Materials and analysis

An unfamiliar palette

Each planet rolls its own palette of raw materials. They are not iron and copper with new names — they are unknowns, each carrying a hidden profile of physical properties. Two worlds never hand you the same shelf.

Deposits of these materials thread through the terrain in geologically correlated veins: what you find in one place hints at what the surrounding ground might hold. Living ground is the clearest signal of all — where vegetation takes hold, in forest, marsh or scrubland, organic materials concentrate beneath it, while barren rock only rarely hides them.

Revelation by analysis

Knowledge of a substance is earned in two places, and they answer different questions. Field teams assay the deposit itself — the place: how rich it is, how pure, how far it runs, whether the ground around it holds water. The Laboratory takes the material as a standing study — the substance: a research position works through an identified material until its full property profile is documented, and it is the study, never the field, that proves a substance's special traits. Recipes demand properties, not names: once the study shows a local material carries what a process needs, that material qualifies as input. Identification also tells you how to get it out of the ground — the material's physical phase names which extraction building can work the deposit, and its output lands in the matching phase store.

Everything the colony has learned collects in a resource catalog: every material discovered so far, how far its study has gone, who is working on it right now, and where its known deposits lie. Until the laboratory completes the study a material appears only under its survey code — its physical class observable, its nature still a question. The completed study is a naming moment: the source enters the colony's records under its own name.

This is the engine of self-sufficiency. The colony that understands its ground stops depending on what it brought down from orbit.