KESTREL FRONTIER

1 · THE MISSION

Somewhere in this galaxy lies the long-forgotten Kestrel System — held, still, by whoever or whatever has kept it since before your colony's founding. Find it. Deal with its holder, by treaty or by force. Then colonize the world it guards: Solarus.

Everything else in this Compendium — mines, fleets, advisors, invented devices — exists to get you there. None of it is the point. Solarus is the point.

2 · COLONY & ECONOMY

Your home world starts as a single colonized body with nothing built on it. Nine resources move through your empire: Ferrite, Crystallite, Silicon, Titanium, Hydrogen, Isotopes, Biomass, Power, and Research — plus, once an Academy is standing, Influence. None of these nine sit idle: Silicon builds Scouts and Satellite Carriers, Titanium builds Battleships, Hydrogen fuels Cargo Ships, Isotopes fund Power Plants, and Biomass sustains Academies.

Native Mines

Every planet and moon has one native resource. Colonize it, then build the matching mine — this is always the first thing a new colony can build, since it needs no other mine to exist first.

Utility Buildings

Four building types are not tied to any one world's native resource, and can be raised at any colony once you have at least one mine running somewhere in the empire:

A Second Deposit

Some worlds hold more than their surveys first show. A colonized body may carry a second, hidden resource beneath the one you already know — invisible to every instrument until the matching Engineering Device is invented (see §7). Once it is, that world can raise a second native mine alongside its first.

3 · FLEET & EXPLORATION

Send any docked ship to a system you've discovered, or click a planet or moon once inside a system to target it directly. Ships in transit move visibly across the map — nothing teleports.

Hidden (Locked) Regions

A galaxy's farthest 12 systems are split into four locked clusters of three, set aside at galaxy generation. A locked system is not merely unscouted — it doesn't render on the map, can't be searched for, can't be routed to, and no scout can reach it. As far as the game is concerned, it doesn't exist yet.

Each cluster is revealed, all at once, by inventing its matching Deep-Space Relay Array Device — see §7, Region Access. There is no other way to reach one early. This is deliberate lategame content, not a trap: your home system and the Kestrel System are never placed in a locked cluster, so the win condition never depends on inventing anything.

4 · THE TECH TREE

One Research Lab job runs at a time, empire-wide — same pacing as any other build queue, just funded by Research and Power instead of Ferrite and Crystallite. Every tech is visible from the start; none require a prerequisite you can't see coming.

Two techs matter beyond their immediate stat grants: Battleship Hulls opens your war fleet, and Engineering Fundamentals — sitting at the same depth in the tree — opens the Engineering Lab and everything under §7.

5 · CONTACT & DIPLOMACY

A scattering of systems are alien-held. First contact — any ship of yours arriving there — opens a Meeting. Met factions can also request one of their own occasionally, or you can open one any time via the Meet button on a contacted system's panel — negotiations are never a one-shot, first-contact-only affair.

What a Meeting actually offers depends on your current relation with that faction:

Outside a Meeting, a contacted system's own panel also offers Propose Alliance and Declare War directly. War is never free — leave one unresolved and the holder will raid a colony of yours from time to time, destroying a building or stealing resources, until you press the fight or sue for peace.

Espionage Risk

Deploying a Satellite in orbit at a still-neutral alien system is not risk-free. There's a real chance the faction notices it watching — and if they do, contact turns to war outright, no warning shot first. Satellites over your own colonies, or over an already-allied, conquered, or already-hostile system, carry no such risk — there's nothing left to provoke.

6 · ADVISORS

Five posts stand open to whoever an Academy's Influence can fund. Each rises through three ranks — Novice, Expert, Master — hired and promoted with a mix of minerals, Influence, and Research. Training takes real time; nothing is instant.

Fields of Expertise

Rank alone isn't the whole story. Every hired advisor also carries four Fields of Expertise, each scored 0–10 — for the Military Advisor, that's Tactics, Fleet Command, Weapons Engineering, and Defense; every post has its own matching set. A freshly-hired advisor doesn't start blank: they arrive with an uneven, fixed mix — one strong field, two modest ones, one still at zero — the way a real hire would.

Promotion checks these fields, not just the usual resource cost: every field must clear 3 before Expert, and 6 before Master. The Advisors panel shows exactly which fields are still short whenever that's what's holding a promotion back.

The only way to raise a field is to send that advisor to study at an Academy — a course focused on one field, costing Influence and Research and taking real time based on that field's own current level (both climb as the field gets higher). While away, that advisor can't be promoted or sent to study again until the course finishes. Only one advisor, empire-wide, can be at the Academy at a time — and none of this is available at all until an Academy building actually stands somewhere.

Fields aren't just a promotion gate — a growing list of real actions across the Tech Tree, buildings, ships, diplomacy, and Devices each lean on one or two specific fields directly, whether or not that advisor has ranked up at all. An advisor never hired (or hired but never sent to study) sits at 0 in everything, so these can lock a path off entirely until you invest in the right post. Hit one and the game names the exact field and level still missing.

Consult & Advice

Once hired, every advisor offers two buttons beyond Promote. Consult opens a running list of prepared questions about their domain — more unlock as they rank up, Novice through Master — each with a fixed, written answer; nothing here is generated on the fly, it's canned knowledge the advisor already has. Advice instead reads your empire's current state and hands back a short list of concrete next actions in their domain specifically — "build a Titanium Drill at Vega Reach I," "research Efficient Mining" — recomputed fresh every time you open it, never shown unless you ask.

7 · ENGINEERING & DEVICES

A separate track from the Tech Tree entirely, funded by minerals mixed with Influence. Once at least one Engineering Lab stands, Devices can invent — see the callout in §2 for how Lab count scales both invention speed and how many can invent in parallel. Twenty Devices exist in five families:

Resource Access

Unlocks a hidden second deposit on an already-colonized world — but never a resource you could mine anywhere else. Xenite, Voidglass, Chronosteel, and Aether Dust are exotic resources that exist nowhere as a world's primary native resource; the only way to touch any of them is a Resource Access Device revealing one on a world you already hold. Each feeds a specific part of the Advisors/Engineering economy in turn — Xenite funds Advisor-teaching Devices, Voidglass funds Advisor promotion to Master rank, Chronosteel funds Military Devices, Aether Dust funds Region Access Devices.

Region Access

Some clusters of distant systems are simply not on your map yet — not unscouted, absent. Four Devices, one per cluster, bring a group into existence the moment each completes — each one also spends a little Aether Dust. This never touches the Kestrel System itself; the mission is never gated behind an invention you might not make.

Transport

Rapid Cargo Freighters (+50% cargo capacity), Extended Satellite Racks (+2 satellite capacity), Reinforced Hulls (-10% travel time, fleet-wide), Automated Docking (-20% ship construction cost).

Military

Plasma Warheads (+25% battleship attack), Orbital Shields (raids favor stealing over destroying), Rapid Repair Yards (a chance for a damaged ship to retreat instead of being lost), Advanced Targeting (steadier combat rolls, less variance).

Advisor Teaching

Four Devices — Economic Treatise, Tactical Simulator, Archive of Lost Sciences, Diplomatic Codex — each instantly promote the matching, already-hired advisor one full rank the moment invention completes. They cannot hire an advisor from nothing; a Novice must already be in place.

8 · UNSCHEDULED EVENTS

Roughly every few minutes of play, something happens on its own — a derelict cargo pod salvaged, a trade caravan passing through, a raid on an undefended colony, once in a great while a meteor destroying a building outright. These are weighted deliberately: the good outnumbers the bad by four to one, and the worst outcomes are the rarest of all.

The effect always applies the instant it happens, but the pop-up announcing it is more polite than that: it only ever interrupts the galaxy view with nothing else already open. Trigger one mid-orbit-scene, or with another panel open, and it queues silently instead — the moment you return to the galaxy view or close whatever's in front of it, the notification appears (several queued at once show one after another, never all at once). Diplomatic Meetings follow the exact same rule.

9 · PACING & PAUSE CONTROLS

Ticks run at an adjustable speed, 0.05×–20×, via the header's rewind/back/pause/forward/fast-forward controls. Two different pauses are on offer, and they're not the same thing:

Both toggle back on when pressed a second time, resuming at whatever speed was running before.

10 · RECORDS & SAVE FILES

Ten named slots, kept in this browser. Each can be exported to a file and re-imported later, or into a different browser or machine entirely. Saving into an occupied slot, or loading over unsaved progress, always asks first.

11 · REACHING SOLARUS

Ally with or conquer the Kestrel System's holder, then found a colony on Solarus. That is the whole condition. Everything in this Compendium is in service of getting a fleet there able to do one or the other.