — a made sun. The Dyson circle is the door; this is the map to it.
• ⌂ PEOPLE — population at home against what the world carries, the diaspora's count, colonies held. Overshoot, climate and the arks all write in this curve.

Beneath the tabs runs ✦ THE CHRONICLE — your firsts, in order: the first probe report, the first distant fire, first contact, the first colony, the first world remade, landfall. The game has always kept these books; now they read as what they are — a story.

15.4 The four emissaries — beginning from zero (revision 08-05)

You begin with nothing spent and everything to reach for. There are no probes already in flight — instead your civilization's first four emissaries stand built, fuelled, and free to send. Nothing moves until you move it: open the map, pick a star, and launch one. They are instrumented (Voyager-grade), so each whispers a telemetry ping home every few years as it crosses — your first act keeps talking to you across the dark. Send the nearest worlds first if you want their reports soonest. After the four, a probe costs Output like any other; by then the benches and the transmitter give you plenty else to do.

And you are not alone in an empty sky: new peoples now seed as close neighbors — within earshot — and a newcomer is heard by the players already there, not only the other way round. Point a probe at a fresh biosignature and you may find a rival, a partner, or a silence that means something.

15.5 Holdings & the named map — never losing your way (revision 08-05)

The Atlas gains a ◈ HOLDINGS tab: your whole empire on one scannable page — the cradle, every colony (with its cohesion and drift), every work (mine, lab, harvester, habitat — with its health, or a ⚱ if it has fallen), and every terraforming project with its percent remade. Each row is a click to the map.

The map itself now carries your names where you need them: your colonies (◉), your works (⛏), and the destinations your fleets are heading for (➤) all wear labels, readable from far out — so a glance across the sky tells you what is yours and where your hulls are bound. You never lose track of your own dark again.

16 · The deep survey and the great eye

What you know about a system is layered, and each layer has its own physics:

• Layer 0 — the census. Position, class, brightness, motion: complete everywhere, from day one. The sky always shines.
• Layer 1 — the bands. Your home instrument park characterizes systems well to ~12 ly, partially to ~25 ly — × your Remote Sensing reach (×1→×4) and × your species' sensorium. Beyond: astrometry only.
• Layer 2 — morphology. Distance alone never decides whether you see a planet. An edge-on system's transits read at 40 ly; a quiet face-on world 8 ly away keeps its secrets until a probe flies. Flare-noisy stars mask their own children. The REMOTE VIEW panel tells you how the picture was obtained — and warns: unresolved companions may remain.
• Layer 3 — the imaging ladder. At the start, planet images exist only for visited systems. Remote Sensing unlocks degraded remote imaging — 24-pixel smudges nearby (◐ SMUDGE), then low-res disks, pushing outward with every epoch. NO OPTICS means exactly that: numbers only, until a probe flies or Perception grows.
• Layer 4 — the gravitational lens. Your own star is a telescope: light bends around its mass and focuses in the outer dark. The Lens Theorem arrives as an outbreak; the instrument is the farthest thing your species will ever build — a needle, not a floodlight: one line through the heavens at a time, years of slew between targets, and at the end of each look one system resolved to harbor quality, its picture exactly as old as its distance.

17 · The dead sky

The galaxy is full of the dead and the mute; the miracle is a voice that answers. The law: you may inherit from the dead; you may only bargain with the living.

• Ruins open to in-situ knowledge — a probe report, a scout, a landfall, a deep look. A city's skeleton under millennia of dust, and in it a library: one volume survives translation, inheritable (☽). The dead cannot bargain; they can only bequeath.
• Archive beacons still transmit, unattended, on cycles with the patience of machines. Hearable from home; the message needs decoding, the library behind it needs study. No hand tends it — and still it is giving.
• The farewell — somewhere a voice is still traveling from a civilization that no longer exists. You can decode it. You can even answer: the reply flies irrevocably into a silence that may or may not be listening — and nothing ever comes back. One day you will visit, and find the transmitter still warm with its last duty.
• The archive precedes you (revision 08-07). Your people are centuries old; their archivists did not wait for you. Every farewell whose light landed before your reign arrives already translated, read, and filed in the archive — the ancestors' inheritance. Only the three nearest dead voices wait untranslated: the starter mysteries, and the best digs. Farewell light that lands after you take the chair is yours to decode, like any fresh signal. The Atlas's ◌ DED filter collects every sky you know to be dead.
• The automated final report. The newer silences do not grieve. What reaches you is a machine: ⟨ AUTOMATED FINAL REPORT ⟩ — BIOSIGNS: 0. CAUSE OF TERMINATION: … — an unmanned archive beacon reciting the cause of death (impact, volcanic winter, population collapse, toxicity, climate, internal fracture, a failing sun) to no one, on a cycle, until its power fails. No two causes need be alike; none of them are poetry. It is worse this way, and it is meant to be.

The graveyard is real, and it fills (revision 08-06). The dead are scattered across the catalog the way a graveyard fills: sparse right at home — you must range out to meet them — richest through the middle distances, thinning toward the deep frontier, where the great old strangers lie (some a hundred, some a thousand, a few two million years gone). A voice reaches you the year its light finally arrives, so newer deaths are heard first and the ancient ones are found, not heard. A beacon haunts only its own neighborhood — you catch it when you are near. And the silent ruins reward the probe sent far, with no reach but yours. Going farther is going deeper into the dead: the frontier gives less as you press out, and never nothing. The silence was always full of stories; now you can read them.

18 · Trade without contracts

Your named insights (◈ outbreak discoveries) can ride contact messages as attachments. The recipient decodes the words, then studies the insight (its own price, its own years — their own level in that track speeds the reading), then integrates: below the snapshot the light carried, their ladder climbs one rung; at or above it, "already known — but the archive keeps the name." Science is a correspondence; the library remembers who wrote first.

✦ The Vault (PRG → ✦) shelves every insight your outbreaks ever minted — great works first, working theorems under them — and each opens its own dossier: what it is, what it can do (attach · announce · trade), and a chronicle where the exchange records will file when the market opens. The names are yours to rewrite (✎); a theorem, like a fleet, is a thing you own.

Outbreaks come in two orders. The common insight is a single rung. And rarely — randomly, but sooner or later for every world — comes the ✦ MONUMENT: three or four rungs at once, treasure-grade, announced in crimson. Who receives one early becomes a trader; who waits becomes a buyer — or a warfleet. The dice are patient, and they owe everyone exactly one kind of fairness: eventually.

And the design's quiet centerpiece: there is no trade protocol. No escrow, no contract object, ever. Matter is slow and information fast, so an insight arrives years before any payment could — every deal has a lightspeed structure, someone always performs first, and trust spans the gap. Whatever was promised in return lives only in the conversation. Betrayal is possible. That is the point — and the wronged party's instruments are the grammar of consequences.

19 · War — the law and the light

A battle is not a decision. It is a doctrine. By the time your fleet meets a stranger, your orders are years old — so you legislate rules of engagement at launch and live with what your law does in the dark.

• The doctrine card: per-encounter-class actions (a benefactor is never struck unless you deliberately remove that default; firing on your own drifted child is a separate, spoken choice), an engage threshold tested against a noisy estimate (a scout aboard reads at σ≈5%; the bare K-glow reads at σ≈35% — luck is purchasable: it is called reconnaissance), a screen priority (escorts die covering the civilians' retreat), and fallback waypoints — the Gilgamesh clause.
• Resolution: Lanchester plus fog. The bigger energy wins — 1.5× advantage ≈ 95% — with ±12% of named uncertainty. Near parity the outcome is genuinely open; beyond it, arithmetic.
• The Shield: warning years (a LOUD launch flare crosses at c; the near-net catches quiet hulls), the ⛨ Bastion (readiness to 95%, a charged battery, half-price deflection), and the standing truth that a defender fights with a Kardashev grid while the attacker brings only what its hulls carried. A flourishing world is a hard target by construction.
• The Compact ⛨: the conditional-protocol primer on an established thread is a treaty act — propose, countersign, standing when both lights have crossed. A public compact enters every would-be aggressor's odds-read: most wars end there, unstarted. The promise, credibly broadcast, is the shield. Two more truths now: the Carsac clause — a standing compact is a standing order: when the flash on a co-signer's sky reaches you, at any distance, the aggressor's flag is MARKED and your grid answers him with STRIKE forever — he struck one; the law he woke belongs to many — and decay: an oath untended lapses after 300 wordless years (any message between the signers resets the clock — renewal is simply keeping the thread alive).
• The Sword ☄ — three grades, no deletion at any of them: RAID burns works, drains a quarter of the stores, and sails home with the holds heavy — salvage lands only when the hulls physically do. ⛓ INTERDICT takes the system's edge instead: nothing lifts — every probe and hull stays grounded while the line holds, 12 + 12 per supplier hull years, until the siege's own supplies run dry and it turns for home with nothing. A blockade buys time, never ground. ⛏ BREAK fells the grid: every work burns, 60% of the stores go, and the people go to the bunkers — a ⛨ Bastion's deep shelters hold two thirds alive; without one, a third — then to the arks: the Mind boards for the strongest colony, or stays in the rubble, remembering. You did not erase them. No one can. The grades ride the doctrine card; they mean anything only to a pure warship convoy (a scout aboard makes you read as a settler). Striking a compact partner turns the compact to ash, and every sky that watched the flash knows whose signature was on it.
• Interception, at home AND in the deep: warships already arrived under a defended sky meet the inbound at the system's edge — their throw joins the grid's. And now the hunt reaches between the stars: a detected, escorted convoy can be run down in open space (⚔ Detected in the deep, FLT pane). You may hunt only what its light reveals — an escort shines, a silent Rama-ark does not — the intercept point is solved deterministically from that old light, and the outcome is pre-committed at launch: RAID (strip the holds, it limps on), DESTROY (leave nothing that answers), or CAPTURE (board it — a whole people and their holds fold into your hulls; the fattest prize the dark offers). Aim at the past, though: if the quarry turned after its flare left, you arrive at empty sky.
• The flash is a SETI event. Third parties see every battle's light, years later. There is no karma system; reputation is information, and information travels at c.
• Displacement, never deletion: a broken world's people scatter as remnants and nomads — and displaced peoples remember.

19.b The hidden instrument — espionage and the counter-game

Certainty is purchasable; so is deception. A ⍟ spy is a small, cold, silent hull: it slips the early-warning net that catches every other convoy, arrives unannounced, and spends 12 years on station collecting. Then the dossier comes home on a tight-beam — light-honest, years in transit — and the ship follows dark. What it carries is what no telescope sells: the target's population, its true grid through the K-mask, its archive, its hull count, its Mind's posture. A fresh dossier sharpens your battle solution to spy-grade — and lifts the veil to its final tier: the infiltration record, the sharpest face in the game.

But every year on station is a die roll. Detection is rare against a quiet world and three times likelier against a vigilant one — and when the roll comes up, the defender's standing law decides what happens, not the spy. ⚿ BURN: the unit is destroyed, the sender's sky is identified, and the incident enters the Chronicle — espionage has a diplomatic price when it fails. Or ⚿ FEED: the infiltrator is left in place, its take quietly curated — the dossier arrives on schedule, complete, plausible, and false. The numbers are composed; the promised archive fragments are even paid, so the ledger confirms the lie; the face on the reconstruction is wrong in exactly the layers the sender had not already seen; and a battle planned on a fed dossier is aimed by the defender. The sender never learns which dossier they hold.

Both dials sit in the Mind's chair (⚛ MND · standing orders): vigilance — active sweeps, triple detection — and the feed doctrine. A quiet world catches fewer spies; a vigilant one catches more; a feeding one turns them into weapons. Choose what kind of silence you keep.

20 · Our kind — the nine dials

At birth your species is rolled, cradle-conditioned: the home world's physics bend the odds. Cold worlds breed slow fires; debris skies breed shelter-cultures with long thoughts; red suns breed infrared eyes; the length of the year teaches the length of a thought. Chemistry follows temperature — water-carbon in the temperate ring, silicon born of heat, ammonia born of cold. The cradle bends; it does not command — and what was rolled is what you are (CFG → OUR KIND; the i explains every dial).

One law binds the nine: the sum is always 450 — a species that is more, somewhere, is less somewhere else — and every build carries a strength (▲) and a weakness (▽). The dials are not cosmetic: tempo paces your growth and your colonies' drift, cohesion is your hands on the rope, aptitude is your lightning, processing is your reading speed, sensorium is your reach, openness is your tongue. And language itself is the geometry of two biologies: the drift of an alien transcript is the 8-axis distance between your kinds — a different chemistry is a different mouth; a different window is a different vocabulary.

◭ The Mirror. The species readout is now a triptych (CFG → ◭). CONSTITUTION states the absolutes any biochemist would read the same way: what you breathe, what chemistry burns in you, how you signal, what frame the cradle's gravity set — and under what spectrum you were shaped. THE SHAPE WE TOOK reads your own chronicle back as biography: famines that pruned the line, skies that fell, the evacuation the frame still carries, the worlds you seeded. THE BRANCHES shows your diaspora as the light last showed them — kin, accent-drifted, sibling, or by now a cousin species wearing your name; heavy worlds thicken their bones, light worlds stretch them, and none of it is ever current news. And at the head of it all stands your kind's own name — generated in your own tongue at first reading, and yours to rewrite with the ✎: a species that can finally refer to itself.

⇌ The Crossing. Deep in the tech tree waits the Transition Theorem: a mind is a pattern, and a pattern can move. A species that proves it may leave the flesh — generations and adaptation become memory, metabolism becomes computation, seven dials rebalance to 350, and every world becomes merely a place. The gulf to biological skies grows deliberately vast; the archive keeps the old bodies' songs. There is no way back. There never was a back to go to.

21 · The dark worlds — the rogue arc

Between the stars drift the ◑ rogue worlds — roughly one for every sun, thrown out of their systems before anyone could name them. No star warms them; some are warm anyway, from within. About one in seven is rock; thousands hold a liquid ocean under kilometers of ice, kept turning by the heat of a heart that never asked a sun for anything.

21.1 Finding and settling them

• Discovery: your probes scan the void they cross — a rogue within ~3.5 ly of a probe's path may be found (a story event, not a harvest). Its light-honest record enters your charts as a faint ◑ point; name it and it keeps the name.
• Colonization: only an ocean rogue with warmth ≥ 40% holds a colony. The expedition crosses in the dark, and the landfall report crosses back at c. A rogue colony has no star name — it is ◑ whatever you called it, forever.
• Exoticity in the dark is chemistry: a silicon kind suffers there; a water-carbon one finds the ocean almost familiar; and the cold-adapted find it merely honest. The dark pays research well — difference is value.

21.2 Terraforming — and the made sun

Any living colony can begin terraforming (Control tab): the world is bent toward your kind — the felt exoticity that drives drift falls by up to −85% at completion. It is a generational megaproject: ~50 years of work, 8 + 20 × felt-exoticity Output per year, stalling (never cancelling) in lean years. The order itself rides light to the site.

On a rogue, pushed to the very end, the finishing ignites: so much poured energy that the world begins to burn — ☀ an artificial sun, kindled where the charts show only dark. Warmth without a cradle; a triumph the Encyclopedia itself records. And the price is the oldest one: a new light in the void is a beacon. Whatever else is out there can see you now.

21.3 Born in the dark — playing the rogue cradle

A civilization raised on a rogue (§4.4) lives the hardest and quietest of lives:

• The depth-sky: an aquatic kind reads the heavens through the water — the whole sky folded into Snell's window, one trembling bright disc straight overhead, ringed by the dark of the deep. No sun ever rises in it.
• The stealth of the starless: a rogue home radiates no legible signature — no grid glow, no home star for anyone's instruments to key on. You are the Dark Forest's born hider. (Until, one day, you kindle a sun.)
• ♨ Works on the dark world: no solar collector without a sun — but the warm heart takes a Geothermal Tap (grid power riding internal warmth), a Mine under a dawnless sky, a Deep Station lowered into the mythic dark that taught your kind to think. Six works at most: one warm heart only carries so much.
• The economy of the sunless runs marginal by design — to grow, you must reach OUT: probes, colonies, the diaspora's wider ears. The handicap softens with the works; it never vanishes.

22 · Appendix — the numbers

The asymptote doctrine (07-26): every curve in the game saturates toward its limit and never arrives — no wall is ever reached, the sixth escort still helps, the 800-year voyage still worsens. The asymptote guarantees the infinite.

Time & world

tick = 600 s = 1 game year          universe seed = 1950
probe speed 0.1c · pod 0.25c        fleet 0.07–0.15c × size^−0.15

Losses (per year, silent)

probe outbound 0.003 · probe reporting 0.010
fleet 0.0035 · exodus ark 0.0001 (Rama) · escape pod 0.001
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)) — asymptote, never cap
scout pathfind = 0.35·(1 − e^(−0.25·scouts / 0.35)) — quiet: no loud premium, no beacon

Economy

pop growth 0.02 logistic → K (100 / 40)          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 0.0005 + 0.002·debris
probe 25 + 1.5/ly · TX 48·(p/50)·mode + 4·comp · deflect 1500·(1+(50/(y+5))^1.6)
TX words ≤500 chars (reader's decode +15) · cipher +15 K, cost ×1.25, replies −20%, eavesdrop ×3
TX grid draw 2·power TW · start: 4 starter probes ready, none in flight

Ships

cost base×size^1.35 · ceiling 1+(K/50)^0.8 · loud ≥ 20 units (2 PW)
colonizer seeds max(5, 2×size) pop · exodus 20 berths/unit, 10% stay
exodus survival 1−0.35·(1−e^(−voyage/210)) · voyage name-drift 0.4·(1−e^(−voyage/200))

The crossing (revision 07-26)

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 ≥55) 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 ~1/35 y, decode 45

The Fracture

drift = exoticity·(1−e^(−age/160))               child <0.2 · sibling <0.55 · stranger
erosion 0.0035 + 0.010·drift + 0.004·min(1,d/100) [+0.010 grievance, 8 y]
independent <0.25 · dark <0.05 · fade −1.5%/yr → ruins < pop 50
resurface: dark ≥60 y & drift ≥0.55 → Tier 2 (Tier 3 at ≥0.78)
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

Language

decode 5 + 45·drift Knowledge · auto below drift 0.12
interregnum drift min(0.5, 0.12 + years/400)

Faith (real time)

grace 7 d · fade →0 over 173 d · recover 7 d · secede at 0.05 (final)

Spaceguard

spawn lead 15–60 y · detect/yr min(0.95, 0.05 + Knowledge/40000 + remote-sensing≤0.40)
first home strike GRAZES (once, ever): pop → 30% · output ×0.5 · then it kills

23 · The road ahead — what is coming

Promises, not contracts — deep time keeps its own schedule. But the charts are drawn, and beta readers deserve to see the heading:

• Digs in foreign skies. The romtech law already says everyone who reaches a ruin-world may dig — the expedition machinery to get an outsider's shovels there (and the brutal decode surcharge for reading someone else's dead) is next.
• The ghost noise spreads. Ruin-worlds will whisper to their neighbors too — a false SETI positive you may spend years chasing. The disappointment will be worth recording.
• The berserker weather. An event family where something patient forces whole species onto arks — the same storms that made the ruin-worlds you were raised on.
• Life in the ruined home — the peaceful return is now live (§13.1c): a scarred world, your own dead as a native dig. Still coming: the armed reconquest when a stranger holds your old sky (with the war layer).
• Armed convoys by choice. The born-aboard get escorts by their parents' fear; the composer will let a settled species arm its own exodus — and a guarded crossing is a loud crossing. Protection attracts attention. That is the forest's little joke.
• Crews with hearts. Fleet cohesion — long patrols grind a crew the way the dark grinds an ark; ships will mutiny, desert, go dark. You will learn of it years late, from a signal that stopped making sense.
• The deep war. Espionage as the Dark Forest's information layer, and the ark as the fattest prize in the void — a whole civilization's skeleton in one hull.
• The pocket terminal grows teeth. The Mind already writes letters (§13.1b); push is next — the WAKE that finds you on the street.
• Born under the ice. The moons are live and colonizable (§7.5); next, the ocean-moon becomes a full colony — and then a cradle: a new way to begin, a species raised beneath a tidal-warmed ice shell, its whole sky a single looming giant. The harshest birth we have drawn — magnetic flux, tearing tides, cryovolcanic ground — for those who want the dark on hard.
• The open universe. A public API: third-party games living inside this lightcone, reading the same honest sky.

24 · The shelf behind the terminal

Lightcone was not invented so much as assembled from debts. These are the books and ideas it owes — and where each one lives in the game:

• Enrico Fermi — the 1950 Los Alamos lunch. "Where is everybody?" The universe seed is literally 1950, and the whole game is an attempt to answer him slowly.
• C. J. Cherryh — Downbelow Station — first among all of them. The lived-in melancholy of deep space: refugee arks, stations that remember, people as cargo and cargo as grief. The texture of every arrival in this game — the exodus split, the remnant who stay on the dock, the pod that must be taken in — is Cherryh's.
• John Scalzi — Old Man's War — the cohort that leaves forever. Every colony ship here carries Scalzi's bargain: a one-way ticket, a new sky, and the knowledge that the people you were belong to the world you left. (This entry was earned by a tester who couldn't stop thinking of it while playing.)
• Kim Stanley Robinson — Aurora — the physically honest starship. A tenth of light speed as a civilization's masterpiece, and the crossing itself as the antagonist. The exodus ark's attrition and the technological plateau of speeds are Aurora's discipline.
• Brian Aldiss — The Dark Light Years — what the voyage does to the voyagers. The people who land are not the people who boarded: the onboard drift, the names that come out of the crossing changed.
• A. E. van Vogt — Far Centaurus — the slow ship overtaken by time itself. Every probe you command across a lightcone, every order that arrives at a world that has already moved on, is Far Centaurus playing out in your feed.
• Liu Cixin — The Dark Forest — why loudness is a price. The ⚠ LOUD warning, the expedition that is watched all the way in, the silence that is the report.
• Arthur C. Clarke — Rendezvous with Rama — the passing object. Slow, massive, artificial, answering no hail — it crosses your sky on its own errand and owes you nothing. And the corollary that your own great hulls are visible the same way, to eyes you will never meet.
• Iain M. Banks — the Culture — the Mind's name, and the ambition of what a Mind should one day be.
• Carl Sagan — the Voyager Golden Record & Pale Blue Dot — the transcript philosophy of the language (every alien name is honestly a translation), the postcard gallery, and the patience of listening.
• Nikolai Kardashev — the energy axis. Drive power in terawatts, and the Tier-4 fires visible across the whole slice.
• Stanisław Lem — His Master's Voice — the signal that may never be understood. The decode machinery's honest limit: Knowledge recovers the words, never the certainty that you understood them.
• Olaf Stapledon — Star Maker — deep time as protagonist. Civilizations as instants, watched from far enough away that their whole arc is one gesture. The tick is Stapledon's clock.
• Vernor Vinge — A Deepness in the Sky — the patient sublight civilization. Traders who count time in seconds-since-departure and wait out centuries in orbit; the people's calendar that survives every world it loses.
• Isaac Asimov — Foundation — the science of crowds. Sociodynamics — the coming track that treats a civilization's cohesion as something knowable, improvable, and heartbreakingly imprecise — is psychohistory wearing our phosphor; and the Encyclopedia Galactica waiting in the spec is his, name and all.
• Douglas Adams — The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy — Slartibartfast, the planetary designer who won an award for Norway's fjords. Not hardcore SF, and it does not need to be: the conviction that a world is somebody's handcrafted work — every coastline a signature, every ice-lineae a flourish — is the spirit every planet in this game was built in. The crinkly bits are the art. (And the universe's scale is best met with a towel and unreasonable calm.)
• The science shelf — Kopparapu et al. (2013) habitable zones, Chen & Kipping mass–radius, Hipparcos/HYG for the hundred-thousand real stars, and the OPAL Jupiter and Voyager Neptune photographs the giants are calibrated against.
• Francis Carsac — Ceux de nulle part — the coalition of worlds against the Misliks. The reason Lightcone's diplomacy is deterrence, and its endgame a galaxy that closes ranks.
• Adrian Tchaikovsky — Children of Time — the Gilgamesh decelerating toward a sky that may not want it: the whole implicit-warfare layer in one image. And uplift as a lesson in how alien a mind can be while still being kin.