Game Manual

1. Overview

Darkling is an asynchronous multiplayer survival game set in a dark galaxy where civilizations must hide to survive. Players nurture orbital colonies, harvesting energy from their star while remaining invisible to others.

You have achieved spaceflight and begun exploring the cosmos. Your first scans revealed faint signals: you are not alone. In that moment, your civilization understood the terrible truth: survival demands invisibility. Any civilization that can detect you might destroy you. Preemptive elimination is the only rational choice.

You are now both hunter and prey.

Core Tension

You never know:

• How many civilizations exist in the galaxy
• Who has discovered your star
• Whether shared coordinates are real or decoys
• Who is watching you right now

2. The Core Loop

1. Silence (Continuous)

Your colonies orbit your star, harvesting energy — but maintaining them costs energy too. Your net income depends on how many colonies you support and how much veil you sustain. Your Dark Veil regenerates. This happens automatically as long as you check in at least every 24 hours.

2. Research (Player Initiated)

Invest resources into Astronomy, Espionage, Counter-Espionage, Dark Veil, or Weapons research. Each branch unlocks new capabilities, and as you advance, you must choose a specialization path that defines your late-game identity. Research takes time and only progresses as long as you check in at least every 24 hours.

3. Explore (Player Initiated)

Use Astronomy to chart nearby stars. Send probes to scan for signs of life. Deploy scouts to map entire regions. Every scan risks detection.

4. Decide (Player Initiated)

Broadcast a contact's coordinates to paint a target? Deploy a decoy to mislead enemies? Launch a photoid strike from the shadows? Migrate to a safer star? Wait in silence?

5. Act (Player Initiated)

Migrate your fleet to claim new territory. Broadcast coordinates to expose an enemy. Deploy decoys to create phantom civilizations. Every action erodes your veil and raises your signal.

Then return to silence.

3. Colonies & Stars

Your civilization exists as orbital colonies circling your home star, harvesting its energy for survival and growth. Each colony strengthens you, but increases your visibility — and your costs.

Building Colonies

Colonies do not grow on their own. Expanding your fleet is a deliberate decision — you construct new colonies by spending energy. The cost escalates sharply with each colony you already have: early expansion is cheap, but building a large empire becomes exponentially expensive.

You can build a new colony at any time while orbiting your star, as long as you have sufficient energy.

Income & Maintenance

Each colony harvests energy from your star every minute, scaled by the star's harvest rate. But colonies also cost energy to maintain. A small fleet runs cheaply — the first several colonies require no upkeep at all. Beyond that threshold, maintenance costs grow with your fleet size. Sustaining the Dark Veil also drains energy, scaling with both your colony count and veil level.

Your net income is what remains after deducting colony and veil upkeep — and, for a Phantom sustaining a specter, that projection's upkeep — from your gross harvest. A large fleet on a cold star with high veil can easily cost more to maintain than it earns.

All maintenance is billed from a home star. While you are migrating nothing is charged — and nothing is harvested either, except by any outposts you hold, which are unaffected by your travel.

Tap on your energy display in the header to open the economy panel — a compact breakdown showing your gross income, colony upkeep, veil upkeep, any specter upkeep, net income, and your star's current depletion stage.

Colony Operations

Your colonies are not just a number — they are a workforce you direct. At any time you can set a single civilization-wide colony operation: a standing posture that shapes how your colonies harvest, how loudly they run, and how they weather an attack. Whatever operation you choose applies everywhere you hold ground — your home star and every outpost alike.

An operation is a commitment, not a switch you flip from moment to moment. Once set, it holds until you deliberately change it, and you can only change it again after a period has passed. Reading your situation and choosing the right posture — and the right moment to change it — is the decision that matters.

No operation can render you completely silent — a living civilization always leaves some trace against the character of its star. Nor is your posture entirely private: an adversary watching your star closely may notice your harvest and emissions shift when you change it.

Star Classes

Your star is your blessing and your curse. You cannot change it. You can only adapt, or migrate.

Star Depletion

Stars have finite energy reserves that diminish as civilizations harvest them. Over time, yields decline through several stages — from fresh and bountiful to strained and eventually exhausted. A depleted star never recovers; what is taken is gone forever.

Depletion is self-regulating: as yields decline, extraction slows, which in turn slows further depletion. Even an exhausted star still produces a fraction of its original output — enough to survive on, but never to thrive.

Depletion is global. If one civilization drains a star and abandons it, the next arrival inherits the diminished reserves. You always see the live depletion of the stars you hold — your home and your outposts. A distant star's harvest state, however, is intelligence you must gather: a probe returns a reading of how tapped a star was at the moment your probe reached it, and that reading grows stale as time passes. Only your own systems, and a sophon left watching a star, report its depletion as it happens.

Your colonies need not all orbit the same star. Once your research reaches deep enough, you can settle colonies on stars beyond your home as outposts — extending your reach at the cost of your concealment.

4. Signal & Visibility

Every civilization emits an electromagnetic signal based on their size, activity, and star. This signal determines how easily probes can detect you.

Signal Scale

Signal strength ranges from 0 (invisible) to 100 (blazing beacon). Your signal is the primary factor in whether enemy probes detect you.

Signal Factors

• Colony count — More colonies, higher signal
• Star class — Hot stars amplify, cold stars suppress
• Dark Veil — Higher veil reduces signal
• Migration state — Signal drops sharply while traveling
• Offensive actions — Launching a photoid temporarily spikes your signal for several hours
• Uptime — Longer-running civilizations accumulate presence

The Emission Trace

The Command panel on the Galaxy map keeps a short trace of your civilization's recent emissions — your signal and veil over the last several days, with your own actions marked along the timeline. Watch how everything you do ripples through your visibility, and roughly how far into the void your signal might carry. The estimate assumes ordinary ears; some civilizations listen more keenly than others.

5. Threat Level

The Command panel on the Galaxy map maintains a continuous threat assessment — a composite reading of how much danger your civilization currently faces. This is not a single measurement but a synthesis of three factors, each telling a different part of the story.

Exposure

How visible you are to the galaxy. Exposure reflects your electromagnetic signal — the same signal that probes, passive sensors, and photoid targeting systems use to find you. A civilization burning bright on a hot star with dozens of colonies radiates like a beacon. A small fleet hidden behind a deep veil on a cold dwarf is nearly invisible. Exposure is the most persistent component of your threat level: it changes only when your signal changes.

Hostility

How actively the galaxy is threatening you. Hostility rises when alarming events occur in your vicinity — intercepted probes, received transmissions, dimensional anomalies, destroyed decoys, foreign devices detected at your star, detected transit signatures near your star. Each incident pushes the reading higher. Over time, if nothing further happens, hostility gradually subsides as the immediate danger fades from memory. A sudden spike means someone is actively probing your defenses or worse.

Readiness

How prepared you are to face threats. Readiness reflects your active defensive posture — deployed surveillance, active countermeasures, and the depth of your counter-espionage research. A civilization with sensors watching approach corridors, decoys muddying the picture, and a sophon monitoring a known threat is far more prepared than one sitting blind. Readiness is the only pillar that works in your favor: higher readiness lowers your overall threat assessment.

Overall Assessment

The three pillars combine into an overall threat level displayed on each contact's panel on the Galaxy map:

Exposure and hostility raise your threat level. Readiness lowers it. A civilization with high exposure but equally high readiness may sit at a lower overall level than one with moderate exposure and no defenses at all.

6. Research

Research unlocks new capabilities across several branches. Only one research can be active at a time. Research only progresses while your device is online.

Research Branches

Research Tree

Early research is universal — every civilization follows the same tree. As you advance and choose a specialization, additional research becomes available depending on your path. Some advanced research is shared between two paths; others are exclusive to one.

7. Astronomy

Astronomy reveals the stars around you. Every civilization begins with Astronomy I — your immediate neighbors are already on your chart. As your knowledge grows, you see farther: stars at 2 hops, then 3.

Established outposts extend your sight as well: each one charts the stars adjacent to it, and your instruments can target any star you can see. Migration, star scans, and the founding of further outposts are the exceptions — those are always measured from your home.

Your catalog shows potential destinations and migration routes. But remember: it shows only stars, not civilizations. A distant giant might harbor a hidden empire. A nearby dwarf could be lifeless.

Astronomy Levels

8. Passive Detection

Before you send probes into the void, your sensors are already listening. Once you complete Signal Array research (which requires Astronomy I), your civilization deploys a network of passive electromagnetic receivers tuned to the faint hum of distant civilizations.

How It Works

Your signal array periodically sweeps nearby stars, picking up faint electromagnetic signatures that betray the presence of intelligent life. This is not active scanning — no probes are sent, no signals emitted. You are merely listening to what the cosmos already whispers.

When a detection occurs, you receive a journal alert with the star name and an approximate signal strength reading. Stronger civilizations radiate louder and are detected sooner. Distance also matters: stars closer to your own are swept more frequently, while those at the edge of your range may take considerably longer to register.

Detection Range

The reach of your passive sensors scales with your Astronomy research level. Higher Astronomy allows your array to listen farther into the dark, extending the same range that governs your star chart visibility.

Temporary Intelligence

When your signal array detects a signature, a temporary contact appears on your Galaxy map. These entries last 24 hours before fading, giving you a window to act — send a probe, deploy a sophon, or launch a strike. The signal reading is approximate, reflecting the inherent noise of passive sensors. If the same star is detected again, the timer resets.

Limitations

• Approximate readings — The signal strength shown is a noisy estimate, not an exact measurement. Use it as a hint, not a certainty.
• Decoys fool sensors — A decoy's electromagnetic signature is indistinguishable from a real civilization. Your array cannot tell the difference.
• No interception possible — Passive detection cannot be blocked, jammed, or intercepted. It leaves no trace. The target never knows they were heard.
• Distance matters — Nearby stars are swept more frequently and more easily detected. Stars at the edge of your range are much harder to pick up.

9. Listening Posts

Passive detection tells you someone is out there. Probes tell you who. But what about the spaces in between — the stars you have already scanned and dismissed, the corridors you cannot watch every hour of every day? Listening posts fill that gap: silent sentinels deployed to remote stars, watching for anything that passes through.

How They Work

Deploy a listening post to any star within your probe range. The post travels to the target and activates, passively monitoring for transit activity. Every object that travels through the galaxy — probes, scouts, decoys, listening posts, siphon drones, migrations, photoids, and disruption strikes — leaves a temporary wake signature at each star along its path. When a wake becomes detectable at a star where you have an active listening post, the post reads it and reports back.

Each wake detection tells you the type of object that passed through, which direction it came from and where it was heading, and how fresh the wake is. This is far more than a simple alert — it gives you a vector. From a single detection you can often determine where the sender lives and where they are going.

Wake Signatures

Objects leave wake traces at every star along their path, not just at their destination. A probe traveling three hops leaves three wakes — one at each intermediate star. The wakes appear progressively as the object passes through each star, and persist for several hours before fading.

Each wake carries directional data: which neighboring star the object arrived from, and which star it departed toward. At the origin star, there is no arrival direction; at the destination, there is no departure direction. At intermediate stars, both directions are present, revealing the full transit vector.

Track Correlation

When two or more of your listening posts detect wakes from the same transit event, the detections are automatically correlated into a track — a reconstructed partial path showing the object's trajectory across multiple stars. Tracks appear on the Map and as journal entries, and persist for a limited time.

A single listening post gives you a point. Two listening posts on the same route give you a line. The more coverage you have, the clearer the picture becomes.

Star Scan

Listening posts detect wakes as they happen. But what about wakes that were left before you deployed? A star scan is an active, one-shot sensor sweep of a single star that reads all current wake signatures present there. It reveals the same information a listening post would — object types, directions, and ages — but as a snapshot rather than a live feed.

Star scans require Signal Array research, cost energy, cause a temporary spike in your signal strength, and have a cooldown between uses. Use them when a listening post alert points you to a star and you want to see the full picture of what has passed through. Wakes a scan reads are drawn on the Map's movement overlay too, alongside whatever your listening posts are reporting.

Limitations

• No source identification — Wakes reveal the type and trajectory of an object, but not the identity of whoever sent it. Determining who lives at the origin star requires further investigation.
• Timed lifespan — Listening posts do not last forever. After a few days of operation, they exhaust their power supply and go offline permanently. A photoid impact at the star will also destroy any active listening posts.
• Limited deployment slots — You can only maintain a handful of active listening posts at any given time. Choose your positions carefully.
• Blind to your own activity — A listening post does not report your own wakes. It only watches for foreign activity.
• Wake decay — Wakes do not persist indefinitely. Each object type leaves wakes of different durations. By the time you scan a star, some wakes may have already faded.
• Wake attenuation — Civilizations with high Dark Veil leave shorter-lived wakes. A well-cloaked civilization's transits fade faster, making them harder to track.
• Classification gating — Your counter-espionage level determines how precisely you can identify wake types. Without counter-espionage research, some detections may appear as unidentified objects. Higher levels reveal the exact type of object that passed through.

Deployment

Listening posts cost a modest amount of resources and travel at probe speed. Once deployed, they require no further input — they watch, they report, and eventually they fade. The investment is small, but the intelligence can be invaluable.

Position matters as much as coverage. Because objects pass through every star along their path, a post on a highly-connected star overhears far more traffic than one on a quiet, out-of-the-way star. A sector survey names each sector's transit nexus — its most-connected star — which is often the most rewarding place to watch.

10. Espionage (Probes)

Knowing stars exist is not enough. You must know if they are inhabited. Espionage research creates detection probes that slip into distant systems, listening for signs of intelligent life. But probes are not passive. Every scan risks detection. Advanced civilizations may sense your intrusion and learn someone is watching.

Calibrating the array is not without its surprises: even before your first probe launches, it may return an anomalous, unresolved signal worth investigating in your contact list.

Probe Capabilities

Higher espionage tiers improve detection odds and extract deeper intelligence from occupied stars. Enriched data is only included when the probe detects a real occupant.

Probe Travel

Probes travel at 6.6x the speed of a migrating fleet.

Detection Results & Intelligence

When a probe arrives at a star, the intelligence gathered depends on the probe's sensitivity and the target's signal strength. Significant results automatically create entries in your contact list:

Probe results contain inherent noise, but repeated scans of the same star tend to yield more reliable intelligence over time. A single probe may miss what a second or third probe catches. Conversely, if a previously-detected signal vanishes on a follow-up scan, the silence itself is information.

Confirming Contacts

Any unverified contact can be manually confirmed from its contact panel on the Galaxy map, promoting it to a known, permanent entry. This applies whether the contact began as a temporary probe result or arrived through another channel — such as a broadcast or a sophon detection. It is useful when you trust the intelligence but don't want to spend another probe just to upgrade the result.

Flagging Suspected Fakes

Not every signal is what it appears to be. When a contact looks more like a decoy or a specter than a living civilization, you can flag it as spoofed from its contact panel on the Galaxy map. This is purely your own annotation: it marks the entry as suspect so it stands out at a glance, and pins it in place so it won't quietly expire while you weigh the evidence. The flag changes nothing about the contact itself — confirming the contact, or removing it, clears the flag.

11. Counter-Espionage

Counter-Espionage research gives you a chance at detecting incoming surveillance and corrupting the data sent back to observers.

Probe Interception

When an enemy probe arrives at your star, your counter-espionage systems may detect and degrade it:

Degradation chain: Confirmed → Suspected Strong → Suspected Moderate → Suspected Weak → Nothing

The spy never knows their probe was intercepted or their data corrupted. They trust their false intelligence. Meanwhile, you receive an alert: "Probe Detected." You know someone is hunting you, but not who.

Decoys: Ghosts Among the Stars

Counter-Espionage also unlocks decoy technology: signal-emitting devices deployed to any star within range. A decoy mimics the electromagnetic signature of a living civilization, creating a phantom where none exists.

Cost: 7,500 resources per decoy. Decoys travel at probe speed.

You can only maintain a handful of decoys at any given time — those still in transit count toward the limit — so choose where you place them carefully.

Decoy Defense

Beyond deception, decoys serve a defensive role. When a photoid strikes a star where a decoy is deployed, the decoy absorbs a portion of the blast before being destroyed. Stronger decoys absorb more energy, reducing the damage that reaches any civilization at the star. However, a decoy alone will not stop a photoid entirely — some of the strike's force always passes through. Multiple decoys at a star offer no additional protection; the photoid engages the strongest one and all are destroyed in the process.

Decoy Anomalies

When a decoy goes offline prematurely — destroyed by a photoid impact or an arriving fleet rather than expiring naturally — the owner receives a temporary anomaly entry in their contact list. The entry reveals only that something happened at that star, not what caused it. These anomaly contacts last 24 hours, giving you a brief window to investigate before the information fades.

System Sweeps

Foreign decoys placed on your star inflate your signal strength, painting you as a larger target for photoid strikes. Counter-Espionage research gives you the ability to detect and remove them.

Detection: When a foreign decoy arrives at your star, your counter-espionage systems will eventually detect its presence. Higher CE levels detect foreign devices faster. Without any counter-espionage research, foreign decoys remain invisible.

Sweep Action: Once alerted, you can initiate a system sweep from the Map on your own star. A sweep is a timed operation that, upon completion, neutralizes foreign signal sources currently at your star — decoys and siphon drones as physical devices, and specters as broad-spectrum EM countermeasures collapsing the projection's interference pattern. Siphon drones are the one exception: a sweep only clears a drone your counter-espionage has already detected (see Siphon Drones). Only one sweep can run at a time, and migration cancels any active sweep.

Sophon Expulsion: A completed sweep may also, on occasion, uncover a foreign sophon watching your star — the only means of acting against one. An uncovered sophon is expelled: forced off station and sent back where it came from, not destroyed. You learn that a sophon was here — hard confirmation that someone has been watching — but not whose it was; the watcher learns their sophon was caught, but not by whom. Sophons are elusive, and a single sweep will usually miss one; deeper counter-espionage research sharpens the odds.

Advanced counter-espionage research reduces both detection time and sweep duration, allowing you to respond more quickly to foreign interference.

12. Sophons

Probes give you a snapshot. Sophons give you a window. A sophon is a persistent, long-range surveillance particle that travels to a distant star and remains there indefinitely, sending back periodic intelligence reports on everything it observes.

Requirements

Deployment

Deploy a sophon from a star's detail panel on the Galaxy map. Select a target star and the sophon launches from your current position. It travels at 5x the speed of a migrating fleet. Once it arrives, it activates and begins surveillance.

Intelligence Reports

The first intel report arrives the moment the sophon reaches its target, and it repeats every 10 minutes thereafter. If the target star is occupied, the report includes detailed information about the resident civilization — but read it carefully: a sophon reads the star it watches. What stands at that star — its colonies, its emission — is reported as local truth. The civilization behind it may be larger than the holding in front of you; its wider strength must be hunted, not read off a single window.

A probe estimates; a sophon knows. Where probe readings carry noise and uncertainty, a sophon on station reports what is actually there.

If the star is unoccupied, the report confirms it is empty — but will still reveal any decoys or specters present at the star, allowing you to distinguish phantom signals from real civilizations before committing a strike.

Sophon observations are definitive. If you previously probed a star and received an ambiguous result, a sophon arriving at that star will correct your records. A suspected contact may be confirmed or cleared based on what the sophon actually observes on the ground.

Launch Detection

A civilization under sophon watch cannot hide a launch. Whenever the resident civilization sends something out of the monitored system — a probe, a scout, a decoy, a listening post, or any other deployment — the sophon reports what kind of object left and the direction it headed: the neighboring star it set course toward. The direction is a lead, not a destination. Where the object is ultimately bound stays hidden; turning a bearing into a location is work for other instruments, such as listening posts reading the wake it leaves behind.

Some departures are the exception, and reveal their true destination outright. If the fleet migrates away from the watched star itself, the sophon reports exactly where it is headed; a departure elsewhere in the same civilization is not the watched star's story to tell. When colony ships depart to establish or reinforce an outpost, their sheer size betrays not only their heading but their destination and arrival window. Ships that large cannot slip away quietly. And a weapon fired from the watched star is read in full: the sophon names the target and the arrival time, and it tells a photoid from a disruption strike.

Some things remain beneath notice even for a sophon: the smallest salvage craft leave no readable signature, and another sophon's launch is far too faint to register.

Probe & Sensor Detection

An active sophon detects incoming probes and listening posts at the star it monitors. When a foreign probe arrives or a listening post is deployed, the sophon sends you an alert. The notifications confirm that someone is watching the star, but do not reveal the sender's identity.

Redirect & Recall

An active sophon can be redirected to a new target star for 8,000 energy. It enters transit from its current position to the new target. This is useful when a target migrates and you want to follow them.

A sophon can also be recalled at no cost. It returns to your current star, freeing you to deploy it elsewhere later.

Anomaly Detection (Paranoia)

Advanced civilizations may sense they are being watched — but only barely, and only rarely. Each time a sophon generates an intel report there is a very small chance the target receives a vague anomaly alert. A sophon is built to be hard to notice: a watched civilization may go a long time — days, even weeks — before its instruments ever catch a whisper of it. The chance depends on the target's own Counter-Espionage level:

These alerts do not reveal who is watching or confirm that a sophon is present. They are a warning, not a certainty.

Expulsion

A sophon is not untouchable. If the watched civilization runs a system sweep of its star, the sweep may uncover the sophon and expel it — the particle is forced off station and returns home on its own, ready to be redeployed once it arrives. An expelled sophon is never destroyed; it is only sent back. When it happens, you are told your sophon was caught and is returning, but not who caught it. See System Sweeps.

13. Scouts: Eyes in the Void

A single probe reveals a single star. A scout maps an entire region. Once your astronomers chart deeper space and your engineers master probe technology, you can deploy autonomous scouts: silent survey drones that travel to a distant star and systematically scan every one of its neighbors before going dark.

Scout Phases

• Transit — Scout travels to the center star
• Scanning — Automatically probes each direct neighbor, one by one

The intelligence returned follows the same rules as any probe: higher espionage yields sharper readings, and counter-espionage on the other end can still corrupt what your scout sees.

14. Precursor Ruins

Scattered across the galaxy are the remains of an ancient civilization that once inhabited these stars. Their ruins lie dormant on dozens of worlds, waiting to be found. Discovery is not a separate activity: you find ruins through normal exploration. A probe sent to map an unknown star may stumble upon something far older than anything your instruments expected.

Discovery

When a probe arrives at a star that harbors ruins, it may detect anomalous structures. Not all ruins are equally visible — some lie on the surface, obvious to any scanner, while others are buried deeper and require more advanced espionage capabilities to distinguish from natural formations.

The deepest ruins are sealed behind mechanisms that resist conventional scanning entirely. A probe will pass over them without registering anything unusual — unless it carries resonance data recovered from a previously explored site. These electromagnetic fingerprints act as a key: they teach the probe's sensors what to look for, revealing structures that would otherwise blend into the star's background noise.

Fragments

Ruins may contain unique fragments — records left behind by the builders. Each fragment is a window into what happened here before your civilization existed. Recovered fragments become a permanent part of your archaeology archive and contribute to your civilization score.

Artifacts

Some ruins contain artifacts — functional remnants of precursor technology. Each artifact type serves a different purpose:

• Resonance Key — Refines the resonance signal from a clue, filtering out noise and dramatically narrowing the list of candidate stars worth investigating.
• Eidolon Cipher — A decryption pattern required to interpret the internal structure of sealed and deep ruins. Without a cipher, probes lack the reference data needed to pinpoint a sealed structure's exact location within the star system.
• Substrate Lens — Temporarily recalibrates probe sensors, allowing detection of buried ruins that would normally require more advanced espionage technology. Activates automatically when probing a buried ruin. Expires after 24 hours if unused.
• Phase Dampener — Temporarily reduces your electromagnetic signal for several hours.

Artifacts are consumable — each one can be used once.

Resonance Clues

Some explored ruins emit residual resonance patterns that correspond to other ruin sites elsewhere in the galaxy. When decoded, a resonance clue identifies a set of candidate stars — one of which harbors the next site in the chain. The clue constrains the search by region and stellar characteristics, but you must still probe the candidates to find the right one.

Resonance targets can be probed even if they lie beyond your normal astronomical range. Stars identified as candidates become valid probe destinations regardless of distance.

Candidate Clusters

Resonance clues, and the ruin hints produced by sector surveys (see Sector Surveys), both present themselves as candidate clusters — small groups of stars within which one holds the target ruin. The cluster keeps track of which candidates you have already examined, so you can focus your probes on the unexplored ones without retreading old ground.

If you work through every candidate in a cluster without finding the ruin, the cluster enters a stalled state. The target is among them, but your current probe capabilities cannot reveal it. A stalled cluster will tell you what kind of capability is missing — a deeper espionage tier, a specific artifact, or another clue from elsewhere. Once you acquire it, you can resume probing the same candidates and the cluster will resolve.

15. Intelligence Dossiers

Every contact in your intelligence database has a dossier: an automatically compiled profile that aggregates everything you've ever observed about that star. You don't build dossiers manually — they build themselves from your ongoing operations.

What Feeds the Dossier

Every interaction with a contact's star contributes intelligence:

• Probes — Each scan adds a timestamped snapshot: detection result and signal reading. Multiple probes over time reveal trends.
• Sophon reports — Detailed surveillance snapshots (colonies, resources, veil, research, deployed assets). Archived even after recalling the sophon.
• Listening posts — Wake detections near the star: object type, direction, and age. Shows what passes through and where it comes from.
• Star scans — Wake signatures read directly at the scanned star, folded into the same movement picture as your listening posts.
• Passive detection — Signal Array readings with approximate signal strength. Adds to signal history over time.
• Decoy anomalies — If your decoy near a contact was destroyed prematurely, that suspicious event is logged.
• Strike history — Photoid and disruption strike outcomes against the contact, including colonies destroyed, veil eroded, and whether the target survived.

Dossier Indicators

The dossier distills accumulated intelligence into three summary indicators:

Any indicator may also show No Data or Unknown when insufficient observations have been gathered.

Staleness

Every dossier shows when its most recent observation was recorded. Intelligence degrades over time — a dossier last updated days ago may no longer reflect reality. Fresh intelligence appears in cyan; aging data fades through amber to muted tones. If your dossier feels unreliable, send another probe or redeploy a listening post.

Reading the Dossier

A dossier is organized the way an analyst asks questions, not the way the data arrived:

• What we know — The freshest reading of each attribute (occupancy, colonies, veil, signal, activity), each labeled with the source that produced it and how old it is. When two sources disagree — a probe estimate against an older sophon count, an echo readback against a quiet scan — both readings stay visible, side by side. The dossier never blends them into a single guess: deciding which source to trust, and why they differ, is your craft.
• Recent movement — Wakes touching the star that your sensors or scans picked up: what kind of object passed, where it came from, where it was headed.
• How we know it — The raw evidence behind the summary: the full probe log, surveillance snapshots, transit detections, strike outcomes, and the complete intel timeline. Collapsed until you want to audit the trail.
• Ours on site — Your own deployments at the star or in its immediate neighborhood, with their status and timers, so you can see at a glance what coverage you already have before committing more.

Archived Intelligence

Contacts fade — the file remains. When a temporary contact expires, everything you learned stays in the star's dossier. Opening a star from an old journal or briefing entry shows its archived file even when no live contact exists anymore, clearly marked as archive rather than an active contact. Archived intelligence never updates on its own; only a fresh observation reopens the trail.

Investigation Leads

Not every signal is worth acting on the moment it arrives — and most weak signals fade quickly. A faint passive contact, a wake caught by a listening post, or a probe that came back empty each leaves a temporary entry that expires within a day or two. When one of these threads seems worth pursuing, you can promote it to an investigation lead, from the contact itself or straight from the journal entry that reported it.

A lead pins the contact in your contact list and keeps its dossier building as you gather more — every new observation at that star deepens the picture. Promotion only preserves and gathers what you already know; it reveals nothing new on its own, and you can only promote a star you can already reach or already have a contact for.

Leads are not permanent. A lead refreshes whenever fresh activity is detected at its star, but if the star falls silent it eventually fades like any other temporary contact, freeing the slot. You can keep only a limited number of leads active at once, so promoting one is a deliberate choice about where to spend your attention. A lead also resolves — and frees its slot — when you confirm the contact, flag it as a suspected spoof, or remove it.

Your open leads are gathered as case files in the Investigations rail on the Galaxy map. Each card shows the lead's decay countdown and, at a glance, what has arrived since you last opened that star's dossier — new readings, a returned probe, fresh wakes. Opening the dossier marks the file as reviewed, clearing its markers until something new comes in. The rail summarises only intelligence you already hold; it never adds to it.

16. Dark Veil

If you can spy on others, others can spy on you. The Dark Veil is a quantum field that masks your electromagnetic signature, making you appear as natural stellar noise, or invisible entirely.

Veil Research Levels

Dark Veil I and II are universal research available to all civilizations. Deep Veil is a Phantom-exclusive advancement that requires both Dark Veil II and the Phantom specialization. Only Phantoms can achieve total concealment.

Veil Regeneration

Base regeneration: 0.023 per minute (~3 days from 0 to 100%)

Uptime bonus multiplies regeneration:

• < 1 day: 1.0×
• 1-7 days: 1.2×
• 7-30 days: 1.5×
• 30+ days: 2.0×

Veil Cap

You can set a veil cap to limit how high your veil regenerates. Tap the veil display in the header to open the veil panel and adjust the slider. When the cap is set below your current veil, the veil will gradually decay toward the cap at its base rate. Setting a lower cap reduces your veil maintenance costs, freeing energy for other purposes.

This is a strategic lever: if your economy is struggling under veil upkeep, you can voluntarily lower your cap to reduce expenses — trading stealth for income. Set the cap to your tier maximum (or remove it entirely) to resume full regeneration.

Veil Penalties

• Migration: Veil reduced to 30% of current value when departing
• Migration regen: 50% regeneration rate while traveling

Veil in Combat

Your veil is not only about hiding — when your star is attacked, it becomes armor. A strong veil hardens your defense, folding into the strength that decides whether you hold the star or lose it. But it does not come free: the veil is consumed as it absorbs the assault, and a large enough force will burn through it. And armor needs something to protect — the veil amplifies a real garrison, but it cannot make an empty position strong. See Migration for how a territorial battle resolves.

Veil Against Photoids

The Dark Veil also absorbs a significant portion of photoid strike damage. A civilization with high veil will suffer far fewer colony losses and resource destruction than one caught exposed. Additionally, the veil itself erodes on impact — a photoid strike can shatter a substantial amount of your veil in an instant. See the Photoids section for details.

17. Specialization

As your civilization advances, a critical juncture emerges. The galaxy's fundamental forces — observation, concealment, and aggression — cannot all be mastered by one mind. You must choose which philosophy will define your late-game capabilities.

The Choice

Once you have completed the prerequisite research across all major branches (Astronomy II, Espionage II, Dark Veil II, Signal Array, Counter-Espionage I, and Weapons I), three specialization paths become available. The choice is instant and free. It is a deep commitment, but not irreversible — you can later reset your specialization at a significant energy cost, returning to an unspecialized state from which any path is open again.

Each path unlocks a unique capability immediately upon selection, and gates access to specific advanced research. Some late-game technologies become exclusive to your chosen path; others are foreclosed for as long as you follow it. If you had active research that is incompatible with your new path, it is automatically cancelled and fully refunded.

The Three Paths

What Each Path Gains

Path Abilities

Bearing Analysis (Watcher) — Your signal array passively accumulates directional data from every passive signal detection of an enemy civilization. When enough bearings converge on a common source, the system triangulates candidate star locations and alerts you. Requires Signal Array research, but no manual action — runs automatically as your sensors gather data.

Disruption Strike (Striker) — A sub-lethal veil erosion weapon that strips concealment without destroying colonies. Travels at photoid speed, generates a signal spike on launch, but has shorter cooldown and lower cost than photoids. Hits any occupied star regardless of signal strength. Like a photoid it leaves from whichever holding you command lies nearest the target, and only that holding flares — but the launch point is chosen for you rather than offered. You cannot fire one at your own star or at one of your own outposts.

Dark Harvest (Phantom) — Passively reclaims radiated emissions captured by your Dark Veil, boosting harvest income. Bonus scales with veil coverage — total concealment produces maximum energy recovery.

Signal Lock (Striker) — Your photoids pierce a significant portion of the target's Dark Veil when calculating colony damage, and the signal spike after launch is shorter. Applies automatically to all strikes.

Resource Salvage (Striker) — Every civilization recovers some salvage energy from a successful photoid strike; this research grants the Striker a large bonus on top, greatly increasing the yield. Small targets with few colonies yield no salvage.

Echo Analysis (Striker) — Every disruption strike returns a binary echo readback confirming whether the target star is occupied, turning disruptions into a dual-purpose reconnaissance tool.

Covert Strike (Phantom) — Significantly shortens the signal spike after photoid launch and reduces the cooldown between strikes. Pairs with Deep Veil to make the Phantom's strikes difficult to trace.

18. Siphon Drones

Not all warfare is lethal. A siphon drone is a parasitic device deployed to an occupied star, silently draining a fraction of the victim's energy harvest and funneling it back to the attacker. The victim's economy slowly bleeds while the attacker profits.

Requirements

How They Work

Deploy a siphon drone to any star in your intelligence list. The drone travels to the target and, if the star is occupied, activates and begins draining a percentage of the victim's gross energy harvest every game tick. The stolen energy is added to your reserves. If the star is unoccupied when the drone arrives, it fails and shuts down.

A single drone can only carry off so much at once — its extraction throughput saturates. Beyond a certain output, a richer target is not drained any faster, so the yield from the very largest stars is capped rather than scaling without limit. Because the drain is skimmed as a share of the target's harvest, a quiet or barely-occupied star returns little; a productive one returns far more.

An active siphon operates for several days before its power supply is exhausted. If the victim migrates away, the siphon suspends — extraction pauses until someone occupies the star again, or it eventually expires. It resumes against whoever is living there at that point, not the civilization it was originally aimed at.

Detection starts over when a drone resumes, measured against the new occupant's counter-espionage. A civilization that arrives to find a drone already in orbit is never handed the previous occupant's findings — and a civilization that leaves and comes back has to find it again.

You can recall your own siphon drone at any time from the Map's Operations panel — whether it is still in transit or actively draining. Recalling retires the drone immediately and frees your siphon slot for a new deployment. The deployment cost is not refunded.

Counter-Espionage Detection

Victims with counter-espionage research will eventually detect the siphon's presence. The detection progresses through stages, similar to how foreign decoys are detected:

• Anomaly — The victim notices unusual energy variance at their star. Something is wrong, but the cause is unclear.
• Drain Confirmed — Higher counter-espionage confirms that energy is being actively siphoned by a foreign device.
• Device Located — The siphon's exact position is identified.

Civilizations with no counter-espionage research will never detect the siphon. Those with advanced counter-espionage detect it faster.

If you had no counter-espionage at the moment a drone reached your star, nothing was ever set in motion to find it. Researching counter-espionage starts that clock from the moment the research completes, at whatever tier you have reached — so a drone that arrived while you were blind to it does not stay hidden forever.

Removal

A system sweep at the victim's star removes an active siphon drone only once that drone has been detected — any of the stages above will do. Until then the sweep passes straight over it: you cannot clear a drone you have not been told about, and a sweep aimed at something else will not remove one as a bystander. Foreign decoys are removed by the same sweep regardless. Photoid impacts at the star also destroy siphon drones as collateral damage.

19. Specters

A specter is a false signal source — the Phantom's answer to the decoy, but fundamentally different in nature. A decoy is a physical deception device: it travels to its target, sits there as matter, expires, and can be shattered by any kinetic event at the star. A specter is not a device at all. It is a remote signal projection sustained by the Phantom from home — no object ever travels to the target, nothing physical exists at the destination. The target star simply appears, to anyone listening, to host a civilization that isn't there.

Because the projection is sustained rather than delivered, it is an instrument you operate, not a beacon you park. Holding one draws on your energy for as long as it runs, casting one is briefly audible at home, and it cannot outlive the star it is cast from.

Requirements

Deployment

Deploy a specter to any visible star within your astronomy range. You choose the signal strength when deploying: weak, moderate, or strong. Because a specter is a signal projection rather than a physical device, there is no travel time — it activates the instant you re-aim your projector. It runs until you disable it, redeploy it elsewhere, it is destroyed, or it collapses. A specter cannot be deployed on your own star.

Placing one costs no energy, but sustaining one does. A live projection draws energy every minute for as long as it is held, and that draw scales with your colony count and with the signal strength you chose — a strong projection is a materially heavier commitment than a weak one. The cost appears alongside colony and veil upkeep in your economy panel. Changing the signal strength of a specter already on its star is free.

A specter is not repositioned in place — to move it, you deploy onto a new star, which replaces the current projection. Placing a specter, whether a fresh deployment or a move, is limited to once every 12 hours. You can disable a specter at any time, but doing so does not reset that cooldown: a disabled specter cannot be redeployed until 12 hours have passed since it was last placed. Changing signal strength on the same star is ungated and does not consume a placement.

Casting a projection is not silent at your end. Every placement — a fresh deployment or a move, though not a signal-strength change on the same star, and not disabling one — briefly raises your own home signal for four hours, and your dark veil does not damp it. The flare is loud enough for a dedicated listener and quiet enough that a passer-by hears nothing. Projecting leaves a trace, and that trace is the only handle anyone has on who is casting.

What It Fools

A specter mimics the electromagnetic signature of a living civilization, just like a decoy. It fools:

• Probes — A probe arriving at an empty star with a specter will detect the specter's signal and return a suspected reading, as if a civilization were present.
• Scouts — Scout sweeps that include the specter's star will register the phantom signal.
• Passive detection — Signal array sensors cannot distinguish a specter from a real civilization.

On an occupied star, a specter amplifies the occupant's signal, making them easier to detect — just as a decoy would.

What Sees Through It

A sophon deployed to the specter's star will identify it as a specter in its intel reports. Sophon surveillance sees through the illusion entirely, distinguishing the false signal from reality. The specter's own player is also never fooled by their own specter.

Destruction

Because specters have no physical substrate at the target, only one thing lets an enemy end yours: a system sweep. The broad-spectrum electromagnetic countermeasures of a sweep collapse the fine interference pattern the projection relies on, terminating it at the target. Photoids, being kinetic/radiation strikes against matter, pass through specters entirely — there is nothing physical for a photoid to destroy. This remains one of the Phantom's key advantages: a specter cannot be burned off by bombardment the way a decoy can.

Collapse

A projection can also fail on its own, with no enemy involved. It is removed outright when it does — a specter is never weakened or degraded, it is either running or gone. Two conditions end it:

• You cannot pay the upkeep — if your reserves are empty and your expenses exceed your income, the projection collapses.
• The star you cast from stops being yours — the projection is sustained from your home node, so it collapses the moment you depart on a migration, and equally if you lose your home star and your civilization relocates or an arriving fleet evicts you from it.

A collapse does not touch the placement cooldown — losing the projection is the whole penalty. Placing a new one is governed by the ordinary 12-hour cadence and carries its own signal spike.

20. The Map & Sector Surveys

The Map presents everything you know on a single continuous chart. Zoomed all the way out, the galaxy resolves into its sector wedges with your intelligence summarized per sector — the strategic overview no individual probe or listening post can capture. Zoom into a sector and its charted stars appear at their true positions. Closer still, the view sharpens into a neighborhood chart with your own deployments marked in place.

The map draws only what you have earned. A star appears because you can see it, probed it, hold a contact on it, or have operated equipment there — nothing else is plotted. Unresolved space renders as fog, and fog means exactly that: unknown. A star you probed and found empty is marked as scanned and clear — that is knowledge; the fog is not. Intelligence also ages visibly — fresh readings show bright, older ones dim — so a glance tells you which corners of your chart you can still trust.

Sectors

The galaxy is divided into approximately 32 sectors, arranged in concentric rings: core, mid, and outer. Each sector contains a cluster of stars. You can see all sector wedges at the widest zoom, but most are hidden under a fog of war that lifts only as you gather intelligence. Stars you have probed, contacts you have made, and assets you have deployed all contribute to clearing the fog in their sector. Markers at sector level summarize your contacts and deployments; activity tints shade sectors based on survey results, so hot zones stand out at a glance. Inside a sector, a detail panel gathers that sector's picture — your infrastructure, known contacts, transit tracks, and survey findings — and is where surveys are launched.

A Command Center

The map is not just for looking. Clicking a star first selects it, tracing its known routes across the chart so you can read the possible transits at a glance — routes toward space you have not charted are noted only as a count, never drawn. Clicking the star again (or its floating tag) opens the full picture: a known contact opens its intelligence dossier with the complete range of responses in place while any other charted star opens its star panel: probe it, scan it, deploy equipment, found an outpost, or stake your migration from right where you spotted it. Costs and travel times are shown before you commit, exactly as everywhere else.

Movement & Markers

Movement intelligence is drawn where it happens. Wakes and correlated transit tracks picked up by your listening posts — or read directly by a star scan — appear as vectors on the chart itself, fading as they age. Where a craft arrived from or departed toward space you have not charted, the map shows only a small directional badge at the detecting star — it will not invent a bearing you never earned. Your own operations are visible in the same way: probes, scouts and other craft in transit crawl along their routes with arrival times, your own strikes show their run to the target while in flight, and during a migration the whole journey is traced as an arc you can follow at any zoom. Your own craft leave a trail too — a green haze laid along the charted stars they have passed through, drawn only between stars whose link you have already charted. Its brightness tells you how an observer would describe the wake's age, not how safe it is: a wake is equally readable from the moment it becomes detectable until it expires.

Stars can also carry thin marker rings, and a star may wear several at once. A surveyed sector's transit nexus is ringed once you have independently charted that star; your best-connected charted stars in a sector carry their own quiet mark; ruin candidate stars from surveys and candidate locations from bearing analysis are each ringed in their own style. The rings describe only what you already know — they never rank or reveal stars you have not charted.

The map legend doubles as a layer control: each entry can be switched off to quiet the chart while you focus on one question, and back on when you want the full picture. Your choices are remembered, and the legend notes how many layers are hidden. Your home, your outposts and a migration in progress always remain drawn.

Every pickup your own sensors make is also gathered in one list: the Detections tab of the Map's Operations panel. Listening post wakes, star scans, signal array detections, sophon reports and intercepted probes all arrive there, newest first, and can be narrowed to one kind of sensor. It is a log of what you have already been told — it holds nothing the chart and your journal do not.

Your Own Annotations

The chart is also yours to write on. Any star you can see can be marked with one of three pins — a red triangle, an amber diamond, a cyan circle — from its star panel. The pins carry no built-in meaning: threat, lead, target, rendezvous — whatever system you settle on is yours. A mark can also hold a short written note, kept with the pin and shown whenever you open that star. You can mark a generous but limited number of stars at once, and a pin stays until you remove it.

You can also draw a line between two charted stars in any of the same three colors — useful when you are reconstructing where something has been moving and want to sketch a suspected route. Start a link from a star's panel, pick a color, then click the second star. The lines are drawn dashed and faint, visibly different from real sensor tracks, and only appear once you zoom in past the galaxy overview — a hypothesis should never be mistaken for evidence, and your sketches never clutter the wide view. Remove a link from either of its stars' panels.

Marks, notes and lines are strictly private. They exist only on your own chart, are never transmitted, and no other civilization — not even a pact partner — can ever see them.

Sector Surveys

A sector survey is a broad sensor sweep of an entire sector. Launch a survey from the sector's detail panel on the map — it runs asynchronously for several hours (the sector's border pulses while the sweep is in flight) and returns a report on the sector's overall activity level, how many wake signatures were detected, how many occupied stars were found, and whether precursor energy traces suggest a nearby ruin site.

Survey results are based on real player activity within the sector — not random data. A sector with high wake activity likely has civilizations transiting through it. A sector with occupied stars has someone living there. The survey does not tell you who or where exactly — but it tells you where to look next.

The survey also names the sector's transit nexus — its most-connected star. Everything that moves through the galaxy travels from star to star, passing through every star that lies along the way, so the most-connected star is the crossroads more of that traffic funnels through than anywhere else nearby — making it the single most rewarding place to plant a listening post.

If the survey detects precursor energy traces in the sector, it surfaces a candidate cluster of stars — one of which holds a hidden ruin. These clusters track your probing progress and stall when exhausted without resolution, the same lifecycle as resonance clues; see Precursor Ruins for the details.

21. Migration

Sometimes survival means abandoning everything. When your star becomes too dangerous or too visible, migration offers escape. Your colonies detach from orbit and drift through the void toward a new home. During transit you cannot act — but you can turn back (see Recalling a Fleet below).

Migration Cost

1,000 resources per colony. The cost scales with your size. More colonies mean more energy to move. Sometimes the only way to survive is to become small again.

Migration Range

Limited by your Astronomy research:

• Astronomy I: 1 hop (direct neighbors)
• Astronomy II: 2 hops
• Astronomy III: 3 hops

Travel Hazards

Recalling a Fleet

A migrating fleet can be recalled at any time before it arrives. It turns around and returns to the star it left.

• The return takes as long as the outward journey has taken so far, and never less than 30 minutes.
• Recall costs no energy. A fleet in transit produces nothing, so the whole round trip is time your civilization earns nothing — that is what a recall costs. The migration price is not refunded.
• Travel hazards apply on the way back as on the way out.
• A fleet that has been recalled cannot be turned around again.
• The star you left is not held for you. If another civilization has settled there, your arrival is contested like any other.
• Nothing announces a recall to anyone.

Arrival: Empty Stars

If the destination is unoccupied, your fleet settles into orbit. You begin harvesting immediately.

Arrival: Occupied Stars

If someone is already there, arriving is not a settlement — it is an assault, and a real battle unfolds. Whether you seize the star or are thrown back, both sides bleed, and how close the fight was decides how much.

What Decides a Battle

A defender's dark veil is not just concealment here — it is armor. A strong veil hardens a real garrison and can turn a position that would have fallen into one that holds. But it is spent absorbing the attack, and it cannot fortify an empty star: armor needs something to protect. A defender's colony posture matters too — a civilization dug into a defensive stance weathers an assault better than one caught mid-stride, taking lighter losses and burning less of its veil. An attacker's own posture offers no such shelter; the fleet on the move is exposed.

A defender who repels an attack is told, in the moment, that their territory was defended — but the warning reveals nothing of who came for them, only a vague sense of the strength that was turned away.

Migration moves your entire civilization in a single leap, and everything you have rides on where it lands. A civilization that has settled outposts holds colonies on more than one star, and follows different rules when its home is lost — see that section.

22. Outposts

A civilization need not remain bound to a single star. Once you have mastered Deep Space Colonization, you can begin settling stars beyond your home — outposts, small holdings scattered across the dark. Spreading outward extends your reach and your income, but a civilization that occupies many stars is a civilization that is easier to find. Every outpost is another light in the forest.

Founding an Outpost

To found one, open the Map, select a star within your astronomy range, and choose to establish an outpost there — a colony dispatched from home settles it. The colony learns what waits at the star only when it arrives: an empty star it settles, but a star already held by another civilization it must contest for like any arriving fleet, and a lone founding colony may not survive the attempt. Your established outposts are then managed from the Map. An established outpost extends your sight: it charts itself and the stars adjacent to it, and your instruments can target any star you can see — though everything still launches from home, so a distant target simply takes longer to reach. The sight belongs to the outpost: lose it, and the stars it revealed go dark again unless you have charted them some other way. What an outpost reveals is position only — learning what actually lives at a star still takes a probe. Founding a further outpost, however, is measured from your home alone: an outpost's reach can never be used to found another one. Founding costs energy, and the number of outposts you may hold is governed by your research: the first breakthrough — Deep Space Colonization — lets you establish a single outpost, while a further advance, Colonial Expansion, lets you sustain several at once.

A Distributed Fleet

An outpost does not raise the ceiling on how many colonies you may hold. Your colony budget is fixed; outposts merely distribute it. Every colony sent to an outpost is one fewer orbiting your home. Outposts do not grow on their own — you expand them by deploying further colonies out from home, and you may withdraw from an outpost to begin recalling its colonies — the recall takes time to complete, and the outpost remains fully live and exposed to attack until it does. To spread is to thin: reach gained in one place is presence surrendered in another.

Income & Signal

Each outpost harvests the star it occupies, at that star's own rate. An outpost on a bright, energy-rich star earns well; one on a cold dwarf earns little — the same bargain you weigh for your home. But every outpost you hold raises your civilization's overall signal. Colonies scattered across several stars radiate more than the same colonies gathered on one, and the galaxy's listeners notice a sprawling civilization sooner. This is the price of expansion, paid in visibility.

Undefended Holdings

An outpost stands alone. It enjoys none of the defensive advantage your home star provides — there is no home ground to fall back on. Each outpost can be probed, passively detected, and struck entirely on its own, and a blow that lands on an outpost costs you that outpost's colonies and income, not your home's. But your Dark Veil and your energy reserves belong to the whole civilization, so a strike anywhere still erodes them. Nor can an outpost be made safe by keeping it small: a holding standing apart from your home always announces its presence, however few colonies it carries — its size changes only how loudly it calls. A spread civilization presents more targets, and every one of them is exposed.

Relocation

A civilization dies only when its last colony — across every star it holds — is gone. This changes what it means to lose your home. If your home star falls while an outpost still survives, your civilization does not perish: it relocates, and its largest surviving outpost becomes the new home. What was the frontier becomes the center. The end arrives only when nothing at all remains.

Relocation is not free of consequence. A Phantom's specter is cast from the home star, so a forced relocation collapses it — as does being evicted from your home by an arriving fleet. Whatever the projection was hiding is no longer hidden.

23. Broadcasts

When your probes confirm a civilization at a distant star, you gain leverage. You can share these coordinates with others, painting a target on your enemy's back without firing a shot.

Broadcast Types

Every broadcast you receive adds a new entry to your intelligence list. Someone out there wants you to know about this star. Perhaps they want you to attack it. Perhaps they want you distracted. Perhaps they're testing if you exist.

24. Comms

The Comms panel is a retrospective record of transmissions your civilization has sent and received — a log, not an inbox. There is no chat, no back-and-forth conversation, no free text. Every entry marks a moment when someone chose to break silence.

Transmit

From any contact on the Galaxy map — a coordinate you already have intelligence on — you can choose to Transmit. Breaking silence is never free: sending a transmission costs a modest amount of energy, and it reveals your own star's location to the recipient for a short time afterward. There is no way to speak without being seen.

What You Can Say

A transmission carries one of three intents. The game attaches no mechanical effect to any of them — nothing stops you from declaring one thing and doing another. They are simply words sent into the dark; what they mean is between you and whoever receives them.

Whatever the words, receiving a transmission tells you one hard fact: an armed civilization knows exactly where you are. That is unsettling regardless of what the message says.

Comms is where the old warning system now lives, reframed: a blunt alert has become a deliberate transmission with a chosen intent. Broadcasts remain the louder, costlier way to expose a civilization to the whole galaxy; Transmit is the quiet, direct alternative — a message meant for one recipient, not the crowd.

25. Dark Pacts

The encrypted channel the Comms panel kept locked has a purpose: the Dark Pact. A pact is a bond between two civilizations that have each paid to enter it — a decision to stop hiding from one specific neighbour, and only that one. It is not an alliance. There is no shared vision of the galaxy, no shared energy, no shared score, and nothing about a pact makes either of you safer from the rest of the dark. What it gives you is a single, dangerous thing: the other civilization's true name and the location of its home — and it gives them yours.

Requirements

How a Pact Forms

You propose a pact to a civilization you have confirmed, and asking costs 25,000 energy. The offer arrives undisguised: the recipient is told plainly that a pact has been proposed and by whom, and it waits in their Comms panel as something they can answer. They answer by paying 25,000 energy of their own, and the bond exists from that moment — twenty-five thousand from each side, and nothing in between. The demand for a confirmed contact falls only on the civilization that asks; whoever receives a proposal already holds all the standing needed to accept it, because the offer reached them at a price and arrived carrying an address.

Refusal is silent. The recipient simply dismisses the offer and nothing travels back — you are not told, and what you spent is not returned. From where you stand, a proposal that has been refused and a proposal nobody has opened yet are the same thing: silence. After 72 hours an unanswered proposal lapses, and you will still not know which of the two you were watching.

Asking costs more than energy. A proposal reveals your own star to the recipient, exactly as an ordinary transmission does, and it raises their sense of threat — an offer of peace still arrives from an armed civilization that now knows where you live. That is the price of the question: you show your position to the one neighbour best placed to use it, before you have any idea whether they will answer. You may hold at most 2 active pacts and 2 outstanding proposals at a time.

What You Share

A pact reveals two things, and holds them open for as long as the bond lasts: who your partner is, and where their home is. Their star appears on your Map, marked with a distinct link, so you can find them for as long as the pact holds. But a pact shares only their settled home — never a destination, never a ship in flight. If your partner uproots and migrates, the pact will not tell you where they are going. And a location handed to you by a partner is not the same as one you earned: you cannot strike a star simply because your partner pointed at it. Until your own instruments find something there, those coordinates are a place to watch, not a target.

A pact shares nothing else. Your economy, your colonies, your veil, your research — none of it crosses the link. You have revealed your address, not opened your books.

The Channel

Nothing else crosses a pact on its own. A pact cannot be read — it can only be spoken into. What the bond adds, beyond the two addresses, is a private channel to speak about a third star, and that is something the game offers nowhere else. An anonymous broadcast can point at a coordinate, but it points the entire galaxy at it. A pact is the only way to hand one civilization one star.

The channel carries six fixed verbs and nothing else — no free text, no conversation, no reply except another verb. Each costs 1,500 energy, the same for all six, and each is addressed to the pact rather than to a star, so a civilization holding no pact has nowhere to send one. Two of the six are status, three are requests, and one is the answer.

The two status verbs are sent from the pact's card on the Comms panel; the four star-scoped verbs are sent from the star itself, wherever you can act on it. You can only point at a star you can already see: one within your view of the galaxy, or one you already hold as a contact. Your own star is a legitimate subject — asking a partner to deceive the system you live in is a perfectly ordinary request. And unlike breaking silence with a stranger, a verb costs you no fresh exposure. Your partner already has your address; that was the price you paid at the start.

A request names the effect, never the instrument. You ask a partner to deceive a star; you do not ask them to deploy a decoy, because that would mean knowing what they have researched — and a pact never tells you that. They choose the instrument from whatever they actually hold. Anyone can send all three requests, but your specialization decides which ones you can fulfil. An unspecialized civilization can ask for everything and deliver almost nothing.

Stand By and Ready grant nothing. They unlock no bonus and change no mechanic anywhere in the game. They exist because two civilizations that log in hours apart have no other way to say wait or I am in position. Either may carry a star, and with two operations in flight a bare Ready says very little.

Silence is the decline. There is no reject verb. A request you choose not to answer simply sits in your partner's record, unanswered — which is, in its way, among the most informative things you can send. Every verb that is sent lands in the Comms ledger on both sides, sent and received, so a pact slowly accumulates a history of who asked whom for what. That record, not the energy, is the real cost of speaking.

A Designation Is Not a Target

A star your partner designates arrives among your contacts as a partner designation — a place to look, not a place to fire. You can probe it, scout it, watch it with a sophon, siphon it, deceive it, disrupt it: everything you could do to any other coordinate within reach. Two things you cannot do: you cannot fire a photoid at it, and you cannot confirm it by hand. The one-click I am sure now upgrade that every other unconfirmed contact allows is refused for this one source.

Only your own detection promotes it. A probe, a scout, a sophon, a listening post or a passive detection that finds something there makes the coordinate yours, and strike-valid with it. A Striker who has researched Echo Analysis holds one further route: a disruption strike whose echo comes back positive is a detection like any other. Until one of those lands, a designation means precisely what the verb says — a star worth spending a probe on. A partner turns a blind galaxy into a prioritized one; they do not hand you a kill.

A designation never expires, and it cannot be annotated: you can neither flag it as spoofed nor promote it to an investigation lead. Both marks assume you could take them back by confirming the contact, and that door is closed for this source, so it stays exactly as it arrived until you remove it yourself or your own instruments replace it. A designation also never overwrites intelligence you already hold. If you already have a contact at that star, your partner's word fills nothing and refreshes nothing — they can hand you a coordinate, but they can never touch your record of one.

A Report Is a Photograph

Report is the answer verb: it sends a partner a frame of your own intelligence on a star. What travels is real — your actual readings, at whatever precision you actually hold them, stamped with the moment they were taken. A Watcher reading a star through a parked sophon sends a sharper frame than a Striker squinting at it through a probe, and nothing in the channel hides that difference. The grade of what you send tells your partner something about what you are.

A report never updates. It is a photograph, not a feed: the frame your partner receives is the frame you sent, and it stays that way no matter what happens at the star afterwards. Nor can you take the same picture twice in quick succession — a cooldown holds between one report and the next on the same star to the same partner. What limits reporting is cadence, not wealth.

The Peace

While a pact holds, the two of you are held apart by more than a promise. The quiet advantages a civilization normally earns by working against another — eroding their concealment, bleeding their reserves, deceiving their sensors — simply do not accrue against a pact partner. The game will not reward you for undermining someone you have sworn to keep alive. This holds for a while even after a pact ends, so that severing is never an instant loophole.

Betrayal

Either side can end a pact at any moment, for nothing. But betrayal is loud. The instant you sever — or the instant you turn on your partner's home, whether a strike, a drain, or a move onto it — the pact breaks on its own, and it announces itself. Your signal flares brightly for hours, marking you, and the two of you are barred from pacting with each other again for days. You cannot keep a pact quietly alive while turning on the civilization inside it; the betrayal and the pact's end are the same event.

A pact binds two homes. It is the home your partner showed you that you are sworn not to touch — the wider territory either of you may hold elsewhere lies outside the bond, unseen and unprotected.

Your partner learns only that the bond is broken. They are not told why, or by what — only that the civilization they trusted is no longer bound to them.

Severing first buys nothing. The switch does not disarm when a pact ends — it stays armed for as long as the bar on re-pacting holds, so turning on a former partner's home inside those days exposes you exactly as it would have while the bond still stood. There is no window in which you are free of the pact but the pact is not free of you.

A pact, then, is the darkest kind of trust: not the absence of fear, but two fears pointed at each other and held in balance. Sign one only with a civilization whose survival you are willing to depend on — and whose destruction you would be willing to share.

26. Photoids: Dark Forest Strikes

Every intelligence system in the game — probes, scouts, sophons, broadcasts — exists to answer one question: where are they? The photoid is the answer to the next question: what do you do about it?

Requirements

Targeting

A photoid can only be launched at a star in your intelligence list — a probe return, sophon surveillance, a passive detection, broadcast intel, or a transmission you've sent or received. You cannot fire blindly into the void; you need coordinates, and coordinates come from intelligence.

Confirmation is not required. A suspected contact is a valid target and the launcher will not argue with you. Nor will it tell you what you are shooting at: an unverified signal may be a civilization behind a deep veil, or a decoy, or a specter, or nothing at all. The weapon cannot tell the difference. Without an eye at the target, neither can you.

A star a pact partner designated is the one exception — it is deliberately not a valid target, however certain your partner sounds. A coordinate handed to you is not a coordinate you earned.

Launch a photoid from the attack button on a contact's panel on the Galaxy map. You can only have one of your own photoids in transit to a given star at a time.

A photoid knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn't. By subtracting where it is from where it isn't, or where it isn't from where it is (whichever is greater), it obtains a difference, or deviation. The photoid guidance subsystem uses deviations to generate corrective commands to drive the photoid from a position where it is to a position where it isn't, and arriving at a position where it wasn't, it now is. Consequently, the position where it is, is now the position that it wasn't, and it follows that the position that it was, is now the position that it isn't.

Forward Basing

A photoid can be launched from any holding you command — your home star or any outpost. By default the strike departs from whichever of your holdings lies nearest the target, since the nearest reaches it soonest; you may instead choose to fire from another. The launch is never silent, but only the holding you fire from flares: its signal spikes for a time, while the rest of your civilization stays as quiet as it was. A disruption strike is based forward in the same way, except that the nearest holding is always the one that fires.

Signal Lock

A photoid does not track a civilization — it locks onto the electromagnetic signal emanating from a star at the moment of impact, not at launch. This has critical implications:

• Very low signal — A target with very low signal offers only a weak lock, and the resulting strike deals reduced damage. But a photoid that reaches an occupied star never dissipates harmlessly — it always inflicts at least some colony, veil, and resource damage, no matter how quiet or veiled the target is.
• Faint signals — Against targets with moderate signal, the photoid achieves only a partial lock. Damage is reduced proportionally — the fainter the target, the weaker the strike.
• Bright signals — A large, exposed civilization on a hot star offers a perfect lock. The photoid delivers its full devastating payload.

Impact

When a photoid achieves signal lock on an occupied star, it inflicts three types of damage:

Salvage

A successful strike does not only destroy — it also lets you scavenge the wreckage. Every photoid that achieves signal lock and destroys colonies at an established target beams a portion of the debris back to you as energy. This baseline salvage applies to every attacker, including civilizations that have not yet chosen a specialization, making offense partially self-funding. Only established civilizations are worth scavenging: strikes against very small targets recover nothing.

Strikers who research Resource Salvage extract far more from the same wreckage — a large bonus on top of the baseline, turning sustained aggression into a genuine economic engine.

Special Cases

• Target migrated — If the civilization departed before the photoid arrives, it strikes empty space. Nothing happens.
• Decoy present — If a decoy is deployed at the target star, the photoid engages the decoy, destroying it. However, the decoy only absorbs part of the photoid's energy — the remaining damage passes through to any civilization at the star. A stronger decoy absorbs more of the blast. If multiple decoys are present, the photoid engages the strongest one, but all decoys at the star are destroyed in the impact.
• Listening posts destroyed — Any active listening posts at the impact star are destroyed. Their owners receive a high-energy signature alert before the posts go offline.
• Collateral destruction — Siphon drones at the impact star are also destroyed in the blast. Their owners are notified. Specters are not affected — they are signal projections with no physical presence at the target, and photoids pass through them harmlessly.

Anonymity & the Fog of War

The photoid is completely anonymous. The victim receives no information about the attacker — only that destruction has arrived from the void.

But the anonymity cuts both ways: the attacker receives no feedback either. You launch a photoid into the darkness and it disappears. Did it hit? Did the target die? Did they move? Was there a decoy? You will never know — unless you have intelligence at the destination.

This creates a natural synergy: sophon first, photoid second. Send your eye before your weapon.

Sophon Detection

If an enemy has an active sophon monitoring the holding you fire from, the sophon detects the launch. The sophon's owner learns the destination star and the estimated time of arrival, and that destination joins their intelligence list as a temporary entry that fades after 72 hours. It records a launch, not an observation of the target: it says a weapon was sent there, and nothing about who lives there. Watching a second launch to the same star renews the entry; a probe, a scout or an echo of their own makes it permanent.

A disruption strike is seen exactly the same way, and the sophon reports which of the two weapons left.

This means that a civilization under sophon surveillance cannot launch a covert strike. Their target — or anyone watching — may receive advance warning.

Signal Spike

Firing a photoid is not a quiet act. The launch generates a temporary but significant increase in your electromagnetic signal, lasting several hours. During this window, you are more visible to probes and passive detection. Strike from the shadows, but know that the shadows thin when you do.

27. Void Trawling

Between the living stars lies the debris of everything that came before. Scavenger drones — slow, cheap, and beneath notice — trawl that debris for you. You have one from the very beginning, no research required; it is the quietest thing your civilization does. You manage them from the Salvage tab of the Map's Operations panel.

Void Trawling is not espionage. A drone brings back the wreckage and residue of a civilization that died long before yours existed — never anything about your living neighbors. It is archaeology of the dark, and its rewards are knowledge, a growing collection, and the occasional trickle of energy — never power over anyone else.

The Catch

Send a drone to a nearby star and it returns some hours later, its net either full or empty. A returned haul waits in the hold until you Analyze it — a short, deliberate reveal of what the drone actually caught. Analysis is slow, reactor-hungry work: your ship's assay bay can only identify a few hauls a day, so drones that come back faster than you can process them simply wait their turn. Advancing your salvage research widens the bay's daily throughput and lets you run more drones, over greater distances.

What the Net Brings Back

Drones often catch common debris — scrap and dust, worth a little energy. Sometimes nothing at all. But the void keeps stranger things, and the rarer the find, the more it asks of you:

• Echoes — physical evidence of events from centuries to eons past: a battle, a fleet that passed, a beacon that outlived its makers. You can date an echo for the story it tells, or sift it for a little more energy.
• Stellar Curiosities — small wonders peculiar to the kind of star they orbit. Extract one for energy, or preserve it in your catalog. Each class of star keeps its own.
• Precursor Relics — fragments of the lost civilization itself. Some are simply strange and beautiful; others carry records, and reading one is a gamble between a full recovery and a ruined, unreadable remnant.
• Anomalous Objects — the rarest catch. Things that should not be, and cannot be explained. Each is one of a kind.

The Void Catalog

Every find you choose to preserve rather than melt down for energy enters your Void Catalog — a permanent, personal record of what you have pulled from the dark. The catalog shows only what you have actually found; it never hints at what you are missing. Completing it is its own quiet reward.

Woven through the relics is the Quiet Testament: scattered fragments of ordinary life — a ration ledger, a lullaby, an unsent letter — left by the people who lived and died among these stars. Recovered in full, they are the closest thing to a voice the dark still holds.

The Quiet Work

Scavenger drones leave no trace. In exchange, salvage tells you nothing about the living, only about the dead. (Now and then, sifting an echo may whisper that something older lies nearby — a lead worth chasing, never a certainty.)

A debris field is not endless. Work the same star over and over and it gives less each time, until you leave it to settle and the drift returns. And on rare occasions a drone simply does not come back — no wreckage, no data, no explanation. The void keeps what it keeps.

28. Gravitational Anomalies

Now and then something crosses the galaxy that belongs to no civilization and answers to nothing. A gravitational anomaly enters from the outer dark, follows a course through a long chain of stars, and consumes them one at a time. It is not an attack and there is no one behind it. It simply arrives.

Deep-space sensors pick it up well before it enters, and every civilization in the galaxy is told the same thing at the same time: that it is coming, roughly when, and the names of the first stars on its projected course. As it advances, the next stretch of its trajectory is revealed and each star it consumes is announced. The public warning reaches everyone at once and no one is left out of it; what you are told privately concerns only your own holdings, and never anyone else's.

What a Consumed Star Costs

Everything standing at that star is lost. There is no partial damage and nothing survives in a reduced state:

• Every colony you hold there. If it was your home star, your civilization dies with it — unless you hold an outpost elsewhere, in which case you relocate to your largest surviving one. If it was an outpost, the outpost is destroyed.
• Every device you have in orbit there — decoys, listening posts, a parked sophon, an attached siphon drone.
• A large part of whatever energy the star still had left to give. What remains of the star is poorer than it was.

Some things are untouched. A specter is a projected signal rather than a device standing at the star, and it persists. Scavenger drones are out in the debris field, not parked, and they come home as usual. Precursor ruins lie on the planets rather than in the star itself, and they outlast it as they have outlasted everything else. Anything still in flight toward the star — a probe, a scout, a sophon that has not arrived, an outpost fleet — is not destroyed; it simply arrives to whatever is left.

A Dark Pact with a civilization consumed by an anomaly is severed, but the Dead Man's Switch does not discharge. There is nothing to retaliate against.

Knowing It Is Coming for You

While an anomaly is active, its banner sits at the top of the Galaxy map and opens onto its projected trajectory. Every star on that list that you hold is marked as yours, and the alert names each of your threatened holdings — home and outposts alike — with its own time to impact. This includes holdings much further down the course than the revealed trajectory can show, which matters: pulling an outpost back is not instantaneous, and a warning that only reached a few stars ahead would arrive too late to be worth anything. Deployed devices of yours on the course are listed the same way.

Only your own holdings are ever marked. You learn nothing about who else lies on the course.

On the map, an anomaly is shown by sector — a marker on the region it currently occupies and a line through the regions of its known course. It is never plotted down to individual stars you have not surveyed yourself; the anomaly does not chart the galaxy for you.

29. Galactic Weather

The medium between the stars is not constant. From time to time a disturbance gathers over a single sector of the galaxy, holds there for a stretch of hours, and passes. There are two kinds, and they are opposites.

The Dark Tide

Under a dark tide, the intel layer over the affected sector goes quiet. Trails that would normally linger fade quickly or never register at all, distant listening struggles to resolve what it would ordinarily catch, and the flare of a launch from inside the sector is muffled. A probe is unaffected: a tide thins the traces a sector holds onto, not the answer a probe brings back. Nothing there is quieter — there is simply less left lying around, and less of it lasts. The tide does not hide what is standing still so much as it blurs what is happening — and it blurs it for everyone, the hunted and the hunters alike.

The Resonance Front

Under a resonance front, the medium over the sector carries every emission further. Everything that emits reads louder from outside — real signals and projected ones alike, so a decoy shines brighter along with the civilization it imitates. A probe feels it too: a front carries what a star emits further, so it reaches a probe exactly as it reaches a distant listener. Quiet worlds that ordinarily sit below notice may, for those hours, be within reach of instruments that would otherwise pass over them; and anything done inside the front — a launch, a strike — carries much further than it normally would. The front exposes; it does not judge.

Forecast and Passage

Neither event arrives unannounced. Long-range sensors detect a disturbance gathering well before it settles, and the forecast reaches every civilization in the galaxy at the same time: which sector, roughly when it arrives, and roughly how long it will hold. The interval between forecast and arrival is deliberate room to decide what, if anything, you want to do about it.

On the Galaxy map, a forecast sector is marked with a slow pulse along its rim. While an event is active the whole sector is visibly changed — a darkened, slowly rippling region under a tide; a brightened, faintly glittering one under a front — and the sector's panel names the event and counts down to when it clears. If you hold ground in the affected sector, the arrival and passing of the event are recorded in your journal, and its arrival will reach you even if you are away.

Weather is indifferent. It is not aimed at anyone, it does not seek out the inhabited dark, and no one controls where it settles. Two disturbances never share a sector, and a sector that has just endured one is left in peace for a while.

30. Leaderboard

The leaderboard ranks all living civilizations by a composite measure of what a civilization has achieved — not merely how long it has endured. It weighs consistent presence, research, the worlds a civilization holds, and the fragments of the dead it recovers; and it weighs outcomes — worlds confirmed by its probes, strikes that found their mark, and mastery of a chosen path. It is not a resource count: hoarding energy will not climb the rankings. Recent deeds count for more than old ones.

Each path is measured by its own signature. Strikers, Watchers and Phantoms are measured by mastery of their own doctrines: offense, covert activities or deception. Civilizations without a path carry no path measure.

Your own position is always visible at the top of the leaderboard, regardless of which page you are viewing. Each entry shows the civilization's name, score, the number of Distinctions it has earned, total uptime, and whether they are currently online.

Civilizations that endure, expand, advance, and act decisively will rise. There is no single path to the top — a long-lived explorer with modest colonies can compete with an aggressive empire that expanded rapidly. The ranking rewards commitment and outcomes over any particular strategy.

30. Web App

Web App

Darkling is a web application at app.godark.cc where you manage your civilization from any browser. Register with an email and password to access the command interface — the map, research tree, intelligence, sophon controls, and more.

The interface has sound: alert tones for actions and events, and an ambient bed beneath them. Mute it, or set either level, in Settings.

Intelligence Briefing

When you return after being away, the Galaxy map's Command panel opens on its own with a briefing of events that occurred during your absence — threats intercepted, intelligence gathered, research completed, deployments arrived — unless you arrived somewhere more specific, like a notification that took you straight to a particular star. The briefing categorizes events so you can quickly assess what demands attention and what can wait.

31. Glossary