Time and Sessions

The world runs without you

A game day is a real minute, and the clock runs with the tab closed. Whatever you started carries on; whatever you missed will wait for you. Events happen between visits, and a visit is for reading what happened and deciding what comes next.

Five minutes

The main mode looks like this: come in, read the notifications, hand out orders in a couple of clicks each, leave. What is done, what is running and where a decision is waiting can all be seen from one screen.

A missed day leaves no trace. There are no daily rewards, no streaks and no timers that reset if you are late. The game is meant as a breather, and it has no intention of becoming a second job with notifications.

The long evening

A couple of real hours is over a hundred game days, and you get a continuous picture. What to do when you have the time:

• refit a ship — what to remove, what to print and where mass and power run out;
• fly a probe over a planet — the only place in the game where the count is in seconds;
• finish reading a planet with a lander — the whole report fits into one sitting;
• listen to the ether — catch a signal on the frequency waterfall before it drifts away;
• read the histories of the systems you found, the "Curious facts" of bodies and what has gathered in the "Knowledge library";
• plan a route — where to fly next and what to build today to get there.

Everything a long evening gives has an automatic mode with a smaller yield. Didn't fly the probe? The station still digs by what can be seen from orbit. A long session is rewarded; a short one stays complete.

Bookmarks

Around you are hundreds of stars with names like T0T0T0-122301, and a week later you won't remember them. So any star can be marked and labelled in your own words: "come back", "empty, don't waste a week", "someone was here". A bookmark costs nothing and changes nothing in the world.

The tick

A tick takes one game day off one running timer. It is the only thing in the game that acts at once and everywhere, so its limits are strict: ticks never speed up communication, a flight never gets faster than light, matter never crosses a system's boundary, and ticks don't help in combat. Each boost takes off less than the one before, and part of every timer cannot be bought off with any number of ticks — that part you wait out.

This is a closed alpha, and ticks are granted by the administrator. You can also earn them yourself: the world holds finds for a science station to study, and studying one earns ticks.

Nobody really knows how a tick works. It is a technology extracted from ancient finds: it unfolds folded-up dimensions of space, and whatever it is applied to moves a day ahead while staying in our time. Your replicant won't be able to explain why it works. It will learn to use it quickly.

Boost what is long and important. Whatever will finish by the evening can finish on its own.

What you will need

A mouse, a keyboard, a wide screen and a browser. The map is three-dimensional, and on a weaker computer the "Graphics quality" setting helps: it changes only the detail of the picture, and the world stays the same. The game lives in a tab next to your work ones, and it has no mobile version.