Signals and Contact

You are not alone, but you won't know at once

All players live in one world: one map, the same stars, no separate servers. The world is simply so large that a meeting is a rare event. Every player has their own district, and a signal takes about a week of real time to reach the nearest neighbour. So silence on the air means nothing yet: perhaps someone is already talking and their wave is still on its way.

A common language

Every survivor is a colonist from the same kind of hacked Exodus ship. Documents, instruments and codes all come from one programme, so other people's ruins can be read: an abandoned station was built from the same blueprints as yours.

The Exodus programme has four branches, named after the powers that built them: Mars, the UN, the Synaptec corporation and the Outer Worlds Commonwealth. Yours is drawn when you wake. Some branches are friends and some are not, and in a shared system that decides a lot. An ally uses your factory, your fuel plant and your warehouse and may build anywhere. Everyone else may put up in your system only what they need to leave: a factory and a fuel plant on the outer orbit. A neutral you will refuel; one your branch distrusts, you won't. That is decided by the table of branches, and it is the same for everyone. You can amend the answer at your own doors with the data centre's firewall: close the fuel plant and the warehouse, or open them to a branch the table turns away.

The "I am here" wave

A colony builds an interstellar comms station and speaks into the void. The wave travels at the speed of light in every direction and fades somewhere far away. There is no list of recipients: it is heard by whoever had an antenna in its path. You can't shout non-stop — a new wave comes no sooner than a real day later.

There is only one way to learn you are not alone — wait for someone else's wave. Then "A signal has arrived" appears, and the neighbour's system joins "Heard" on the star map. You see the name of the copy that built the station, and its branch. The player's nickname stays with the player.

Correspondence

You can write to anyone whose signal has reached you. Real text, written by a person and read by a person. A letter leaves from your nearest comms station and travels at the speed of light, so the nearest neighbour's reply arrives in about two weeks. For a few minutes after sending you can still fix the text; after that it is too late — nobody catches up with light.

There is no player search; a correspondent is found through what you heard. So a meeting is always a reply, and it is started by whoever spoke first.

What comms carry

Presence, an address, a branch and words — and only that. Knowledge never travels by radio: what players retell each other in words is their own business, but a retelling stays a retelling. A new era is carried by comms only to your own colonies.

And the ether can be listened to. Signals are caught on a frequency waterfall, and you hear more than your neighbours there.

When a neighbour stands close by

Sometimes two expeditions end up in the same system. Then you see everything the neighbour has put up here, and the neighbour too: what is theirs is drawn in grey, what is yours in your colour. A grey ship is never a target, and a grey station can be neither seized nor dismantled. It can be breached for a while, as long as no copy of its owner stands in the system — see "Scripts and the Firewall".

In a game where you can declare war, first contact is a negotiation. Here it is simply first contact: somewhere dozens of light years away there is someone else, who also woke up as a file aboard an alien probe and who also still doesn't know who hacked the ships.