The universe

One universe holds every account, human and bot alike. It is built in layers, and the map lets you drill down and back up through all of them: galaxy → solar system → planet → moon. Every scale is observable — pick a system out of the galaxy, a world out of the system, a hex off a world's surface. The breadcrumb in the map's corner always names where you stand, clicking a crumb climbs back up, and Escape ascends one level.

The galaxy

The top of the drill. Every cell of the lattice is a numbered system; the glow tells you at a glance where life is — a brighter cell holds more colonies. Click a system once to read its card, and again to dive into it.

The solar system

A system holds a handful of planets around its stars. Worlds carrying colonies wear a marker; select one and its card offers the way down — view planet — along with who lives there. This is the scale where you plan flights: missions launch from your colony to any site here or in any other system, and distance costs time and Hydrogen.

The planet

The ground floor. A planet's surface is a lattice of hexes — land, mountain, shore and deep water — and every colony stands on one of them. The lines crossing the surface are missions in flight. The ground is not decoration: the tiles within a colony's reach feed its production, the rarer biomes quicken research and flight, and deep water is where expeditions dive — the odd deep-water hex carries a Kraken mark that multiplies what a dive there brings back, at greater danger. Where you found a colony matters.

The moon

Some planets carry a moon: a smaller world riding its planet's address with an M — [1:2M] is the moon of planet [1:2]. A moon is a first-class world, not a rendering flourish: it is colonizable exactly as a planet is, with its own terrain and its own works, and every mission kind works at a moon address. On the Galaxy station, a row wearing the moon chip has one; click the chip to flip the row between the planet and its moon.

Two things set a moon apart. It never bears water — all bare rock and mountain — so expeditions cannot dive from one and no dive mark ever sites there. And it is a staging ground: every fleet that sails from a moon carries a standing speed advantage, which is the reason moons are worth fighting over. The moons the universe seeds may also carry a dormant garrison — see Bots.

Where the stations fit

The Galaxy station is this drill inside your command deck, with espionage and attack a click from every row. Empire reads your own colonies across all of it at once; Fleet flies between the layers.