Replicants and Ships

How it begins

You are the digitised mind of one of four thousand colonists aboard a ship of the Exodus programme. The ship was hacked in flight, the pods were disabled, and exactly one survived — yours. Paperwork saved you: logistics loaded the wrong pod model, and the malicious code did not fit the outdated firmware. Nobody has promised you luck like that again.

An alien probe picked you up: it read you, ran you on its own processors and assembled a ship beside itself in its own image. From that moment you are such a probe yourself.

The ship is the body

A replicant lives in its ship: the ship is its computer, its senses and its hands. Hence a simple rule: every ship in the world is somebody. Building a ship and creating a replicant are one action, and it takes about a game year. Shipyards never hold empty ships.

• The number of copies is the number of ships. Fleet and population are the same thing.
• A new ship is a new replicant, with its own name and its own price.
• Losing a ship is losing a replicant and everything it knew.
• A replicant does one thing at a time, like the person it once was.

How many of you there can be

The fleet is small: three copies in the first era, and only a change of era raises that ceiling. Each copy costs more than the one before. It is written onto the colony's orbital data centre, and the centre's level decides what the copy wakes up with: on a modest one it will not carry over the longest of what its parent learned.

The moment it was all for

With one copy the game feels like a to-do list. The second one turns it into a game: one builds a home, the other leaves for a distant star, and you have two stories running side by side and knowing different things. From then on every copy is one more thing happening at once — and one more line to check during a short visit.

The body changes, the mind stays

Engine, reactor, sensors, fuel cells, weapons and the hull itself are printed at a factory and fitted with one order. The replicant stays itself: the same name, the same knowledge tree, the same lineage.

The trade-offs are real. The reactor never has power for everything at once, extra mass eats into acceleration, and the hull sets the speed ceiling. There are always fewer slots than you want — that is what working the configurator is about.

Name and record

A copy is born signed: your nickname plus a number. A copy's name can be given once and for good. The colour it wears on the map changes whenever you like.

Every copy has a "Replicant" tab — its personal record: whom it descends from, which Exodus branch it belongs to, which stars it discovered, where it found life. There are no levels or badges, only what this particular copy has done.

Death

Losing the ship takes the replicant and its whole knowledge tree. You can lose a copy only where you brought it yourself: the aliens do not move, and another player's ship is never a target. Where a ship dies, wreckage with its records remains, to be read by whoever arrives next. That may well be you.

There is no way back in the game after losing your last copy, so look after it. This is a closed alpha: if it does happen, tell us on the "Write to us" page.