GLOSSARY

The glossary defines the fields and terms used throughout the codex: the properties of resources, the matter they make up, items and research, orbits, world rules, what players know of the world, and how the world is generated. Field names in code style are the names shown on each item's page.

Resource fields

Temperature and matter

Kelvin (K): temperature measured from absolute zero, the coldest possible. There are no negative values.

Sublimation: a solid turning straight into a gas without passing through a liquid stage. In a vacuum there is no air pressure to hold a liquid, so ice sublimates instead of melting. This is why a comet grows a tail near its star.

Differentiation: a hot body sorting itself by density. Whatever is molten moves, with lighter material rising to the surface and denser material sinking to the core. The Differentiation rule does this with the settle effect, and a body's melts_at is the lowest melting point of anything in it.

Volatile: a resource that turns to gas at a low temperature. Ice is volatile; iron is not.

Liquid: a resource with liquid set: Fuel, Water, Hydrogen, Oxygen and Coolant. Only a Tanker or the Hull takes one aboard. Any ship fills its own fuel tank at a dock, an ally's dock opened to allies, or from a tanker, and any miner can unload a liquid it mined.

Byproduct: what is left over when something is made or used. Recipes leave Slag, and burnt fuel leaves Exhaust. Byproducts keep matter conserved.

Conservation of matter: nothing is created or destroyed, only moved or changed. The universe's total mass never changes, except for a new player's hull with its starting fuel and admin grants, which arrive from outside the map.

Dispersed: matter that has thinned out into space, such as exhaust from burnt fuel. It is still counted, but too thin to collect.

Scrap: what a scrapped facility, or a job that ends early, leaves behind: the same mass as what it was made of or had taken. See Scrap.

made_of: what a ship, station, facility or gate was built from: its build cost. Scrapping turns it into scrap.

Dumping: a ship putting cargo onto the body it is at. A resource mixes into the body's surface; an item floats there intact until a ship picks it up.

Tick and minute: the game advances one tick at a time. Durations in the data (recipes, builds, travel) are written in minutes, and tick_scale turns them into ticks, so they keep their real-time length whatever the tick length. The world also counts in minutes: orbits, world rules, warming and generator burn. So do mining rates and wear.

Items and research

Item: a built thing carried in a hold like cargo, such as a fitting. Its key names its kind and blueprint, such as fitting:cargo_pod. Items with the same key are identical, and each takes one unit of hold space.

Fitting: a part a ship carries in one of its slots, such as a Cargo Pod. Its effects add to or take from the ship's numbers while it is fitted. A station with a Shipyard fits one and takes it out again.

Slot: a place on a ship for a fitting: small, medium or large. Bigger ships have more. A fitting goes in a slot of its size or larger. Warships also have hardpoints, sized the same way; a weapon or a hangar goes only in a hardpoint, and any other fitting only in a slot.

Design: a player's own version of a blueprint, with its own numbers, made by research in a Lab. A design's lineage is its name; each revision researched from it takes the next number, such as longhaul-3. Until a trial measures it, its owner sees each number only as a range.

Design copy: an item, printed onto data cores in a Lab, that lets its holder build another player's design once. It cannot be researched, and a build uses it up.

Locked blueprint: an endgame blueprint, such as the Clipper or the Fusion Reactor, that no ARCHON can build or research until trialled designs of its own reach the numbers the blueprint requires. A design copy of one allows its holder to build it regardless.

Prototype: a ship built from, or fitted with, a design no trial has measured. Its owner sees those numbers only as ranges.

Trial: a prototype put through its paces. It burns fuel and wears the ship, and at the end its owner knows the design's true numbers. A station trials its own designs and its facilities' where it stands, and a ship trials a gate beside it.

Research: labs using up materials to make a design. The materials' density, hardness and melting point decide which numbers rise and which fall; their grade and amount decide by how much.

Sites

Site: something hidden at a body from the start that prospecting never shows: a deep deposit, a derelict or a ruin. A deep scan finds it, and the find belongs to its finder alone.

Deep scan: a ship with a deep scanner searching the body it is at for sites, for a set time. Each minute, each site not yet found has a chance to turn up; deeper ones are harder to find.

Deep deposit: a pocket of one resource below a body's layers, often a rare one. A landed lander digs it out, or a deep drill mines it.

Landed: the state of a lander on its body's surface instead of in orbit. The surface and orbit meet only through landed ships, and sensors in orbit see the surface only while deep scanning it.

Derelict, ruin, relic and record: what the builders left. See that page.

Orbits

A body circles its star, or a moon its planet, on a fixed and predictable path.

A Star has two fields of its own. A tier's star_mass and star_heat are the ranges they are picked from:

Kepler's laws describe these orbits:

• A body moves fastest at periapsis and slowest at apoapsis.
• A larger orbit takes longer: the period grows faster than the size.

Temperature from the star: a body is colder the farther it is from its star, and its temperature moves gradually toward what the starlight gives it. A comet on a stretched orbit is frozen at apoapsis and heats past ice's sublimes_at near periapsis, so it sheds ice there.

Shading: mass between a body and its star blocks some of its light. Any mass nearer the star, and within its own size of the line to it, counts: the starlight is divided by 1 + that mass × per_mass (10,000 mass halves it). A debris field, a comet's trail or a passing planet cools what lies behind it, which warms again once it is out of the shadow. Players see the shade of the bodies they have seen.

World rules

World rule: a way the world changes on its own, listed on the world rules page. A rule looks at a body (for: body) or two bodies in a system (for: pair) once a minute; when its conditions hold and its chance rolls, its effect happens. See Sublimation and Collision.

Impact energy: how hard two bodies would hit: the smaller body's mass times how fast they move relative to each other along their orbits. Pair rules read it as energy, and their relative speed as speed.

Formula: values and numbers joined by + and *, such as resource.amount * 0.01 + 20. Rules use formulas for conditions, chances and amounts. Numbers may be negative (warmth * -0.05 + -1), as there is no minus sign otherwise.

Warmth: a body's own heat, in kelvin, on top of what its star gives it. An impact warms the pieces it makes; the Radiating rule cools them again.

Gravity: a body's mass over its size: how hard it is for vapour to escape it. Heavy bodies (gravity 500 or more) hold their volatiles, so their ice melts instead of sublimating. Gravity is not a pull between bodies: nothing in the world pulls on anything else.

mass_ratio: in a pair rule, the heavier body's mass over the lighter's. It is the same whichever body the rule looks at first.

parent_mass: the mass of the body a moon orbits, or 0 for a body orbiting its star. The Moon kind rule reads it.

Cause chain: every world event names the rule that fired and the values that made it fire, and links back to the event that last changed the same body. Following those links explains how something came to be, such as a collision, the split it caused, then ice shed from an exposed fragment.

Effects

Heat: adds to a body's warmth, or takes away with a negative amount, never below 0. It is gradual, so its only event is body.cooled, when warmth is back to 0.

Change: turns some of a resource into what it melts_into or freezes_into, unit for unit, wherever it is in the body. See Melting and Freezing.

Shed: moves some of a resource from a body's surface into its Trail.

Split: breaks a body: its surface becomes Debris, and its deeper layers are shared among Fragments.

Merge: joins two bodies into one. The heavier keeps its orbit, everything both held mixes into one layer, and the impact warms it. See Accretion.

Orbit: the lighter body of a pair starts orbiting the heavier, on a circle at the distance between them, and becomes its moon. See Moon Capture.

Swap: when a moon outgrows its planet, the two trade places, since the heavier body is always the one orbited. It is recorded as body.orbiting with no rule, caused by whatever made the moon heavier.

Eject: sends a body out of its system along the route closest to the direction it is moving. Ships at it ride along; a star, or a body with a station, does not leave.

Drifting: the state of an ejected body between systems, like a jumping ship. It cannot be reached until it arrives, which takes the route's length divided by the rule's drift speed.

Capture: a drifting body arriving in a system and being caught by its star into a wide, stretched orbit. It arrives at the far end of that orbit, on the side it came from, and its cause chain leads back to the system it left.

Knowledge

Sighting: what a player knows of a body: its orbit, its surface, how many layers lie under the surface, and the tick it was seen (as_of). The game shows players sightings, not the live world.

Presence: having a ship or station in a system. While present, a player's sightings there stay current every tick; after leaving, the view freezes and goes stale.

Prospecting: a ship spending prospect_minutes at a body to see every layer, not just the surface. Surveyors can prospect; prospect_minutes on a ship blueprint sets which other ships can.

Witness: a player present in a system when a world event happens there. Only witnesses see the event; others find a changed system when they next look.

Worldgen

History: a body's record of the world events that changed it. It starts when its system was generated; a body with no events since formed with its system.

Bodies (tier): the pattern every ordinary system in a tier is generated from: a star, then planets, fields and moons, set by the tier's bodies (their total mass, the mix of resources, how many planets and fields, moons per planet, and how far out). Planets are generated melted and settled, one layer per resource with the lightest outermost; fields are one mixed layer. Bodies are spaced so none starts close enough to catch or hit another, and the world rules run on them from tick 0.

Archetype: a system that follows its own pattern instead of its tier's ordinary one, such as a Shattered system or a Furnace. Each archetype has its own share of each tier's systems, and some never appear in some tiers.

Frost line: the distance from a star beyond which ices can condense. Nearer in, the star's light keeps them above their sublimes_at, so inner bodies are rock. A hotter star pushes the frost line out.

Kind rules: the rules that decide what kind a body is, from what it is made of and how big it is. They are checked in the order of kinds, first match wins, and checked again whenever a world event changes the body. share.ice is ice's share of a body's mass. Debris, fragments and trails keep their kind.

Fair homes: every system in the home tier with iron on a body's surface is a candidate home. Once the world is generated, each candidate is scored by the mass of everything within home_score_jumps jumps, and those close to the typical score are marked as homes. A new player gets the free home furthest, in jumps, from every other player's home and stations.

systems, systems_per_player: a tier's size, as a fixed number of systems or a number per player the world is made for. Each tier sets one of the two.

spacing: the typical distance between neighbouring systems in a tier. A tier's band of the map is as wide as its systems need at this spacing.