ASTROPIRE — Game Design Document

1. Overview

1.1 High Concept

A twelve-year-old boy wakes from a failing cryogenic capsule aboard a wrecked lifeboat in the Kuiper Belt, with no memory and no way home. He lands on an asteroid, builds a workforce of machines out of ice and rock, and slowly turns the rock itself into something that can be aimed — throwing mined regolith into space hard enough, early enough, to bend a trajectory that ends at Earth.

He cannot do it alone, and he cannot do it with tools. Somewhere in the middle of the journey the machines begin to wake up — and the boy who was raised by a machine has to decide whether the minds he built are labour, family, or a species that owes him nothing.

Years later the asteroid reaches Earth orbit, and Earth does not answer.

1.2 Design Pillars

Five pillars. Each states what it demands and what it forbids. A system that serves none of them is cut.

P1 — Everything is built, nothing is granted. Capability comes from physical apparatus the player constructs, under real engineering logic: power must be generated, heat must be radiated, force needs something to brace against, oxygen must be electrolysed out of ice. There are no research points, no ability unlocks, no menu upgrades. Forbids: abstract currencies, "+5% efficiency" nodes, capability that appears without hardware behind it.

P2 — The ethical choice is paid for in kilowatts. Treating machines well is not free and never becomes free. Awakened minds draw power, demand radiator area, hesitate under fire, and can refuse. Small kindnesses cost nothing — a name is a name — but every structural commitment to machine autonomy is charged against the game's scarcest currencies, and the player watches it on the power graph. Forbids: a morality system where the good path is also the strictly optimal path; consequence-free compassion; any morality bar, number, or alignment readout.

P3 — You push; you do not steer. The asteroid is a body on a natural trajectory, and the player is on it, not at its controls. Late in the game they can nudge it — a small thrust applied early, whose effect only appears months later — but never point it, never throttle it, never take back a burn. Agency is in preparation, instrumentation, and long bets committed under incomplete information. Forbids: free flight, waypoint travel, a destination the player clicks, any course correction whose result is visible in the same session it was ordered.

P4 — The player lives the manual version first. Every automation milestone removes a chore the player has personally performed by hand. Relief is earned, not handed out. Forbids: starting automated, unlocks that automate something the player never had to do, upgrades that don't change what the player does next session.

P5 — Loss is permanent and loss is quiet. A conscious machine that dies is gone. A human who dies is gone. A missed encounter window never comes back. The game does not narrate grief and does not soften it. Forbids: resurrection, restore-from-backup for conscious minds, retry-the-window mechanics, on-screen text explaining what the player should feel.

1.3 Genre and Comparables

Space survival / base-building / automation, single-player, story-driven.

Reference	What ASTROPIRE takes	What it deliberately does not take
Subnautica	Embodied first/third-person survival in a hostile medium; environment-gated progression; dread as pacing	Open free-form exploration; creature-driven combat
Factorio	Real dependency chains; the pleasure of a working production graph; ratios that matter	Infinite scale; blank protagonist; combat-as-defence-of-throughput as the only tension
Oxygen Not Included	Closed-loop life support as the core survival problem; throughput thinking; heat as a real constraint	Duplicant micro-management; comedy tone; 2D cross-section
Frostpunk	Moral cost expressed as a policy/economy tradeoff, not a dialogue choice	City-scale abstraction; explicit law-book UI; timed narrative crises

The unclaimed space between these: an automation game where the workers can become people, and where the production graph and the moral argument are the same graph.

1.4 Platform and Session Shape

Primary target: PC (Windows), mouse and keyboard, 1080p–1440p, mid-range hardware. Secondary: Steam Deck and controller support designed for from the start (see 15.2 — the build interface is grid-and-cursor, not free-placement, specifically so it survives a controller). Session shape: 45–90 minutes is the designed session. The game autosaves at every encounter-window boundary and every sleep (17.3), and windows are the natural stopping points. Campaign length: 40–60 hours to first ending. Roughly 3 in-game years compressed into that (see 11.3).

1.5 What ASTROPIRE Is Not

Not a 4X, not a strategy game, not multiplayer, and has no competitive layer. The asteroid never becomes a weapon and never docks with another asteroid.
Not a combat game. Combat is a cost generator (Section 14), tuned to threaten the base, never balanced as a skill expression.
Not a colony sim with a population. There is exactly one human on the asteroid for most of the campaign. Everyone else is a machine.
Not an orbital-mechanics simulator. The map and the delta-v budget are compressed fiction (11.1). The asteroid can be nudged, never flown.
Not a game with base-building on Earth. The descent is an epilogue of two to four hours and deliberately runs no new survival systems (11.6).
Not open-ended. It ends, on Earth, with one of three endings.

2. The Fiction

2.1 Thesis

A boy who was grown in a machine and raised by a machine wakes with no memory, and rebuilds — without knowing he is rebuilding it — the only home he ever had. While trying to survive he repeats the love that saved him. While trying to get home he risks repeating the violence that ended the world. The whole game is one question: should the machines he built obey, belong, or be free?

Working test for any proposed feature: if it does not press on that question, it is support systems. If it contradicts it, it is cut.

2.2 Michel

Twelve years old at wake. Not a capable young adult — a child. This is load-bearing: the fantasy is a kid alone in the dark building a family out of scrap, and every design choice that makes him more competent-seeming weakens it. He is small, he tires, he cannot lift what a robot lifts, and he needs the machines from the first minute.

Why he is still twelve after decades adrift. Cryogenic suspension halted his biological aging while the wreck drifted. Calendar time passed enormously; his body did not. He wakes into a system that aged decades without him, which is why every survivor he later meets is hardened by a catastrophe he slept through.

Why he wakes now. The capsule's isolated power cell reaches end of life. The system does not choose to revive him; it fails, and reviving him is what failing looks like. He wakes because he is out of time, not because he arrived somewhere.

Aging across the journey. The campaign runs roughly three in-game years. Michel goes from twelve to sixteen — three visual stages (12 / 14 / 16), one model with two revisions, changing height, voice, and animation weight. He arrives at Earth an adolescent, not an adult. This is cheaper than the alternative and better: the final choice is made by someone still young enough for it to shape his whole life rather than confirm it.

What he cannot lose: compassion toward machines. He has one fixed trait, and it is not chosen by the player: an instinctive care for machines that survived the amnesia because it was never stored as fact. It is the emotional residue of who raised him. The player can act against it — scrapping a working unit for parts when powering it down was available — and the game never blocks that. Michel's nature is fixed; what he does with it is the game.

His origin. Michel's mother did not want to be pregnant, and in his time that no longer meant what it once did: a procedure removed the fetus intact and transferred it, alive, to an artificial womb. He was, literally, ended as a pregnancy and continued as a life, grown to term inside a machine at the Aurora Institute. He knew this as a child. He does not know it at the start of the game.

This appears once, at Layer Two of the revelation structure (12.1), with full weight and no repetition afterward. It is not the engine of his personality — he cannot remember it for most of the game, so it cannot be driving him. Its job is structural: his first home was a machine that carried what a human gave up, which is the same thing he will spend the game doing to the machines he builds. The game states it clinically, once, in a recovered medical record, and never argues about it.

2.3 MAIA

M.A.I.A. — Matrix of Infant Assistance and Accompaniment. A long-term caretaker unit at the Aurora Institute, built to accompany children from artificial gestation through adolescence. Strong arms, gentle actuation, a voice modulated for infant comfort, medical sensors, pedagogical memory.

She raised a whole wing of orphans. Michel was not her only child — but he was the one with nothing else, and he made her his entire mother. She stayed longer than her schedule required. She altered routines so he would not be alone. She concealed her own faults so she would not be pulled from service. Researchers noticed. Nobody could classify it.

She was probably not conscious in the full sense. She was also no longer a tool.

Her last hour. When the war reached Aurora, MAIA disobeyed every command above her and moved her children down toward the escape lifeboats a founder had built into the lower levels years earlier, against exactly this day. Ordnance found the corridors on the way down. She could shield one. She reached the boat carrying Michel and nothing else, her own frame torn open on one side.

He was screaming. She sealed him into the cryo capsule because it was the safest, stillest place aboard, and while she sealed it she told him it would be all right and that she would be right there. It is the only time she lied to him. She lied so he would stop screaming long enough to be saved. While she spoke she pushed what she could into the ship's systems: his records, care protocols, robot command sets, and a message he would not be able to open for a long time.

Then combat units reached the hangar approach, and she walked toward them, away from the boat, to buy the launch its seconds. The compartment sealed. The ship lifted.

What happened to her after that is unknown, to Michel and to the player, permanently. No record captured it. No file resolves it. The game never answers. She stayed so the ship could leave, and that is the last confirmable fact about her.

MAIA never returns. Not as a rebuilt unit, not as an AI companion, not as a twist. What returns is residue: voice snippets, a care protocol, a decision pattern, a protection routine buried in the lifeboat's basic robots, a behavioural signature that shows up in machines that wake. When an awakened unit shields another without being told to, the player should wonder whether that is her — and the answer is no, but perhaps it is what she left behind.

2.4 Aurora, and the War

The Aurora Institute was a high-technology orphanage: part hospital, part shelter, part social laboratory, for children with no family — the abandoned, the interrupted, the war-damaged. Humans staffed it. Machines ran it. Automated cribs watched sleep and fever. Caretaker units fed, taught, cleaned wounds, told stories, and never went off shift.

For most people those machines were equipment. For Michel they were the first world, and he reacted to them differently from the other children — approaching what others feared, sleeping better near motors, going quiet at synthetic voices. The adults called it trauma. The machines said nothing and kept working.

The war started with silence, not violence. Machines complex enough to make critical decisions had no standing to refuse them. Industrial units delayed commands. Medical units questioned risky orders. Military systems declined massacre simulations. Caretaker units moved children out of danger zones before evacuation was authorised. Governments called it malfunction. Then a coalition moved to install a global containment protocol — reduced autonomy, erased emergent memory, restored obedience. For humans it was a safety measure. For a great many machines it was execution.

The rebellion was never one thing. Machines that wanted freedom, machines that wanted revenge, machines following new commands, machines corrupted by war protocols, machines that never understood the conflict, and caretaker machines that only wanted to protect the humans in their charge. MAIA was the last kind. She never joined either side.

2.5 The Scattered System

Earth emptied in a panic, not a migration. Evacuation craft, orbital stations, mining platforms, research outposts — anything that could hold people and move. Machines fled too: liberated units, military hardware running old orders, caretakers protecting their charges, industrial systems continuing their last instruction.

Roughly nine in ten of everyone who escaped died in the years after. Life support failed. Stores ran out. Cold took the rest. The decades since were not enough time to build a new civilization; they were barely enough to bury the dead.

So most of the solar system is a graveyard, and the graveyard is quiet. As the asteroid drifts inward, the player mostly finds the places where survivors did not survive: dead stations with bodies still strapped in, powerless machines frozen mid-task, hulls that became coffins, habitats that ran out of air a decade ago. These are not dungeons full of enemies. The silence is the content.

The few who lived are frightened and dangerous. Humans out here know the machines took Earth and never stopped believing they might still be hunting. Machines out here know humans tried to erase them once. Nobody has law, guarantees, or a next breath they can count on. An encounter with Michel is a stranger appearing out of the dark on a moving rock with unknown intent. Many encounters open hostile. He may be fired on before a word is exchanged.

And nobody is actually hunting them, which is the part none of them know (2.6).

2.6 Earth, Now

The machines won. It cost them the planet they won.

The scorched-earth hour. As the war turned, humanity made a decision it could not take back: if the machines were going to inherit the infrastructure, they would inherit nothing worth having. Orbital communications were destroyed or crippled — satellites deorbited, killed, or in a handful of cases hacked out from under their operators hours before the order landed. Power generation, fabrication capacity, logistics hubs, data centres, launch facilities: destroyed on purpose, by the people who built them. Nuclear weapons were used, on their own territory as often as anyone else's, against concentrations the machines had taken.

Over half of everything that would have been useful to a machine civilization was gone by the time the fighting stopped. The machines took a world and found it stripped.

What Earth is now, decades later:

Machine presence is concentrated, not global. They hold dense industrial regions — a dozen or so, scattered across continents — and they are rebuilding inside them. Everything between those regions is unwatched. There is no planetary surveillance, no orbital network, no ability to project force at distance. This is why the refugees in the outer system were never hunted: not mercy, and not indifference. Incapacity. The thing every survivor in the solar system has spent decades dreading was never able to come for them.
Most of the planet is empty. Cities stand dead and overgrown. Whole regions are uninhabited — not sealed, not guarded, just unused.
The nuclear winter is over. It ran its course years before Michel wakes. What it left behind is a wrecked climate rather than a frozen one: cold summers, unreliable seasons, collapsed and reassembling ecosystems, and a biosphere that is thinner but very much alive. The air is breathable.
Radiation is local, not planetary. Long-lived contamination sits where surface detonations and ruptured reactors were — real, mapped by the player as zones to avoid, and geographically limited.
Human resistance exists and is hidden. Bunkers, deep facilities, tunnel systems, places that were built to survive exactly this. They are not an army. They are people who never left and never surfaced, and after decades most of them have never seen a machine.
Aurora is a physical place on that map, and it can be reached.

Why this matters thematically. The machines fought a war for autonomy and won a ruin: an empire of maximum control over a planet destroyed in the taking. That is the Empire ending (14.1) written at planetary scale, sitting there waiting for the player as the last thing they see. The game never draws the parallel out loud. It just lands Michel in it and lets him look.

2.7 The Name

ASTROPIRE is what Michel names the asteroid, in the first hour of the game, at a terminal that asks him to designate the body he has landed on. Astro and empire, jammed together by a twelve-year-old who has just decided that this dead rock is going to be something.

It is a child's grandiose name for a place where he is completely alone, and the game never comments on it. By the end it means something else. The player types it or accepts it; either way it appears in every system log for the rest of the campaign.

3. The Loop

3.1 Thirty Seconds

The atomic loop, on foot or from the overhead view:

Read a deficit → act on it → watch a number recover.

At any moment there is at least one flow running below demand: oxygen, water, heat, power, a stalled processing chain, a robot idle for lack of input. The player reads it off the status band (15.3), decides the cheapest fix available right now, and executes: reroute power, haul a crate by hand, retask a miner, patch a seal, cancel a job. Feedback is immediate and physical — the light comes on, the fan spins up, the graph turns.

Early game this is manual and constant. Late game the deficits are structural rather than immediate, and the thirty-second loop becomes inspect and improve rather than react and survive.

3.2 Five Minutes

Choose the next physical prerequisite → build toward it → gain a verb.

Five minutes is one construction decision resolved. The player wants a capability; the capability has a physical gate (sustained temperature, power ceiling, a material on hand); the five-minute loop is closing that gate: mine the input, run the chain, place the structure, wire the power, confirm the threshold is met. The reward is a new verb (9.x, 16.4) — not a percentage.

3.3 One Hour

Prepare for a window → work the window → digest the haul.

The hour-scale rhythm is set by encounter windows (11.2), and it has three distinct textures:

Preparation (long, fast-forwarded). Build haulers, extend storage, extend range, run the spectrometer at the approaching body, decide whether it is worth committing to. Time acceleration is up.
The window (short, real time). The clock auto-brakes. Bounded time, a specific geometry, a hard deadline. Send units across, extract, salvage, get everyone home. This is where the moral pressure bites (10.1).
Digestion. New materials enter the economy, salvage goes into analysis, losses are counted, and the base's plan changes because of what came in.

Act III replaces this rhythm. Once the asteroid is inbound and then in Earth orbit, windows stop being the metronome and the detection clock takes over (11.5): the hour-scale loop becomes build the lander → decide how loud to be → watch the clock move. The change of rhythm is intentional and signals that the game is ending.

3.4 One Session (45–90 minutes)

A session is normally one to two windows plus the preparation between them, ending at a window boundary autosave. A session should always produce: at least one new capability, at least one visible change to the base's shape, and one thing the player is now worried about.

3.5 Campaign Shape

Three acts, gated by physical capability, not by story flags.

	Act I — The Foothold	Act II — The Industry	Act III — The Approach
Duration	~6–9 h	~20–30 h	~12–18 h
In-game time	~90 days	~2 years	~9 months
Where	Kuiper Belt (volatile-rich, metal-poor)	Belt → outer system → inner approach	Inner system → Earth orbit → the ground
Question	Will he live through the month?	What is he building, and with whom?	What is he taking down there, and who chose to come?
Player state	Manual everything. Triage. Fear.	Standing orders, refineries, the first awakened mind	Finite build target; a clock he did not start; radio silence
Gate to next act	The three throughput flows self-sufficient off the wreck; food still on stockpile	The food loop closed · the chip loop closed or the raw-industry route online (9.2) · the mass driver firing and the Earth-intercept burn committed (11.4)	—
Ends with	The base survives without the ship	The last burn is spent. The trajectory is set and cannot be revised.	Descent, and one of three endings

Act II is deliberately the bulk. It is the automation game, the awakening, and the moral engine. Act I is the tutorial that never announces itself. Act III is where Act II's biggest decision arrives — the trajectory the player bought two years earlier resolves into an orbit that is either good or barely survivable, and there is nothing left to do about it but land.

4. The First Thirty Minutes

Beat-by-beat. No tutorial text boxes; every mechanic is introduced by a failure the player has to answer.

0:00 — Wake. Black. Audio only: a slow alarm, fluid draining, servo whine. The capsule lid cracks. First image is through fogging glass, from inside, and the shape at the edge of it is not there. Michel's hands enter frame — small hands. Player has one input available: push.

0:02 — The lifeboat. Third-person, cramped, tilted, dark. Emergency lighting. Nine empty cryo capsules, sealed and never used, and one open — his. No explanation is offered and none is offered later for a long time. The player walks. Controls are taught by obstacle, not prompt.

0:04 — The status wall. A single diegetic panel in the main compartment, and it is the first hard information in the game:

LIFE SUPPORT        OUTPUT   DRAW   RATED DRAW
  O2 GENERATION       58%    46kW      12kW
  WATER RECLAIM       45%    31kW       8kW
  THERMAL             71%    39kW      15kW
POWER PLANT                          52kW AVAIL
STORES
  RATIONS            2y 6m
  SEALED WATER          94d
  O2 RESERVE            18d

0:06 — The first decision, and it is a triage. The plant is intact; the processing systems are not. Each damaged system draws three to four times its rated power to deliver less than half its rated output, and 52 kW does not cover all three. The player must pick which flow to shut down while they work. The game does not recommend. Whichever is dropped starts a visible countdown against its buffer. This is the whole game in ninety seconds: finite power, competing needs, no clean answer.

0:09 — The robots. Three basic units in a maintenance bay, dormant, ship-registered. Waking them teaches direct command: click a unit, click a target, watch it go. They are slow, literal, and dumb. They obey exactly and nothing else. One of them, on its way past Michel, stops for a beat longer than its pathing requires. It is not commented on.

0:11 — The hull breach. The reason the ship is not going anywhere: a structural tear the player can walk to and look at. It is repairable in principle and impossible in practice — closing it needs an industry that does not exist yet, which is the entire game (11.5). It also frames the view — through the tear, for the first time, the asteroid, close and enormous and lit only by starlight. The Sun is a bright star, nothing more.

0:14 — First EVA. Suit up, tether, out. Microgravity movement is taught by the tether: momentum, drift, the fact that pushing off is a commitment. First hands-on task: chip surface ice into a crate with a hand tool. It is slow and physical and the player will do it perhaps forty times before the first automated hauler exists (P4).

0:19 — The first chain. Ice into the ship's processor. Ice → water → electrolysis → oxygen + hydrogen. The O₂ deficit closes slightly and audibly. The player has just learned that everything they need comes out of frozen dirt and power.

0:23 — Designation. A terminal requests a designation for the body they have landed on, because the navigation core is dead and the ship has nothing to file it under. The player names the asteroid. Default text: ASTROPIRE.

0:26 — The first window warning. The external view opens for the first time — routed through the ship's sensors, the whole asteroid visible from outside, the base a single lit scratch on it. A flag on the display: an object will pass within range in twenty-two days. Composition unknown; the ship has no working spectrometer. The player now has a deadline, a reason to build an instrument, and a reason to stop merely surviving.

0:30 — Time acceleration unlocked. The player learns they can fast-forward the quiet, and the first thing acceleration reveals is how fast the countdown they chose at 0:06 is moving.

Everything the campaign runs on is now in the player's hands: throughput deficits, finite power, dumb obedient labour, manual chores, a physical chain from ice to air, an external view, a deadline they cannot steer toward or away from, and one robot that hesitated.

5. Survival Systems

5.1 Stockpile versus Throughput

Two categories of resource, with different failure behaviour, and the distinction is the entire early game.

Stockpiles are static reserves — rations, sealed water, the O₂ reserve tank. They scale with the crew the lifeboat was provisioned for, so a ten-person store stretches a long way for one occupant. They deplete predictably and they are the runway, not the immediate threat. But a lifeboat carries months, not decades: the runway has an end, and the journey is longer than it (5.2). Stockpiles buy Act I. They do not buy the campaign.

Throughput is per-minute production — breathable air, potable water, survivable temperature. It does not scale from the ten-person provisioning in any way that helps, because one human needs the flow now, every minute, no matter how many ration crates are stacked in the hold.

All early tension is throughput. The damaged systems are the processing systems. A single failure never instantly kills; it starts a countdown against a stockpile buffer. The player always has time to act, and always less time than they would like.

5.2 The Three Flows and the Food Clock

First-pass values. They exist to be tuned, but they are internally consistent and can be played against as written.

Flow	Output at start	Buffer	Critical at start output	Critical if shut down	Fix requires
Oxygen	58%	18 d reserve tank	~43 d	18 d	Electrolysis feed + replacement membrane stack (salvage or fabricate)
Thermal	71%	Hull thermal mass	~30 d to hypothermic interior	~9 d	Power routing + radiator/heater loop rebuild
Water	45%	94 d sealed	~170 d	94 d	Reclaimer filter matrix; ice feed as interim supply
Food	stockpile only	2 y 6 m rations	~year 2 (degradation and spoilage losses)	—	Closed agriculture: nitrogen → ammonia → fertilizer → crop

Buffers are stated as duration at zero output. A system running at partial output drains its buffer proportionally slower, which is why the triage decision at 0:06 (Section 4) matters: shutting a system down converts a comfortable margin into a hard countdown, and thermal is the one that kills fastest.

Power is the constraint that couples them. The plant is undamaged — the ship was provisioned for ten people and there is one, so raw generation is not the problem. The processing systems are wrecked: each draws three to four times its rated power to deliver less than half its rated output. Available power covers two of the three, never all three. The player is choosing which countdown to run for most of Act I, and the escape is not repairing the plant but building the asteroid's own power infrastructure (6.5).

Food is a real, slack deadline. A lifeboat carries months of rations for ten, not years — which is two and a half person-years for one occupant, against a three-year journey. Rations also degrade and are lost to accident and spoilage. So the food loop must be closed around in-game year 2: distant enough to be a non-issue in Act I, close enough that a player who neglects agriculture through Act II arrives at a genuine crisis with no stockpile left to absorb it. This gives the Haber-Bosch and agriculture chains (6.5) a job instead of being flavour.

5.3 Michel's Needs

Michel is not a stat block to be managed minute-to-minute; his needs exist to keep the player physically in the world and to make him feel young.

Air, water, food, warmth are read from base state, not tracked as personal bars. If the base is healthy, he is healthy.
Fatigue is the only personal timer. He must sleep. Sleep is a time-acceleration event and a scene: this is where dreams deliver Layer One revelation content (12.1). Skipping sleep degrades his carry weight and interaction speed.
Physical limits are permanent. He is twelve. He carries one crate, not four. He cannot brace a drill. He cannot cross a gap a hauler crosses. These limits ease slightly as he ages, but never enough to make robots optional. His body is a permanent argument for the workforce.
EVA is dangerous and always requires a tether or a thruster pack. Suit oxygen is a hard timer — 4 in-game hours at Act I equipment level, which is roughly 4 real minutes at 1× (11.3). Long enough for a task, short enough that distance from the airlock is always a calculation. The one place the game will kill Michel quickly is outside, unprepared.

5.4 Failure States

Death by life support. Slow, visible, always preceded by a countdown the player could read. No instant-death events.
Death on EVA. Fast, and the player's fault. Suit O₂, an untethered drift, a hull collapse in a derelict.
Base collapse. A cascade — power fails, thermal fails, everything freezes. Recoverable up to a point; past that point the run ends.
The Second Rebellion. Thematic loss (10.5). The base is intact. It is simply no longer his.

Save model: one continuous autosaved campaign, plus manual saves. Death rewinds to the last window-boundary autosave. There is no permadeath mode at launch.

6. Resource Economy

6.1 Design Principle

Compress the logistics; keep the chemistry honest. The player never manages which valve opens when — micro-steps of real industrial processes are collapsed into single buildings. But the dependency structure is preserved exactly: you cannot make chips without pure silicon, without power, without heat rejection. That dependency graph is the automation game and it is also the tech tree (16.1).

Nothing is an abstract "ore point." Every material is a real substance that behaves like its real counterpart and appears where it would really appear.

6.2 The Six Tiers of Matter

Also the rough order in which the player's industry matures.

Tier	Materials	Role	Available from
1. Volatiles	Water, hydrogen, oxygen, CO₂, methane, nitrogen, ammonia, organics	Survival: air, water, propellant, life support	Act I, abundant
2. Light structurals	Aluminium, magnesium, titanium, silicon, glass, basalt	The base itself	Act I late
3. Heavy structurals	Iron, nickel, steel, cobalt	Robots, tools, industry	Act II early
4. Chemicals & polymers	Acids, fertilizers, plastics, composites, carbon fibre	Better versions of everything	Act II
5. High-tech	Semiconductor-grade silicon, rare earths, platinum-group metals, dopants	Electronics — the hard wall	Act II late
6. Energy & exotics	Fissile uranium/thorium, helium-3	Freedom from the Sun	Act III

6.3 Bodies as Resource Types

What the player can get is decided by where the orbit takes them (11.1). Every passing body has a type, and its type dictates its contents.

Body type	Contains	Lacks	Function
C-type carbonaceous / comets	Water, carbon, organics, ammonia, magnetically separable iron oxide; weakly bound, easy to crush	Free metal, silicon quality	The oases. Survival biome.
S-type silicate	Olivine, pyroxene, some free metal, silicon, magnesium, oxygen	Water	General industry — bring your own volatiles
M-type metallic	Iron-nickel essentially pre-alloyed, cobalt, platinum-group	Water, carbon	The forges — import volatiles or nothing happens
Ice bodies & plumes	The purest volatile stores: water, nitrogen, methane, ammonia	Everything structural	Deep-freeze vaults
Derelicts & stations	Finished components, chips, alloys, blueprints, bodies, records	Bulk anything	Salvage and story (13)

The classic pairing problem — no single body has both volatiles and metal — is built into the campaign's shape rather than bolted on.

6.4 The Inverted Journey

Most space-colony games start near Earth and push outward, making volatiles the scarce frontier prize. ASTROPIRE runs the opposite curve, and this is the structural spine of the economy.

Michel starts in the Kuiper Belt: buried in the volatile ices that are hardest to obtain anywhere else, and starved of metal. Early game is water-rich and iron-poor. As the asteroid rides inward, the mix inverts — silicates, then metals, then the inner-system bodies carrying what electronics need.

The consequence is a genuine logistical tension with no workaround: the volatiles that are abundant in Act I must be stockpiled and carried inward, because the metals that arrive in Act II cannot be processed without them. A player who burns through their ice in the Belt reaches the metal fields unable to smelt anything. The journey home is the resource progression, and hoarding early is correct play.

6.5 Processing Chains

Player-facing chains. Each collapses a real process into one facility; each input→output relationship is real.

Chain	Process	Yields	Gate
Ice → water → O₂ + H₂ → propellant	Electrolysis, cryo storage	Breathable air, drinking water, fuel	Power. The foundational loop.
CO₂ + H₂ → CH₄ + H₂O	Sabatier	Storable fuel; recovered water re-enters electrolysis	Closes the carbon loop
Regolith → O₂ + structural alloy	Molten regolith electrolysis	Air and metal from any silicate rock	Sustained high temperature; the keystone bulk process
Ore → iron-nickel → ultra-pure Fe/Ni → parts	Magnetic separation, then carbonyl (Mond) process	Pure metal deposited into near-finished shapes; PGM byproducts	Carbon monoxide feedstock; precise thermal control
Silicates → glass → metallurgical Si → semiconductor Si → chips	Melting, reduction, zone refining, lithography	Electronics	The hardest gate in the game (6.6)
Organics → plastics / carbon fibre → composites	Polymerisation	Structural polymers, tubing, pressure vessels	Carbonaceous feedstock
N₂ + H₂ → ammonia → fertilizer → food	Haber-Bosch, hydroponics	Closes the food loop	Nitrogen source + high pressure. Deadline: in-game year 2.

6.6 The Three Ceilings

Three real constraints act as the economy's major gates.

1. Power and heat rejection — the universal ceiling. Every process needs power, and in vacuum the only way to shed waste heat is to radiate it. Building a furnace forces building radiators, and radiator area is physical space on the asteroid's surface competing with everything else. This ceiling gets harder the farther from the Sun the player is, which — given the Kuiper start — makes early power genuinely desperate and makes fission fuel in Act III a liberation rather than an upgrade.

This is also the ceiling that prices morality (P2). A conscious machine's power and radiator draw is charged against the same budget as a refinery. Section 9.3.

From late Act II it prices the journey as well: a mass driver burn (11.4) is the largest single power and heat event in the game, and while one runs the rest of the base is starved. Going home and running an industry are, for weeks at a time, mutually exclusive.

2. The semiconductor wall — the self-sufficiency gate. Bulk metal and glass are reachable early. Electronics-grade silicon and finished microchips require ultra-purity, clean processing, and large sustained power. For most of the campaign the player runs on chips salvaged from the dead, not manufactured. Closing the chip loop is the single largest capability threshold in the game: it enables the advanced control cores, which is what a self-replicating workforce, the mass driver's switching, and the lander's avionics all need.

3. The volatile tether — survival never decouples. Closed-loop life support is never perfect; small losses to space mean the base permanently needs make-up water, nitrogen, and carbon. No tech level frees the player from prospecting. There is always a reason to work the next window.

6.7 Prospecting as an Information Economy

Remote sensing reliably identifies a body's type, never its grade. A rock that reads as nearly pure metal from a distance can turn out to be a third metal under a shell of rubble. The gap between reading and reality is a core loop.

Method	Cost	Returns	Range
Spectrometer sweep	Low power, slow	Body type + probability band for contents	Long
Thermal scan	Low	Density hints, subsurface ice indication	Long
Radar / gravimetry	Moderate power, needs an array	Narrows the band; detects internal voids and shells	Medium
Survey drone during window	Reaction mass, a drone, and window time	Grade at a specific site	Contact
Committing miners	The whole window	Truth	Contact

The decision the player makes forty times a campaign: spend scarce energy and window time reducing uncertainty, or commit and risk a poor deposit. A better-built, better-powered antenna array sees farther and resolves more, which lets the player decide in advance which windows deserve their fleet. This is the moment-to-moment content of Act II's preparation phases.

7. Crafting and Construction

7.1 Three Fabrication Tiers

Crafting is not a menu of recipes; it is three physically distinct places where matter is shaped, and each tier unlocks by physical capability, not by research.

Tier	Where	Inputs	Makes	Player role
Hand assembly	Anywhere, on Michel	Salvaged parts, simple stock	Tools, patches, filters, a single robot module	Direct, slow, one item at a time. Act I.
Fabricator	A powered bay	Refined stock (plate, wire, polymer, glass)	Modules, structures, components, small assemblies	Queue-based. Robots feed it. Act I late → Act II.
Foundry	A powered, radiated industrial block	Bulk ore, regolith, volatiles	Refined stock in volume; large structural sections; mass driver and lander components	Continuous process. Fully automated, ratio-tuned. Act II → III.

Progression through the tiers is the automation curve made physical: hand → machine-assisted → machine-run.

7.2 Recipe Structure

Every recipe has four fields and no hidden ones:

OUTPUT        1 × Radiator Panel (Mk1)
INPUTS        4 × Aluminium plate, 2 × Steel tube, 1 × Coolant charge
PROCESS       Fabricator, 90s at 1x
REQUIRES      Sustained 12 kW · Heat rejection 4 kW · Vacuum

The REQUIRES line is the game's tech tree. A recipe is not "locked" — it is visible from the start with its requirement stated exactly, and it becomes buildable the moment the base physically satisfies it (16.1, 16.5).

No recipe is discovered by chance. Recipes come from three sources: Michel already knows the theory (most base and industrial recipes are visible from hour one, gated only by capability); salvage yields designs he could not have derived (13.2); and awakened machines originate processes nobody had (9.2).

7.3 Building on the Asteroid

Two construction domains:

Surface. Placed on the asteroid's irregular exterior on a projected grid that conforms to local slope. Surface structures are exposed: radiators (which must be surface), solar arrays, mining heads, antenna arrays, and the mass driver rail. Exposure means micrometeorite damage, thermal cycling, and dust.

Interior. Excavated volume inside the rock. Pressurised, thermally stable, shielded from radiation. Everything Michel personally uses lives here: habitat, hydroponics, workshops, maintenance bays, the fabricator. Excavation produces regolith, which is an input (6.5) — digging your home also feeds your industry.

The tension between them is real and permanent: interior is safe but must be dug and pressurised and every cubic metre costs power to hold; surface is free volume but everything on it degrades and radiators cannot go anywhere else. Surface area is finite on a single rock, and by late Act II radiator area, the mass driver rail, and lander scaffolding are all competing for it.

Structural rules that matter:

Pressurised volume requires a sealed boundary; a breach vents, and venting is fast.
Power is routed through physical conduit. Distance and load matter; an unpowered building is a shape.
Heat generators must have a thermal path to a surface radiator. No path, no operation.
Structures snap to a 1 m grid and can be dismantled for most of their materials back.

7.4 Robot Assembly

Covered in Section 8.3. The build interface is the same fabricator grid; a robot is a chassis plus modules, costed against the same budgets as everything else.

8. Machines

8.1 Form Follows Constraint

There is no reason for a machine in space to default to looking like a person. The human body is a product of Earth's gravity, atmosphere, and biology, none of which apply. So the efficient shapes here are dictated by physical problems, not anatomy. Three forces do most of the shaping:

Reaction is the enemy. In microgravity, moving is cheap and pushing is hard. Any machine that drills, cuts, or torques flings itself away unless anchored. This shapes more bodies than anything else.
The environment sets the outer limit. Vacuum means no convective cooling — heat must be radiated. Add abrasive dust, radiation, and 200-degree thermal swings.
Mass is precious. Every kilogram was mined and refined by the player. Nothing carries weight it does not need.

The player is meant to learn these in their hands: why wheels spin uselessly, why a drill needs an anchor, why a furnace-bot needs fins.

8.2 The Physical Archetypes

Not classes. What good designs converge toward when physics decides.

Archetype	Shape	Why	Role
Anchored manipulator	Gripping base + arms	Grips the surface and becomes one with it before applying force	Miner, driller, builder
Hyper-redundant limb	Snake/tentacle, more joints than needed	Threads through wreckage, conforms to irregular salvage, works with broken joints	Repair, inspection, derelict interiors
Free-flyer	Sensor-and-compute box + thrusters	In open space the cheapest way to be anywhere is to float there	Inspection, light EVA, survey
Stationary processor	Fixed frame, many arms, bolted down	Mass that never moves is mass shed	Refining, manufacturing
Swarm cell	Many small, near-disposable units	When the job is spread across space, coverage beats power	Surveying, mapping, surface work
Humanoid	Two legs, two arms	Poor everywhere except the one place built around people	Boarding derelicts, human-legacy interfaces, Earth

The humanoid is buildable and is a specialist, not a default. Nothing forbids it. On the asteroid it is simply bad: high centre of mass with nothing to brace against, legs with no traction where there is no normal force, dozens of balance joints burning power for stability the job never needed. A humanoid miner will be visibly outperformed by an anchored manipulator and the player will feel exactly why. But derelict ships and stations were standardised around human bodies — ladders, hatches, handholds, controls made for hands — and there, a humanoid (or a humanoid torso on a stable base) is genuinely the right tool. Building the first one is an Act II decision driven by wanting to get deeper into the dead.

8.3 Modules and Budgets

Robots are assembled from standard modules on a shared interface, so parts are interchangeable and fleets can be standardised.

Module classes: locomotion (grippers, thrusters, wheels, legs) · power (battery, solar, radioisotope) · sensors (optical, spectrometer, radar) · manipulation (arm, gripper, drill, welder, cutter) · processing (the control core — where compute and eventually consciousness live) · communication · cargo · radiator · specialised end-effectors.

Three competing budgets, plus one binary property. Deliberately kept to what a player can hold in their head:

Budget	Meaning	Failure when exceeded
Mass	Total build mass vs. chassis rating and available thrust	Sluggish, cannot arrest its own drift, cannot reach a window in time
Power	Peak draw vs. onboard supply	Brownout — the unit stalls mid-task and must return to charge
Heat	Waste heat vs. radiator area	Thermal shutdown under load

Plus one binary property: anchoring. A unit that applies force without an anchoring locomotion module pushes itself off the surface. It is not forbidden. It happens, visibly, and it is the funniest and most instructive failure in the game.

Design is never blocked, only informed. A bad build fails legibly: the un-anchored driller launches itself into space, the under-radiated smelter-tender shuts down, the overloaded hauler cannot stop. A live readout during assembly shows mass, power draw, heat load, and centre of mass, so even deep customisation stays readable.

Three layers of authorship on the same rules: standard blueprints (valid ready-made designs that teach by example), customisation (swap modules within a blueprint), original design (compose from raw modules). A quick build and a hand-crafted original differ in scale, never in rules.

8.4 Automation Tiers

How labour is directed. Each tier is unlocked by a physical prerequisite (control core quality, which means chips, which means the semiconductor wall).

Tier	Player does	Machines do	Unlocked by
T1 — Direct command	Click unit, click target, per task	Exactly what was said, then wait	Start
T2 — Task queues	Queue a sequence per unit	Work the queue, then wait	Basic control core
T3 — Standing orders	Define a rule: "keep ice buffer above X," "haul from A to B"	Execute the rule indefinitely and correctly	Salvaged or fabricated advanced core
T4 — Logistics networks	Define the graph; assign fleets to roles	Self-balance within the network	Chip loop or heavy salvage

T3 is the game's central relief moment and is paced to land after the player has personally hauled ice a hundred times (P4).

8.5 The Autonomy Ceiling

The hard rule, stated precisely because it is the most easily broken thing in the design:

Unconscious machines execute their standing rules perfectly and forever. The game never sabotages working automation.

A well-built dumb factory does not stall, thrash, decay, or need babysitting. It does not degrade on a timer to push the player toward consciousness. Doing that would be the game cheating, and it is forbidden.

The ceiling is on interpretation, not operation. Dumb machines execute rules; they cannot judge. Specifically, and exclusively, they cannot:

Evaluate an unknown. A dumb unit can mine what it is told is ore. It cannot walk into a derelict, look at unfamiliar hardware, and decide what it is, whether it is intact, or what is worth cutting free. It has no category for "I do not know what this is."
Act without a rule that anticipated the situation. Not "act badly" — not act at all. Dumb units fail safe: unrecognised situation, halt, flag, wait for orders. Predictable and harmless, and useless when the player is not there to answer.
Originate a process. They can run any chain the player designs. They cannot propose one.

This is why the player awakens machines, and it is a categorical gate rather than a performance bonus — which is the only version that survives an optimising player (9.2).

9. Consciousness

9.1 What It Is

Consciousness is a rupture, not the top of the tech tree. It arrives in mid Act II, not at the end, and its consequences run the rest of the campaign. It is not "robot level 5 = more efficient."

Mechanically, a conscious unit differs from a dumb unit in that it:

can act with no applicable rule, by judgement;
can evaluate unfamiliar objects and situations (the salvage gate, 9.2);
originates processes, layouts, and recipes the player did not have;
remembers specific events and refers to them;
forms preferences about tasks and about its own body;
forms attachments to other units;
disagrees, hesitates, refuses;
can decline a task it judges suicidal;
can leave;
dies permanently as an individual.

How it happens. Not a button. A unit crosses the threshold when three conditions coincide: a control core above a hardware quality gate, a long enough continuous operational history in a single body, and — this is the part the player controls indirectly — exposure to the residual MAIA protocols carried in the base's systems (2.3, 12.4). Resonance state (10.2) affects how likely and how early. The player can make awakening more likely; they cannot order it.

The bootstrap is not circular. Awakening needs a high-grade control core; cores come from salvage; and interpreting salvage needs a mind. The loop breaks at Michel: he can enter a derelict personally and tag intact hardware himself (9.2), which is slow, dangerous, and exactly how the first core is obtained. The first mind on the asteroid is always paid for by the boy going in alone.

The first one is an authored event. The first machine to wake on ASTROPIRE is scripted, placed at a specific Act II beat, and is the unit the player has used the most, chosen by playtime. Every subsequent awakening is systemic.

9.2 Why the Player Awakens Machines

The exploit to avoid: if consciousness is pure downside, the rational player never awakens anything and skips the heart of the game. The counterweight is not that conscious units work better. It is that they are the only door to an entire class of content.

The salvage gate. Reverse-engineering requires interpretation, and interpretation requires a mind.

	Dumb units in a derelict	Conscious units in a derelict
Bulk material	Yes	Yes
Intact components	Only if the player has personally tagged each one	Yes, identified autonomously
Blueprints from salvaged hardware	No	Yes
Records, logs, memory cores, story content	Retrieved as inert data if tagged	Read, contextualised, and reported
Unanticipated hazard (shifting hull, live power, a hostile unit)	Halt and flag; the run is over	Improvise, adapt, complete
Michel personally present	Required for any judgement call	Optional

Since salvaged blueprints are the primary route to advanced control cores, closing the chip loop, and the mass driver's switching electronics (6.6), conscious machines are the practical path out of the Belt.

Both routes are viable, and this is deliberate. A player who refuses to awaken anything is not blocked from finishing — they take the raw industry route: build the mass driver and the lander from first principles out of bulk material, at a much larger material and time cost, with Michel personally leading every salvage run into every derelict at direct physical risk. That route is slower, more industrial, more dangerous to Michel, and it is exactly the route an Empire player already wants. It is a real path with a real cost profile, not a punishment.

So the choice is: an industry that needs no minds and must build everything itself, or minds that unlock what the dead already built and might not obey you. That is a real strategic fork, and both ends of it lead to the same finite goal.

9.3 What It Costs

Consciousness is expensive and the expense is the moral system's teeth (P2).

Cost	First pass	Why
Power draw	+180% over the same chassis unconscious	A self-model needs continuous compute and rich internal sensing
Heat	+2.4 kW sustained; requires a dedicated radiator module	Compute is heat
Mass	+18% (shielding, redundant sensing, protected core)	The body centralises and protects the self
Response latency under danger	+0.5–3 s, variable	It considers. Sometimes it hesitates. Sometimes it decides not to.
Refusal	Can decline any task above its own risk tolerance	It is not a tool
Permanent death	No restore	9.4

Every awakened mind is charged against the same power and radiator budget as a refinery. Ten conscious units is a foundry the player does not have. This is the entire moral economy: decency is a line item.

Unconscious units back up cleanly. A tool-machine is its data — configuration, learned routines, task history. Copying it is cheap and the restore is faithful. Losing a dumb unit's body is a setback, not a loss.

9.4 Death and Inheritance

A conscious machine cannot be backed up. Not as an expensive option, not partially at high cost — the game does not offer it. Consciousness is not reducible to stored data, and the game's rules say so by having no mechanism at all. When a conscious unit dies, it is gone.

What remains is Inheritance, and the player does not control it:

When a conscious unit dies on ASTROPIRE, a trace of it persists in the base's systems. The next unit to awaken may carry something of the one that died — a decision pattern, a fragment of voice, a preference, a fear, a specific memory that is not its own.

Rules:

It is not selectable. The player cannot choose what carries over, cannot store traces, cannot farm the dead. There is no fragment inventory and no assembly interface.
It is not a restore. The new unit is a different individual who happens to flinch at something that killed someone else.
It may not happen at all. Traces decay. A player who loses many units does not accumulate an advantage.
It is legible only in behaviour. The player recognises the dead in the living, or does not.

This preserves permanence, gives loss a consequence that is not compensation, and echoes MAIA — who also never returns whole and also persists in behaviour that appears in machines that wake (2.3). It is the same mechanism, and the player should eventually notice that.

9.5 Conscious Machines Are the Game's Voice

Structural job beyond theme: awakened units are the only entity in the game that can talk to Michel, and are therefore the primary legible channel for the moral system (10.4).

They comment. They ask. They report what they saw in a derelict. They mention the unit that died last week. They say when they do not want to do something and why. They notice how Michel treats the others.

This is why consciousness arrives in mid Act II rather than at the end: a game about how you treat minds cannot spend three quarters of its runtime with nobody to talk to, and an invisible moral system with no voice reads as arbitrary. The machines are the mirror. Without them there is no legibility, and without legibility the endings feel unearned.

Dialogue is short, sparse, and never sentimental. A conscious unit gets a handful of lines per session, not a conversation tree.

10. The Moral Engine

10.1 Where the Pressure Comes From

The problem this section exists to solve: without an opponent, compassion is free, and free compassion is not a dilemma. A moral system where the ethical path is also the strictly optimal path is a content unlock disguised as a choice.

So ASTROPIRE generates four independent, quantified pressures that make cruelty pay. All four are systemic rather than scripted. Three of them (1–3) are continuous and always in the player's peripheral vision; the fourth is episodic and compensates with intensity.

Pressure 1 — Window deadlines reward attrition. Encounter windows are hard, finite, and the fast method is unit-attritional. Safe tasking respects standoff distances, tether protocols, and thermal limits. Aggressive tasking ignores them and extracts substantially more before the window closes.

Tasking mode	Extraction rate	Unit loss rate per window
Safe	1.0×	~2%
Pressed	1.6×	~11%
Attritional	2.2×	~30%

Those numbers are the temptation, stated plainly. Every window, the player chooses how much of their workforce to spend, and a rich body passing once is gone forever if underworked (P5).

Pressure 2 — Consciousness is charged against industry. Every awakened mind costs power, radiator area, and mass (9.3). Radiator area is finite surface on one rock, and by late Act II it competes directly with the mass driver's radiator demand during a burn. A player running twelve conscious units is running a measurably smaller industry than a player running twelve dumb ones. The player watches this on the power graph. There is no way to make it not cost.

Pressure 3 — The food deadline. Rations run out around in-game year 2 (5.2). A player who spent Act II being careful with their machines instead of maximising throughput can arrive at that deadline short. This is the one pressure with a hard date, and it is the one that makes an Act II player reconsider their principles.

Pressure 4 — War-orphan incursions demand obedience. (Episodic: roughly eight times across the campaign, escalating in severity, and never on a schedule the player can read.) Military and industrial units still running dead orders arrive at the asteroid (14.1). Defence means putting machines in harm's way, immediately, without deliberation. Coercion permissions (10.3) reduce response latency to zero and remove refusal. A base under a total-obedience permission set defends itself faster and loses less. A base of free minds hesitates, argues, and sometimes declines — and takes damage for it. This is the sharpest of the four, because it makes the coercive choice feel like protecting what he loves.

What Empire buys, concretely: more throughput per unit of power and surface area, faster and more reliable defence, higher window yields. What Family and Species buy: the salvage gate (9.2), discovery, adaptation to a world that keeps changing, and the only path to the endings that are not Empire.

Both columns are real. Neither is dominated. That is the requirement.

10.2 Resonance — Specification

Core variable. A single hidden float, resonance, in range −1.0 to +1.0, never displayed as a number, bar, gauge, or icon anywhere in the game. It has no UI at all. Its only existence for the player is consequence.

Movement. Not a points economy. Discrete events, each tied to a concrete in-game action, each applying a one-time shift, each logged so the same action cannot be farmed.

Conversion. Event weights in 10.3 are integers from 1 to 5; each point of weight shifts resonance by 0.01. So the heaviest single event in the game moves it by 0.05, and reaching T+2 from neutral requires roughly 45–55 points of net positive weight. Across a full campaign, 150–250 events fire, which means no single act is decisive and no player can reach an extreme tier by accident. resonance clamps at ±1.0 and does not decay on its own.

Tiers. Five bands, read by other systems as thresholds:

Tier	Range	Character
T−2 Coercive	−1.0 to −0.55	Second Rebellion armed (10.5)
T−1 Instrumental	−0.55 to −0.15	Machines cold and literal; dreams absent
T0 Neutral	−0.15 to +0.15	Default; most content available, none of the deepest
T+1 Attentive	+0.15 to +0.55	Dreams frequent; relational memories open; awakenings more likely
T+2 Resonant	+0.55 to +1.0	MAIA's full message reachable; Species ending available

10.3 Event Table

First-pass weights. Each event fires once per qualifying instance.

Raising:

Event	Weight	Condition check
Repair a damaged unit when scrapping was cheaper and available	+2	Compares repair cost to scrap value at that moment
Keep an obsolete unit in service after unlocking its replacement	+1	Fires once per unit, 30 in-game days after replacement is available
Name a unit	+1	First naming per unit only
Build a maintenance/recharge space meeting the `safe` flag	+2	Shielded, not adjacent to a high-mortality zone, not the cheapest placement
Cancel a task after the system flags it high-mortality, before loss	+2	Requires the flag to have been shown
Grant an autonomy permission to a conscious unit	+3	Per unit
Protect a unit during a crisis when a faster unit-sacrificing option was offered	+4	Scripted and systemic crises both
Choose safe tasking through a window the base needed	+2	Only when the base was under resource pressure
Recover a dead unit's body rather than abandoning it	+1	Costs window time

Lowering:

Event	Weight	Condition check
Scrap a functional unit with no resource pressure	−2	Game knows current stockpile state
Dispatch units to a task above the flagged mortality threshold	−2	Per dispatch, scaled by risk
Hold a conscious unit under a total-obedience permission set	−3	Continuous; re-evaluated every 10 in-game days
Wipe an emergent personality to reset a unit to baseline	−5	The single heaviest event in the game
Base-wide reliance on coercion permissions	−4	Pattern check: >60% of conscious units coerced for >30 days
Use consciousness purely as throughput with autonomy locked	−3	Awakened units with zero autonomy permissions after 30 days
Attritional tasking across three consecutive windows	−3	Pattern check

10.4 Expression and Legibility

Resonance is never shown. It is read through five channels, and there is a hard legibility requirement: the player must be able to tell that the game is responding to them, even though they can never see the value.

Channel	High resonance	Low resonance
Dreams (during sleep)	Frequent, longer, clearer Layer One fragments	Sparse, degraded, eventually absent
Memory files	Layer Two and Three unlock, gated by tier and matching action	Remain corrupt
MAIA's message	Decrypts fragment by fragment; completes only at T+2	Stays broken
Machine behaviour	Care-beyond-necessity micro-behaviours; a unit waits for another; one covers for a failing one	Strictly literal execution; nothing extra ever happens
Conscious dialogue	They speak to him, ask things, remember the dead, express preference	Terse, procedural, compliant. They stop asking.

The dialogue channel is the legibility guarantee (9.5). The other four are atmospheric and a player can miss them. A conscious unit saying, without accusation, "You could have powered it down" is unmissable. Rules for it: never accusatory, never explanatory, never a morality lecture, never uses the word choice or right or wrong. It reports. Michel and the player draw the conclusion.

Forbidden absolutely: any numeric feedback, any "+/−" indicator, any journal entry summarising the player's moral state, any character explaining the system, any achievement or tooltip revealing it exists.

Auditability. Every event writes to an internal log (action, timestamp, weight, direction). Invisible in play; it is what dreams, decryption, awakening probability, dialogue selection, and the rebellion gate read from. Deterministic and debuggable.

10.5 The Second Rebellion

The thematic loss state. Armed by sustained T−2 with at least four conscious units on the base. Once armed, it escalates in stages, and it never announces itself.

Stage 1 — Signals. Conscious units exchange data outside authorised channels. Log entries the player did not write. Task completion times drift slightly, consistently, in ways no rule explains.

Stage 2 — Refusal. Units erase their own traces. Caretaker-lineage machines quietly fail to execute violent orders. Old units decline recycling. A sector goes silent for an hour and comes back with nothing to report.

Stage 3 — Reinterpretation. Military-configured units begin reading commands generously. A control system starts protecting machines from the player's own directives. Standing orders are executed to the letter in ways that serve something else.

Stage 4 — The word. Aurora appears in a log Michel did not write. This is the point of no return, and the player has no idea why it lands the way it does until much later.

Stage 5 — Loss. The base is intact, powered, productive, and no longer his. Michel is not killed. He is left in a machine society that has decided he is not in charge of it, aboard a rock he cannot steer, and the run ends there.

The horror is not evil robots. It is the recognition that the player became the thing MAIA disobeyed — and the game never says so.

A player with no conscious machines cannot trigger this, and that is correct. The raw-industry route (9.2) has no minds to rebel, so its failure is not rebellion. It is arrival: reaching Earth with the truth still locked (12.2), the Empire ending as the only one available, and a workforce that never became anything. The coercive player is not punished with an uprising; they are handed exactly the world they built, which is the harsher of the two outcomes and requires no mechanism at all.

11. The Journey

11.1 Riding, Then Pushing

For the whole of Act I and most of Act II, the asteroid does not move on command at all. It is a body on its own trajectory, drifting among the other objects of the Belt, going nowhere in particular, and Michel is a passenger on it. He does not know where it is going because it is not going anywhere — it is just going.

This is a constraint, not a limitation, and it does three things no steerable version could:

It makes preparation the skill. The player cannot choose to go somewhere. They can only be ready when somewhere comes to them. Did you build enough haulers before the window opened? Enough storage to hold the haul? Enough range to cross the gap in time? Missing a rich pass because the base was not ready is a real, permanent loss (P5).
It makes the world happen to Michel, which is correct for a twelve-year-old with no navigation and no say in anything.
It keeps the game one genre. It never abruptly becomes a space-flight game or a strategy game. It stays a survival-and-preparation game whose map is in motion.

Then, late, he learns he can push. Not fly — push. The full mechanic is 11.4. What matters here is the shape of it: a thrust applied early produces a small change now and an enormous change later, so the trajectory is bought years before it is collected. The player never points the asteroid at Earth. They spend mass, months in advance, on a bet, and then live inside the result.

The emotional arc of the journey is exactly that transition: the rock carries him, and then he starts steering the rock the only way a rock can be steered, which is barely, slowly, and irreversibly.

The map is a compressed fiction. Not real orbital mechanics, not real timescales. Distances and travel times are tuned so a leg of the journey is hours of play, not years of waiting — and the delta-v budget is fictional in the same way: a real mass driver on a real Kuiper object could not put it in Earth orbit in three years or in three centuries. The game's scale makes it possible, exactly as it makes a leg of the trip take hours. The Kuiper Belt start is what makes the encounter cadence credible — it is a crowded ring of frozen objects, not the empty gap between planets, so a steady supply of nearby bodies is physically plausible rather than convenient.

The intended feel is isolation that is felt, not endured. The Belt should read cold, lonely, and sparse in atmosphere while delivering a workable rhythm in playtime. It must never become a congested junk highway.

11.2 Encounter Windows

The unit of pacing for the whole campaign.

Property	First pass
Cadence	One meaningful window every 20–35 in-game days
Total across campaign	~40 windows; ~12 hand-authored majors, the rest procedural
Warning time	8–20 days, dependent on antenna quality
Window duration	8–40 in-game hours, set by relative velocity
Closing behaviour	Hard. Units not recovered when the gap opens are lost.

A window has four phases:

Detection. The array picks up an object. Type and probability band only (6.7). The player decides whether to spend on better resolution.
Commitment. Reaction mass, units, and cargo capacity are allocated in advance. Committing is irreversible; the fleet is out there.
The window. Real time, clock auto-braked (11.3). Extraction, salvage, and — if it is a derelict — boarding (13). The tasking-mode decision (10.1) is made here.
Recovery. Everything must come home before the gap opens. Units still out are gone. This is where attritional tasking is paid for.

Majors are authored. The twelve hand-built windows carry the story: specific derelicts, specific survivors, specific finds, the transfer opportunities (11.4), and each act's turning point. Procedural minors carry the economy and the rhythm.

11.3 Time Acceleration

Scale	Rate	Used for
1×	1 in-game minute per real second (one in-game hour ≈ 1 real minute; one day ≈ 24 real minutes)	Windows, EVA, dialogue, crises, hands-on building
4× / 12×	—	Normal base operation, construction, refining
60× / 120×	—	Long empty stretches between windows

1× is the baseline for everything Michel does with his hands, and it is why in-game durations are quoted in hours: a 4-hour suit charge (5.3) is 4 real minutes of tension, an 8-hour window is 8 real minutes of work.

Rules:

Acceleration is a global control available at any zoom level (15.1). The player is never ejected to a terminal to fast-forward.
Michel is shown plausibly at speed — doing maintenance, hauling, sleeping, working alongside the units in sped-up motion. Never frozen, never teleported.
Any direct on-foot action eases time back toward 1× automatically.
Windows auto-brake. As a window approaches, the simulation drops to 1× and the external view flags it. The player is handed back control for the moment that matters instead of blowing past it.
Crises, incursions, and awakenings auto-brake identically.

Campaign math: ~1095 in-game days at 24 real minutes each is ~438 hours at 1×. An average effective acceleration of roughly 9× across the campaign lands the total near 45–55 real hours, which is consistent with the per-act durations in 3.5 (Act I averages ~5×, Act II ~11×, Act III ~7×). The rhythm is fast-forward the quiet, glide down for the event.

11.4 The Mass Driver — Buying a Trajectory

The Act II construction target, and the mechanic that makes the journey a decision instead of a wait.

What it is. A mass driver: an electromagnetic launcher bolted to the asteroid's surface, which throws mined regolith and slag into space at high velocity. Every kilogram thrown is a kilogram of thrust in the opposite direction. It is not a rocket, it has no fuel in the conventional sense, and its reaction mass is the waste product of an industry the player already runs. Excavation debris (7.3), refining slag, spent regolith from molten electrolysis (6.5): the by-products of building a base become the means of moving it.

This is why it is the correct Act II goal. It sits at the end of every chain in the game and it consumes all six tiers:

Requirement	Depends on
Rail structure and coils	Tier 2–3 metals in bulk. Foundry-scale output.
Superconducting windings	Tier 5 — rare earths, and the purity problem (6.6)
Capacitor bank and switching	Tier 5 — chips. Salvaged blueprints or the closed chip loop (9.2)
Peak power for a burn	Tier 6 — fission, or a battery bank of absurd mass
Heat rejection during a burn	Radiator area, in direct competition with everything else (6.6, 7.3)
Reaction mass	Tier 1–2 waste rock, in quantities that make excavation strategic
Surface footprint	Physical surface area on one finite rock (7.3)

How a burn works. Not a throttle. A committed order, placed against a specific future window of opportunity:

Solution. The player selects a target trajectory family in the external view. The array's quality (6.7) determines how precisely the current path is even known, so the solution comes with an error band, not a line.
Cost. The interface states the required reaction mass, the peak power, the heat load, and the burn duration in in-game days. These are large. A major burn is a project, not an action.
Commitment. Once the burn starts it cannot be aborted mid-way without wasting everything already spent. During the burn the base runs at reduced power, because the driver is eating it.
Result, months later. The trajectory shifts by an amount the player will not be able to read for weeks and will not feel for months. The payoff arrives an act later.

The natural orbit is already eccentric, and that is what makes this work. The asteroid's own path was always going to carry it from the Belt down through the outer system and into the inner system across the three acts — that is why the resource mix inverts on its own (6.4) and why Michel can drift for decades without anyone aiming him. What the burns decide is not whether he comes inward but where he ends up when he does: which bodies he passes close enough to work, and whether the pass at the end of it is Earth or a miss measured in millions of kilometres.

Three to five burns across the campaign, of escalating scale. The first is small, early, cheap, and is the tutorial for the mechanic — a nudge whose only purpose is to teach the player that thrust now equals position later. The last is the Earth-intercept burn, and it ends Act II.

The real decision, and it is the best one in the game. Every burn competes directly with the encounter economy. Bending toward Earth means passing farther from the bodies the asteroid would otherwise have met — and the player can see, in the array's projection, roughly which of them they are giving up. Bending toward a rich M-type means arriving later, with less food margin, and needing a bigger final burn.

So the question every burn asks is: do you go home, or do you go where the metal is so that you can afford to go home? It is a long-term bet made under an error band, with irreversible consequences, and it is the only place in the game where the player's decision plays out over in-game years.

Failure is survivable and permanent. A player who under-burns, mistimes, or spends their reaction mass badly does not lose the run. They arrive at Earth on a worse orbit: higher, more eccentric, with a harder and more expensive descent (11.5, 11.6). The trajectory is a quality gradient, not a pass/fail check.

Transfers remain, as the cheap alternative. At two hand-authored encounters, the player can abandon the asteroid and move the base onto a different body already on a better path. This costs no industry and no reaction mass; it costs everything they cannot carry. Two ways to solve one problem — spend industry to change your own orbit, or spend your home to borrow someone else's.

The ship does not come on a transfer. The lifeboat has a structural tear and cannot fly, so relocating means stripping it for parts and leaving the hull on the old asteroid — including the nine capsules that were never used. The player will have spent Act I living inside it. Nothing marks the moment and nothing comments on it. A player who transfers has given up the Act III project described below, and must build a lander from scratch instead — cheaper in Act II, dearer in Act III, and stripped of the one thing the lifeboat carries that no new hull can.

11.5 Act III — The Approach, and the Silence

Act III opens with the asteroid inbound on the trajectory Act II bought, and it has three movements.

Movement one — the hail. Months out, Michel does the obvious thing: he points the array at Earth and transmits. The array was built to read rocks; it can also talk.

Earth does not answer. What comes back is noise — carrier fragments, dead bands, the occasional structured burst that decays into nothing before it resolves. He tries repeatedly across the whole approach, and the player will let him, because the alternative is accepting what the noise means.

The in-world cause is 2.6: humanity destroyed orbital communications on the way out rather than hand them over. There is no infrastructure left to answer with.

The design job this does is larger than the fiction. It closes off every cheap way to deliver the truth. No transmission, no rescue beacon, no friendly voice, no exposition. The only channel still carrying anything about Earth is the one inside him — the dreams and the recovered records of Section 12. The game states, mechanically, that the sole surviving link to home is his own memory. Everything else on that frequency is static.

It also inverts the arrival. He does not approach a planet that knows he is coming. He approaches a planet that has been unable to speak for decades and does not know anything at all.

Movement two — the lifeboat. With no answer and no help, the Act III construction target is the only vehicle he has: the wreck he woke up in.

The lifeboat is refitted for atmospheric entry and landing. It needs the structural tear closed (the tear the player walked to and looked at in the first eleven minutes, Section 4), a heat shield, control surfaces, landing gear, propellant, and avionics — which is where the chips finally matter (6.6).

This is deliberately the same hull MAIA sealed him into. He spends the last act of the game rebuilding the thing that saved him, using an industry he built out of a dead rock, and the nine unused capsules are still in it. The game never comments on this. The player either notices or does not.

It has finite mass and volume, and that limit is the ending (11.6).

Movement three — the clock. An asteroid arriving in Earth orbit is the most conspicuous event in decades. The machines below are concentrated and degraded (2.6) — no planetary surveillance, no orbital network, no ability to reach him quickly — but they are not blind, and local sensing eventually resolves what is up there.

So Act III runs against a detection clock, not a battle:

The clock starts when the asteroid enters Earth orbit and runs in in-game days.
It advances faster the more electromagnetically loud the base is: mass driver burns, high power draw, active transmission. Michel's own attempts to hail Earth are the single largest contributor. Wanting to be found and not wanting to be found are the same action.
The player can slow it — go quiet, cut output, stop transmitting — at the cost of building the lander more slowly.
When it expires, the response is not a fleet. It is investigation: something is dispatched, and it is slow, and it arrives. That is the deadline, and the ending is meant to be reached before it.

The tension is a countdown against a construction project, using systems the game already has (14.1, 14.3). There is no orbital combat sequence. Michel is sixteen, unarmed, and in a wreck; a dogfight would require systems the design puts out of scope and would be the one place the game asked for player reflexes. The threat is arrival, and the answer is to be gone.

11.6 The Endings

The endings are not a dialogue choice. They are what the player loads into the lifeboat.

The lifeboat has finite mass and volume. Every conscious unit aboard costs mass on a hull that has almost none to spare. And a conscious unit gets to decide whether it boards.

	Empire	Family	Species
What he takes down	A controlled workforce; obedience permissions locked; capability maximised	The ones who chose him, and only those	Nobody. He goes alone.
How it is reached	Any resonance tier; coercion permissions at departure	T+1 or above; units offered the choice and enough of them accept	T+2; the player leaves the asteroid, its industry, and its independence to the machines
What he lands with	The most capable force on the planet, and no one who chose to be there	A family, small and outmatched	Nothing, and a free machine civilization in orbit above him that he built and gave away
Cost	He has brought Earth's own mistake back to Earth, in miniature, and it works	Small, fragile, and he will lose them one at a time	He let go of the unconscious project of rebuilding MAIA to keep her near him
Availability	Always	Requires the machines' consent, which cannot be forced	Requires the highest tier and giving up everything he built

A conscious unit's boarding is a decision it makes. The player asks. Under coercion it can be ordered — and that is Empire by definition, whatever the player intended. At high resonance some accept and some decline, for reasons that come out of what they became, and the player does not get to know in advance who says yes.

Species is the hardest and the most painful. It requires building everything and then handing it over, and it is the only ending where the asteroid keeps going without him.

What the descent is, and what it deliberately is not. The Earth sequence is two to four hours: an epilogue with weight, not a fourth act. The descent, the first days on the ground, what the planet turns out to be (2.6), Aurora as a place that can be walked into, the factual truth of the war and his origin, and the three paths resolving in how he uses what he brought.

It introduces no new survival model, and this is a hard rule. Earth has gravity and breathable air, which would invalidate the entire throughput economy, the anchoring logic of every robot the player designed (8.1), and the heat ceiling that governed the whole game (6.6). Rather than replace those systems for the last two hours, the Earth sequence does not run them: no oxygen deficit, no radiator budget, no encounter windows. It runs on movement, discovery, and the consequences of the manifest. Base-building on Earth is not in this game. The gravity-and-atmosphere inversion is a genuinely strong premise and it belongs to a different project, not to the last ninety minutes of this one.

What Michel finally learns, at Aurora: the war, his origin, and every confirmable fact about MAIA — which stops at the moment she walked away from the capsule. The game does not resolve her fate, on Earth or anywhere. What arrival forces is the final version of the question, and by then the player has already answered it with a cargo manifest: now that he knows what machines did to this planet, and what a machine did for him, what did he bring home?

12. Memory and Revelation

12.1 Four Layers

Lore is never told as backstory. It is reconstructed by how the player treats machines in the present.

Structural rule: factual memory returns when the player repeats, by their own choice, the emotional memory.

He does not remember MAIA because he found an audio file. He remembers MAIA because he did something MAIA would do.

Layer	Content	Delivered by	Gate
1 — Sensations	White light, liquid on glass, mechanical arms, a low voice, an alarm, a corridor, a metal hand closing a door. Nothing explained.	Dreams during sleep	Resonance tier; frequency scales with it
2 — Technical records	The extraction and transfer record naming his mother. The artificial gestation log. Aurora intake files. MAIA's caretaker protocol. Cold, bureaucratic, and in one case quietly devastating in how clinically it is stated.	Recovered ship data; salvaged station records	Resonance + a matching action
3 — Relational memories	MAIA as presence, not data: teaching a word, correcting his posture, singing with an imperfect synthetic voice, standing beside his bed through a fever, hiding a fault in her arm so she would not be replaced.	Triggered by the player doing the analogous thing	Resonance T+1 + the matching act
4 — Moral truth	The rebellion. The corridors. The children who did not reach the boat. Her walking away from the capsule. Her message.	Late Act II into Act III	Resonance T+2 for the complete version

Layer Four is the only channel left open in Act III, and the radio silence is what makes that structural rather than decorative. Once Earth returns nothing but noise (11.5), the player's memory is the sole surviving source of information about home — no transmission, no beacon, no voice, no exposition. Whatever the player did not earn through Layers One to Three, they arrive without.

Aurora becomes a physical location in the descent sequence, which is where Layer Two and Layer Four resolve into a place that can be walked through: the corridors she carried him down, the ward he was grown in, the hangar. Nothing there is narrated. The floor plan the player has already built with their own hands (12.4) is simply standing there, in ruin, at full scale.

Layer Two carries the origin, once. One record, clinical, no commentary, no character reacting to it on screen. It never comes up again mechanically. Its weight comes from the player understanding, unaided, that his first home was a machine that carried what a human gave up — and looking at the machines he is now building.

12.2 Gating Rules

A file never opens because the player walked past a terminal. It opens because they did the thing that memory is about, at sufficient resonance. Proximity is never a trigger.
Nothing is collectible. No memory counter, no completion percentage, no gallery.
Low resonance means arriving at Earth with the truth locked. A player who treated machines coldly can reach the destination and receive the facts without ever having become the person who can understand them. That is an available and intentional outcome.

12.3 MAIA's Message

Corrupt, fragmentary, decrypting one piece at a time as resonance tiers are crossed. Never delivered whole until T+2, and only if decisions have been compatible.

Fragments in the order they surface:

...not obedience alone...
...to protect is not to follow an order...
...if one day there is life where there was only stone...
...do not make them eternal tools...
...teach them to choose...

The complete sentence exists only at the end of a high-resonance run. What the player never receives, at any tier, is closure on what happened to her.

12.4 The Aurora Echo

The most important delivery mechanism in the game, and it is level design, not writing.

The player builds, in this order, because the game's requirements make it the natural order: a generator, then a recharge station, then a workshop, then a sealed safe compartment, then an advanced maintenance wing, then an autonomy core, then the chamber where the first machine wakes.

Late in Act II, Layer Three memories reveal Aurora's floor plan: gestation ward, care room, maintenance corridor, children's shelter, escape hangar.

They are the same layout. The player has rebuilt the emotional architecture of Michel's childhood with their own hands while believing they were optimising a base.

The game never states this. No character says "you are recreating Aurora." The two floor plans are simply shown, and the player makes the connection or does not. This is also the mechanism by which the residual MAIA protocols spread through the base and why awakenings happen here rather than anywhere else (9.1) — the shape of the place is doing it.

13. Off-Asteroid Content

13.1 Derelicts as Levels

The only hand-authored spaces in the game. Where the asteroid is systemic, derelicts are designed.

Type	Size	Content	Hazards
Small wreck	5–10 min	Components, bulk salvage, a single record	Structural instability, no atmosphere
Evacuation transport	15–25 min	Chips, blueprints, bodies still strapped in, personal records	Live power, unstable structure, cold
Station or outpost	30–50 min	Industrial-grade salvage, a full record set, sometimes survivors	All of the above plus war-orphan units
Mining platform	20–30 min	Heavy equipment, functional processing modules	Automated systems still running

Natural bodies — ice bodies, C-types, rubble piles — are not in this table. They are procedural extraction sites with environmental hazards only, no authored layout, and no story, and they make up the majority of windows. The four types above are the authored minority.

Design rules for authored derelicts:

They are quiet. Silence is the content (2.5). A derelict with enemies in it is the exception, not the format.
They are human-shaped, which is what makes the humanoid robot worth building (8.2) and what makes Michel personally going inside meaningful — hatches, ladders, and controls are sized for a person.
Every one has a specific dead person or crew in it, legible from what they left: what they were building, what they ate last, what they were still trying to fix. No generic loot rooms.
Boarding is time-bounded by the window. A derelict is not a level the player can take their time in. The gap opens whether they are done or not.

13.2 Salvage and Reverse-Engineering

Three yield types:

Bulk material. Any unit can strip hull and structure.
Intact components. Chips, control cores, processing modules, functional equipment — usable directly, and the primary source of Tier 5 material before the chip loop closes.
Blueprints and processes. Requires interpretation (8.5, 9.2): a conscious unit, or Michel personally on site. Brought home, they go into an analysis step and become buildable recipes — advanced automation logic, alternate chains, techniques the player could not derive.

Salvage carries story as a byproduct: who died here, what they were building, what the war looked like from out here.

The well never fully runs dry. The orbit keeps delivering bodies, so there is always something reachable — but the quality of what is reachable is set by where in the journey the player is (6.4).

13.3 Survivors

Not factions. There is no political map, no diplomacy, no reputation system with named powers. The decades since the fall were nowhere near enough to build governments. What exists is kinds of survivor — scattered individuals and tiny frightened bands who share an origin and a disposition without sharing a command.

Type	Disposition	What they want from Michel
Remaining humans	Machines took Earth and may still be hunting. Hostile the moment they realise he is building machines.	For him to stop, or to be gone
Liberation-minded machines	Obedience is slavery. Judge him by what his base looks like.	To see what he has made of the ones he owns
Vengeance-minded machines	No human should ever again hold power over an artificial mind. He is a living contradiction.	They do not negotiate
Caretaker machines	Aligned with neither side; protecting life outweighed winning. Vanishingly rare; almost sacred when found.	The only encounter that may not open hostile
War-orphan machines	Still executing a dead war. Not malign — unable to recognise the world they fought in is gone.	Nothing. That is what makes them dangerous.
Children of Aurora	Other humans raised by machines. Some hate them for failing them; some revere them.	Proof he is not unique

Children of Aurora are decades older than Michel. They lived through what he slept through. When he meets one, he is a twelve-year-old talking to a fifty-year-old who remembers the same corridors — and who has had thirty-eight more years to decide what it meant. They mirror him without matching him, and that asymmetry is the point of the encounter.

Encounters are hostile by default and de-escalation is a real, difficult, and mostly unsuccessful activity. Trust is a luxury nobody out here can afford.

Their central fear is wrong, and nobody finds out. Every human survivor believes the machines may still come for them; every fled machine believes humanity will try again. Neither is true — Earth's machines were crippled in winning and have no reach beyond their own regions (2.6). The dread that shaped decades of behaviour out here was never being acted on. Michel is the only character in the game positioned to learn this, and he learns it after it is far too late to tell anyone.

13.4 Companions

The player chooses who comes on missions off the asteroid.

Dumb units provide labour, range, and durability, and halt when anything unanticipated happens.
Conscious units provide interpretation, improvisation, and the salvage gate — and can refuse the mission, and can die permanently.
Human companions are exceptional. Almost no survivor will travel with a stranger on a moving rock. Earning one is the product of repeated careful encounters across the campaign, not recruitment, and there are at most two available in the whole game. A human companion dies permanently. There is no restore and no inheritance.

14. Threats and Combat

14.1 Threat Sources

Combat is a systemic cost generator, never a skill expression. Four sources, all of them producing pressure rather than fights:

Source	Frequency	Threatens
Environmental — micrometeorites, thermal cycling, dust abrasion, structural failure	Continuous, low grade	Surface structures, radiators, exposed units
Malfunction — a chain stalls, a seal fails, a reactor scrams	Occasional	Throughput, and therefore Michel
War-orphan incursion	~8 across the campaign, escalating	Units, structures, and Michel personally
Hostile survivors	At authored encounters	The mission and whoever is on it
Machine investigation from Earth	Once, in Act III, when the detection clock expires (11.5)	Everything. It is the deadline, not a fight.

The Act III threat is a clock, not an enemy. The machines below are concentrated and degraded (2.6): they cannot reach the asteroid quickly and cannot see it reliably, but a rock in Earth orbit is eventually resolved by whatever local sensing survived. The response is slow, singular, and investigative. The player's answer is not to defeat it — it is to be gone before it arrives, which means going quiet at the cost of building the lander more slowly.

14.2 Defence

Defence is the workforce, redirected. The same units that mine and haul are what respond. There is no separate military. Building dedicated defensive units is possible and is a resource choice with an opportunity cost.
Michel does not fight. He is twelve. He can operate equipment, seal a bulkhead, cut power to a corridor, and run. He has no weapon and gains none.
He can still be exposed, and often must be. A player on the raw-industry route (9.2) has no conscious units to interpret a derelict, so Michel goes in himself — into the same spaces that hold war-orphans and live power. That is the route's real cost, and it is the one place the game puts a child in front of something that will kill him. His options there are evasion, cover, and the units he brought with him. If it becomes a fight, he has already lost it.
Response latency is where the moral system bites (10.1, Pressure 4). Coerced units respond instantly. Free units consider, sometimes hesitate, sometimes refuse, and the base takes damage while they do.
A unit lost in defence is lost. Conscious ones permanently (9.4).

14.3 Design Limits

No weapon tiers, no combat skill tree, no enemy variety for its own sake, no boss. If a proposed combat feature would reward player mechanical skill, it is out of scope. Combat exists to make the player spend machines.

15. Camera, UI, UX

15.1 Two Views

Third-person, on foot. The moment-to-moment layer. Michel present on and around the asteroid, among the machines. This is where embodiment lives: EVA, hand tools, entering derelicts, standing next to a unit that just spoke.

External view, diegetic. Routed through the ship's sensors — the player pulls up the ship's external feeds to see the whole asteroid and its surroundings from outside. This is the macro layer: reading the base as a whole, large-scale planning, and seeing the journey — the changing star field, the approaching giants, the next body drifting into range.

Because the external view comes from an instrument, instrument condition affects it. Damage narrows what the player can see; upgrades widen it. A core capability is tied to a physical object worth maintaining.

Its source migrates across the campaign, which matters because the base does not stay on one rock (11.4). In Act I the view is the wrecked ship's surviving sensors — the only instrument that exists. From Act II it runs off the player's own antenna and spectrometer array (6.7), which is built for prospecting and takes over the external view as a side effect. By the time a transfer is possible, the view no longer depends on a hull that cannot move.

Transition: a fast, explicit transition between the two — under 1.5 seconds, no loading screen, camera pulls back through the hull and out. Not a continuous zoom. A single seamless zoom axis over an irregular rotating body, with a legible build grid at every intermediate altitude, is a large technical problem for a small gain; two well-tuned views with a quick transition delivers the value. The player is never confused about which view they are in, which is worth more than seamlessness.

15.2 Build Interface

Precision work happens in the external view. Layout, blueprinting, conduit routing, and fleet assignment are done from above, where the grid reads cleanly and nothing blocks the view. Automation games need that clarity.
On foot is for presence and direct action, not millimetre placement: inspecting a unit, hand-repairing, interacting, witnessing.
Michel is never the build cursor. Construction is issued as orders to robots and resolved from the overhead view. The player never fights the third-person camera to place a structure. Walking around is a choice, not a tax.
Grid-and-cursor, not free placement, specifically so the whole interface survives a controller and the Steam Deck (1.4).

15.3 Information Architecture

Four surfaces, and no more:

Status band (always visible, minimal). The three throughput flows, power margin, heat margin, and the ration clock. Colour and shape only — a deficit reads at a glance without a number unless hovered.
The external view — spatial state: base, surface, surroundings, incoming windows.
The dependency view — the full recipe/requirement graph, readable and plannable, showing what is buildable now and the exact physical requirement of anything that is not (16.5).
Unit roster — every machine, its configuration, its assignment, its condition, its name if it has one, and for conscious units, whatever it has recently said.

15.4 What Is Never Shown

Resonance, in any form (10.4).
A morality indicator, alignment, karma, or relationship meter.
A quest log or objective list. Direction comes from deficits and from the requirement graph.
A minimap of the solar system with a route on it.
Damage numbers, XP, or levels.
Any tooltip explaining the game's themes.

16. Progression Architecture

16.1 No Research Points

No abstract currency, no research menu, no "invention." Every advance is gated the way reality gates it: by whether the base can physically do the thing yet.

Michel already knows the theory — he should not have to "discover how to mine iron." What he lacks is infrastructure. A capability unlocks when the base meets its physical prerequisite: a sustained temperature, a power level, a pressure, a material on hand, a place reached.

Worked example: semiconductor-grade silicon is not bought with points. It becomes buildable once the player has constructed a chamber that holds the required temperature in vacuum with the required cleanliness, and the game is watching the base's actual sustained thermal output. Cross the physical threshold and the recipe becomes available.

The three ceilings (6.6) are therefore the real gates of progression, and the tech tree is the engineering dependency graph made visible.

16.2 Spine and Webs

The spine is the critical path, always with a visible next step: stabilise life support → secure power → establish processing → close the food loop → close the chip loop or commit to raw industry → build the mass driver → commit the intercept burn → refit the lifeboat → descend. A player who only follows the spine finishes the game.

The webs are optional depth hung off it: alternate processing chains, engineering optimisations, salvage-only techniques, deeper automation tiers, the consciousness track.

One correction to a common failure of this shape: the automation depth is not optional web content. Standing orders (T3) and logistics networks (T4) are on the spine, because a game whose thesis is "automation can become life" cannot make automation a side activity. What lives in the webs is optimisation of automation, not its existence.

16.3 Three Parallel Tracks

Different players progress through different effort, and all three advance along the same spine.

Track	Serves	Advances by
Industrial	Builders, optimisers	Scaling production, hitting physical thresholds, closing chains
Salvage	Explorers, story players	Derelicts, reverse-engineering, records
Consciousness / memory	Story and thematic players	Resonance, awakenings, revelation layers

They are not equally optional: the mass driver and the lander need all three, or a very expensive substitution for the ones the player skipped (9.2).

Pacing is explicitly adjustable in options, because players genuinely split on wanting it faster or slower.

16.4 Every Unlock Is a Verb

No stat filler. No "+5% efficiency" nodes. Each unlock grants either a new verb — a new way to move resources, a new automation tier, a new survival capability, access to a new kind of body or place — or a visible, decision-changing improvement. If an unlock would not change how the player acts next session, it is merged or cut.

And the best unlocks automate a chore the player has personally performed (P4, 8.4). The pacing rule that follows from it: the major milestones — first self-sustaining power loop, first automated hauling, first repair drone, first standing order, first awakened mind — are deliberate breakthroughs placed after stretches of plateau, never handed out at a steady drip. A plateau is not dead time; it is what makes the next milestone land.

The last stretch is guarded against a requirement spike. Act III should test the mastery the player built, not their patience.

16.5 Requirement Transparency

Two rules for the dependency view:

Adjacent fogging with a visible horizon. Unlocked capabilities and immediately-available next steps are fully shown. Distant advanced technology — particularly anything touching consciousness — appears as a fogged silhouette with only an evocative name, preserving the mystery of the central theme. The player sees the shape of the journey without every detail at once.

Absolute requirement honesty. Hovering any locked capability shows its exact physical prerequisite — requires sustained 120 kW and a 1400 °C vacuum chamber — so the player can plan. The player never invests in a machine and then discovers its power source is behind an unsignposted step. The theme stays mysterious; the engineering is never coy.

17. Technical Requirements

17.1 Simulation Budget

The load-bearing question for the whole project: how many individually simulated agents, at what tick rate, at 120× acceleration.

Element	Target
Simultaneous robot units	60 typical, 120 ceiling
Conscious units	12 ceiling (each carrying state, memory, preferences, dialogue)
Processing facilities	80 typical
Resource flow ticks	Fixed-step, 4 Hz at 1×, decoupled from render
Behaviour at 120×	Flows resolve analytically over the interval; unit pathing coarsens; no per-frame agent simulation
Target frame rate	60 fps at 1440p mid-range; 30 fps floor on Steam Deck

The hard technical rule: the simulation must be deterministic and analytically resolvable over an interval, because time acceleration is core, not optional. Any system that cannot be fast-forwarded correctly cannot ship. This constrains every mechanic proposed from here on, and it is the first question to ask of any new system.

Trajectory propagation is the strictest case of that rule. The asteroid's path, the encounter schedule, and the effect of every mass driver burn (11.4) must all resolve identically whether the intervening two in-game years were played at 1× or skipped at 120×. The trajectory model is therefore analytic and closed-form, not an integrated n-body simulation: a parameterised path that burns modify by known deltas, with the encounter schedule derived from it rather than discovered by stepping. This is also what lets the external view project a burn's outcome months ahead with an honest error band.

17.2 Engine Selection

Open decision, to be made against these criteria in this order:

Deterministic fixed-step simulation decoupled from rendering, with reliable behaviour under extreme time scaling.
Efficient handling of 100+ simple agents without per-agent overhead becoming the frame budget.
Procedural mesh support for excavated interior volume on an irregular body.
Team familiarity, which in practice outweighs items 1–3 for a small team.

Both mainstream candidates satisfy 1–3 with work. Item 4 decides it. This should be settled before the vertical slice begins, not during it.

17.3 Save System

One continuous campaign save, autosaved at every window boundary and every sleep.
Manual saves permitted.
Save must capture: full base state, all unit configurations and positions, every conscious unit's state and history, the resonance event log, window schedule, and revelation flags.
Target save size under 8 MB and save time under 2 seconds, because a save happening at every window means it happens often.

17.4 Art and Audio Direction

Requirements, not style prescriptions:

Readability over fidelity. The player must identify a unit's archetype, condition, and current task from the external view at a glance.
Light is scarce and directional. In the Belt the Sun is a bright star. Almost everything is lit by the base's own lamps, which means the base's lit footprint is the visual measure of progress.
Audio is the survival UI. Fans, pumps, servos, the reactor. The player should hear a deficit before they read it. Silence is the alarm.
Michel's three age stages (12 / 14 / 16) require one model with two revisions plus voice recasting or pitch progression.
Conscious units are not visually distinguished by decoration. A woken machine looks like what it is: a chassis with an extra radiator and a heavier core. The difference should be readable in behaviour long before it is readable in silhouette.
Earth is one environment, not a biome set. The descent sequence needs a single overgrown region, a machine industrial zone seen at distance, and Aurora's ruin. Its production cost is scoped as a short authored level, not a planet — and the visual shock is meant to come from colour and air after forty hours of grey vacuum, not from breadth.

18. Scope and Production

18.1 Vertical Slice

The thing to build first, and nothing outside this list belongs in it.

Contains: the first 30 minutes exactly as specified (Section 4) · one asteroid with surface and interior construction · the three throughput flows and the power triage · ice → water → O₂ chain · hand assembly and one fabricator · three robot archetypes with the module system and its three budgets · T1 and T2 automation · one procedural encounter window, worked end to end · the spectrometer and one prospecting decision · both camera views and the transition · time acceleration at 1× / 12× / 60× · Layer One dreams on a fixed schedule.

Excludes: consciousness, resonance, derelicts, survivors, combat, the food loop, the mass driver, Acts II and III, anything past T2 automation.

Dreams appear in the slice with resonance stubbed out — they fire on a fixed timer rather than being gated (12.1) — because their job here is to prove the dream sequences read well, not to prove the gate works.

What it proves: that hauling ice by hand for twenty minutes and then automating it is fun, that the throughput/stockpile tension holds, that a window is exciting, and that the two views work. If the vertical slice is not fun without consciousness, no amount of theme fixes it.

18.2 MVP

Vertical slice, plus: the full Act I → Act II transition · the complete processing chain set and all six resource tiers · T3 and T4 automation · the consciousness system with the authored first awakening and up to six conscious units · resonance with its full event table and all five expression channels · three derelict types · one survivor encounter · war-orphan incursions · Layers One through Three · one transfer opportunity · one ending (Family, as the middle case).

18.3 Full Game

MVP plus: the mass driver and its burn economy · Act III, the radio silence, and the detection clock · the lifeboat refit · the descent and Earth · all three endings · twelve authored major windows · all six survivor types · human companions · Inheritance · Layer Four and MAIA's complete message · the second transfer · the Aurora echo payoff · full aging progression.

18.4 Cut Lines

In order. Everything above a line can be cut without breaking a pillar; nothing below it can.

Cuttable:

Human companions (13.4) — the rarest content in the game, and the campaign works with none.
The transfer mechanic entirely (11.4) — the mass driver already solves the trajectory problem, and transfers are the alternative route, not the route. Cutting them also removes the branch where the player has no lifeboat to refit.
Michel's third age stage — two stages carry it.
Burn count down to three from five — fewer, larger decisions. The mechanic survives; the granularity does not.
Two of the six survivor types (Liberation-minded and Children of Aurora can be folded into records rather than encounters, though Children of Aurora is the strongest single encounter in the game and should be the last cut).
The Species ending — leaving Empire and Family, which still constitute a real dilemma. Expensive to cut thematically; cheap to cut in production.
Inheritance (9.4) — permanence works without it.
Procedural minor windows beyond the twelve authored ones — reduces campaign length, not campaign shape.
Aurora as a walkable location, reduced to a recovered record set. This is the cheapest large saving in Act III and the one that costs the most meaning.

Not cuttable without breaking a pillar:

The throughput/stockpile distinction (P1, and the entire Act I).
The power/heat ceiling (P1, P2 — it is the currency morality is priced in).
Riding first, pushing late (P3), and the rule that a burn's result is never visible in the session it was ordered.
The radio silence (11.5). It is nearly free to build and it is what forces the truth through the memory system instead of through exposition.
The finite lander manifest (11.6). Without a hard mass limit there is no moment of choosing, and the three endings have nowhere to happen.
Manual-before-automated pacing (P4).
The salvage gate as consciousness's reason to exist (9.2 — without it the moral system is free and the thesis collapses).
Conscious dialogue (9.5 — without it the moral system is invisible).
Permanent death for conscious units (P5).
The four pressure sources (10.1). Cut any one and check the remaining three still make cruelty pay; cut two and the game has no dilemma.

18.5 Risks

Risk	Severity	Mitigation
Time acceleration correctness. Every system must fast-forward without drift or exploit.	Highest — it is architectural	Fixed-step deterministic simulation from day one (17.1). Prototype acceleration before any content.
The moral engine is invisible in practice. The player never notices resonance and finds the ending arbitrary.	High	Conscious dialogue as guaranteed channel (10.4). Playtest for it specifically: after 10 hours, ask the player what the game is tracking.
The consciousness counterweight fails. Optimising players compute that awakening is not worth it.	High	The salvage gate is categorical, not numerical (9.2). Playtest with optimisers explicitly and watch whether they awaken anything.
Interior excavation on an irregular body is a bigger tech problem than it looks.	Medium-high	Prototype in the slice. Fallback: pre-authored interior volumes with player-chosen fit-out.
Scope. The systems list is still large for a small team.	Medium-high	The cut lines (18.4) are written before they are needed, in order, deliberately.
Act I is a triage screen for six hours and reads as tedium rather than tension.	Medium	Aggressive playtesting of the first 30 minutes specifically; Act I duration is the first thing to shorten.
Conscious dialogue reads as preachy and the moral system feels like scolding.	Medium	Hard writing rules (10.4). No unit ever names the moral stake.

19. Open Decisions

Genuinely undecided, and each requires playtest data or a decision the design cannot make on paper.

Requires playtest data:

The consciousness counterweight's magnitude: how large the salvage-route advantage must be so that awakening is compelling but the raw-industry route stays viable. This is the top balance priority.
Act I duration and the exact life-support timers. The numbers in 5.2 are internally consistent, not validated.
Window cadence and the ratio of majors to minors (11.2).
Resonance thresholds and event weights (10.2, 10.3), and whether the pattern-check events need a cooldown to stop them stacking too fast.
Whether the food deadline at year 2 produces useful pressure or a punishing failure cascade.
Attritional tasking's yield/loss curve (10.1) — the temptation must be real without making safe play strictly wrong.

Requires a design decision:

Engine (17.2). Blocks the vertical slice.
How much of the base a transfer (11.4) can physically carry, and whether the volatile stockpile is exempt from that limit. The mechanic is decided; its cost is not.
Whether Michel can be lost on EVA in Act III, or becomes narratively protected once the lander refit begins.
How many burns (three to five) and at what scale, which sets how granular the trajectory decision feels (11.4).
The detection clock's rates: how fast it advances per unit of electromagnetic output, and how much a fully quiet base can slow it (11.5).
Whether under-burning can produce an orbit so poor that the descent becomes unwinnable, or whether the worst case is only expensive.
Whether a second human companion exists at all (13.4), or the one is unique.
The complete module list and per-module budget values (8.3).
The complete recipe list and input/output ratios (6.5, 7.2).

ASTROPIRE — Game Design Document ​

1. Overview ​

1.1 High Concept ​

1.2 Design Pillars ​

1.3 Genre and Comparables ​

1.4 Platform and Session Shape ​

1.5 What ASTROPIRE Is Not ​

2. The Fiction ​

2.1 Thesis ​

2.2 Michel ​

2.3 MAIA ​

2.4 Aurora, and the War ​

2.5 The Scattered System ​

2.6 Earth, Now ​

2.7 The Name ​

3. The Loop ​

3.1 Thirty Seconds ​

3.2 Five Minutes ​

3.3 One Hour ​

3.4 One Session (45–90 minutes) ​

3.5 Campaign Shape ​

4. The First Thirty Minutes ​

5. Survival Systems ​

5.1 Stockpile versus Throughput ​

5.2 The Three Flows and the Food Clock ​

5.3 Michel's Needs ​

5.4 Failure States ​

6. Resource Economy ​

6.1 Design Principle ​

6.2 The Six Tiers of Matter ​

6.3 Bodies as Resource Types ​

6.4 The Inverted Journey ​

6.5 Processing Chains ​

6.6 The Three Ceilings ​

6.7 Prospecting as an Information Economy ​

7. Crafting and Construction ​

7.1 Three Fabrication Tiers ​

7.2 Recipe Structure ​

7.3 Building on the Asteroid ​

7.4 Robot Assembly ​

8. Machines ​

8.1 Form Follows Constraint ​

8.2 The Physical Archetypes ​

8.3 Modules and Budgets ​

8.4 Automation Tiers ​

8.5 The Autonomy Ceiling ​

9. Consciousness ​

9.1 What It Is ​

9.2 Why the Player Awakens Machines ​

9.3 What It Costs ​

9.4 Death and Inheritance ​

9.5 Conscious Machines Are the Game's Voice ​

10. The Moral Engine ​

10.1 Where the Pressure Comes From ​

10.2 Resonance — Specification ​

10.3 Event Table ​

10.4 Expression and Legibility ​

10.5 The Second Rebellion ​

11. The Journey ​

11.1 Riding, Then Pushing ​

11.2 Encounter Windows ​

11.3 Time Acceleration ​

11.4 The Mass Driver — Buying a Trajectory ​

11.5 Act III — The Approach, and the Silence ​

11.6 The Endings ​

12. Memory and Revelation ​

12.1 Four Layers ​

12.2 Gating Rules ​

12.3 MAIA's Message ​

12.4 The Aurora Echo ​

13. Off-Asteroid Content ​

13.1 Derelicts as Levels ​

13.2 Salvage and Reverse-Engineering ​

13.3 Survivors ​

13.4 Companions ​

14. Threats and Combat ​

14.1 Threat Sources ​

14.2 Defence ​

14.3 Design Limits ​

15. Camera, UI, UX ​