Skip to content

Painting the map

So far the galaxy's geography is uniform. Regions give parts of it a face: their own sky, their own music, their own color wash on the map - and their own weather, in the form of local danger. Landmarks pin single, named places to the chart.

Regions

## [Regions](regions)

### [The Veilfall](veilfall)
---
Center: 5, -4
Radius: 3
Skybox: sky-neb2-rvb
Music: Artemis2
Color: #cc2244
Enemy mix: 40%
Station mix: 5%
Mine chance: 75%
---
Veil country. Red skies, salted lanes, and no honest ports for miles.

### [The Lantern Lanes](lantern_lanes)
---
Center: -4, 2
Radius: 3
Skybox: sky-delight
Color: #ffcc44
Enemy mix: 0%
Station mix: 30%
---
The Combine's home lanes - calm, bright, and busy. The safest miles in
the Reach.
  • Center / Radius - a square patch of map: Center: 5, -4 with Radius: 3 covers everything within 3 cells of that system. Centering a region on a side's home turns their neighborhood into their territory.
  • Skybox / Music / Color - arrival mood. The sky and music change when the crew jumps in; the color faintly washes those cells on the map.
  • The danger lines (Enemy mix, Station mix, Mine chance...) - these override the galaxy's average inside this region only. That's how you write a warzone (enemies up, ports down, mines everywhere) or a haven (enemies zero, ports plentiful) without touching anything global. The full list of dials is on The dials page.

Overlapping regions

If two regions overlap, write the smaller one first - it wins.

Landmarks

Landmarks are the opposite of procedural: single, named, hand-placed places - the locations of legend your dialogue and story can point at.

## [Landmarks](landmarks)

### [The Pale Ark](pale_ark)
---
At: 1, -2
Kind: derelict
---
A colony ship a century adrift, lanterns long cold. Every spacer in the
Reach has a story about what still walks her corridors.

### [Lighthouse Station](lighthouse)
---
At: -4, 2
Kind: station
Side: lantern
Art: starbase_science
---
The Combine's great beacon at the heart of the home lanes - half port,
half promise.

Kind: is station or derelict; a station can name a Side: (a side key) and an Art: (its model). At: pins it to a system.

Landmarks can also carry Guards: (a fleet that contests them, once) and Terrain: (a nebula or asteroid envelope, so the place sits in cover whatever the cell rolled).

A landmark you fly INTO

A landmark carrying Relic: is not a prop. It is an interior - chambers, passages, boxes, subtracted masses, named places and authored contents - built when the crew arrives and torn down with the cell.

### [Torgoth Megastation](giants_house)
---
At: 2, -1
Kind: derelict
Relic: voice
Relic file: relics/voice.amd
Cutscene: arrive_voice
---
field means
Relic: the relic key in that file - this ruin has an inside
Relic file: the .amd holding it. Defaults to <key>.amd
Cutscene: played ONCE, the first time anyone arrives in this system

The ruin itself is authored in its own file, as a ## Relics section - see the library's relic guide for the geometry. A relic file is self-contained: its ## Items, its ## Cutscenes and its dialogue scenes are registered when it loads, so the whole ruin - the space, what is in it, and what is said in it - opens as one document.

Three things happen for free when a landmark becomes a relic:

  • The way in is on the map. A selectable contact and a navpoint at the point carrying Roles: entrance. Nothing else in the interior is marked.
  • The inside draws itself as you fly it. Every point carrying Roles: is a dark measuring post until a ship reaches it, and then it lights up and stays lit. The radar fills in behind the crew rather than handing them a floor plan.
  • The relic brings its own atmosphere, sized to the structure, so the landmark's own Terrain: is skipped - two nebulae over one ruin would fight, and the relic's is the one that has to be right, because it is what caps warp inside.

universe_in_relic(ship) answers "are they in the ruin right now", which is how a mission leaves a crew alone while they are inside one.

Saying where they are

Every arrival shows a title card naming the system - the landmark, else a side's home, else the region, else the coordinates. Nothing named a cell out loud before; the galaxy map header does, and most story missions never enable that console.

Next: Captains and the cast - give the galaxy faces.