The first landing
Your ship is dying in orbit. Everything the colony will ever own has to come down before it does.
The ship is a countdown
The expedition arrives on a ship that was never meant to stay. Its modules decay every turn, and once the hull finally gives, everything still aboard — people, supplies, equipment — is gone. The opening of every game is triage: deciding what comes down first, and accepting that the order you choose is a statement about what you can afford to lose.
The ship is also a settlement you run, for as long as it lasts. Tens of thousands ride in cryostasis; the few you wake — irreversibly — crew the deck: coordination, maintenance, cryo oversight, the reactor watch. A live power balance feeds every section, batteries buffer the difference, and when it stops closing you choose what the ship stops being: sections can go dark, be cast off, or be stripped for material — each with its price stated where you decide, each written into the chronicle by name. Care visibly stretches the decay clock; neglect and sacrifice shorten it. It never stops.
Descents are one-way. A lander carries hundreds of people at a time and stays on the ground for good, and the fleet is built smaller than the ark — not everyone can come down, by construction. The first wave carries what a fresh outpost holds — a few leaders, people, bridging life support and construction stock. It comes pre-loaded with exactly that outpost kit, and the manifest form reloads it with one click; the manifest is yours to edit before you commit, and the form reads ahead what the ground will do with a surplus. Equipment flies only as loaded cargo — a rover claims far more hold than a crate, and spare-part crates unpack into building material where they land.
Who is aboard in the first place was decided back on Earth. Before launch you pick the program that assembled the expedition — a research institute, an engineering works, a settlement foundation, a veteran survey corps, or the neutral consortium. A sponsor only shapes the opening composition: the professions and generation of the crew it recruited, the mix it packed, the data it brought. It never changes what the assembly may cost, and its imprint fades as the colony raises generations of its own.
Later descents go out as waves: one manifest, one destination, split across as many landers as it weighs. Every launch draws the ship’s stored power — a wave beyond the safe budget still flies, as forced launches that risk damaging a module. What is scarce is not the size of a single launch but how many descents the ship carries at all — every wave spends slots you can never buy back.
A wave lands by the room it meets. What fits goes into the settlement; stock past its shelves waits on a drop site beside it and drains in turn by turn until the pile is gone; people past its beds and roofs stand outside as a loose unit led by the surplus names — and a wave that would put people on the ground with no name to lead them is refused before it launches.
Time grows with the colony
Turns lengthen as the colony matures — and the first widening is earned, not dated. The whole pre-colonization era plays out week by week — every ration and every watt matters — and the clock widens to months on the day the colony crosses its first phase threshold: people accepted under prepared roofs, with the orbital reserve gone. Seasons and whole years follow once the colony runs on institutions instead of hand counts. Faster time is a reward: it means you no longer have to count litres.
A long turn never becomes a black box. Anything that deserves your attention — a birth, a death, a discovery, an outbreak, a ship module failing — stops the clock early so you can react, and pressing end turn again plays out the rest of the same turn.
Choosing the ground
Where you put the first Field Station matters more than almost any later decision. The landing region decides your starting climate, terrain, water outlook and the materials within reach. And the choice is made blind: from orbit you see the map’s face — relief, rivers, the look of the land — never measured values, because nobody has stood on the ground yet. Later landers can either reinforce an existing site or found a new outpost elsewhere — spreading out buys reach and costs cohesion.
The world itself is deterministic: the same seed always produces the same planet. What you learn about a world on one attempt is genuinely yours to keep.