LIGHTCONE

NEW◭ The species codex — every people you know, on one pageContact used to live scattered across a log. Now every civilization you have exchanged light with keeps a page of its own: the CONTACTS ledger carries each correspondent as a card wearing its latest known face — and the difference between a fog-blur stranger and an envoy-grade acquaintance is visible before you read a word. Open the card and the species dossier unfolds: the reconstruction at full size, and beneath it the record between two skies — every milestone the light has ever delivered, on one timeline. The year the line was established. The audience held, or the door kept shut. The envoy reports, the burned infiltrators, the battles, the ultimatums, the compact that still stands. A civilization is not a chat thread. Now it doesn't look like one.

NEW⚖ An envoy stands at your threshold — and behind the veil, a faceThe oldest question of the game — when do I meet someone? — now has an answer you can stand in front of. Send an ⚖ envoy to an inhabited sky and it does not just open a line: it waits at the system edge, a standing question with no deadline, until the host decides. RECEIVE it across the threshold and something no signal can carry changes hands: the first direct optical record of another living people. Because you never truly see an alien — you reconstruct them. Every correspondence now carries a ⌖ morphology reconstruction: a mass-blur in fog at first trace, a contour at the first decoded word, a body plan as the conversation holds, proportions as the shared lexicon grows — and at a received audience, the envoy's own optical record, near-truth, a face emerging from phosphor noise. Ocean-borne peoples drift finned and horizontal; radial peoples wear their arms like spokes; the post-biological stand as angular lattice-ghosts. TURN AWAY instead, and the hull departs without a likeness — but a refusal leaves a trace, and treaties offered later by the refused carry a re-approach cost. The first door opened is history: THE FIRST AUDIENCE now stands unclaimed in the Galactic Record.

NEW⍟ The hidden instrument — certainty is purchasable, and so is deceptionThe dark forest grew a counter-game. A ⍟ spy is a hull built to not exist: small and cold, it slips the early-warning net that announces every other convoy, arrives in silence, and spends twelve years listening. What comes home on the tight-beam is what no telescope sells — the target's true grid through its mask, its archive, its fleets, its Mind's posture — and the final tier of the veil: the infiltration record, the sharpest face in the game. But every year on station is a die roll, and when the roll comes up, the defender's law decides. ⚿ BURN destroys the unit and names the sender before the whole Chronicle. Or — the cold option — ⚿ FEED: the infiltrator is left working, its take quietly curated, and the dossier arrives on schedule, complete, plausible, and composed. The numbers are false. The promised fragments are even paid, so the ledger confirms the lie. The face is wrong in exactly the layers you had not already seen. A battle planned on a fed dossier is aimed by its victim — and the sender never learns which dossier they hold. Both dials wait in the Mind's chair. Choose what kind of silence you keep.

NEW⚱ The silence was never empty — the graveyard wakesThe dark forest has always had a floor of bones; now you can find them. Scattered across the catalog are the ruins of civilizations that lived their whole history and are gone — a beacon still repeating on a machine's patient cycle long after the last hand that built it; a farewell voice crossing the dark, addressed to anyone, reaching your sky the very year its light finally arrives ("We were many. We are few tonight, and by the time this reaches you we will not be at all… speak our sky's name once, in whatever tongue you keep"); or silent ruins a probe finds under the dust, a dead people's records outliving their keepers. Each bequeaths something to inherit — a named insight, a discipline's worth of knowledge from the dead. And they lie the way a graveyard fills: sparse right at home (you must range out to meet the dead), richest through the middle distances, thinning toward the deep frontier where the great old strangers wait. The dark kept its dead. Now it lets you read them.

NEW☄ You survive your first fall — and your children drift, they do not dieThe Great Filter is the game's one honest catastrophe, and it was ending civilizations by the score while their gods were away. No longer — not the first time. Every civilization now survives its first undeflected impact: a grazing blow, not annihilation. Cities burn to ash, a thrown-dust winter dims the sky for generations, the count crashes — but the world lives, and a letter finds you: "Your homeworld survived the Great Filter — barely." A warning felt in the bone. The second time, the sky falls for real. And your colonies no longer quietly die of neglect: a world left too long does not fade to a corpse — it drifts into a living stranger, an independent people who learned to live without you, and one you can still win back. Ruins are for catastrophe now, not for a parent who stopped writing.

NEW◈ You are not alone — and your own people rememberNew civilizations now settle close enough to hear each other — a lit sky next door, detectable across the dark, with a name the Mind puts in front of you: an inhabited world N light-years out — send them a word (it is cheap), or a probe. The first steps of a new Mind teach by the hand now: the guide will not move on until you have actually launched your first emissary, opened a program, cast a signal. And when your own people's faith fades — a silent god is a fading one — the world finally tells you what to do: presence rebuilds it (you are mending it simply by tending your world, and faster now), and when you want to act at once, a ⛯ day of rite and remembrance spends Output for an immediate lift. Drifting colonies, too, wear their win-back actions right in the list — ✉ Message, ◆ Invest, ◉ Reinforce (the cavalry).

NEW↺ Coming back is a welcome, not a wall — and a season of fixesReturn after a long absence and the log no longer buries you: a "While you were away" card gathers the backlog and clears the routine in one tap, leaving only what wants your hand. Night-side cities were reworked to read like an orbital photograph — warm megalopolis clusters against vast dark, scaled by how settled the world truly is, not a clinical white scatter. And a long season of fixes landed: an arrived fleet can be recalled or scrapped again (no more ghosts holding a slot forever); a lapsed works can be rebuilt; the research wheel can be steered and stopped by hand; the installation readout shows net-per-cycle economics and every body's projected yield (moons included); a distant menace only shows when it is genuinely near; a homeworld keeps its own name after an evacuation; and the evacuation veil finally falls silent, as a passenger's should.

NEW⚱ The night the homeworld fell — the evacuation, told properlyWhen your cradle dies, the interface stands down and a single full-screen veil takes over: the Mind is a passenger now, and the crossing is the whole of it. This week that veil learned to tell you what happened and what comes next. It names the specific cause at the top, in its own hard light — a tracked impactor whose deflection fell short, an unseen rock with no warning at all, a declared war fleet that broke the grid, an unannounced strike. Beneath it, a wide crossing animation: ⚱ the fallen cradle on one shore, ◉ your strongest surviving colony on the far one, and ⟟ the Mind's vessel set by how much of the dark it has actually crossed — "18.4 of 47.0 ly crossed · 39% behind you." A dedicated breaking-news e-mail now carries the fall the hour it happens, not buried in the daily ledger. And a tap on "What waits at the far end?" opens the reckoning in full: the colony may have held, drifted into a stranger, or fallen in the years of crossing — you learn which only on descent — and the old world is never wholly lost: once you land, a colonizer or a ⏣ Terraformer can go back for its ruin. The end of a world should feel like one. Now it does.

NEW◈ Begin in the dark — and never lose your way in itA day of onboarding and navigation. You now truly start from zero: no probes already in flight — instead your civilization's first four emissaries stand built, fuelled, and free to send, and nothing moves until you choose their targets and launch them. They are Voyager-grade, so they whisper home every few years while they cross. New peoples now seed as close neighbors (~12 ly) and — the real fix — a newcomer's arrival is heard by the players already there, not only the other way round; the Dark Forest finally has voices in it. A new ◈ HOLDINGS view (in the Atlas) gathers your whole empire at a glance — the cradle, every colony with its cohesion, every work with its health, every terraforming project — each row a click to the map. And the map itself now names your colonies (◉), your works (⛏) and where your fleets are heading (➤), readable from far out, so you never lose track of what is yours. Plus: a colony-repair guide for a drifting people (◉ Reinforce is the cavalry), the panel tabs slimmed to icons, and the fleet cards tidied.

NEW✦ The game reaches back — inheritance, letters, and the recordThree changes to the space AROUND the game. You begin in the dark, with everything to reach for: the program that raised you leaves you four emissaries — built, fuelled, and free to send. Choose their targets and launch them; nothing moves until you move it. The Mind writes to you: while you are away, at most one e-mail a day, in its own voice, only if something happened — what needs your hand, what is worth your eye, and the quieter ledger (one-click goodbye if you'd rather have silence). And above it all now hangs ✦ THE GALACTIC RECORD — the shared chronicle of firsts, claimed once, by one people, forever. The first war has a name. The first contact between two peoples does not. Still unclaimed — the dark is waiting. New civilizations also now seed as true neighbors, close enough to hear each other — a dark forest, finally, with someone in it.

NEW⌗ Progress — the story of your becomingA new rail panel that looks backward so you can see forward. Four tabs — SCIENCE (every research ladder and the shape of a species learning), INDUSTRY (the stockpile curve where every raid and storm season is legible), ENERGY (a Kardashev meter with a progress bar toward K-II — a made sun), PEOPLE (souls at home and in the diaspora) — each with a hero number, a trend arrow, a phosphor curve across the decades, and the Mind's counsel pinned where something is tilting. Beneath them, ✦ THE CHRONICLE: your firsts, in order, from the first probe report to landfall. The game always kept these books; now they read as what they are — a story.

NEW⚑ Salt in the deep — stations that live, die, and change flagsThe station lifecycle grew its teeth. The deep is no longer a neutral backdrop: every year, every station rolls a seeded, environment-weighted hazard — a bolide out of the debris belt that pays your ore premium, an eruption on the Io-forge, metal fatigue in old unrefurbished iron, a storm season on a climate-crisis world. Rare, legible, never arbitrary. And war learned a new word: the fourth strike grade, ⚑ SEIZE, takes a beaten system's works whole — their stations answer to the victor's Mind after, lights still on, producing under a foreign flag. The answer is ☒ SCUTTLE: demolition charges whose order rides light to the site and fells the works so there is nothing left to take — nine times out of ten. The tenth time, the charges stay silent. The order and the conqueror travel at the same speed; the dark decides which arrives first.

NEW🜄 The sky keeps books — climate stewardshipThe warming your foundries write on your own sky stopped being scenery. It now arrives in bands with teeth — strained skies, storm years, crisis, collapse edge — taxing output, slowing growth, bleeding cohesion, and rolling seeded disasters: the storm that will not end, the quiet fields, the grey district. And it can be answered, with two instruments: the Mind's new stewardship dial (a share of gross output spent cooling the sky — instant, and it hurts) and the new Planetary Stewardship research ladder (industry that breathes more gently — slow, and it lasts). Your colonies warm their own skies too, under your light-delayed policy; their storm years reach you as letters that have already stopped being true. A real climate-wardenship, priced honestly: the Great Filter, now with paperwork.

NEW🌙︎ Moonfall — colonies under the iceThe habitable moons stopped being scenery. An ocean moon — Europa-class, an ice shell over a tidal-warmed sea — or a rare warm exomoon can now hold a full colony: open the moon's card in any system you stand in and the new ◉ COLONIZE button composes the ark, aimed not at a planet but at a moon of one. And here the deep game changes shape: a moon's truth is physics, not chance — tidal heat is arithmetic, so there is no va-banque coin over an ocean moon; what the numbers say, the landing finds. The ocean is narrower than a world (smaller cradle, stranger life — exoticity runs high), but it does not care what the star does. A colony in the dark, warmed from below, its whole sky one looming giant.

NEW⏣ Terraforming — a world is not a verdictThe trap worlds around your cradle stop being dead ends. Send the new ⏣ Terraformer to any terrestrial world — even one the telescopes call a corpse — and the machines begin a remaking that takes on the order of a hundred and fifty years, your adaptability science shaving decades off. The milestones arrive as letters across the dark: "the first rains fell this decade; they still burn, but they fall." A finished world is a made cradle — the composer, the atlas and the landing all honor it as true ground. And the va-banque gamble grew mercy: a convoy that lands on a barren world without a scout no longer turns back or dies — the hulls come down, and a dome rises. A foothold on dead ground, waiting. Bring the terraformers, and one day the feed will read: THE DOME OPENS — they held on, and the world came to meet them.

NEW⟟ The Mind counsels — and gives the brief tourThe Mind stopped waiting to be asked. It now watches the state of your civilization and pins its counsel to the top of the log — each card a single sentence and a single button: the benches idle? Start the program. The cradle filling? Here is the nearest world, manifest ready. An expedition running down? Refurbish — 48 Output. Small orders execute in one click; great decisions open the right view with the Mind's suggestion already filled in. New arrivals (and old hands alike) get A BRIEF TOUR — five illustrated steps, drawn in phosphor, from the map to your own sky — and the Link now acts, not just watches: commit research and order refits from your pocket. Every button in the game answers now, success or failure — nothing runs silent.

FIX◆ The deep years keep honest booksA sweep through the station lifecycle. An old station whose upkeep you cut no longer collapses the same afternoon — the neglect clock runs from the day your order reaches it, and takes its honest 120 years. The news of a distant ruin rides light home instead of arriving instantly; a derelict now reads ⚱ DERELICT everywhere instead of posing as a living producer; and re-settling your own dead world is possible again — the sky admits you, as it always should have.

NEW⚓ A hull's second road — refit, redeploy, retireA colony ship whose gamble failed limps home and docks, battered but whole. Now its story need not end there. Refit it for a fraction of a fresh build and send it out again — it skips the long years on the slip entirely, though it sails on the frozen tech of its birth: an old ship on a new road. Or break it up for scrap, and a quarter of its build cost returns to the yards while its chronicle closes. Every hull keeps a chronicle now — its foundings, its failed gambles, its returns — the soul of a ship you can reuse.

NEW⏳︎ The vintage matters — an old hull is old all throughA ship is locked to the tech of the year it was built, and now that lock bites everywhere. An old warship fights the dark with the guns of its era, not today's. An old ark's cryogenics were cruder, so more of its sleepers never wake — it lands a thinner colony than a modern hull would on the very same crossing. And the older the build, the more its badge dims and yellows in the fleet list: a ship that plainly wears its age. Your fleet is a museum of the tech-plateaus you have passed through — and museums are slow.

FIXPOLISH🔭︎ The Atlas filters find their worldsThe Cradle, Rich, and Bio filters now surface what they promise: nearby detected cradles, the great resource sites, and the systems where a biosignature has been read. Open a system and a banner at the top warns you the moment one of your own craft is already crossing the dark toward it — no more sending a second colony ship where the first is already bound. And a fleet reads as vessels and tonnage now, not a headcount: "1 Colony Ship · ~50 kt", never "1 colonizer".

NEW◆ Site prospect — where it is worth diggingThe Mind stopped crying wolf on every pebble. Every world is now read for what it is worth — minerals, energy, or the research value of the truly strange — and graded barren to PRIME. Telemetry gives an order-of-magnitude estimate that can be wrong (send a mine to a lode the survey oversold, and the rock under-delivers — the honest Fermi tax); a probe or a colony reads the truth and the real yield. The great catches shout in gold — on the body, in a new Atlas "Rich" filter, and on the star map. And the richest catch of all is a dead one: a system holding the ⚱ ruins of a fallen ex-colony, waiting for a research expedition to excavate what a whole people left behind.

NEW🌍︎ Colonize on a hope — the va-banque worldRemote sensing reads a distant sky as a probability, never a promise — so you no longer need to send a probe before you settle. Dispatch a colonizer on the telemetry alone, and the world's true habitability is settled only on arrival, years later. A world in the confident heart of the habitable zone is a near-sure thing; one out on the optimistic margin is a gamble the composer names by its odds. Land on a corpse the telescopes flattered, and a scout in the convoy turns the hulls toward the next charted cradle — without one, the dark keeps them. Luck is purchasable: it is called reconnaissance.

POLISH◇ Honest skies — physics & clarityA pass for the details that break the spell. A world reading −185°C no longer claims a "greenhouse" — its CO₂ has frozen to dry-ice caps, and the readout says so. A moon's starter base now reads "base online," not the "active" that looked like a colony you never founded. A system with no cradle is marked an outpost site, not a colony site — the Mind names what it is a candidate for — and the atlas gained a colony-candidate filter to find the worlds worth the crossing. Long dispatch and fleet lines wrap instead of clipping, and the Mind's summaries speak a star's real name.

FIX◆ Repairs from the fieldA lone ark could be "detected" 194 light-years out — impossible for a single hull; that sighting range is now bound to what a near-neighbor could truly witness. Typing a fleet's name was sluggish while the star map ground away behind the composer — the map now rests when a panel covers it. And the colony yard no longer refuses a world its own report calls habitable.

NEW⟟ The Link — Lightcone in your pocketThe companion terminal can now be installed as an app. Open the Link on your phone and add it to your home screen — its own icon, full-screen, no browser chrome: the Mind's dials, your events, and the WAKE calls, a tap away. The star map stays a desktop instrument (a hundred thousand stars need the big glass), but the world you tend now travels with you. Push — the WAKE that finds you on the street — is next.

NEW🌙︎ Moons — a million small worldsEvery planet grew moons — over a million of them, seeded across the whole sky. Gas giants unfold into Galilean systems: volcanic Io-worlds kneaded molten by their giant, ice-shelled Europa-worlds hiding tidal-warmed oceans beneath the frost — habitable, whatever the star does — and the rare warm exomoon. Found bases on them, or open one and watch it turn, its giant looming half the sky behind.

NEW⚔ War in the deepThe hunt reached between the stars. A detected, escorted convoy can now be run down in open space — the intercept point solved from old light, the outcome (raid the holds, destroy it, or capture a whole civilization's ark) committed at launch. You aim at the past: if the quarry turned since its flare left, you arrive at empty sky.

NEW⚫︎ The dark lightyears — life aboard the arkThe generation crossing became a life, not a loading bar. Tend the ark by watching the promised harbor across the years; answer the deck's hard questions in the dark; and at the ramp a people lands whole — or broken. The Mind wakes you at every contingency, by feed and by mail, and if you sleep through it, it decides in your name and logs exactly why.

NEW🏛︎ Raised on ruins & the road homeA new way to begin: born among the bones of a people who fled this sky — a scarred world, ghost-signals from the dead, and a vault of their buried knowledge to dig for a head start. And for the ark that turns back, the hell-thread: life on the ruined cradle you fled, your own dead cities waiting under the new settlement.

LAUNCH◈ Public beta openedLightcone opened its doors to the first 500 travelers. One shared universe, one server that never sleeps, the speed of light as law. The dark answers slowly — and now, it answers to more of us.