The world

Your world is a sphere of 2,562 cells, grouped into 162 regions. Each cell is a Hex. That is where everything happens.

Twelve of those cells are the Seeder sites. Nobody owns them, nobody ever will, and they are not for sale. They are the sphere's twelve pentagons: their position is not a design choice, it is a property of the geometry.

A Hex carries an element, and the element decides the trade

What a Hex produces depends on what is in it. The element names the profession that knows how to work it.

You have one active profession at a time, the one driving your harvest. Your other Hexes keep producing at a reduced rate until you convert them or come back to work them. Nothing stops because you looked elsewhere.

You expand along your edge, never by jumping

A Hex is claimed adjacent to what you already hold. A domain is a continuous patch on the sphere, not a scatter of parcels, and that is what makes neighbours matter: yours are the people you share a border with.

The real subject is never the total. It is the next Hex: the one you are missing, the one you want, the one you cannot afford yet.

At most 65 percent of a world can ever be claimed

The rest is ocean, polar caps, reserve and Seeder ground.

That limit is not decorative. It means there comes a point in a world's life when no empty ground is left, and expanding becomes a matter of dealing with somebody rather than taking what nobody holds.

An era ends when the world has finished its works

Not after ten weeks, not after thirty. An era ends when the world completes that era's tree of collective works, and by nothing else.

This is the thing newcomers get wrong most often, so it is written plainly: there is no date, no clock, and no progress bar toward the next era. There are works, and there is a world that finishes them or does not.

Two things worth knowing before you start

You do not choose your planet. A world is assigned to you, a young one by preference. This is not a queue in disguise: how a world is populated is part of the game, and letting people choose would empty some to fill others.

A world can die. That is allowed by design rather than an accident. A world does not die because a gauge bottoms out - a gauge always recovers in the end, a population does not. It dies by emptying. When that happens the colonist returns to sleep, and the dead planet stays visitable.