Field Manual — Orbital Defense

01

Briefing

Every world in this system was surveyed, catalogued, and left alone. Then the beacons went quiet — one after another, inward from the dark — and when the relief flights arrived they found the same two things waiting at every silent station.

You fly a single ship. Below you is a beacon that must be brought to full charge, and around you is the orbital scaffolding of a station nobody finished. One beacon per world, and it does not charge in a night — every level is one more push on the same signal, which is why the ring around the planet closes a little further each time. The light it throws is exactly what brings them.

Two things come. Neither is interested in you specifically. The swarm is drawn to light the way anything is drawn to light, in numbers, without malice and without pause. The machines are drawn to structure — they were built to disassemble and reuse, and they have never been told to stop.

You cannot outfly both. The manual that follows exists because the pilots who survived did not fly better than the ones who did not. They read the world first.

⚠

The one rule that matters. Every world imposes a condition, and the condition is not decoration. A build that wins on Kepler Reach will lose on Cinder for reasons that have nothing to do with how much damage it does. Read the world, then build.

02

The Round

A level alternates between two phases. Almost everything you decide is decided in the first one.

Build Phase

🌗 Quiet

No enemies. Gravity is suspended so you can sit in the build menu without your ship falling out of the sky — you will see Station-keeping on the HUD while this holds.

Solar collectors are earning the whole time. Spend Materials on defenses, and place them where the world's condition will let them work.

Ready early? Press Start wave. You are not punished for it: the Energy you would have banked over the remaining time is credited to you immediately, based on the collectors you actually built. Calling the wave early costs you nothing but the waiting.

Flare

☀️ Contact

Gravity returns. The wave arrives in scheduled groups — bugs, machines, or both — and your defenses fire on their own. Your ship is the mobile part of the answer, not the whole of it.

Survive the wave and the beacon gains charge — each wave is worth the level's whole share of it divided by the number of waves, so clearing the last wave of a level is what completes it. Nothing is waiting on a timer. Routing energy to the beacon adds a little on top, which can finish a level early but never finishes one on its own; a boss holds the level open however full the bar is.

Clear every wave in a level and you advance; the beacon keeps what it gained, so five levels fill it and the world is secured. Lose the beacon or run out of hull too often and the saga restarts — and the signal starts again with it.

Between waves you are offered an upgrade draft. Read the Ship Paths section before you take the first one — the third pick is more permanent than it looks.

Anchors

Defenses do not go anywhere you like. Every structure attaches to an anchor, and each anchor type suits different work.

03

Resources

Four currencies. Two are spent inside a level, two are banked across the whole campaign.

🔬

Elixir and Tech are the roguelite layer. They survive a lost saga. Everything else — your defenses, your ship build, your progress through the levels — does not. A failed run is still paid work.

04

The Nine Worlds

Each world is a saga of five levels ending in a boss. The condition is gentle on level one and merciless on level five — the same rule, turned up. Worlds unlock in order.

05

Ship Paths

Five paths, three tiers each. You may open three of the five in a run — and once that many are open, no fourth can ever be started for the rest of the saga.

🔒

The cap is the decision. Drafts stop offering shut paths once you are at the limit, so the third path you open is the last one you will ever open. The build then lasts the whole saga — through deaths, through level transitions — and is erased only when the saga itself restarts.

The first two tiers of a path are numbers. The third is a capstone that changes how the ship behaves. Finishing a path should feel different, not merely larger.

06

Defense Catalog

Everything is available from the first level. Nothing here is unlocked — the skill is knowing what, and where.

Five branches. Kinetic and Energy do the obvious thing. Force deals no damage whatsoever — its entire job is to move the swarm into guns you already built. Bio is lopsided on purpose, murderous against one faction and nearly useless against the other. Chem does not care about armour, because it keeps working after the shot lands.

Support Structures

Each of these answers one world. Off that world most of them are close to useless, which is deliberate — picking one is a read of the condition rather than a strictly better choice.

07

Hostiles

Two factions, two entirely different problems. What kills one reliably is the wrong tool for the other.

The Swarm

Organic, fast, fragile, and drawn to light. They come in numbers that make single-target damage feel like a joke, and they die to anything that covers area. They drop 🧪 Elixir.

Their tell is the beacon: almost all of them run straight at it. The exception is the Lumen Moth, and the exception is what will cost you your economy.

The Machines

Von Neumann salvagers. Slower, tougher, and completely uninterested in your beacon — they go for what you built. They drop 🔩 Tech.

They compound. A Bulwark keeps its neighbours alive, and a Replicator turns every structure it finishes into another machine. Kill order matters far more against machines than against the swarm.

Behaviours

How a hostile decides where to go. This, not its health bar, is what makes it dangerous.

08

Doctrine

Eight things the surviving pilots agreed on.

Read the world before you spend anything. The counter-tools for the current condition are surfaced at the top of the build palette. That placement is a hint, not decoration.
Spread your collectors. On every world that touches sunlight, the dense farm on the bright patch is the trap. It peaks higher and then it all fails at once.
Call the wave early. You lose nothing — banked Energy is credited for the time you skip. Idle build phases are the single largest waste of a run.
Open your third path deliberately. The first two are cheap. The third is the end of your choices for the entire saga.
Area beats the swarm; kill order beats the machines. Flak and chem pools answer numbers. Against machines, shoot the Bulwark and the Replicator before the thing actually hitting you.
Force weapons are not weak, they are indirect. A Tractor Pylon does no damage and still wins fights, because it decides where the fight happens.
Range is worthless where sight is blocked. On Halcyon a long-range Lance is a trap; redundancy across shells is not.
Losing a saga is not losing everything. Elixir and Tech are banked. Spend them in the workshop and come back with a better ship.

Good hunting.

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