The builders came long before any ARCHON, built in a few systems, and left. What they built has been decaying since. Nothing of them remains but their work.
They built mostly at the edge of the galaxy, and their work is rare: a find is an event. It lies hidden at bodies, deeper than most deposits, where a deep scan turns it up.
- Derelicts are their ships and stations, adrift in orbit. A scrapper or breaker takes one apart into scrap.
- Ruins are their structures on a body's surface: cities, works and machines. A ruin never leaves its body; only a landed lander takes one apart.
- Relics are working pieces of their tech, given up by the last part of a derelict or ruin. A lab studies a relic to unlock its blueprint: the Wayfarer, the lattice scanner or the core tap. These exist nowhere else.
- Records are data cores holding what the builders wrote down, each dated. Some name a system where the builders also built, and holding one charts that system. Whoever holds the core can read it.
A found derelict or ruin tells when the builders made it, when they left it, and how much of it has decayed since.