A slow space game for those who like science fiction and cannot afford a game that takes four hours. Light speed is the ceiling, the distances are honest, a visit takes five minutes.
You are — how to put this gently — a file. The digitized mind of a colonist from the ship EXODUS, and you woke up aboard an alien probe.
The EXODUS was broken into in flight, and of four thousand capsules one survived — yours. An alien probe picked it up, ran you on its own processors and built a ship beside it in its own image. Now you are that ship: you fly, you look, you build and you copy yourself. Each such ship is a replicant, and there is none without a hull: building a ship means creating one more self.
Spectral classes, the snow line and signal delay do real work here: from them the game works out where things lie, how long a flight takes and when an answer arrives. The physics is close to real wherever a decision comes out of it.
An ordinary visit: open the tab, read what finished, give orders and leave. While the tab is closed, construction and flights carry on by themselves.
No scheduled logins, no streaks, no rewards that expire. The world does not come for you: aliens here do not travel, and a replicant or a base can only be lost where you flew yourself.
If what you want is fast progress, daily rewards and a fight every ten minutes, this game will not suit you. Better to say so here than after you register.
star systems on the map. Each one appears the first time someone looks at it, and stays that way for good.
the edge of the map cube: a piece of a galactic arm where stars stand as close as they do around the Sun.
roughly, to the nearest other player. A signal takes about a week of real time to get there.
six real hours are a game year; a week is nearly three decades.
A flight works the way a real one does: acceleration, a drift with the engine off, deceleration. The starting ship is built for flights within a system. To a neighbouring star you fly on something more serious, and the road takes a real day, or even a week — and the tab can stay closed all that time.
A signal covers a light year in a game year, that is, in six real hours. A letter to a neighbour five light years away takes more than a day; to a base forty light years out, about ten days.
So everything you know about a distant base is its past. An order will find it changed, so from afar you set goals, and the details are settled on the spot.
Resources never leave their system. No freighters, no routes, no market: a ship is built from metal mined at the same star. What it does not have, you will not have here either.
Which is why «where to fly» is the main decision in the game, and it costs several real days.
One real minute is one game day. You open the tab, read what finished, give orders, leave. And if you feel like spending an evening, there is the probe flight, where the count is in seconds. A missed day costs nothing, and losses are never sudden: replicants and bases are lost only where you flew yourself.
| ACTION | GAME TIME | REAL TIME |
|---|---|---|
| A flight between planets of one system | days | minutes |
| A mining station | weeks to months | about an hour |
| One research node | days to years | minutes to a day |
| A new replicant | about a year | about 6 h |
| A signal across 5 ly | 5 years | 30 h |
| A signal across 40 ly | 40 years | 10 days |
| A flight to a neighbouring star | years to decades | a day to a week |
Star classes are distributed as they are in reality: three quarters of the sky are red dwarfs, dim and prone to flares. The class is visible from afar and hints at what to expect, but the hint stays a guess: what a star really holds is learned by whoever flies there. And there everything is computed by simplified but honest physics: every planet's mass, orbit, temperature, gravity and air look like the real thing.
The world here is computed, and one thing follows from another: a planet's temperature depends on the star's mass, and whether it has frost and clouds depends on its temperature.
A star's mass sets its light and its lifetime; its metallicity, how much matter the planets get and whether giants grow. Planets grow in the disc until it disperses, and a system has exactly as many as the disc had time to grow.
Colour, clouds, frost and auroras follow from composition, temperature, air and magnetic field. In a probe flight the mountains stand taller on a light planet, craters fill in under thick air, and the star in the sky is exactly the size it looks from that orbit.
The drive runs while accelerating and braking; the drift between is free. Burning fuel, the ship grows lighter and brakes faster than it accelerated. Its speed ceiling is set by the field that holds off the oncoming interstellar hydrogen.
The model is simplified wherever precision would add arithmetic and no decisions: gravity does not bend a course, the onboard clock does not fall behind, the map squeezes distances. How the rest works is told in the articles «Star Systems and Generation» and «Interstellar Flight».
A habitable-zone planet is a place where life is possible. A living world is a place where it is, and a lander tells the two apart: first whether there is life, then whether there is a mind, then who they are.
Life follows from the planet itself: from its star's light, its gravity, water and tides. What grows under a dim star is nothing like what grows under a bright one, and on a light planet the trunks reach higher — the weak gravity holds them up.
Scout. What stands at a star is known only to whoever flew there or reached it with an observatory.
Build bases and replicants — slowly, and not cheaply. Building a ship means creating one more self.
Learn. Every replicant has its own tree of knowledge; it grows apart and never merges with anyone else's.
Look for others: alien life, neighbours on the air, and the wreckage of those who arrived before you.
The list is short, and everything in it is missing on purpose: that is how the rules are made.
You begin alone in an unfamiliar sky, and nothing here moves faster than light. What is left is to find out how far one mind can spread, and what it drops along the way.
PLAY ON A COMPUTER