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. Charging the beacon takes time, and 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. Clear every wave in a
level and you advance; lose the beacon or run out of hull too often and
the saga restarts.
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.