Time and Sessions
The game is built for two rhythms at once: a five-minute look-in between other things, and the occasional long evening. Both are complete, and the choice between them is yours.
The world runs without you
A game day costs a real minute, and the clock runs with the tab closed. Everything you started — a build, a flight, a study — carries on; everything you missed will be waiting.
Things happen between visits. A visit is for reading what happened and deciding what to start next.
Five minutes
Log in → see what finished → read the notifications → hand out orders → leave. This is the game’s main mode, and the interface is written for it: the state reads off one screen — what is done, what is running, what is waiting on you — and an order takes two or three actions.
Missing a day leaves no mark: no scheduled logins, no streaks, no closing windows, no timers burning down. The game is built to stay somewhere you are glad to look in on.
A few hours
Two hours is 120 game days: builds finish, short flights end, technologies come in. Along with everything that rewards attention and never wants hurry:
- going through a ship node by node — what to strip, what to print, what to fit;
- surveying a planet by hand instead of leaving it to the automatics;
- reading the history of the systems you found, and working out where to dig.
The long session has one rule: everything it offers has an automatic mode with a smaller return. A long evening pays; a short visit stays whole.
What carries between visits
A day passes between two visits, and the sphere around you holds some hundred and sixty addresses, every one of them named by the generator. So any star can be starred and annotated in your own words — “rich in isotopes, come back”.
A bookmark is pure convenience: it costs nothing and changes nothing in the world. It tells you exactly what you saw yourself; what is visible from a distance is still decided by instruments.
The tick is the one exception
One tick takes one game day — one real minute — off one running timer. The account of them is global: it works over the top of light lag and the locality of resources, and it is the only thing in the game that does. Ticks are bought, or extracted from artifacts found where a system’s history holds strangers.
Four boundaries are what make it permissible:
- communication always travels at its own pace — light lag is the subject of the game;
- a flight stops at the light floor — a tick shortens the drive’s slowness, and the road stays as long as it was;
- matter stays where it is — a system boundary is still a boundary;
- one boost takes half of what remains, and a repeat counts off the new remainder.
That last boundary is a mechanical guarantee: however many ticks you spend, the timer stays above zero, and you always leave a session with something running. What a tick sells is not waiting this time.
Desktop only
Mouse, keyboard, a wide screen, a 3D map of the system. The game lives in a tab beside your work tabs; a mobile version stays outside the project, by a deliberate decision.