Research and Knowledge

The main rule

Technology is a property of the replicant. A new copy is born with what the original knew; after that each goes its own way, and they can never converge again. Learning is never exchanged: not on meeting, not over comms, not through you.

If you have played anything with one tree per account, you will have to adjust. You have several separate specialists who physically cannot retell each other what they have learned. That is how the world works, and nobody forgot to add the button.

What follows

• A second copy is a second profile. Who becomes what is decided once and for a long time.
• A wrong assignment is costly to fix. The right knowledge appears in the right place only if someone who knows it flies there, or someone learns it all over again.
• Losing a copy loses its tree. Years of research go down with the ship.

What a copy wakes up with

A copy's mind is written onto the colony's orbital data centre, and the centre's level decides how much of the parent's tree reaches the newborn. A modest data centre loses the longest of what was learned — the top of the tree; the roots stay. The order window tells you how much will be lost before you press the button, so it won't come as a surprise.

How study goes

Nodes range from short to very long; a typical one takes about an hour of real time. Each one opens something: a station, a ship module, the next level of a building. There are no empty "+2% efficiency" nodes in the tree.

One thing is studied at a time, but the queue is set in advance: the study plan moves on to the next item by itself. A postponed node keeps its progress and waits for you to come back to it. And a copy that has learned the nodes for faster thinking gets through the next ones sooner, so the same knowledge costs two copies different amounts of time.

The exceptions are all about presence

The rule has three provisos, and none of them moves records from one tree to another. The world hands knowledge to whoever is on the spot.

• Colony knowledge. Copies standing in the same system work together: the two of them can build what neither could alone. When one leaves, its knowledge leaves with it.
• A project's reward goes to every copy that stood in the colony at the moment of completion.
• A new era. Word of it travels over comms at the speed of light and reaches your colonies that have an interstellar comms station. Another player hears nothing.

In practice

Set a study plan before a long flight: studying is the only thing a copy does on the road. Upgrade the data centre before you order a copy. And keep track of who stands where: an order available yesterday may close today simply because one of the copies has left.