Compendium

Drone Commander is a hybrid Visual Novel / RTS / RPG game that dynamically alternates between gameplay modes to keep the experience varied and cinematic. Players engage in story-driven conversations, tactical real-time strategy battles, and explore RPG-style sections with character interaction and minigames.

The player, an ordinary human, is abducted into a galactic conflict involving several alien factions and an ominous, destructive Type 3 drone fleet. Initially seen as primitive, the player gradually gains influence by showing an uncanny ability to control drones and coordinate defense strategies.

The player's fleet, called the Vanguard, is on the run from the drone fleet while rescuing alien races and occasionally launching counterattacks. Humanity has only recently begun to advance technologically after surviving a near-catastrophic drone attack. Characters have rich backstories and personality-driven arcs, and the choices you make shape alliances, friendships, rivalries, and even romance.

Gameplay Modes

• VN Mode: Storytelling, dialogue trees, choices with consequences
• RTS Mode: Command fleets, deploy drones, manage shields, formations, and superweapons
• RPG Mode: Explore ships and alien planets, interact with crew, complete quests, and engage in pixel-art shooter combat
• Minigames: Crew hiring, job assignment, research progression, morale tracking, fleet economy management

Tone & Themes

A balance of emotional storytelling, sci-fi mystery, and tactical warfare. Explores themes of identity, trust between species, power, and redemption. Blends anime-style drama with strategic gameplay and rich lore.

⚠ Heavy spoilers — living planning document. This is the developer's act-by-act workflow for the whole game: the rough beat order, the open problems, and the options being weighed. Everything here is provisional and changes as the design firms up.

Act 1 — Saving Earth

• Straker abducted
• Explore the Freexyl
• Rhyzark flees, the Bot Rebellion, the waking of Tiff, the Final Nightmare, Drunmuire, Albion's Anchor
• Arrival of Neph / the Invasion
• The Vanguard Special Mission Group: 12 missions — the introduction of the FOM
• The Drone Fleet arrival
• Battle for Earth

Act 2 — Mirelexia

• Travel to Mirelexia
• Travel to the metropolis — the Nobility (peasants)
• Explore the jungles — revelations
• Task Force Black / Black Fleet hidden missions
• The Drone Commander
• Temple Battle: a battle in the Honnehari Temple against the Morrigan… and a massive giant ethereal being, Ivrixia. Ends with Ivrixia offering to be a knowledge compendium for you whenever you meet her in a Temple — but she does not join your team. She tells you about the deep power of this star system, the sun, and how it can be used as a weapon to stop the Drone Fleet.
• Locked in: you do not fight against Daria in this act, and you do not have Rexalia on your team.
• Preparation Missions — humans, Sekarri and Mirelexians work together to activate the space-bound artefacts Ivrixia described
• Liberation of Mirelexia Prime — battle with the Drone Fleet. The star/sun uncloaks them for a slight advantage, but unlike Earth this erupts into a full-on space battle with the Drone Fleet harbingers

Act 3 — The Black Fleet

Here your decisions have a huge impact: you can join the Black Fleet, or reject them and stay with the Vanguard.

• Black Fleet Space Battle: Black Fleet encounter against Morrigan's forces. Win, and she asks you to leave and join her. Lose, and you're captured — you can choose to stay or escape.

Going to the Black Fleet

• Do all Black Fleet missions — meet Gia, Makara, Vess etc.
• Special Missions: Finding Daria
• Special Missions: XXXX (super secret)
• QTE events to play as Straker, so you see what you're missing on the Vanguard side.
• Also on this path: loot planets that are victimising other races; war with the Kethri factions; help Vess recruit more humans; final battle; tearful return to the Vanguard.

Staying with the Vanguard

• Every milestone mission, Morrigan texts you to give you the chance to switch teams.
• Every milestone you miss, you get a QTE option to play that event as Brian (the Straker-like character on the Black Fleet).
• You get to play the Kethri Discovery Missions.
• Meeting the Annunaki — you can only romance her if you stay with the Vanguard.
• Meeting Snow.
• Meeting Garland.

Either way, nothing is fully missable: stay with the Vanguard and you'll still meet Gia, Makara, Vess etc. later — but with a reduced chance to build relationships. Join the Black Fleet and you'll still get the chance to meet Snow, Garland and the Annunaki — likewise with a reduced chance to build relationships.

Act 4 — The Kethri

• The Kethri home world; the Annunaki & the Undead-Annunaki.
• Critical plot point 1: your first major loss as the Vanguard.
• Critical plot point 2: a partial coming together of the Vanguard and the Black Fleet — your chance to meet the characters you didn't meet on your chosen Act 3 branch.

Act 5 — Shal, the Deritonians & the Drakhans

• Travel to Shal (formerly "Fortress Deep" in earlier drafts) — home world of the Deritonians & Drakhans.
• Negotiations…
• Ends with the Drakhans giving Straker the coordinates and the Amulet that lead into the Vionite arc (see Meeting with the Vionies).

Act 6 — The Vionites & Daria

• Vionites — first formal contact with the Vionite Empire (see Meeting with the Vionies).
• Daria's arc lands here — deferred from Act 2 so the Vionites and Honnehari don't have to be explained too early.

Act 7 — The Honnehari

• Honnehari

Act 8 — The Final Showdown

• The Skrill and the final fight

Loose Ends to Fix

Solved. How much do your interactions with the Honnehari influence your first meeting? — they don't believe you met them.

Solved. Evil faction: the Committed. You now fight them after meeting Ozerane, not early on when defending Earth.

Solved. Problem 1 — Black Fleet interactions. If you stay with the Vanguard all the way: Morrigan texts you at every milestone with the chance to switch, missed Black Fleet events are playable as Brian via QTE, and the partial Vanguard/Black Fleet coming-together in Act 4 lets you meet everyone you missed — just with a reduced chance to build relationships.

Solved. Problem 2 — timing of Daria & Rexalia. No Daria fight and no Rexalia in Act 2. Daria is found via a Black Fleet special mission in Act 3, and her arc lands in Act 6 alongside the Vionites — so the Vionites and Honnehari no longer need explaining early.

Permutations

• 1. You find Rexalia, the Black Fleet find Daria, then you face off over Ivrixia. Con: unveils too many characters too early.
• 1b. As above, but you face off in the core of Mirelexia and Ivrixia comes later.
• 2. You don't find Rexalia or Daria until after your first meeting with Ozerane. The battle for Ivrixia ends without you obtaining her just yet — she acts as a remote advisor. So this standoff is for the core of Mirelexia; then, after meeting Ozerane, you can meet Daria and Rexalia independently.

Current Favoured Approach

Now largely baked into the act-by-act outline above — kept here for the reasoning trail.

• Mirelexia — fight for Ivrixia against the Black Fleet (no Daria, no Rexalia).
• Result: Ivrixia becomes a remote advisor only.
• Later you'll have more run-ins with the Black Fleet.
• Meet Ozerane, get rejected — then you race to find Rexalia.
• Separate story: you play as Brian (a Straker-like character on the Black Fleet) as you also race to find Daria and unlock her.
• The Black Fleet arrive where Rexalia is, to find her joined with the Vanguard.
• Final face-off… but both sides begin to waver, having had many run-ins and starting to see they're on the same side.
• The Committed attack Earth — you both race to stop them.

The word drone carries two meanings in this universe, and you'll meet both. Drone Commander is — at its core — a game about drones, so it's worth getting the distinction straight before going any further.

Combat Drones — Personal & Tactical

The first kind are personal combat drones: small autonomous weapons and support units that fight alongside you on the ground or in close quarters. These include modern human FPV drones and the hovering Sekarri assist drones that escort their operators into battle. More types are planned, and the roster will keep growing.

• FPV Drones (Human-made) — Modern-day style drones called in for air strikes, grenade drops, ammo drops, puzzle-solving and more.
• Basic Sekarri Drone — A defence-shield drone that soaks hits for its operator and returns fire with electron bolts. Can be levelled up.
• Medic Drone — Heals allies and revives those who have been incapacitated.
• Kethri Biological Drones (planned) — Living drones grown rather than built.
• Vionite Drones (planned) — Resonance-attuned drones aligned with the Vionite essence framework.

Autonomous Vehicles — Drone Ships

The second meaning is far larger in scale. Drone vehicles are autonomous space-going craft — battleships, scouts, beamships and everything in between — piloted remotely rather than crewed in person. The Sekarri practise a hybrid form of space warfare in which most of their fleet is run this way, by drone pilots of varying specialism.

The Tether and the H-Pod

A Sekarri pilot connects to their ship (or ships) in two stages:

• The Tether — A partially biological Sekarri neural implant fitted in childhood. It is the lifelong connection point through which a pilot's mind reaches outward.
• The H-Pod — Sensory-deprivation rigs of varying design that fully lock a pilot in for more complex tasks. Some H-Pods are flooded with an amniotic-style fluid, leaving the pilot floating while connected.

For humans, the Drone Pilot Program — a joint effort by Kira, the digital Sekarri native Amu, and Evren — adapted the technology so non-link users could connect at all. People like Straker use modified H-Pods to fly Sekarri craft despite having no Tether of their own.

Drone Pilot Ranks

The Mirelexian Drones — Legend of the Original Commander

For the Mirelexians, "drone" means something else again. Bipedal, multi-armed, insect-like humanoids living in a split corporate-aristocracy society at roughly modern human technology level, they keep an old legend about the original Drone Commander — a warrior who saved their people from extinction by learning to fly the giant wasp-like flying beasts they call drones.

Deadly and hyper-aggressive, those drones were turned through hormone warfare and other arts; the Commander tamed them, rode one into battle, and changed the course of the war. Many Mirelexian sects still believe his return is bound up with their own survival — and with the beasts' original (largely docile) nature, much like Earth's modern drones.

The Drones of the Drone Fleet

Finally there are the Drones of the Drone Fleet — better known as the Dark Worlders. The name is a misnomer: very little is known about them at all, except that they descend on the galaxy as a vast, seemingly unbeatable conquering force, reduce it to rubble, and depart — only to return generations later for another culling.

Welcome, Commander. Space strategy games have a terrain problem. Without hills, chokepoints, or rivers, battles devolve into blobs smashing into blobs in an empty void. Asteroids only get you so far.

Drone Commander does something different. Instead of importing ground-war mechanics into space and hoping they stick, we built a strategy layer native to orbital combat — one where the battlefield has structure, territory, and depth without a single wall or turret line. Everything you build, everything you fight over, is rooted in the science-fiction of the universe itself.

This guide walks you through how base building works, what you’re managing, and why it all matters.

Your Fleet: Three Ships, One War

You don’t build a base in Drone Commander. You deploy a fleet. Your operations run through three capital ships, each with a distinct role. Think of them as your economy, your brain, and your fist.

The Command Ship

This is your nerve centre. Everything starts here. When you deploy the command ship at the start of a mission, your first move is to fire up the Nanite Forges — internal reactors that passively generate energy. You’ll start with three, and they’ll quietly tick away, filling your energy reserves while you figure out your opening strategy.

Energy is the gating resource for everything else. You spend it to unlock departments — the four operational branches that open up your options:

• Mining Operations — unlocks harvesters (for ore), enticers (for preparing void matter extraction), and void harvesters
• Engineering & Prospecting — unlocks surveyors (for research points) and the ability to research drift projectors
• Defence Industry — lets you mount turrets, shield generators, and other defensive systems directly onto your ships
• Cyber Warfare — opens up a suite of offensive and defensive digital attacks, but it’s the most expensive department to enable, making it a deliberate mid-to-late game commitment

You can’t unlock everything at once. At roughly 10 energy per second from three forges, your first department takes about 20 seconds to come online. That’s 20 seconds of defending with whatever you arrived with while you decide: do I go for economy first, or territory, or defences?

That tension never goes away.

The Research Ship

Your upgrade platform. The research ship doesn’t build combat units — it makes everything else better. Fleet-wide damage boosts, armour upgrades, engine speed, harvesting efficiency, drift field improvements — it’s all here, and it all costs research points.

The research ship is also where you unlock the blueprints for advanced units like the Dampener Ship and the entire cyber warfare tech tree.

Every RP you spend here is an RP you’re not spending somewhere else. Want to go all-in on cyber warfare? That’s 265 RP for the full tree — RP that could have gone to weapons upgrades, drift field efficiency, or dampener blueprints. The research ship is where your long-term strategy takes shape.

The Assault Carrier

Your war factory. The assault carrier builds all your combat ships — fighters, raiders, beam ships, missile frigates, battleships, shield ships, and heavier capital-class vessels like the Arkhelion.

Before you can build most unit types, you need to research them on the assault carrier (which costs energy), then deploy a construction field — a platform within a set radius of the carrier where your units are actually assembled. You also set a rally point so completed ships automatically disembark clear of the build zone.

The actual building is handled by constructors — small utility ships that pick up ore and energy from the command ship, fly over to the construction field, and spend those resources assembling the unit. Fighters are the exception — they don’t need constructors and can be produced directly.

As the game progresses, you can unlock additional construction fields to increase your throughput. More fields mean faster fleet replacement, which matters when you’re losing ships in a contested drift zone and need reinforcements now.

The Economy: Four Resources, One Loop

Energy

Generated passively by nanite forges on the command ship. Used to unlock departments and research unit types. You don’t need to micromanage it — the forges tick away on their own — but you do need to decide when to spend your reserves, because unlocking a department at the wrong time means you’re sitting without energy when something more urgent comes up.

Ore

The workhorse resource. Ore funds almost every unit and structure in the game. Harvesters fly out from the command ship to mining zones near the planet below, descend to the surface, collect ore, and return to deposit it. The mining zones drift across the map as the planet orbits, so your harvesters are constantly adjusting their routes — you can’t just park them and forget.

Research Points (RP)

Generated by surveyors — ships you build at the command ship and then deploy to research zones scattered across the map. Once a surveyor is in position, it passively generates about 1 RP per second by scanning the local environment. You can station up to two surveyors per zone.

RP is the currency of strategic choice. It buys drift projector research, cyber warfare unlocks, fleet-wide upgrades, and advanced unit blueprints. You never have enough, and every spend closes a door somewhere else.

Void Matter

The most interesting resource in the game — and the one that ties everything back to the lore.

To get void matter flowing, you first build an enticer and send it to a null field on the map. The enticer prepares the null field for harvesting (about 30 seconds). Once it’s ready, you deploy void harvesters to extraction points within the field, and they begin pulling void matter.

Void matter is what sustains your drift fields — the territorial hex network that forms the backbone of your defence. Every active drift projector drains about 1 void matter per second. Run out, and your fields start going dark. This means void matter income isn’t optional — it’s the lifeblood of your territorial presence.

Drift Fields: Your Terrain in Space

This is the heart of Drone Commander’s RTS identity.

The Problem

In a ground-based RTS, terrain does the heavy lifting for strategic depth. Mountains funnel armies. Rivers create chokepoints. Walls and turrets form layered defences that attackers must chew through. None of that exists in space.

The Solution

The entire map is divided into a honeycomb grid of hexagonal zones. At the start of a mission, this grid is invisible. When you build and deploy a drift projector into a hex cell, that cell activates — visually distinct, owned by you, and projecting altered physics within its boundaries.

Inside a friendly drift field, your ships gain a combat advantage: increased speed and increased firepower. Inside an enemy drift field, your ships are debuffed. The fields don’t block movement — any ship can fly into any hex — but the further you push into enemy territory, the more the odds stack against you.

This is what replaces walls and turrets. One enemy drift field is manageable. Three in a row, each stacking debuffs on your fleet while buffing theirs, is a meatgrinder. You’re not breaking through a gate — you’re fighting uphill through increasingly hostile physics.

Chains and Networks

Drift projectors don’t work in isolation. Every active projector must trace an unbroken chain of friendly hexes back to your command ship. The command ship is the power source. If a projector in the middle of your chain gets destroyed, everything beyond it goes dark — no buff, no debuff, just neutral space.

This is where the real strategy lives. A wide, shallow network is resilient but offers weaker coverage. A narrow, deep one projects power but is brittle — one surgical strike on a junction hex and half your network collapses. You’re constantly making decisions about network shape, and the enemy is always looking for the load-bearing hex to knock out.

Managing the Grid

Each drift projector has a manual on/off toggle. Mid-battle, you might shut down rear hexes to conserve void matter for the front line, or go dark on a flank to consolidate resources for a decisive push. You can also reclaim any drift projector — destroying it instantly and recovering some void matter — to reposition your network on the fly.

Breaking Through

When attacking into enemy drift fields, you’ll want a Dampener Ship — a specialist unit that reduces the debuff effects of enemy drift fields within a radius around itself. Dampener ships require significant RP investment to unlock (70 RP across two research tiers), but without them, pushing through deep enemy networks is brutal.

The Science Behind the Strategy

Here’s what makes Drone Commander’s base building more than just mechanics.

Strange Matter and the Ancient Gold Rush

Billions of years before the events of the game, ancient races noticed something extraordinary: the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation — the echo of the Big Bang — wasn’t perfectly uniform. In twelve locations across the galaxy, CMBR appeared to clump together. When they investigated, they discovered that in these regions, the fundamental constants of the universe were different. The speed of light, the permittivity of space, the values that define how reality works — all variable.

What they found was a substance they called strange matter — not the quark-based strange matter of human physics, but something far more profound. This matter allowed direct manipulation of spacetime itself.

A galaxy-wide gold rush followed. Every advanced civilisation raced to these twelve locations to claim what they could. They refined the strange matter into shards — portable batteries that could locally alter the fundamental constants of the universe. With a shard, you could change the speed limit. You could make distances shorter. You could rewrite the rules.

Starlanes and Null Fields

The ancients used their shards to build starlanes — corridors across the galaxy where spacetime behaves differently, allowing travel between star systems at speeds that would otherwise be impossible. Different shards had different capabilities, and the starlane network became the infrastructure of galactic civilisation.

Those ancient races are long gone — wiped out by the Drone Fleet or vanished into history. But the starlanes remain. And where starlanes exist, were planned, or have degraded, they leave behind null fields — ghostly residue where the strange matter that once warped spacetime has slowly leaked its energy.

Void Matter: Bottled Leftovers

Void matter is what you harvest from null fields. It’s the waste product — the faint, degraded trickle of the original strange matter that once powered starlane corridors. It retains just enough of the source material’s properties to allow localised manipulation of physical constants.

When you deploy a drift projector and it creates a hex field, what’s actually happening is a crude, small-scale recreation of what the ancients did with shards. You’re projecting a zone of altered fundamental constants into the battlefield. Your ships perform better inside because the physics are literally different there — tuned in your favour.

This is why drift fields cost void matter to sustain. You’re actively maintaining a region of warped spacetime, burning through the resource to keep the constants altered. Stop feeding it void matter, and reality snaps back to normal.

The Bigger Picture

The entire RTS economy mirrors what’s happening at the galactic scale. The Drone Fleet — the Dark Worlders — strip-mine entropy (crystallised, locked information — essentially the soul of living beings) to power their cosmic infrastructure, including the ability to cast fake universes and import exotic matter. You’re doing the same thing at a tactical level: harvesting the remnants of ancient technology to project zones of altered physics that give you a fighting chance.

The resource hierarchy reflects the civilisation tiers of the galaxy:

• Void Matter — accessible to all spacefaring races. The dregs. Enough to project basic drift fields
• Resonant Essence — accessible to the Vionites and above. Discovered after 300 years of pulsar research. Stronger effects
• Entropy — accessible to sovereign-tier civilisations. The real power source. What the Dark Worlders harvest from the living
• Arch-Matter — accessible only to the most ancient races. The stuff of legends

Every resource you spend in Drone Commander has a lore reason for existing, a lore reason for being scarce, and a lore reason for doing what it does. The strategy isn’t layered on top of the fiction — it grows out of it.

Cyber Warfare: The Invisible Front

Once you’ve stabilised your economy and drift field network, the Cyber Department opens up an entirely different axis of attack.

Cyber operations are targeted actions with cooldowns, launched from the command ship after enabling the Cyber Warfare department (300 energy — the most expensive unlock) and completing research on the Research Ship.

On offence, you can disrupt individual enemy drift fields, drain their energy generation, siphon their void matter reserves, blind their radar, or — at the top of the tree — shut down their command ship entirely for 20 seconds. A fully invested cyber player can dismantle an enemy drift field network without firing a single shot.

On defence, when the enemy launches a cyber attack on you, an alert fires and you get a response window — a quick button-mash or key-sequence minigame. Succeed, and you reduce or negate the attack. Fail, and it lands at full strength. Higher-tier defences give you more time, a chance to auto-block, or even reflect the attack back at the enemy.

The tradeoff: the full cyber tree costs 265 RP. That’s RP not going to dampener research, weapons upgrades, or fleet-wide armour. Going all-in on cyber is a commitment — but if your enemy isn’t prepared for it, it’s devastating.

Opening Strategies

At mission start with 1,000 ore, 60 RP, 0 energy, and 0 void matter, you face genuine choices:

• Economy Rush — Enable Mining Operations first, get harvesters and enticers running immediately. Ore and void matter flowing fast, but you have no territorial presence and no drift fields early. You’re betting on out-producing the enemy
• Drift Field Rush — Enable Engineering & Prospecting first, research drift projectors, and start claiming hexes using your starting ore. Fast territorial control, but you’re burning reserves with no income to replenish them. If the enemy disrupts your void matter pipeline, your network collapses
• Turtle — Enable Defence Industry first, mount turrets and shield generators on your capital ships, and weather early aggression. You survive, but you fall behind on territory, economy, and tech. This works as a reaction to early pressure, not as a long-term plan
• Cyber Play — A long-game investment. Get Mining Operations running for income, then pour everything into the Cyber Department and its research tree. Devastating in the late game, but you’re vulnerable and under-teched for a long time

The 60 starting RP is enough to do one thing well — not everything. That’s the tension, and it’s there from the first second.

Space strategy games have a terrain problem. Without hills, chokepoints, or rivers, battles devolve into blobs smashing into blobs in an empty void. Asteroids only get you so far. We wanted something better — mechanics that create real tactical depth without breaking the fiction of open space.

Saturation Fields

Invisible energy-drain zones seeded across the map by generators. Any ship — ally or enemy — that enters a saturation field has its energy slowly sapped. They won't show up on your main view, only on radar, so there are no glowing boundary boxes cluttering your screen. You'll need detector ships to scout safe routes, and smart players will bait enemies into fields they don't know are there.

The result: space has structure.

• Invisible on the main view — no glowing boxes, no immersion-breaking overlays
• Visible on radar only — rewarding players who check their instruments
• Detector ships required — scouting becomes a real tactical role
• Affects all ships equally — your own fleet isn't immune, so placement is a double-edged sword
• Creates corridors and danger zones — flanking matters, recon matters, the map has shape without a single wall

Orbital Hot Zones

The battle takes place in high orbit — far enough from the planet that your fleet can manoeuvre freely, close enough that orbital positions matter for bombardment and landing operations. The planet itself arcs slowly across the bottom of the map on its orbital path, disappearing off one side and re-emerging from the other.

This changes everything. Orbital capture points — the on-ramps for bombardment runs and landing craft drops — shift in value as the planet drifts. A position that's critical right now becomes worthless in a few minutes as the planet moves out of range. Defenders can't just park on a point and hold it. Attackers can't wait forever to push.

Both players see the same orbit. Both can plan around it. The question is who reads the map better.

• Planet arcs across the map in real time — a slow, visible orbit that reshapes the battlefield
• Capture points shift in value — a key position now might be worthless in minutes
• No static defence — defenders have to move with the zones or lose relevance
• Bombardment windows are temporary — time your push or miss your shot
• Predictable, not random — both sides have the same information, rewarding planning over reaction

Hex Fields

The missing piece. Saturation fields give space its terrain. Hot zones give the map a heartbeat. Hex fields give it territory — a living, shifting front line that both sides are fighting to control.

The Grid

At mission start, the entire map is divided into a honeycomb of hexagonal zones. This grid is invisible until a hex scout is deployed into a cell, at which point that hex activates — visually distinct, owned, and projecting modified physics constants within its boundaries. The grid is programmatic: calculated from map width and height at load time with a configurable hex_diameter (default 700). No overlap, no manual placement in the editor. Hex scouts snap to the nearest unoccupied hex centre on deployment.

The whole map is claimable. Every hex is a potential battleground.

What Hex Fields Actually Do

Hex fields aren't walls. They don't block movement. Any ship can fly into any hex, friendly or hostile. What changes is the physics inside.

A friendly hex modifies local constants in your favour — better shield regeneration, faster weapon cycling, improved sensor range. The specifics depend on what's been researched and what tier of energy is powering the field. An enemy hex does the opposite: your ships are debuffed, their ships are boosted. Neutral hexes have no effect.

The result is layered, asymmetric defence without a single physical barrier. Pushing through one enemy hex is manageable. Pushing through three in a row, each stacking debuffs, is a meatgrinder — and that's the point. It replaces the “break the wall, break the turret, break the base” progression of traditional RTS with something that fits open space: each hex you cross tips the odds further against you until you crack the network.

• No movement restriction — any ship can enter any hex
• Buff/debuff zones — friendly hexes boost your ships, enemy hexes punish them
• Stackable depth — multiple hex layers create the layered defence that replaces walls and turrets
• Researchable effects — what each hex actually does depends on your tech progression
• Scalable by energy tier — a hex powered by void matter gives a modest buff; one running on resonant essence is significantly stronger

Chain Logic

Hex fields don't operate in isolation. Every active hex must be able to trace an unbroken chain of friendly hexes back to a command ship. The command ship is the power source. If the chain is broken — because a hex scout was destroyed or shut down — everything beyond the break goes dark. No buff, no debuff, just neutral space.

This is where the strategy lives. A perfectly built hex network can be collapsed by a surgical strike on a single junction hex. A wide, shallow network is resilient but weak. A narrow, deep one is powerful but brittle. Players have to decide how to shape their network based on the tactical situation, and the enemy is always looking for the load-bearing hex to knock out.

• Hexes chain back to command ship — no chain, no power
• Junction hexes are high-value targets — destroying one can cascade a whole section dark
• Network shape is a strategic choice — wide and resilient vs deep and powerful
• Flood-fill adjacency check — each hex knows its neighbours; power propagation is a simple connected-component check from the command ship outward

Void Matter Economy

Hex fields consume void matter to stay active. Not a one-time build cost — an ongoing drain, every tick, for every powered hex. Expand too fast and you'll bleed your reserves dry. Lose your harvesters and your network starts collapsing from the edges inward as you're forced to shut down fields to keep critical ones online.

Each hex scout has a manual on/off toggle. Mid-battle, you're managing a power grid under fire — shutting down rear hexes to keep the front line lit, or going dark on a flank to consolidate resources for a decisive push. The more territory you hold, the more it costs to hold it.

This is the longevity mechanic. Battles aren't just about who has more ships. They're about who can sustain their territorial control while disrupting the enemy's supply chain. Hit their void matter harvesters and watch their hex network flicker and die, hex by hex, as they scramble to decide what to sacrifice.

• Ongoing void matter cost per active hex — expansion has a price
• Manual on/off toggle per scout — triage decisions in real time
• Resource pressure creates natural ebb and flow — overextension is punished, efficiency is rewarded
• Harvesters become strategic targets — choke the supply, collapse the network
• Mirrors the galactic-scale entropy economy at a tactical level

Reading the Board

A well-designed hex battlefield tells a story at a glance. Your hexes glow one colour, the enemy's another, neutral space is dark. You can see where the front line is, where the gaps are, where a chain is thin enough to cut. The enemy's command ship sits behind layers of hostile hexes. Your job is to find the weak point, punch through, and collapse their network from the inside.

Missions can start with pre-established hex networks — the enemy already dug in, your fleet arriving and deploying its initial hexes as crew chatter contextualises what's happening. No tutorial screen. The player sees the board, hears the team react to it, and understands. Push blue into red. Cut the chains. Take the command ship.

The Payoff

Three systems, one dynamic battlefield. Saturation fields give space its terrain. Orbital drift gives the map a heartbeat. Hex fields give it a front line. Every match plays differently not because of randomness, but because the geometry is always shifting under your feet — and the best commanders are the ones who see it coming.

Starting Resources (Per Mission — Tunable)

Resources

Command Ship

The command ship is the backbone. Everything starts here. It generates energy, enables core departments, and builds all non-combat units.

Nanite Forges

Forges are the first thing you activate. They passively generate energy. More forges = faster energy generation. Mission-dependent how many you start with (e.g. 3 for the moon mission, max 6).

Department Unlocks

Departments are enabled by spending energy. Once enabled, they stay on. This is the gating mechanism — you can't do everything at once, you have to wait for energy to accumulate and choose what to enable first.

Note: At 10 energy/sec with 3 forges, the first department takes ~20 seconds to unlock. This paces the early game nicely — you're defending with what you arrived with while the forges tick up.

Unit Build Table — Command Ship

Hex Scout Reclaim: Click any deployed hex scout and hit reclaim — the scout is destroyed and a portion of void matter is returned to reserves. Use this to reposition your network or consolidate resources when void matter runs low. Simple, no cooldown, immediate.

Critical Build Chains

Chain 1: Hex Scout (Territory Control)

The primary path — getting hex fields online to claim territory:

1. Deploy Command Ship
2. Enable Nanite Forges → energy starts generating
3. Wait for 200 energy
4. Enable Mining Operations
5. Build Constructor (100 ore from starting reserves)
6. Build Harvester (150 ore) → deploy to harvest zone → ore income starts
7. Wait for 200 energy
8. Enable Engineering & Prospecting
9. Research Hex Scout (30 RP from starting 60)
10. Build Hex Scout (500 ore)
11. Deploy Hex Scout to hex cell → consumes void matter

Void matter fork: Before step 11 works long-term, you need enticers:

• After step 6, also:
• 6b. Build Enticer (200 ore + 15 RP from starting 60)
• 6c. Deploy Enticer to null zone → void matter starts flowing

Players who rush hex scouts without establishing void matter income will watch their fields flicker off. That's the trap, and it's a good one.

Starting RP budget (60): The player can afford the hex scout research (30 RP) AND one enticer (15 RP) from starting reserves with 15 RP left over. This means early decisions matter — do you spend that remaining 15 on a second enticer for safety, or save it for something else? Once starting RP is spent, further RP requires deployed surveyors.

Chain 2: Dampener Ship (Hex Assault)

The path to breaking through enemy hex networks:

1. Research Ship: Research “Dampener Field Theory” (40 RP)
2. Research Ship: Research “Dampener Ship Blueprint” (30 RP)
3. Assault Carrier: Build Dampener Ship (300 ore)
4. Deploy with assault fleet → reduces enemy hex debuffs in local radius

Total cost: 70 RP + 300 ore. This is a mid-game investment — you won't have 70 RP to spare early. The player has to decide when to pivot from expanding their own hex network to building the tools to crack the enemy's. Push too early without dampeners and your fleet melts in enemy hexes. Wait too long and the enemy network becomes impenetrable.

Chain 3: Cyber Strike (Disruption)

The path to disabling enemy systems without a direct assault:

1. Wait for 300 energy
2. Enable Cyber Department on Command Ship
3. Research Ship: Research “Cyber Warfare Suite” (40 RP)
4. Select target → launch cyber attack
5. Enemy gets chance to respond (button-mash defence)

Why it's late-game gated: 300 energy is the most expensive department unlock, and the research prerequisite means you're investing RP that could go to dampeners or upgrades. Cyber is the “I've stabilised my economy and hex network, now I want to start dismantling theirs from a distance” play.

Chain 4: Full Defence Lockdown

For players who want to turtle and weather early aggression:

1. Wait for 200 energy
2. Enable Defence Industry
3. Build Field Generators (100 ore each, tack onto ships)
4. Build Turrets (200 ore each, tack onto ships)
5. Optional: Build Arc-Defence Ships (400 ore)

Tradeoff: You're safe, but you have no ore income beyond starting reserves, no RP generation, and no hex presence. The longer you turtle the further behind you fall on territory. Works as a response to early aggression, not as a long-term strategy.

Cyber Department

The cyber arm operates from the Command Ship once the department is enabled (300 energy) and relevant research is completed on the Research Ship. Cyber attacks are targeted actions with cooldowns — not passive effects.

Offensive Cyber Operations

Defensive Cyber Operations

When the enemy launches a cyber attack on you, an alert fires and a response window opens. The player has a few seconds to engage a button-mash / key-sequence defence minigame. Success reduces or negates the attack. Failure means full effect.

Cyber Research Tree (on Research Ship)

Cyber Warfare Suite (40 RP)
├── Hex Disruption
├── Power Drain
├── Cyber Defence Suite (35 RP)
│   ├── Adaptive Countermeasures
│   ├── Auto-Reject Protocol
│   └── Advanced Cyber Defence (50 RP)
│       └── Mirror Protocol
├── Advanced Cyber Ops (60 RP)
│   ├── Void Siphon
│   └── System Blind
└── Cyber Mastery (80 RP)
    ├── Forge Shutdown
    └── Hardened Core

Total RP to fully unlock cyber tree: 265 RP. That's a massive investment — a player who goes all-in on cyber is sacrificing dampener research, hex efficiency upgrades, and weapon upgrades. But a fully kitted cyber player can dismantle an enemy hex network without firing a shot.

Research Ship

The research ship is primarily a buff/upgrade platform. It doesn't build combat units — it makes everything else better. It has the same defence tack-on options as the command ship (turrets, field generators, etc.).

General Upgrades

Assault Carrier

The assault carrier builds all combat units. No gating departments — if you have the ore, you build the ship. The constraint is ore income and queue time.

Note: Unit roster is illustrative — existing units from the current build slot in here. Costs are placeholders for balancing.

Fleet-Wide Weapon & Ability Unlocks

Ships produced by the assault carrier are expendable — built in bulk, lost in battle, replaced from the queue. But their effectiveness scales with fleet-wide upgrades purchased via RP (and in some cases void matter) on the Research Ship. These are permanent for the duration of the mission.

Design note: Each ship class starts with one weapon and can unlock additional systems through RP spending. This means RP is an ongoing operational resource — not just a tech tree currency. A player generating high RP income has a fundamentally more capable fleet than one who isn't, even with identical ship counts. Void matter also plays a role in some upgrades, creating further tension with hex field maintenance costs.

Capital Ships (Reserve Ships)

Capital ships are distinct from assault carrier production. They are persistent — they survive between missions, carry upgrades forward, and grow in power over the campaign. Think pets, not cattle.

• Persist across missions — damage, upgrades, and loadout carry over
• Individually upgradeable — RP and void matter spent on a specific capital ship, not fleet-wide
• Limited in number — you won't have many, each one matters
• Boss-tier combat presence — significantly stronger than standard fleet units
• Named and characterful — tied to the narrative, crew dialogue, and story progression

Capital ship upgrade details will be fleshed out as the system develops. The key constraint: RP and void matter spent on capital ships is RP and void matter NOT spent on fleet-wide unlocks, hex fields, or cyber operations. Every resource in this game should hurt to spend.

Build Priority Decision Tree

At game start (1,000 ore, 60 RP, 0 energy), the player faces genuine strategic choices:

All are viable depending on the mission and enemy aggression level. The 60 starting RP is enough to do one thing well, not everything — that's the tension.

Energy Hierarchy (Future)

The current resource model uses void matter as the hex field fuel. Long-term, the plan is a tiered energy hierarchy that maps to the game's lore:

This hierarchy doesn't need to be implemented now, but the resource system should be built with it in mind — void matter is tier 4, and the plumbing should allow higher tiers to slot in later.

Details to be revealed…

Details to be revealed…

Weapons in the RPG/exploration sections are expendable. Ammo is finite, and managing it is a core part of every level. There are two main ways to arm yourself:

1. Found in the field — Weapons can be picked up during a level, but ammo for them is strictly limited. Burn through it and the weapon is dead weight unless you find more on that same map.
2. Bought from shops — Dedicated NPC vendors sell weapons and items. The human side is handled by Straker’s old, jaded shopkeeper archetype (contributed by community member ScottishMadLad), and items are sold by Audrey, an NPC contributed by Gwynedd00. Deritonian equivalents of both vendors exist for missions on Deritonian-aligned worlds, with their own stock and pricing.

Carry Limit

You can only carry a maximum of 2 weapons per level. Loadout choices matter — pick the wrong pair for the terrain or enemy type and you’ll feel it fast.

Out of Ammo? Tough.

If you exhaust a weapon’s ammo and there’s no resupply for it anywhere on the current map, that’s the run. No magical refills, no infinite reserves. This drives the player to vary loadouts, scavenge, and treat every shot as a decision.

Vanguard Upload Beacons

To keep the system from feeling punishing, maps include beacon points — either active Vanguard Upload Beacons or abandoned Vanguard outposts that can be re-activated. Interacting with one swaps gameplay into a 2–5 minute orbital battle: essentially a fly-by skirmish above the planet.

Win the orbital fight and Vanguard drops you an ammo dump and a medical care package on the surface — enough to restock for the next stretch of the level. Lose it and you walk away with what you started.

The intent is a clean risk/reward loop: beacons are optional, but they’re the only reliable way to refill mid-level. Skilled pilots can effectively earn their way out of an ammo crisis instead of restarting the mission.

Originally known as the Dark Worlders by the ancient Skrill race. The Sekarri refer to them as the Drone Fleet to reduce panic, as the name "Dark Worlder" carries a legacy of hopelessness.

Origins

Proto-Human in origin — the original humans, grey in colour, from another galaxy. They once had nations, many races and colours, but eventually formed a single totalitarian government and a single skin colour: grey. As they expanded outward, they were intensely xenophobic.

They originated on a planet over 1 billion years ago. Originally a civilization with culture and wars similar to others, they became obsessed with technological supremacy, eventually utilizing eugenics and total domination. They were eventually trapped on a planet surrounded by a Null Field — a barrier that prevented matter from existing.

Visual Evolution

• Early Expansion: Their army and politicians looked mechanised — giant armoured suits, faces concealed, breathing mask fittings.
• Mid-Expansion: Their form shifted from metallic to wizard-like: robes, cloaks, facial masks became capes. Front line troops looked like mages.
• Late Expansion: Ethereal, light-bending material. Face obscured to prevent aliens looking upon the face of their "gods."

The Skrill War & The White Hole Event

An ancient race called the Skrill (Keepers of the Universe) broke the barrier, believing they could "fix" the Dark Worlders' programming. This acted as Pandora's Box. Upon release, the Dark Worlders destroyed the Skrill's 10th Fleet and ignited a 10,000-year war.

The Skrill attempted a diplomatic meeting near an entropy sink (black hole) to contain the threat. The Dark Worlders betrayed them, corrupted the entropy sink, turning a black hole into a White Hole. This rift allowed reinforcements from another galaxy, leading to the extinction of 95% of all life in the galaxy.

Hierarchy

• Arkons: Regional/Galactic political masters. Visible as orbs of energy with no physical body. They oversee harvesting quotas, entropy conversion, and construction of exotic artefacts.
• Sovereigns: Supreme military commanders charged with conquering entire galaxies. Appear as mages in cloaks wielding "magical" staves (high-technology weapons). Cannot be killed and can spawn like instances of an app.
• Arch-Pestel: Brigade/corps leaders who micromanage at the solar system/planetary level. Charged with ensuring the expungement of 95% of populations. Now exist as part of the Sovereign's mind.

Military Capabilities

According to Kira, no race has ever won a single skirmish against them. Their technology appears as "magic" to the Sekarri (who are 300 years ahead of humans). They have wiped out 95% of tier 2 and 3 sentient life in the galaxy.

The "Hornet" Strategy: They utilize scouts. If a scout is alerted, the fleet swarms in overwhelming force. The only counter-measure is to destroy or distract the scout instantly. The Sekarri once sacrificed an entire fleet just to stop a scout from reporting their location.

• Classification: Tier 0 species (year 2029+), on the edge of Dispersion networks
• Deep culture shock after first Drone Fleet invasion
• Transformed after the war — several massive leaps in technology, unexplained to the outside observer
• Desperation forced humanity to strip naval ships for material to build starships
• Relies mostly on young ship captains under the age of 35

A race of humanoid feline-like species. Very advanced but now a nomadic travelling race. They came from a world called Alara that was destroyed. Alara had continents: Langara, Caelin, Lyran, Gerestone and Mythan.

• Classification: Tier 1 species, 300+ years more advanced than humanity
• Extermination survivors; post Alara and Deridana
• Females outnumber males 7:1
• Height: approximately 7'6"
• Their society revolves around prides, and the supply of men often lies at the center of politics and culture

Modern-day Sekarri, though 300 years ahead of Earth technically, are culturally very similar to humans. Technological developments allow them to be more progressive and inclusive, but some stereotypes linger.

Sekarri females have adapted to "maidenhood" — true poly-type relationships including love for the male, love for other females in the group (pride love), and love for the crown (first female). Their relationship dynamic is both complex and simple.

A corporate-driven planet, with smaller moons and planets where anti-capitalists have fled. They still believe in nobility, monarchs, and love buzzwords.

They evolved from spiders. Their star shouldn't be what it is — a mystery that hints at deeper secrets in the galaxy.

Classification: Tier 1 species (barely).

• Classification: Tier 1 species
• Decentralised, spread out through the galaxy
• No home world — Tovar was destroyed, and they have sought a world of their own ever since
• Can blend in and infiltrate other races, better than Sekarri Demi technology
• Mercantile in nature with spiritual underpinnings

After the destruction of their home world Tovar, the Kethri began looking for a world of their own. The two succeeding factions decided to go the other way, and used the mastery of bio-technology they had developed to blend in with other alien societies without them even noticing. Little is known about any of their people who tried to establish a new home world.

The resistance group is called The Kindling — in their tongue it also means a tight-knit gathering of people. The Kindling were gentle, persuasive, and mostly lived in the open with other alien races, seeking asylum or volunteering work in exchange for living space and resources.

The Umbra Consortium, by contrast, used their Hidden Paw to influence alien governments' decisioning and direction — including on Earth, when they arrived in the 50s, possibly earlier.

Mirrorweave. The Kethri can directly change their physical appearance, but also influence and persuade. Their artificially produced — for want of a better word — pheromones influence people's perception cores to see them as one of their own. This ability is called Kinscent, and together with their shapeshifting it forms their wider suite of Mirrorweave abilities. The Umbra Consortium often exploit Kinscent to exert suggestive control over alien governments.

Over thousands of years, both sides have wound their necks back in. Even the Umbra Consortium are careful about how they apply pressure, having been found out in the past. When settling an alien world they always target less advanced ones: their bio-nanites quickly infect all satellites and hardware to ensure direct editing of any digital footage — posts and comments get re-edited to remove their true form.

On Earth, the Umbra Consortium mostly have control. They gently influenced the formation of the FOM — for though they are enemies of the Kindling, both are enemies of the Dark Worlders, and they believed a unified Earth would be a strong Earth. The Kindling–Umbra Consortium strife in modern times is often one of hypocrisy: contrary to the name, both can be as bad as each other.

Kethri still have to be careful about slipping into their true form. As such, they only do it on rare occasions — gathered together with others of their kind, on the planet, at night. This may be the origin of the werewolf tale.

The bombshell: the Sekarri emulated these abilities to develop the Demi Project, which became their approach for first contact — creating Demi forms of the species they wish to interact with (for humans, a half-human / half-Sekarri form). The Sekarri Demi Project runs on Demiweave — a more synthetic, nanite and camo-photonic version of the Kethri's natural Mirrorweave.

Planet: Shal

Deritonians are bipedal and reptilian in appearance, possessing mammalian features like hair. They come in varied colours from green to pink, with heights from 5ft to 8ft.

A hardy, externally pacifistic species organized into a traditional, feudal society of houses and clans — blending rituals and nature-spirit beliefs (akin to feudal Japan's Shinto) with medieval European culture (Wales, England, Scotland, Ireland). They have templar knights.

Drakhans are a Tier 3 dragon-like ancient species who are extremely pacifist, hiding from the galaxy after devastating wars. They share the planet with the Deritonians, but enforce a strict policy of isolation causing Deritonian civilization to stagnate.

The Deritonian government is formally seeking asylum with humanity, offering 500,000 battle-hardened warriors and rare minerals in exchange. Deritonians and humans have already begun forming personal bonds, including romantic relationships.

▸ See also: Vionite-Lore — ranks, the two royalties, Resonant Essence & the Deadlight Survey. Plus Meeting with the Vionies — first formal contact with the Vionite Empire in the Post Earth-Liberation chapter.

Mouse and squirrel-like in form, with large diversity in both appearance and culture depending on distance from the Core Worlds. Vionites sit right on the line of the Tier System — the most advanced civilisation of their grade, and deliberately fuzzy: top of Tier 1 or the bottom of Tier 2, depending on who's measuring. Their recent grasp of Resonant Essence is what tips them toward Tier 2 at all.

• Population: ~100 billion citizens across multiple star systems
• Height: 4.2 ft (1.28 meters) on average
• Highly intelligent, passionate and aggressive
• The only T1 race that can travel in space without dispersion fields
• Core Worlds: Militaristic mouse-like generals
• Home Worlds: Retail sector, politicians and luxury
• Fringe Worlds: Hippie squirrel-like populations

Unlike others, the Vionites' energy footprint is too high to hide. So they prepare for war — culturally, politically and scientifically. They are currently undergoing a massive Total War military campaign, the only race insane enough to go toe-to-toe with the Drone Fleet.

An aquatic, noble and benevolent race. They were the first — the elders, the founders, the forerunners. They built all the infrastructure found in the galaxy today. But they were wiped out by the Dark Worlders after releasing them from their prison, in an event known as the White Hole incident.

Reclusive and ancient — a younger race than the Skrill, who came first, yet still impossibly old. Legend has it the Honnehari were already around when the Dark Worlders were first released, some 750 million years ago. As a Tier 3 race, they are godlike in technology compared to all other living species.

The Honnehari knew they couldn't stay or they'd be wiped by competition (the Drone Fleet), or eventually atrophy as all intelligent races do. So they left the galaxy — no one is sure how.

Makers of Life

The Honnehari do not breed life so much as author it. To them, Tier 0 and Tier 1 life is trivial to manufacture — they could spin up twenty fully-formed humans in a week, each one carrying all the entropy, branching soul-data, and "self" we believe makes us unique. No womb, no lineage, no millennia of evolution; just intent and the machinery to express it.

Their dead prove the point. When the Vionites breached a timelocked Honnehari krypt, the seven corpses they found each still resonated more energy and signal than several human cities combined. Even in death, a Honnehari is louder than a living civilization. (Stranger still, the krypt also held a single human skull — an impossibility no one has yet explained.)

See also: the Eridix and Resonant Essence — the half-real Honnehari construct the Vionites salvaged, and the soul-physics they reverse-engineered from it. Daughter-character Yevera is the last Honnehari still lingering in this region.

Previously known as the Adamant. A species still being fleshed out in the lore — details to come.

Every named character in one place — one line each. Names link to full entries where they exist below. A dash means the detail is still to be filled in.

Civilisations in the galaxy are ranked along two independent scales rather than a single tier. A race's standing on one axis need not match the other.

1. Reach & Energy

A Kardashev-style measure of how much space and power a people commands — from a single planet, to a local system, to a galaxy, to a dominion of galaxies.

2. The Gnosis-Lattice — or Yield-Domains

Named the Gnosis-Lattice by the Skrill, and called Yield-Domains in the harsher tongue of the Dark Worlders, this scale measures how deep a civilisation can read and rewrite the informational substrate of reality itself.

Because entropy in this universe is information — crystallised, locked-in, the fundamental layers of reality — mastery of physics is downstream of mastery of information. The deeper you read the lattice, the more you can create: virtual universes, shards, and exotic constructs willed into being, some of which can in turn rewrite the universe's constants.

The Skrill catalogued these depths to keep them; the Dark Worlders renamed the same depths to mine them.

Reach ≠ Gnosis

The two axes diverge. The Vionites command a vast empire (high Reach) yet have only glimpsed the lower layers of the Lattice — resonant essence — leaving them deep in reach but shallow in gnosis.

In current human understanding, our best ways to evaluate and find aliens are a mix of the Kardashev Scale (for ranking them) and the Drake Equation (for estimating how many there are). Kardashev held that the more advanced a species, the more energy it commands — so the larger ones, like a Type II, ought to be visible by hunting for the Dyson Spheres they'd build to harvest a star.

The Tier System proposes that energy is not the fundamental measure of an advanced race. Energy still matters, but it is really a question of the distribution of energy — how much useful, available energy a civilisation can move across its estate. The fundamental base resource is information. Information is the real currency, which means some super-races might actually prefer the cold regions of space, where negentropy is easier to maximise.

A race's Tier is therefore determined by both Energy and Information Mastery together — not energy alone. (See also The Two Axes of Advancement, which splits these into Reach and the Gnosis-Lattice.)

In short: Sovereigns harvest life in the galaxy to extract entropy (crystallised/locked information). The entropy can be used to create Fake Universes, in which they build things they need. They then import those things using Virtual Entropy.

Entropy is a base layer of reality. The real-world definition is the measure of the unavailability of energy to do work, or a measure of disorder. Drone Commander expands this interpretation as the percentage of locked-in information, unmodifiable — essentially, the soul.

Entropy is superior to available information, in that entropy can be used to generate new information. This is what makes it so valuable. The Dark Worlders have limits on what they can create (stars, black holes, etc.) as physics limits what information can do. Entropy allows them to work around this — a minable resource giving access to exotic matter like Shard Strange Matter.

Casting Alternate Fake Universes

The Dark Worlders treat entropy like an oil rush. They don't care that harvesting extracts souls or destabilises local space — it powers their economy, allowing them to make Fake Universes, Shards, and cosmic-constant altering matter.

Alternate realities don't exist in Drone Commander. However, the top-tier species can manipulate and cast alternate probabilities into micro-universe bubbles within our existing universe. With Fake Universes they can build whatever they want; with Virtual Entropy, they import what they built.

The Dark Worlders believe they are doing good, because they think they can prevent the universe from ending by leaching Fake Universes.

• The leftovers of when entropy is harvested or corrupted. Must be processed to form into Spawn.
• When a forge is created and people (alive or dead) are brought for processing, wastage is left over that festers into malicious energy.
• The Dark Worlders realised that if left untouched the energy would dissipate, so they channel it into Entropic Spawn — a second layer of defence for the forges.

It's not faster than light, nor transportation, nor quantum nonsense.

Billions of years ago, species noticed that not all CMBR (Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation) was equally distributed — it appeared to clump together in 12 places. On closer inspection, CMBR seemed to almost instantly appear in another location. There were 12 regions in the galaxy where physics behaved differently.

The top races of that era began a gold rush, racing to each location and bottling up the super-resource into Shards. Shards are like batteries for special matter that can change the physical constants of the universe.

• If you have a shard, you don't need to play by the rules of the universe
• You could double your weight or make the speed limit 5x faster
• You could make distances shorter
• But like oil, you have to refine it for what you want — there are hundreds, maybe thousands of shards

The shards are bottled super-physics from regions of early CMBR where physical constants were different and variable. These clumps of space have long dissipated, but the ancients raced to mine, refine and purpose them. Different shards have different functions related to the part of space they came from.

History of the Sekarri (Sekar venatrix)

Venatrix meaning gender imbalance. Sekarri come from a wider family of Sekar, meaning smart hunters.

Pre-History: During their last major evolutionary phase ~200,000 years ago, environmental factors caused females to die at much higher rates in childbirth. Through selective breeding and survival of the fittest, women who bore more females were selected for — creating the 7:1 forcing function.

Early History: Social bonding dominated their civilisation. The instability of breeding meant many Sekarri still carry epigenetics from previous Sekar favouring monogamous relationships. It took the rule of law, religion and even caste systems to engrain their polygamous society. A Pride System was formed.

< 800 Years Ago: Sekarri maintained strict traditions — any male not pairing with more than 6 women would be severely punished, as would women who attempted to keep a man to herself.

After 400 Years Ago: Living standards improved. Autonomy and individual rights became more of a thing. Cultural revolutions followed. People were free to form relationships how they pleased — with the final caveat being that high-level government officials must still be seen to follow traditions.

• Swat Sisters: Sub-specialist unit, high volume, called upon in most urgent war theatres. High fatality rates, well paid.
• Battle Bros: The male contingent of Swat Sisters. Normally separated by gender until the fall of Alara.
• Red Sisters: Super-specialist hit women. Contracted by governments or lucrative companies with government approval. Have an ethical checklist and can refuse jobs.
• Tier 1 Operators: The elite. Fel was a fleet Tier 1 operator — one of the very few with space combat experience. Irivin was all-terrain, specialised full-core army.

The Decades Before — Timeline (Human Calendar)

The Empress's Announcement

The first warning did not come to Alara itself. A far-out Sekarri colony — one of their most distant outposts, yet relatively close in astronomical terms — was attacked and destroyed. In the aftermath, the last Empress — a descendant of the original Freexyl — went out on system-wide channels and announced the detection of the Drone Fleet, and what that might mean. In the same address she confessed to something long dismissed: the eons-old legends were true — the Sekarri had ancient warning of the Dark Worlders.

At the time, no one could explain why the Dark Worlders didn't come straight for Alara. In truth, the Drone Fleet had become distracted by another civilisation and concentrated its attention there — buying the Sekarri roughly 40 years to prepare. There was enough time to panic, to bluster, and eventually to come together — building defences and escape routes in a massive multi-pronged effort.

The End of the Dynasty

The Freexyl dynasty ran from the tyrant Empress the first Freexyl slew, through Freexyl herself, then her daughter, and her daughter in turn — each serving a term as Empress. By the time of the announcement the dynasty was already on the way out; the news of the Dark Worlders effectively solidified it. The decision was made not to continue the monarchy aboard the evacuation fleet — making the Empress who gave the warning the last.

The Big 5 Capitol Ships

One prong of that plan was the construction of five capitol ships — the Freexyl among them. One never made it out of dock.

What most people don't realise is that the Sekarri did not have this fleet all along. Their technology is lopsided because the threat of extinction forced them to rapidly assemble space assets on a timescale no healthy civilisation would choose. Paradoxically, it's also why the Sekarri seem so relaxed compared to everyone else — they've known about the Drone Fleet for years, while races like humanity are still absorbing the shock.

None of the capitol ships were built on the ground. They rose in massive, sprawling space docks — which made it far easier to filter who came aboard and who didn't. The ships were deliberately over-specced, with plenty of empty space, and Alara managed to keep them from becoming overloaded and taxed with civilians. (More on the insurrectionist terrorists and how that was managed — coming later.)

The Freexyl Standoff — Origin of the Human Sector

What the governments of Alara were not prepared for was low-level coordination by civilians. At the time the Freexyl was scheduled to leave, hundreds of civilians held the ship hostage, refusing to release it until it took on more civilians than had been arranged. They weren't bluffing — they had access to ship propulsion, power distribution and more.

Azdria led a strike group to put them down non-lethally — the Red Sisters, Kat, and a whole roster of now-familiar faces were involved. In the confusion there were multiple deaths.

The area where the standoff occurred was left abandoned out of respect ever since — which is why, when the 300–400 abducted humans came aboard, there was already an empty, fully provisioned section of the ship waiting to house them. That place is now known as the Human Sector.

To adapt to the gender imbalance, Sekarri females developed fine needle-like hairs below the belly button that stand on end during arousal. These inject a form of organic hormones into males on contact — a genetic historical adaptation.

As centuries progressed, they lost utility as cultural mechanisms took precedence. However, some females still have active filaments: 1/5 Sekarri women have them, but 1/3 Langarans do.

• Velara (Primary Nurturers): "Heartkeeper" — deeply involved in the child's upbringing, providing love, guidance, and daily care. The emotional anchors of a child's life.
• Lorena (On-and-Off Caregivers): "Lifebringer" — participate more sporadically, offering support when present but with other duties or interests. Still contribute to the child's upbringing when they can.
• Astraea (Rarely Present): "Star-touched" — more remote, often due to duties or personal choices. Serve as a figure of admiration or distant influence. Astraea have been known to float between prides.

What Children Call Their Mothers

Sekarri children have multiple mothers, and each parenting role carries its own terms of address:

• Velara: Most Sekarri call their Velara Mum, Mom, or Mother — the same intimate terms used across many cultures.
• Lorena: Typically addressed as Maw, Mala, or simply Ma.
• Astraea: Can also be called Ma or Maw, though this is rare and not used by all children. The common approach is to call them Mimi followed by their name — e.g. "Mimi Fera's coming over for dinner tonight."

The Sekarri's polyamorous lifestyle isn't simply a consequence of the 7:1 ratio — it's a deeply woven emotional tradition rooted in something far more profound than physical need.

At the center of their prides is Bondlove — a sacred, near-sexual connection shared between women. It transcends friendship, built on mutual comfort, emotional syncing, and intimate touch: nuzzling, holding, shared warmth. Though not explicitly sexual, bondlove carries a closeness that often feels just as fulfilling as time with the male partner — sometimes more so.

There is no envy, no rivalry. When the male is unavailable, one woman may take on the Veyla role — altering her voice and posture in a respectful ritual. She doesn't just comfort the others; she is rewarded with favour and affection. Bondlove is more than custom — it is the very fabric of Sekarri identity, sisterhood, and healing.

Sekarri faith is a complicated thing. There is no single official church — instead there is a kind of unofficial religion that, over the ages, quietly absorbed nearly all of their earlier faiths. It doesn't work the way religion does on Earth: it carries far more historical and political weight than spiritual dogma. It is better understood as a way of life — closer to something like Confucianism than to a worship-based creed.

Old-style clergy and traditional religious figures still exist, but they are few. The masses instead follow the unofficial religion: they pay a modest monthly membership and receive perks and standing in return — faith woven into civic and institutional life.

The Gods in Us

Before the Pride system, Alara hosted many religions side by side — a monotheism, a Buddhism-like faith, and a Daoism-like tradition. For a time monotheism took the majority, largely because tribal warlord queens claimed a divine mandate as a pretext for enslaving millions.

It fell out of fashion once the prides formed. Monotheism never held the same appeal for the Sekarri as it did for humans: prides are multipolar, not singular, so a great household all praying to one god never took root — every member held inherently different values. In its place rose "The Gods in Us," a faith already thousands of years old.

It holds that there are sixteen gods, tied to the six stages of life. A Sekarri attaches spiritually to a god, and as they grow and change they move between the gods they feel best represent and watch over them — others read it as the gods spurring them to do better, to give more. Together the sixteen embody harmony, the very thing a pride household strives to achieve.

In the last few hundred years, as society advanced, the gods have become more symbolic than literal — treated almost like good-luck charms, the Sekarri being a rather superstitious people.

Freexyl's Temple

The temple aboard the Freexyl ship is believed to store Freexyl's essence. Whether her actual remains rest there — preserved like a mummy — is not known for certain. What is known is that much of her wealth and possessions came here: effectively her entire estate was transferred to the ship, and helped pay for its construction.

People do not worship her. They hold her in reverence, much as great leaders are remembered — the way China regards Mao Zedong or the United States Abraham Lincoln. They come to pay their respects and take pride in her legacy. Some, however, given the tragedies of Alara, believe her spirit still watches over and protects them.

Alara has multiple continents, much like Earth. The Sekarri World Wars revolved around the supply and rights of men.

First three wars — The Supply of Men  |  Fourth and fifth wars — The Rights of Men

Tactical & Military Command

Intelligence, Science & Control

Civil & Political Caste

The Vionite Core Worlds do not hold a single crown. Power is split between two royalties, and the populace is perpetually divided over which is the real one.

Military Royalty

The first is a military royalty — and, crucially, it is merit-based in part. You can work your way into royalty through service and command. This is a deliberate design: it largely prevents the inbreeding and nepotism that rot hereditary dynasties. But it is a composite, not fully meritocratic — bloodline, patronage, and old family influence still tip the scales.

Retail Royalty

The second is a retail-focused royalty — more economically minded, built on trade, syndicates, and the wealth of the Core markets.

The Tension

Because the two coexist, the Vionite Empire carries a standing tension: the populace sometimes regards the warrior-line as the true royalty, and sometimes the merchant-line — depending on the age, the war, and who is feeding the worlds. Neither fully eclipses the other.

Just as humans once knew of light speed but believed in the Ether before Einstein showed the true 4-dimensional nature of the universe, the Vionites have glimpsed the basic principles of entropy in action. They understand this as Resonant Essence.

This discovery took 200 fleet ships working for 300 years in one of the most extreme environments known — a pulsar system. The combination of time-dilation, intense radiation, and the gravity gradient allowed them to view how information works at the fundamental level.

Around 1450 (human calendar) — some 700 years ago — the Deadlight Survey breached a timelocked Void Stasis Krypt and recovered seven dead Honnehari corpses, a depleted Eridix, and — inexplicably — a single human skull. It was a find that nearly cost them everything: the fleet almost destroyed itself in the pulsar reaching the krypt, and the Honnehari dead inside still resonated more energy and signal than an entire human city. General Ozerane's staff, working with a Honnehari Eridix, were able to reverse-engineer ancient, godlike Tier 3 technologies. This hinted at Resonant Essence.

Think of an Eridix as an AI drone that exists only half in our timestream — a construct that is never fully here. The one the Vionites recovered had been bleeding power for millions of years and was finally running out, which is the only reason they could pin it down and extract it. They studied it intensely; it was the Rosetta Stone for everything that followed.

Entropy vs. Resonant Essence — the fuel analogy

If Entropy is petrol — the crude, common fuel everyone burns — then Resonant Essence is kerosene or diesel: the same underlying stuff, refined into something far denser and more potent, linked directly to time, life, and space.

After centuries of work, they finally built instruments to measure Resonant Essence. They expected to see a new field, particle, or dimension.

They did not expect to see the fundamental soul data of living beings.

Vionites, Sekarri, humans — all complex, branching data snippets that grow, split and merge. Not DNA code created from parents, but immortal data streams that resonate through different dimensions and time domains. Even after death, their Essence directly influences the evolution of the galaxy.

This shocked the Vionites to the core. The pragmatic conclusion: they were at least 100,000 years behind from being able to make Tier 3 status. The system is now off-limits, but like Area 51, the technology benefits are being slowly siphoned to the populace — including Stellar Architecture via resonant stream fields.

It also bought them one impossible prize. Once they grasped that essence links life, time and space, they could attempt what the Honnehari do casually: make a new being. But the Vionites have no technology to simply conjure a lifeform from nothing, so they cheated — the Black Section seeded the work with stolen DNA from their best strategic mind, Strategon Ozerane, and channelled it through the Eridix's resonant machinery. The result was Daria — the Black Genesis — a child who is therefore partially built from Honnehari technology, and only a half-sister to Ozerane's natural daughter Oryen.

In 1152 (human calendar), a Vionite survey flotilla — the expedition history would call The Graven's Watch — came across a 'locked' region of space. They were not, at first, aware of what lay inside; what drew them was the pulsar and its rare value as a natural laboratory. The locked region sits within the pulsar's sphere of influence — not the pulsar itself, but bound to it in a way the Core has never made public (more on that connection later).

As decades of patient observation wore on, the survey began to unmask the presence of a Honnehari Krypt hidden in that region. What had begun as astrophysics became the most important archaeological prize in Vionite history. The covert programme to crack it took the name the Deadlight Survey, and the Core Worlds ultimately committed 200 ships over roughly 300 years — many lost, the fleet more than once nearly destroyed in the pulsar itself. By approximately 1450, the Deadlight Survey breached the Krypt, recovering seven dead Honnehari, the half-real Eridix, and a lone human skull whose presence — 800 million years before humanity — no one has been able to account for. [More to come.]

A Hidden War as Cover

From the Krypt's discovery to the present day, the work on the Eridix — and the back-engineering of its godlike, two-tiers-above technology — has remained a central but hidden project of the Core Worlds. To shield it, the Core did something extraordinary: they manufactured hostilities against the Fringe Worlds. The war was, in large part, a distraction — cover to move fleets, lay infrastructure between worlds, and keep the Home Worlds (the retail, accounting, finance and royalty center) from ever learning what the Core had found.

So the squirrel-like Fringe and the merchant Home Worlds bled and bickered over a secret only the Core's military caste was permitted to hold — the same caste that would, centuries later, quietly author Daria from it.

Carapax

A semi-sentient species that used to live on Alara. Before the evacuation, Neph was free to abduct as many as she could and convert them into her armies.

Tiny

Details to be revealed…

A proposal by the fans — a design framework for how Prides form, hold together, and fracture. Straker does not simply collect women; every Pride is a living social graph that must be negotiated, balanced, and maintained.

There are a limited number of Pride Crowns. Not every character can be a Crown — only a few per faction. The Crown is the anchor of a Pride: her approval (or veto) shapes who else can be admitted.

Every character — Crowns included — carries a whitelist of characters she gets along with and a blacklist of characters she will not tolerate.

• A Crown will not allow anyone from her blacklist into her Pride.
• A Crown is fine with anyone from her whitelist.
• For a neutral character (on neither list), Straker has to do some legwork — courting, favours, and persuasion — to earn the invite.

The second, third, and subsequent women also hold whitelists and blacklists. A wife may propose to invite her friends or her maiden circle, but will resist inviting anyone on her blacklist.

• One character hating another may not have veto power on her own.
• But two or three wives hating the same person will trigger a vote that can prevent the invite.
• The Crown's hidden vote is doubled — her preference weighs twice as heavily as any other member's.

4A — Named Groups

Rather than maintaining huge individual lists, you can define groups of characters and add an entire group to any whitelist or blacklist. For example:

BLACKFLEET = { Morrigan, Gia, … }

Adding BLACKFLEET to a character's blacklist instantly blacklists every member — far cleaner than listing each name.

4B — Sums, Unions & Counts

Lists support set operations. You can take the sum or union of multiple white/black lists, and you can count how many characters like or hate any given individual. This is what powers the voting and stability maths below.

Within a Pride you count the characters who like each other (mutual whitelist) and those who dislike each other (blacklisted but still sharing the Pride).

• More friendships (whitelisted bonds) → more stable.
• Fewer hatreds (blacklist pairs forced together) → more stable.

A stable Pride is easier to maintain and keep happy. A Pride packed with rivals will constantly demand Straker's attention, mediation, and resources to avoid fracturing.

A few characters receive special treatment for monogamy. The system is largely in line with the plan above, but different races have different preferences — only the Sekarri have Prides, so members of other races may simply not be interested in joining one.

Development Approach

• Build monogamy routes first for roughly 10–20 characters, treating them as if they were Crowns.
• Then refactor those paths so the same characters can exist as Pride members (specific to them) rather than Crowns.
• Use code and hierarchy so each character's script follows a similar flow but stays specific to their personality — easy to slot in.
• Then layer in a whitelist and blacklist between them.
• If this works, expand outward to more characters over time — where some will be blacklist-to-all (i.e. strictly monogamous).

Per-character preferences that shape how each romance route is written and played — updated as routes come online.

Kira Virethorne Sekarri · Astraria

As an Astraria, Kira leans toward polygamy over monogamy — she doesn't want to sink too much time into emotional relationships, so a Pride suits her better than an exclusive bond. She prefers men who are confident, outgoing, and funny.

Gia Sekarri · Black Fleet

Tied to the Black Fleet, Gia prefers something more intimate. On the outside she is a soldier and warrior, but she needs to be able to come home to someone who will let her open up — the right partner gives her the emotional security to set the armour down outside of her duties.

• Show genuine interest in her hobbies — above all, opera.
• When she talks about war or battles, always say you would prefer a non-violent solution.

Where the story goes after the first ~25 hours. With Earth liberated, the war stops being a local rebellion and becomes a galactic one. This chapter collects the plot beats, escalations, and design notes for the back half of the game — expanded as each arc is written.

Towards the end of the game you get your first formal discovery of the Vionite Empire — the moment the Vionites stop being rumour and distant resonance signatures and become a power you actually sit across from. This arc covers first contact proper: the opening interactions with the Vionites, the diplomacy and friction that follow, and how the galaxy's most advanced lower-tier civilisation — straddling the top of Tier 1 / bottom of Tier 2 line — reacts to a newly-freed Earth backed by the Drone Fleet.

⚠ Working outline — spoilers & dev notes. This is a rough plot scaffold for the back-half Vionite arc, kept here so the beats don't get lost. Names, mission numbers and ordering are provisional and will firm up as the act is written.

The Committed

The Committed are an offshoot faction of the Vionite Empire. They disagree with the core principle that the Total War buildup should be a purely internal affair.

Recap & sidenote: Ozerane and the Vionite Empire see the rest of the galaxy's species as a waste of time, because they are Tier 0 and Tier 1. Tier is not the same as Type — a Tier 1 civilisation needs more than the ability to control the energy of its own planet and star; Tier 2 needs a deep understanding and utilisation of Resonant Essence, and the higher up the scale you go, the greater the manipulation of data, knowledge and reality. The Type civilisations model is wrong, because a Type II or Type III race doesn't need the raw energy we assume they do.

The Committed believe that a Total War footing alone is not enough to survive. They hold that the rest of the galaxy's "inferior" species should serve the Empire — as cannon fodder and distractions. Their leader's plan: take the humans, Deritonians, Drakhans, Kethri and so on, load them into small cheap ships, and direct them toward every Dark Worlder emergence point. The hope is that the Dark Worlders follow them back to their home worlds and stay preoccupied wiping out lower-tier civilisations — buying time while the Vionite Empire builds up.

Original plan (provisional): after Mission 11 of the Vanguard campaign, the Sovereign contacts the leader of the Committed to reinforce Neph and the FOM, who are close to losing Earth. The Vionites are severely OP compared to everyone — a handful of them could take a country — so the counterbalance is that she complains she only has a token scout force. Even so, they reclaim 80% of Earth in a matter of days to weeks. The Vanguard then make a final counter-assault on Sevastopol: an amphibious landing with multiple aircraft-carrier support, dropships, Doorknockers and half a million humans.

Discovering the Vionite Empire

At the end of the last act — as you're leaving, still at a loss for how to build a coalition that could stand up to the Drone Fleet — the Drakhans tell Straker to go to a set of coordinates and to use a certain Amulet.

You take the ship and travel to the coordinates, which appear to be a black, barren, coal-like planet. You go to the spot Delgado (a legal-judge character) directed you to and place the Amulet on the ground. A wave ripples out, and before your eyes the entire planet transforms into a vast mecha-tropolis. You're jumped by security and imprisoned.

You learn that the entire Vionite Empire is cloaked — every planet, many stars, all of it obscured from any lower race. Many believe the Vionites are a god-tier race and seek them out, but the Vionites are mildly xenophobic: they erase the minds of anyone trying to enter the Empire and dump them on an "emigration planet" that screens them and sends them away. Only the Amulet stops them from wiping your mind and discarding you the same way.

They pass it up the chain, and you earn a chance to visit the Core Worlds under tight military escort. Here you meet Cirin, who takes you to the leadership — they've taken an interest in your stories.

Negotiations — Visiting the Core Worlds

• You meet Tyrenna, an architect — flirtatious and threatening, but through her you learn deeply about Resonant Essence and the history of the Vionites' 600-year project to understand it.
• You meet Ozerane and make your case — trying to compel the Vionites to join the fight against the Drone Fleet. His soldiers, the Laars, die constantly and are revived with ease; you see just how superior the Vionites are — everyone floats, and many control things with their minds. The Empire is on a Total War footing and sees every other species as a primitive distraction.
• You wander the Home Worlds, where you meet friends of Lysandara.

Rejection & the Road Through

You get rejected. Ozerane doesn't believe you met Yeverii, and you're kicked out.

From here you try to find Rexalia, only to be confronted by the Committed in an insane battle. Here you finally reunite with the Black Fleet and stop them, gaining access to Rexalia. Potential showdown with Daria.

You go back to meet Ozerane — now with Rexalia on your team and the Committed beaten — and finally convince him to give your stories credence. Unfortunately, during this time things have escalated, and you watch the Vionites lose an insanely huge fleet battle against the Drone Fleet.

Loose threads and pending deals that need resolving before the back half of the story closes out — expanded as each one lands.

The Sekarri Lifespan Pact

The Sekarri offer all humans the ability to extend their lifespan to 150 years. In exchange, humanity grants the Sekarri partial immigration status and access to Venus.

The community keeping the Vanguard flying — this roll is constantly being expanded as more supporters rally to the cause.

• That Side Character
• Captain Root
• Captain Crappost
• Scottish Madlad
• Gwynedd
• Jeff Anterell

⚠ Dev workflow — not lore. Running list of canon clarifications and story beats still to land in-game.

• The tribute numbers were always a light touch for Neph. Make an in-story reference later that shows the truth clearly: the public demand to Earth is 1 million — the number humanity thinks it's paying to be spared. The actual obligation to the Dark Worlders is only 100,000 plus Earth brought to heel — the real cost of the arrangement upstream of her. The ~900,000 gap is pure skim: Neph takes the bulk for the Dominion and writes it off as an "accounting error" in her favour. Her secret confession to Banes — topping up 1 million every 5 years — confirms it was never a one-time tribute but a recurring harvest baked in from the start. Land the reveal as a concrete beat (a Banes scene, intercepted Dominion comms, or a captured ledger in a mission).
• Lease-expiry maths. A 50-year lease topped up at 1 million every 5 years implies roughly 10 million humans over the full term. Decide whether anyone on the human side ever does this arithmetic on-screen — and what actually happens at expiry (renewal, handback, or whether the lease itself was fiction too).
• Tier-cap wording in the Pact. "Limited to Tier 0, but hard-capped below Tier 2" reads two ways — clarify whether Earth is held at Tier 0 outright, or permitted to develop up to (but never reaching) Tier 2.
• "Ships donated in secret by the Vanguard." Secret from whom — the Dark Worlders, the human public, or Neph's own command? Decide whether Neph sanctioned the donation or whether Vanguard leadership risked it behind her back.
• Dead-end diplomacy scene. The real human governments negotiate with the Sekarri Vanguard leadership completely unaware of Neph, while Banes fronts the actual arrangement. That's a strong dramatic-irony beat — worth showing one of these futile official negotiations on-screen.
• Number-consistency sweep. Neph's character entry previously said she could pay off the Dark Worlders with "a few hundred thousand" — now aligned to the 1M public / 100k real split. Sweep in-game dialogue, devlog copy and any older lore passes for stray figures.