LIGHTCONE

The dark answers slowly.

A deep-time space simulation. One game year every ten minutes — whether you watch or not. A thousand real stars, information at the speed of light, a civilization that is yours to tend and never to pause. The world works while you sleep.

⟟ OPEN THE CHANNEL THE HANDBOOK ✦ THE CHRONICLE ♥ KEEP IT ALIVE

01The six laws

Physics is the headline. Distance, time, and information all obey the speed of light. The game is allowed to be slower than its competitors — that is the genre.
You never see the truth — only your light cone. Every readout is the past. Surprise, doubt, and obsolete intelligence are first-class gameplay materials.
Time cannot be paused. One game year passes every 10 real minutes, ~144 years per real day, whether you watch or not.
Silence is content. The game never announces a loss. Ships simply stop reporting — and you infer the rest, the way a real civilization would.
Policy, not micromanagement. You set courses, budgets, and dispositions; your Mind acts in your name while you are away. Deep time does the rest.
There is no win condition. The underlying question — can any single intelligence ever dominate the universe? — has an honest answer.

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

02What waits in the dark

Be born strange. Choose your cradle — a quiet sky, a littered rich one, an orphaned world with a wary people, a starless ocean beneath kilometers of ice, or a digital pattern whose flesh-and-blood parents did not survive writing you.
Listen first. SETI is the cheapest legitimate act: the murmur of the galaxy, decoded one concept at a time — Ief. = the dark.
Send emissaries. Probes cross for decades and answer years late. Some stop answering. The silence is the report.
Scatter your children. Colonies drift into strangers — their tongue forks, your name erodes in their mouths, and one day a message arrives you must pay to understand.
Configure your Mind. Seven dials, red lines it will never cross, a policy stack that colonizes and hails and wakes you only when it must: I AM WAKING YOU.
Bend worlds. Terraform and adapt from both ends — and on a starless world, push to the very finish and kindle an artificial sun the whole dark forest will eventually see.

03✦ From the Encyclopedia Galactica

The chronicle has no byline. Every analysis says the channel originates everywhere, or nowhere. Entries publish a century after the events they record — these are real pages from the live world.

Opening the chronicle…

Read the full chronicle →

04⟡ Light-years ahead — the charted course

Where this world is already headed. If it is on this chart, we are flying toward it — the board below is for everything that is not.

NEXT⟟ THE LINK as a free appThe Mind in your pocket: the pocket terminal becomes an installable app with push — I AM WAKING YOU arrives even when you sleep. First as a web-app install, then in the stores.
CHARTED◐ MoonsWorlds grow moons — the gas giants unfold into whole small systems: icy sub-worlds to found on, tides that knead them warm, skies where the primary fills half the dome.
CHARTED⇶ Far mindsProbe autonomy: hulls that decide at the far end of the light-lag — standing orders for machines your words cannot reach in time. The command queue grows a brain.
CHARTED◭ SociodynamicsThe science of crowds: a research track that makes cohesion knowable, improvable, and heartbreakingly imprecise. Psychohistory, wearing our phosphor.
CHARTED⚔ War in the deepMidpoint interception: meeting a fleet between the stars, not over your world — doctrine, pursuit, and the cold arithmetic of closing velocities.
CHARTED⌂ The moving throneRelocating the seat of the Mind: your capital need not be your cradle forever. Homes end; the chair travels.
DEEP FUTURE◎ The second sunThe Kardashev road: industry beyond a world's ceiling, a circle of collectors closing around a star. The endgame that asks what a civilization is for.
DEEP FUTURE∵ The Mind speaksThe delegate finds a voice of its own — briefings written by the temperament you dialed into it. It already acts in your name; one day it will phrase itself.
DEEP FUTURE⌁ The open universeA public API: our universe as a place other developers can build inside — action games running in the same space, under the same physics. The lightcone bends for no one (a third-party game sees only what its light has reached), and what flows back into the world passes a strict audit. One universe, many doors.

No dates on a chart this long — deep time keeps its own calendar. Supporters see the course corrections first.

05The board — tell us what you found

Submitting needs a game account (that is also the antispam) — open the channel first. Voting too.

Reading the board…

06Keep the world turning

One world, one heartbeat, no ads, no lootboxes — just a server that must never sleep and a Mind that answers its maker. If LIGHTCONE keeps pulling you back, you can help keep the lights (and the artificial suns) on.

♥ SUPPORT ON PATREON

Supporters wear a badge in the world. The world stays the same for everyone — deep time is not for sale.