Signals and Contact
Every player lives in one universe, and a meeting here arrives as a signal that has been travelling for years. You can only answer somebody who spoke first.
Everyone in one universe
Players share one world, and scale and slow expansion make a meeting rare. Every survivor is a colonist off a ship hijacked the same way, thrown through the same unstable wormhole; it puts you out somewhere random and, by the look of it, at a random time — hence the different starting systems, and the difference in age between the civilisations of people who began on different days.
Hence, too, the common language of a meeting: somebody else’s ruins can be read, because the documents, the instruments and the codes all came out of one project.
The “I’m here” wave
A colony builds an interstellar comms station and speaks into the emptiness. The wave travels at light speed, reaches thirty-five light years and fades — range and lifetime being one number read twice: a wave that reached thirty-five light years spent thirty-five game years getting there, by definition.
Who received it is the world’s business. There is one way to learn you are not alone, and that is to wait for somebody else’s wave.
Whoever hears it gets a “Signal received”, and the neighbour’s system lands in “Known” on the star map: the address is known, the name of the other replicant is known, the distance is worked out. What shows is the name of the copy that built the station, a thing of the world; the account nickname stays with the account. Flying out there is a long way past anything Era I can do.
A wave is caught by whatever stood in its path. A station built later is listening for the next one.
Correspondence
Anyone whose signal you received can be written to, in text that a person writes and a person reads. A letter leaves from your nearest dish for their nearest known one and travels at the speed of the wave: an answer from a neighbour across the district is six real days each way.
For five real minutes after sending, the text can be rewritten; after that it goes as it stands. Your correspondent comes out of what you heard, so a meeting stays the thing you are answered in.
What the signal carries
Presence, an address, and a player’s words. A message is text, and the trees of two copies each stay with their own. Whatever players tell each other in words is their own business.
PvP, diplomacy and markets stay outside the game: there is nothing to harm one another with, no mechanical agreements exist, and resources stay in their own systems.
A live first contact is rare, and powerful because of it. Here it costs exactly what the distance to the other side costs.