Design: from discovery to development

Proposed, October 2026. Change by pull request.

An explorer finds something valuable on a quiet world. A company comes to dig it up. Traders haul in what the build needs, pirates raid the supply line, fighters are paid to stop them, and months later the system is different for good: new trade, a new station, a higher tech level, and people living there who are glad or angry about it.

This is how Witchspace gets a real-world supply chain: not a simulation of every crate, but a chain of events that all three careers feed, and that leaves the galaxy changed.

It builds on exploration (surveys, moon grades, first discoveries), companies and contracts (contracts, standing, building worlds), the trading companies (the Titanoboa and the yards) and the economy.

Principles

• The deposits are seeded; what happens to them is shared. Every deposit is in the galaxy's seed, the same for everyone, waiting to be found. What a commander does with one (who they sell it to, how much gets delivered) is a few records on the server, and the clock does the rest. No simulation runs while nobody is looking.
• Every career has a part. Explorers find, traders supply, fighters protect or raid, and the companies' agendas collide over the spoils.
• It changes the world, permanently. A developed system has a new export, new prices and a new station on the chart. Other players find it changed.
• People, not resources. Somebody lives on that world already. For them a find is a job, an eviction or a fortune, depending on who you sold it to. Glad, sad, mad, bad.
• Modern rules only. Classic stays as it was in 1984.

The chain

1. Prospect: the explorer finds it

• Deposits. About 12 a galaxy at any time, arriving in survey seasons (a few new ones a galaxy each month, from the clock, so no one can find them all in an afternoon and there's always something new; see fairness). Seeded, on moons and planets in systems that are low tech (5 or under) or thinly settled: the places nobody has looked closely, and where Wexley-Yorozu already goes looking.

• What they are. Each yields one commodity the game already trades, in a quantity the system has never seen:

  Deposit	Yields	Note
  Platinum seam	Platinum	Rich and quiet: everyone wants it
  Gem field	Gem-stones	Small, valuable, easy to smuggle
  Heavy-element vein	Radioactives	Dangerous to mine; Vorg likes it
  Gold reef	Gold	The classic rush
  Mineral shelf	Minerals, Alloys	Low value, huge volume: a station quarry

  Later, a sixth: something nobody has a name for (the door to the Thargoid thread).

• Finding one. A surveyed body has a small chance of a trace ("unusual readings"); only the Deep Survey Scanner turns a trace into a find, with a deposit grade (Poor, Fair, Rich). The find is survey data like any other, but valuable, and with a choice attached.

• First to bring it home has their callsign on the find for good: Nova's Find, the Okafor Seam. That's where firsts keep coming from: every development makes new places.

2. Claim: the explorer chooses who gets it

At a station, the find can be sold to whoever is there to buy it. The choice decides what happens to the world:

• Standing goes up with the company you sell to, and down a little with its rivals.
• One claim a deposit. The first commander to sell it decides, in the shared galaxy. Solo (signed out, or not in shared space), you decide for your own copy of the galaxy.
• Warning the locals (the explorer's dark-side choice from exploration stage 2): publish the find through the Mutual's newsletter instead. Nobody pays much, but the locals file their own claim, and the company that wanted it remembers.

3. Build: the traders supply it, the fighters guard it

Once claimed, the company moves in. Development runs in stages, each needing goods delivered and time passing:

• Supply contracts. Each stage's list appears as contracts on the boards of stations within a few jumps, from the developing company, paying well. In the shared galaxy every commander's deliveries move the same build along: a community goal costing one counter per stage on the server.
• Nobody delivers? It still gets there, slowly: the company brings its own freight. Each stage then takes about three times its minimum. Players make it fast, not possible.
• Delivering at the site. Once groundbreak starts, the site itself buys: a docking point (a Bullsnake, a supply platform, later the half-built station) that pays premium prices for the list, and sells the first ore at a discount.
• The supply line is a target.
  • Pirates gather on the routes to a site, more for a Vorg site, fewer for a Mutual one; cargo bound for a build is a fat target.
  • Escort and defence contracts for fighters: guard a convoy, clear a route, bounty on the gang raiding it (stage 3 of contracts).
  • Rivals. Hexon or Vorg may want a W-Y build to arrive late (the story hook already in companies): sabotage contracts for those who'd take them.

4. Open: the system is changed

When the last stage finishes, it's news across the region, and the system is permanently different:

• A new export. The deposit's commodity is now made here in volume: cheap at the source, and the prices of that commodity drop a little at nearby stations as supply spreads. New trade routes for everyone.
• New imports. A workforce needs food, medicine, liquor and luxuries: prices for those rise here.
• Tech level up one step (two for a Wexley-Yorozu station), so better equipment is sold here.
• A new place. An outpost or a second station on the chart, with its own name (and a first to dock there). Its name honours the find: Nova's Find Station.
• Opening premiums for the first traders in, as for a new station.
• Who runs it. The developing company's presence in the system goes up: more of its contracts, its police or its security wing, its rules.

5. Consequences: who's glad and who's mad

The people already there react, in news, messages and contracts:

• Wexley-Yorozu: prosperity on the station, debt on the surface. Some families are relocated; the Mutual's newsletter runs the story. A Ninefold-like thread can grow from any W-Y development.
• Vorg: a boom town. Work and danger; the government may slip a level (a Confederacy becomes a Feudal world for a while). Good for fences, bad for haulers.
• The Mutual: slower growth, but the locals own a share; Mutual members get a discount there for good.
• Unrest (later): a badly handled development can turn a system against its company: strikes (the export stops), sabotage, a change of government.

How it stays cheap and the same for everyone

• Seeded: where the deposits are, what they yield, their grade, the stage lengths, which goods each stage needs, and the economic changes once open. All from the galaxy seed, like trails and moons.
• On the server (the accounts object that already holds first discoveries): per claimed deposit, who claimed it, for whom, when; per stage, the tonnes delivered. A few hundred rows across eight galaxies, read a galaxy at a time and cached, like firsts.
• Progress is computed by anyone from those few facts and the clock: a stage is done when its minimum time has passed and its tonnes are in, or when three times its minimum has passed.
• Solo play: the same records are kept in your save instead, so a signed-out commander sees their own galaxy develop. Signing in later doesn't overwrite the shared galaxy: your solo claims stay in your save only.
• Trust: as for firsts, the server checks claims and deliveries for sense (a real deposit, a delivery no bigger than a hold, no faster than a ship can fly) and takes the game's word otherwise.

Numbers (a first pass)

Building it in stages

1. Deposits and claims. Traces and finds from surveys, grades, the claim choice at a station, finder's fees and standing, the finder's name on the site. Server: one claims table. The chart shows claimed sites and who claimed them.
2. The build. Stages from the clock and deliveries; supply contracts from the developing company; delivering at the site; what you see in orbit at each stage (reusing the yard models of building worlds as they're made).
3. The open system. New exports and imports, price effects nearby, tech level, the new station or outpost, opening news and premiums.
4. Raids and protection. Pirates on supply routes, escort and bounty contracts, rival sabotage.
5. Consequences. Relocations, news, the Mutual's newsletter, government shifts, unrest; a Ninefold-style story thread for W-Y builds.

Each stage is worth having on its own: after the first, finds and claims already pay, carry names and change company standing.

Open questions

• Should a claim expire if a development is abandoned (a company's build stalls for months)? Perhaps it reverts, and the deposit can be claimed again.
• Can players buy shares in a development, and be paid as it produces? Fun, but it needs a ledger on the server: later, if at all.
• How visible is a build in systems next door: a news line, a glow on the chart, ships passing through?
• Thargoids. The sixth deposit type, the one nobody can name, is a natural door. Who finds it first, and who do they tell?

Think something here should change? Say so on the ideas board, where others can vote it up, or email hello@witchspace.org.uk. If you code: this page is docs/design/discovery-to-development.md on GitHub, open to pull requests.