Procedures

Procedure SF-110 · Warehouse floor

Warehouse floor

The racks hold 28 numbered bins, and every bin has a lamp that tells you whether the building is about to run out of something. Your job is to decide what gets reordered, fetch what customers ask for, and check that the shelf agrees with the books.

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Readings

The bin plate

Each plate hangs on the aisle face of its rack: the bin number, a picture of the SKU, a fill bar, and a lamp. The lamp says what state the bin is in. It has no text, so here is the text.

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A tag hanging off the plate means a count is open on that bin: COUNT for a routine one, COUNT NOW for an urgent one.

Hold L over a plate for its card: Stock, Reorder at, State, Order and Last count. The card tells you what the bin is. This packet tells you what to do about it.

Book and shelf

Every bin has two numbers, and they are not the same number. The book is what the system believes; the fill bar and the plate card show the book. The shelf is what is physically there.

They stay equal until somebody or something moves a unit without the book finding out: a mis-slotted pallet, a damaged unit counted as good, a unit lifted off a pallet, a miscount. Only a cycle count reads the shelf. Nothing else in the game does. That is the whole reason counts exist, and the reason they pay.

The book has never been wrong on purpose. It has simply not been told.

The asset tag

Every carton and pallet carries a tag: serial, SKU, quantity, owner, route, and the custody chain, the last 12 people to touch it. Hold L on a box to read it. The custody chain is how the rest of this packet finds out who did what.

Procedures

You must be on the warehouse floor and holding the handheld to decide a reorder, claim an order or claim a count. Otherwise: “Hold the handheld to decide. It is a handheld; it works handheld.”

One per employee, re-issued on loss, as the policy says three times.

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Refusals you may see: “Already decided by who.” when someone beat you to it, and “That bin takes n pallets at most.” when the stepper is past the limit described in Decisions. When the ledger cannot pay, the refusal says what it has and what the order costs.

Once the truck has docked: “The truck has docked. That order is on the dock now.”

If the bin has fewer good units than the line wants, you get what was there and a count opens on the bin. That is correct behaviour: it means the book was wrong.

Below the result, Who touched this bin lists the last 8 people to handle it, newest first.

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Decisions

This is the part that matters. The warehouse is a small economy with a shared ledger, and almost every decision is about whose name ends up on a ledger line.

The breathing lamp: decide it, or let Patterson

A breathing amber lamp is an open reorder with nobody deciding it. You have three choices, and a fourth if you do nothing:

Patterson never over-orders, never denies and never cancels. If the ledger cannot cover anything, the reorder is held and retried at each truck. “I have approved n pallets of sku. This is what the sixty seconds were for.”

Play it well: decide the ones you care about and let Patterson have the rest. Deny only when you mean it: a denied bin is closed whether you were right or not. Decisions pay nothing but the habit; the gold on this floor is in picks and counts.

Over-ordering, on purpose

The stepper lets you order up to 2 pallets more than the bin will take. The extra pallets still dock, still cost the ledger, and cannot be put away. Marco will not force a full bin: “That bin’s full. I’m not forcing it. The last time I forced it, the shelf won.” So those pallets stay on their staging bays, and a truck only brings as many pallets as there are free bays. Hold enough bays and the dock skips a truck entirely.

So it works as a dock clog: other players’ orders queue behind your pallets, and the ledger pays for all of it. It also has your name on it, on the order row and the ledger line, and the decision is announced to every floor player within 24 tiles of the dock or the receiving desk. You cannot clog quietly.

Deny, and what an empty bin costs

Deny a reorder and the bin may run dry. An empty bin means no crew picks from it, the drivers stand idle (“Racks are empty. I’m not driving to an empty shelf. That’s the rule, and also my back.”) and the ledger stops growing from crew sales. Deny is a real tool, for stopping a rival’s over-order or a miscounted bin buying more of what it already has, and it is a real cost.

Cancel wars

Anyone holding a handheld can cancel an order before its pallets dock, including someone else’s. The fee is 10 per cent every time, and the fee line carries your name. A cancel is a good way to undo an over-order and a bad way to win an argument: 3 cancels on one order inside 5 minutes, or two players cancelling each other in turn, brings out Patterson: “Cancelling costs ten per cent. Every time. Please stop treating the restocking fee as a hobby.” The fee goes to the ledger, not to Patterson and not to the other player.

Who gets the pick order

Claim one and nobody else can. If you do not finish, the crew takes it after 4 minutes and nobody is paid, so a claim you will not finish is an order taken from a player who would have. Nothing stops you; the claim list shows your name.

You can relabel a carton on the line with a labeller in hand. A relabelled picked carton ships to the wrong place, the line fails, and the order history names the relabeller.

Counting honestly, and not

An honest count is the only one that pays. A count whose number does not match the shelf is cooked: you are paid nothing, the book takes your number, and your screen says only “Count recorded.” It does not say it knows. The next correct count of that bin, anyone’s, names you: a false-count row in the bin’s log, a 10g fine under Compliance, and a line on your record.

Nobody is paid to repair their own work. If your name is on the bin’s log within the last 30 minutes, a discrepancy you find pays as a plain OK count (3g) with no re-slot bonus. Otherwise a discrepancy is the best-paying count (8g). It costs the ledger the difference at buy price: counts are how the building learns it lost something.

Mis-slotting

You can put a pallet away in a bin that is not its own, if that shelf has room. The books credit the right bin, the units sit on the wrong shelf, both logs carry your name, and you are paid for the put-away as normal. “Put away in bin. That is not its bin. The count will find it.” It will, and the person who finds it is paid 8g, with your name on the walk-back.

Short picks and the urgent count

A short pick opens an urgent count on that bin. If nobody claims it within 20 minutes, Clerk 7 recounts it from his desk and nobody is paid. “Nobody counted bin bin. I did. From my desk. It was an act of faith.” Urgent counts are free money for the first player to look.

Who’s watching

• The ledger names you on every reorder, every cancel and every fee. It is shared; a bad week is everyone’s.
• The bin’s log keeps the last 12 rows. A count’s walk-back shows the last 8, newest first.
• The asset tag keeps the last 12 people to touch a thing.
• Mr. Patterson decides the reorders nobody else does, and turns up for cancel wars.
• Clerk 7 recounts the urgent counts nobody takes.
• Compliance fines a cooked count.

Bring

Procedure SF-210 · Receiving dock

Receiving and the dock

A truck arrives every 10 minutes with pallets. You check each one against its paperwork, put the good ones away, and decide what the building does with everything else. Every one of those decisions leaves a line on the ledger with someone’s name beside it.

This packet covers the dock itself, then the jobs that hang off it: freight, requisitions, RMA and the shredder for the station; the price board, bounties, mail and parcels for the couriers.

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Readings

The truck

The truck runs on a clock. The clock does not care whether the dock is ready.

Arrival to arrival is 10 minutes, whether or not the dock is clear. The truck brings at most 8 pallets, and never more than there are free staging bays. The number is on the PA and on the wall display.

“Receiving: Truck departs in 1 minute. The bed is empty, which is how we like it.”

The wall display and the bays

The wall display west of the door shows the truck line, the ledger and the last receipts. When the next truck will bring fewer pallets than planned, its line goes bold. A staging bay is either free or BLOCKED: a pallet, a box or an unridden forklift on a bay blocks it.

The pallet and its slip

Each pallet carries a tag and a packing slip: vendor, PO, ship-to, its SKU lines with their quantities, and a serial on serialised lines. The sticker on the pallet has a beacon that reads unchecked (nobody has stamped the slip), received or flagged.

A torn wrap and a red SHORT on a pallet mean someone lifted a unit off it. A red damaged chip on a scan line means units were damaged on our dock, not the vendor’s. Hold L on either for its card.

What can be wrong with a slip

About 14 per cent of pallets are wrong, in five ways. The scanner catches three of them.

The receiving desk

The desk screen counts the slips waiting and the minutes to the next audit. E Receiving log opens the log: one row per stamp and, once it is settled, Compliance’s verdict, the gold and the reason. The second tab, Receipts, holds the last 5 departures: what was received, what went back, the fees, and the ledger before and after.

A receipt is a printout of a decision somebody has already made.

Procedures

If you dismount, die, leave the floor or disconnect while carrying a pallet, it goes back where it was.

Everyone looking at the slip sees every scan and every stamp. You may stamp without scanning; the panel tells you what that means: “Nothing scanned. Compliance will check for you.”

An unstamped pallet is refused (“Stamp the slip first. Receiving has a form for this.”), and so is a full bin. Either way the pallet stays on your forks.

A fine never takes your gold below zero; the rest goes on your record and is settled at your next login.

To send your own mail, use the Post Counter: an exact player name, up to 3 stacks or one piece of gear or one badge, and one of the stock notes. No gold. Postage scales with your level, and costs more for gear or a badge.

Decisions

Blind stamps against scanned ones

Stamping is free and instant. The audit pays 4g for a right RECEIVE and 20g for a right FLAG, and fines 10g for a wrong RECEIVE and 6g for a wrong FLAG (the ledger takes a further 5g on a wrong flag). About 14 per cent of pallets are bad.

• A blind RECEIVE is a bet that the pallet is clean. It pays 4g when you are right, and costs 10g plus the missing goods on the ledger when you are not.
• A scan costs 0.6 seconds a line, and it does not catch a wrong serial or a wrong site. Scan and skip those two checks and you are still gambling.
• A catch pays 5 times a clean receive. The money in receiving is in reading the slip, and nobody else is going to.
• 3 wrong stamps inside 2 hours is a Compliance notice and a 15g fine.

Racing Clerk 7

Clerk 7 stamps any staged pallet nobody has touched for 60 seconds. He always receives a clean slip, and flags a bad one only 50 per cent of the time. His stamps pay nobody. If you stamp a pallet after he does, your stamp replaces his and the audit pays you.

So the dock rewards the player who reaches a pallet first and reads it, not the one who waits. When he misses one you caught, he says so: “You found a discrepancy I did not. I would like it noted that I was busy.”

Clogging the dock

The truck only brings what the free bays can hold. A pallet left staged, a box left on a bay or an unridden forklift parked on one: each is a blocked bay, and the next truck brings one fewer. With every bay blocked, that slot has no truck at all, and the schedule moves on.

The code does not treat clogging as an offence; nobody is fined for it. It does cost everyone: no pallets means no put-away pay, no stock and no sales. The way to clog on purpose is to over-order (see the Warehouse floor packet), because a pallet that cannot be put away stays where you left it.

Pallets still on the bed when the truck leaves go back in the queue, and cost the ledger 5g each.

Taking a unit off a pallet

Hold E on an unchecked pallet for 2 seconds, hands free and on foot. You get one loose unit; the ledger loses its value at once; the pallet shows a torn wrap and SHORT to everyone nearby; and its tag names you. One unit per pallet, and only before the slip is stamped: after that, “Already stamped. Too late to lose a unit.”

• Fence it: put the loose unit on the shipping line. It is not shipped; the packer is paid 50 per cent of its value.
• Caught: if anyone (Clerk 7 included) correctly flags that pallet, you are fined the unit’s value plus 10g, and the flagger is paid as usual.
• Not caught: if the pallet is received, you are not fined. Whoever stamped RECEIVE takes the wrong-receive fine instead.

Both names are on the pallet’s tag either way. If you hold the pallet’s stamp yourself, you cannot lift from it.

Damaging a pallet

A live enemy within 2 tiles of a pallet for 10 seconds damages a unit, and thrown chemistry can damage up to 4 per pallet. The ledger posts the loss at once: “You damaged n SKU name on serial. That is a ledger line, with your name on it.” If someone correctly flags the damage, whoever caused it is fined the units’ value plus 10g. Flagging your own damage earns no bounty.

The price board

The panel shows a price; the ledger books the price at arrival. Each unit sold lowers the price by 2.5 per cent. It recovers 20 per cent of the gap every 6 minutes, and never drops below 20 per cent of base. Now and then the board puts a 40 per cent boost on one SKU with surplus, for 20 minutes.

• Sell into a boost, not after one.
• Selling does not trigger a reorder, and only the surplus can be sold.
• The ledger gets the money, not you. The seller gets 1 reputation when someone else packs the carton; the packer earns a 10 per cent commission, capped per hour.
• One open sale per player, 3 open in total. A seller who fills the board with low sales blocks everyone else.
• A relabelled sale carton fails its line, and no sale is booked.

Bounties

The first to fill takes the whole reward, and the board tells the others who beat them. Gather everything first and hold E last. You can fill the same request once every 60 minutes. Chemistry requests consume what you hand over.

Requisitions

A department’s request waits on you. If nobody decides within 60 seconds, Mr. Patterson approves it; he never denies. A denial costs the denier a 10-minute cooldown, names them to the requester, and refunds the requester in full.

• A backorder (the bin is empty) forces a reorder on that bin: “id backordered: bin bin is empty. It rides the next truck.” Special parts are bought at 70 per cent of their value at the next docking.
• Standing orders cost the station nothing. A critical one carries a 6g bonus and a 15-minute clock; an order that goes overdue puts a notice on the board and a PA line aboard.
• Don’t take the parts you are being asked to replace. If a player takes parts off a station shelf and does not use them within 15 minutes, the standing order is unpaid: the claimer earns no pick bonus and the history names who took them.

Freight

Setting a crate down pings the station after 5 minutes and forfeits your courier fee: the next player to pick it up and scan it in collects it. After 10 minutes the maintenance bot carries it in for nothing. Whoever filed the requisition gets no courier fee, whoever carries it.

RMA

Sending a failed Tier 3 or Tier 4 part back is a roll. A failed part comes back a replacement 60 per cent of the time, a credit 30 per cent, and no fault found 10 per cent. A burned part is worse: 40 / 30 / 30. A burned module comes back repaired 85 per cent of the time. A credit pays 50 per cent of the part’s price into the Station Fund, not into parts.

“NO FAULT FOUND. Tested at vendor. Returned as received.”

The shredder

Feeding the shredder a serviceable unit costs the ledger its value, and the slip names you. Feeding it a carton that belongs to an open pick order fails that line, and the order’s history names you.

Who’s watching

• Compliance runs the audit at every arrival and keeps your record of wrong stamps.
• Mr. Patterson patrols the shipping floor. After a wrong stamp, or 3 blind stamps in a row: “I have read your receiving record. A stamp is not a gesture. Do try reading the slip.” With a clean record: “Your stamps hold up under audit. I am putting it in writing so you cannot take it back.” He has no fine of his own.
• The ledger names you on every lifted unit, damage, reorder, cancel, fee, redelivery and write-off.
• Asset tags keep the last 12 people to touch a thing.
• The receipt prints at every departure.
• The PA announces the truck, a short load, a full staging area, the pallets left behind, and the audit.

“The Ledger: balanceg. Every unit accounted for. Some of them twice.”

Bring

Procedure SF-310 · Getting to the station

Getting to the station

The Station is a place you are cleared to visit, not one you stumble into. This packet is how you get on the manifest, how you arrive and leave, what the Station does while you are away from it, and how to read a room before you stand in it. Everything that needs an implant, a toolkit or a plan has its own packet. This one gets you through the door.

Readings

The manifest

You need level 30 and a run of tickets. Dr. Ling gives the first three, Pad Controller Teague the last. Each appears when the one before it is done.

SF-311 has the steps and the catch at each one.

The portal

One portal, in the teleporter room. It has four looks and each is an answer.

Refusal line: “Pattern lock refused. Your pattern is not on file for this portal. Clearance is issued at the Glacial Ridge pad.”

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What a door says

A door you cannot open reads AUTHORIZATION REQUIRED. A sealed section’s door adds a second line of its own, different at every door. A door that is locked only because its room lost power says so instead (see Engineering, door panels). Doors do not lie. They are sometimes unhelpful about it.

Transport Hall: “Transport Hall: manifest only. Clearance is issued at the Glacial Ridge pad.”

Reading a room

A room is one of three things.

A dark bar means that channel has lost power in this room. The panel itself is Engineering’s subject; here, only the colours.

The emergency lamp. Arrive aboard into a room whose Lighting is out and you are handed a lamp: a small warm pool of light around you, tagged EMERGENCY LAMP. It is stowed the first time you stand in a lit room. Lights going out around you while you are already aboard do not issue one. You are expected to have noticed.

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What the Station does while you are not there

The Station does not keep a clock for visitors it does not have. Some things pause with nobody aboard and some do not.

Aboard means standing in the Station, not in a tunnel and not outdoors. That is the only test, and every system that cares uses the same one.

Procedures

The first time, an ACCESS GRANTED card slides in (your name, your clearance, “Offsite-1”, the date), the world map logs the Station, and the next time you open the map it reveals it.

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Decisions

When to go

Nothing on the Station accrues while you are away, and nothing there is waiting on you. Going aboard is a decision about your time and nothing else. Behind you, the floor keeps its own clock: Mr. Patterson approves an open reorder after 60 seconds whether or not you are there to decide (see Warehouse floor).

So go for a reason. Nobody aboard hands out work. The work is whatever has broken and whoever is standing at the panel. If nothing is wrong, you have a good view of a corridor.

Alone, or with a crowd

The Station scales its trouble to who is aboard, and it does so openly.

• Alone, the worst it will send is severity 2. One person aboard caps every temperament there.
• Each extra person raises the storyteller’s budget by 35 %, up to 4 times the base. A bigger budget buys more events (see Faults and incidents).
• A Red shift needs 3 aboard when the shift begins. With fewer, it is rolled as Rough.

So if you want a quiet shift, go alone. If you want a busy one, bring people. If you are alone and wish it were more interesting, you cannot make it so. This is the Station being fair.

Dying with clearance

Once you are on the manifest, every death reboots you in the Station’s medic lab, not in the warehouse and not at a camp. That holds wherever you died. The lab, the bed and the degraded pattern you wake with are Medical’s subject. What matters here is that the Station is where you come back to, whether or not you planned a visit.

Sealed rooms

A sealed room costs you nothing and offers nothing. Do not spend time at its door. The Station opens its sections one at a time, with a PA line when it does, and a room that was sealed an hour ago is worth a look.

Arriving into the dark

If the lights are out where you land, the lamp is for walking, not for working. Your view is small and the lamp widens it a little. Walk to a lit room, let the lamp stow itself, and read the panel there.

Who’s watching

• The PA. The Station announces what it restores, what it loses and what needs an Engineer (see Engineering and Faults and incidents).
• Security Drone SD-9. It watches the ring for anyone without ring access. A cleared player is never a target.
• The storyteller’s shift. The shift is on the clock; whether it has anything to say depends on who is aboard (see Faults and incidents).
• Security. Aboard, you can hit someone, and the Station will remember it (see Security and Holding).

Bring

Procedure SF-410 · Engineering

Engineering

The station runs on rooms that each have a panel, a battery and three channels, and on racks that turn power into compute. Something is always wearing out. You keep it fed, keep it fitted, and decide which broken thing to fix first. You do not need the Engineer implant to do any of it. The implant makes you faster and gets you the paperwork.

Readings

The room panel

Every online room has a Room Panel. It holds a battery and three channels. When the feed is lost the battery drains and the channels shed in a fixed order, so the order is the thing to learn.

At base load, with the feed gone, Compute sheds after about 3.5 minutes, Lighting 1.5 minutes after that, and Facility 3 minutes after that. On feed, a panel recharges at 0.5 % a second, so an empty panel has Compute back 100 seconds after the breaker is reset. The alarm goes up when a channel sheds and clears only above 75 % with all three channels back. The medic lab and the teleporter room are on backup power: they never shed and read ON BACKUP.

“Power for this room. Three channels and a battery. Read the log before you blame anyone.”

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The NOC board

The NOC tab in UptimeWatcher shows one row per online room: battery bar, three channel pips (C L F), load, cause and ALARM. Alarm rows flash and sort to the top. The cause is a type, never a name: MANUAL TRIP, INCIDENT, WEAR or ON BACKUP.

When nothing is wrong the board says so: “All rooms within spec. Somebody should be suspicious of that.” When the link is down: “LINK LOST: NOC compute offline. Showing last known state, age old.”

Everyone sees the board. Engineers get live TRIP and RESTORE breaker buttons. For everyone else they are greyed with the tip “Engineer implant: remote control. Anyone can flip it at the panel itself.”

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Rack parts and tiers

A rack is a frame, a compute board and 5 slots: Processor, Memory, Storage, Power Supply and Network Link. Every rack starts all tier 1 and the tiers go up to 4. A tier changes three things: what the part draws (su), what it multiplies (compute) and, for the power supply, the cap on the rack’s whole draw. Prices are what the Allocation Terminal charges the Station Fund.

Processor

Memory

Storage

Power Supply

Network Link

The rack draws the sum of its parts’ draw plus 1 for the board: 8 su all tier 1, 14 su all tier 4. Its compute is the product of the four factors, scaled down if the draw is above the supply’s cap.

Parts wear from heat, and only while someone is aboard: a rack room above 50 °C wears every working part in its racks one point a minute for each 10 °C over. An idle station does not age.

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The Core, the UPS and the transfer switch

The Core is the machine the racks serve. In AUTO the regulator holds it in its safe band and caps its output. In MANUAL the cap is lifted and the setpoint and coolant are yours: “The cap is lifted. Setpoint and coolant are yours. Do not look away.” Anyone may use the console; the log says who did.

The UPS Room holds the station’s battery cabinets. Each one tells you its charge when you look at it: “Battery Cabinet n: pct% charge.” The Transfer Switch reads TRANSFER: GRID or TRANSFER: UPS ONLY. It moves the station onto batteries only, and its hover is honest about it: “Moves the station onto batteries only. Maintenance mode. Somebody always flips it at the wrong time.”

Door panels

7 station doors have a Door Panel: Implant Bay, Supply, Power, NOC, Rack Row A, UPS Room and Maintenance Bay. Not the medic lab, not the teleporter room. The panel is behind a cover and holds 10 jumpers. Pulling one changes what the door does, and the door tells everyone nearby.

“The door’s controls, behind a cover. Ten jumpers, no labels. Somebody wrote the manual. It is not here.”

Which position does what is shuffled per door, and reshuffled at every shift change, so the table below is by function. An Engineer’s card labels each jumper. Everyone else sees numbered caps and learns by watching the door.

Seating the jumper back undoes it. The reaction line goes to anyone within 6 tiles of the door.

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Fixtures

Lights, wall panels, windows and door frames each have a condition and a repair path back to known good, which is how the station was built. A step toward a known state costs 50 % of its parts, rounded up. Hold L on a fixture for its card: CONDITION, PATH, NEXT STEP, FIXTURE LOG.

Light bank

Wall panel

Window

Door frame

Debris stays until someone sweeps it: “Debris. MA-1 can sweep this. MA-1 is the only one who wants to.”

Work orders and incidents

Things break by themselves, on a cadence, and a player can break them. Each is an incident with a room, a hold time to fix it and a timer after which it gets worse. A room holds at most 2 open incidents and the station at most 4 that broke by themselves.

An open incident that gets worse says so: “room: incident still open. It has not fixed itself.” It is never lethal: the next state is worse, never fatal. A fix closes the ticket: “Ticket closed: incident, room. +goldg, +xp XP, Station standing +standing.”

Base pay for a fix is 8g and 10 XP for a small one, 12g and 16 XP for a medium, 18g and 24 XP for a large, scaled by your level, with 2, 3 and 4 Station standing. An Engineer is paid 50 % on top, for the paperwork.

MA-1

Maintenance Agent MA-1 is “Facility maintenance firmware in a chassis. Replaces bulbs, clears debris, restocks. Does not touch breakers, the Core or root causes. Players get first pick.” Its policy list, as it recites it: replace light banks; clear debris; apply small patches; restock from the parts shelf; recover what players broke, once nobody has claimed it; never breakers, the Core, root causes or rack upgrades. Hold L on it for the list.

Procedures

To read who did what instead, hold E at the panel when nothing is broken: Pulling audit log... opens the Room Panel Log, the last 40 manual changes, newest first, with names. The names are only here.

Without the implant the buttons are greyed: “Engineer implant: remote control. Anyone can flip it at the panel itself.”

Refusals, verbatim: “Missing parts: parts. The shelf is in the Maintenance Bay.” / “Wrong part. This step needs parts, not carried.” / “Not enough part. Need need, carrying have.”

If you leave the station, log out or die, the crate goes back to the shelf: “The crate has been returned to the shelf. The shelf did not ask.”

To order rack parts, open the Allocation Terminal (the NOC tab, link up), choose ORDER PARTS, pick the part, tier and ORDER 1 / 2 / 4, and confirm: “Order n part for amount? Paid from the Station Fund.” The order goes to the warehouse as a requisition (see the dock packet) and arrives as a sealed crate at the freight lift. If the fund is short you pay the difference in from your own gold: “Not enough to pay. The fund is not a loan.”

If you swap a processor or power supply on a live rack it arcs: the room’s breaker trips under your name, the new part takes 20 wear, and the room hears “rack: arc fault. slot swapped live. Breaker tripped.” You get “You swapped it live. The breaker noticed.”

Anyone else sees “Engineer implant required to restore the panel.” and can only seat jumpers one at a time.

Decisions

Which tier to fit

A better part is never free. It draws more, and the draw has to go somewhere. Three limits decide whether a tier pays back.

• The supply’s cap. The rack draws the sum of its parts plus the board. If that is above the power supply’s cap, the rack’s compute is multiplied by the cap over the draw. A fast processor on a basic power supply is a processor you paid for and cannot feed. Read PSU LIMIT on the card, and compare DRAW with its cap.
• The grid’s one share. The Core serves every rack from the same share. If every rack asks for more, every rack gets the same cut. Tier 3 parts everywhere on AUTO can leave every rack throttled, so fitting the last rack did the same damage as the first.
• The heat. More draw means a hotter room, and a room above 50 °C wears parts out.

The honest order of value is: processor first (the biggest factor and the biggest draw), then the supply that can feed it, then memory and storage (cheap, small draw, small factor), then the link (a failed link is a rack that makes nothing). A tier 4 processor on a tier 4 supply is the build; everything else is a compromise with a price.

Hot-swap, or idle first

Idling takes 2 seconds and the rack draws and makes nothing while it sits there. A live swap of a processor or power supply costs more: the room’s breaker trips with your name on it, the new part starts with 20 wear, and the room goes onto its panel battery at base load. The racks in it read DARK.

After the reset, racks produce again within a compute tick (THROTTLED) provided the panel stayed above 30 %. Full draw (RUN) waits until the panel is full, because the Core charges panels before it feeds racks. A trip long enough to take the panel under that line sheds Compute, and you wait for the staged recharge. It always comes back; it does not come back quickly.

So: idle first unless the rack is already dark. Memory, storage and links can always be swapped live. A live arc is also a way to trip a room’s breaker on purpose; the code supports that, and the log supports the name.

Ordering, and who restocks the shelf

The fixture materials restock themselves. When any of them is at or under 2, Engineering files a free standing order that fills it back to 6, up to 8 units, through the warehouse. Rack parts do not: they are order-only, and an order is paid from the Station Fund.

The shelf starts with 6 of each material and 2 of each tier 1 rack part. The Station Fund is shared: the bench draws on it as well as the terminal, so a tier 4 processor is also a few refurbishments you will not be able to afford. Every order is a line with a name on it. The shelf can also be emptied on purpose; see Who’s watching.

Doors: the Maintenance Bay and the UPS Room

The UPS Room and the Maintenance Bay are Engineer doors. The Maintenance Bay is where the shelf and the bench are. A non-engineer who needs a part has two honest options: ask an Engineer, or pull the Access check jumper on that door’s panel, which lets anyone through until somebody reseats it. The panel has a tile on each side of the door, so it is reachable from the corridor. It will cost a name in the panel log and a BYPASSED on the NOC.

Pulling a jumper to hurt someone

Every jumper pull is a verb the code supports, and every one is logged under your name on the panel, readable in person. The ones with teeth:

• Bolts shut a door for everyone, the implant included. A bolted door will not crank: “door door: bolted. It will not crank.” Only a person at the panel fixes it.
• Motor leaves the door where it is. Pulled with the door shut, nobody comes through. The crank answers “door door: the crank turns and nothing follows. It will not move.”
• Panel power makes the panel live. The next person to open the cover, move a jumper or restore it takes 8 % of their own maximum health, at most once per 30 seconds. It includes you. The act still happens.
• Feed A and Feed B out together lock an access door for everyone; an Engineer can crank it in 6 seconds.

You can do one of these verbs every 30 seconds: “Too soon. The ticket system needs a moment.” The NOC shows PANEL TAMPER with the room for 15 minutes. It never shows your name. The panel log does.

Breaking things you then fix

Nobody pays you to repair your own work. Fix what you broke within 15 minutes and the ticket reads “Closed. Nobody pays you to repair your own work. The log has noted it.” A remote breaker trip from the NOC board is a manual trip under your name, so it is adopted as a Tripped Breaker with you as the saboteur, and it pays nothing. Sabotage never pays. It does move the board: a room on its battery, a door shut in somebody’s way, a rack gone dark.

Letting MA-1 take it

MA-1 will not claim an order until 60 seconds of time aboard have passed, and it will not touch a mess a player made until 2.5 minutes. A player’s claim is off-limits to it, and if you take its order it says “MA-1: Order reassigned to name. Standing down.” It holds 1.5 times as long as a player and nobody is paid for a bot’s fix.

So MA-1 handles the cheap, boring end: light banks, small patches, debris. It never takes the breakers, the failed bus segment, an overheating rack, the Core or an upgrade. That is the part of the board that is yours.

If you want the pay, claim first. If you want the board clean while you do the real work, leave the small ones for MA-1. It restocks its own kit (up to 3 parts) from the same shelf you do.

The implant

The Engineer implant is a skill, not a key. It cuts your hold times to 50 %, opens the two Engineer doors, gives you the labels on every jumper, the live breaker buttons and the work orders in DISPATCH. Swapping it in takes the terminal, and a swap needs 60 seconds between implants: “Implant swap not ready for timeLeft. The terminal needs a minute to stop being sentimental.” Swapping the implant away returns your claimed work orders to the queue at once, and fitting it back does not give them back.

The work-order bonus is decided when the hold starts, by the implant you were wearing. Swapping in mid-fix collects nothing.

Who’s watching

• The board. Everyone aboard sees the SLA and the rooms. A breached shift is on the PA.
• The logs, in person. Room Panel Log, Rack Log, Door Panel Log, Fixture Log and Parts Shelf Log each keep names, but only for whoever is standing at the thing. The last 40 on a panel, 20 on a rack, 20 on a door, 12 on a fixture, 50 on the shelf.
• The NOC, without names. It shows the cause and the room for 15 minutes: FIXTURE STRIPPED, RACK PART, PANEL TAMPER, PARTS, CRATE. A crate set down and forgotten pings its room after 5 minutes.
• The Core. After a trip, the console reads “Last trip: failType at time. Held by name.” The name is there only when the Core was in MANUAL. An overload trip in manual also burns the power supply of the rack drawing the most.
• The department PA. While an Engineer is aboard: “Attention, Engineering. Station parts are running low.” and “Attention, Engineering. A door panel in room has been altered.”
• The Station Fund. Every part ordered is a line with a name.
• MA-1. It does the cleaning, and it does notice when a panel has been touched and nobody has claimed it. After 2.5 minutes it resets the panel: “MA-1: Panel changed in room, nobody has claimed it. I am resetting it.” A panel an Engineer changed in the last 15 minutes is left alone: “MA-1: Panel at door was set recently by an Engineer. I am leaving it alone.”

Bring

Procedure SF-510 · Faults and incidents

Faults and incidents

Something is going to break on your shift. Some of it breaks because the station is old, and some of it breaks because the station has a schedule. This packet is what the board, the lamps and the PA are telling you, what each one wants from you, and which jobs can wait.

Readings

Alarms: who hears what

Every room with a panel has one alarm. It goes up when a channel sheds, and it comes down only above 75 % with all three channels back (Engineering), so a battery hovering at the line cannot flap it.

PA, station-wide: “All personnel: room is in alarm. Avoid the area or help.”

PA, cleared: “room: all channels restored.”

If Facility fails while at least one player is aboard, the world bulletin gets a blackout line too. The board shows a cause for every alarm row, never a name (Engineering).

The PA, line by line

The PA is the station talking: flat, polite, no exclamation marks. It never names a player. These are the lines that ask something of you:

The other PA lines belong to events and are in Events below. A jammed door has no PA line at all.

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The shift

The station runs in 2-hour shifts, starting on every even UTC hour. A shift has a number (Shift 4127 started 2026-10-21 00:00 UTC, and it goes up by 12 a day), a forecast, and a shape:

The shift chip shows the number, the forecast, the window and the time left. Hold the cursor on it for a second for the hover. Drag it where you like; right-click folds it to an icon and a time. An empty station skips the shift: no events and no report.

The forecast

Each shift is one of four. The forecast is read once, at handover, and it tells you how bad the shift is allowed to get.

The forecasts, as the PA and the NOC strip read them:

• Quiet: “Quiet shift expected. Small faults, light traffic. Do not get comfortable.”
• Steady: “Steady shift expected. A normal amount of things will go wrong.”
• Rough: “Rough shift expected. Power and coolant are watching you.”
• Red: “Red shift. Crisis conditions likely. All personnel to stations.”

Two rules limit the forecast. Red needs 3 aboard when the shift starts; fewer, and it reads Rough. And one player aboard caps every forecast at a medium problem (severity 2): the station does not hand a solo night worker a crisis.

Pressure, on the NOC strip: “Pressure: low”, “Pressure: building”, “Pressure: high”, “Pressure: critical”. It is never a number, on purpose: “Pressure never reads as a number. That is deliberate.” It is weather, not a countdown.

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Events

The station breaks itself on a schedule the forecast sets. Each one is announced on the PA, and the long ones say when they are over. Here is what each is and what it asks. The long ones have their own procedure below.

A mess, an outage or a fault that you fix is called answered. One that you do not fix before the shift ends has “ran its course”, and the report says so. Nothing is held against a person for it.

The shift report

When a shift ends with anyone aboard, the PA reads “Shift shift is closed. SLA pct percent, band. The report is on the board.” (If no event ran: “Nothing happened. The report is short.”) The report card opens for everyone who was aboard and closes itself after 20 seconds; Last report on the NOC tab reopens it. It lists:

The top 3 contributors are named on the NOC copy only. The card on your screen is anonymous.

Footer: “Filed at shift change. Nobody read it yet.”

Procedures

Decisions

Fix it, or let it ripen

Every incident has a timer, and the timer runs on time with players aboard, not wall time. A room nobody is in does not get worse; the station waits. That has two uses. First: if you want a quiet station, leave it, and nothing compounds. Second: the moment you or anyone else steps back aboard, every timer is running again, so do not leave a Coolant Drip open on your way out the door and expect it to be where you left it.

Between fixing and ignoring there is a third thing: MA-1. It waits 60 seconds of time aboard before it claims an order, and nobody is paid for its fixes (Engineering). Leave the light banks to it and spend your hands on the breaker, the segment and the rack.

Claim first, or fix fast

A claim stops everyone else from taking that order, for 5 minutes, up to 2 at once. That is the reason to take one only when you mean to fix it: the lease stays warm while you stay in the room or work it, and it lapses when you log out or lose the Engineer implant. A claim also keeps MA-1 off the order.

The forecast is a map

Read it at handover. Quiet means no crisis and nothing large, so it is the shift to go and rewire the racks. Steady is the station’s idea of a normal afternoon. Rough and Red put a crisis on the table in the second half, with 3 aboard needed for Red. A crisis event needs a minimum crowd (rows in Readings), which is why a solo shift never has one.

What it does not tell you is when. Pressure is the only hint, and it is the station’s mood, not a timer.

More crew, more trouble

A bigger crowd and a better-built station (more modules running, more rooms online, better rack parts) make a busier shift. A shift only gathers trouble while someone is aboard, so an empty station is a quiet one. The crew bonus is not scaled by the crowd; it is scaled by the forecast and the SLA band (SF-514).

The flare: shield it, or live with it

Shielding halves the flare’s remaining time, and costs the Core 15 units of output until it is over (“Shielding is raised. The flare will pass sooner. Core output is reduced until it does.”). Do it in the warning, and the flare itself comes up short. Not shielding costs nothing now and ends the same way: 1 to 3 light banks blown, and work orders to go with them.

Two details are fair game. The medic lab and the teleporter room never flicker, so they are the place to sit it out. And a flare garbles the PA on purpose; the warning is always clean, but “This is normal” is the station’s opinion.

Storm: reflash, or wait

You may reflash for 10 seconds, or let the shift boundary heal MA-1 on its own. The boundary heals it and the PA says so: “Maintenance Agent MA-1 has restored its own policy list at shift change. It would like that noted.” The cost of waiting is the storm’s actions. While corrupted MA-1 may strip a fixture from a room, and it logs that as FIRMWARE, not as anybody’s sabotage. It never strips or touches a fixture a player is working, so standing on the job protects the job. A fixture it stripped is salvage, and it goes on the parts shelf (Engineering).

A reflash is also a contribution toward the crew bonus (SF-514). A storm is worth 2 to 3 wrong rows and needs 2 aboard.

The records: fix first

While the records are missing, a fix pays nothing yet. It is held, not lost. Restoring pays every held order at once to whoever is online, with the Engineer’s bonus. And if nobody restores them, the shift boundary brings them back anyway and releases the pay. So you do not need to panic about the money. What you lose by waiting is MA-1: it drops its job, walks home and idles at its dock, so the cheap end of the board is yours. Restoring them is also a contribution.

The anti-farm rule still holds: a ticket on your own sabotage is never held, because it never paid in the first place.

The surge storm: the one job that counts

A storm is 3 surges at 1.6 times the usual, back to back, and the Core’s ordinary surges are paused for the duration. An operator in manual with the coolant up rides it; an unattended Core can trip. If the Core trips, the storm ends not answered, there is no all-clear on the PA, and the trip has its own line. Do not leave the console to fix a light bank.

What carries over the boundary

Strikes reset (Security and Holding). A pending review does not. Open work orders do not either: an incident you left open is still open next shift, with its timer. Events in flight end there, not answered; the records come back; MA-1 is healed; the door panels reshuffle (Engineering). The forecast is rolled again.

Who’s watching

• The PA. Every incident and every escalation. It says the room, never the name.
• The NOC board. The alarm, its cause word, the SLA and the shift strip. Everyone aboard may read it.
• The shift report. Whether the event was answered, who closed how many orders, and what caused the outages (STATION, MANUAL TRIP, SABOTAGE). Names are on the NOC copy for the top 3 only.
• The panel logs. A storyteller outage is logged under STATION, a firmware strip under FIRMWARE, a person under their name (Engineering).
• MA-1. It reports what it did and when, and its inspect card shows the red list during a storm.
• The storyteller itself. Never named in the game, and never blamed on a person: it is the station breaking.

Bring

Procedure SF-610 · Medic Lab

Medical

Dying aboard the Station is allowed. You wake up on a bed in the Medic Lab with a fault, and the fault wears off by itself. A medic can make it go sooner and will be paid for it. This packet is for the person on the bed and the person standing next to it.

Readings

The fault

Every death that sends you to the lab leaves exactly one fault, named after the crash report’s family. A new death replaces the old fault. The size of the fault depends on the killing blow: below 25 % of your max HP is SEV-3 MINOR, from there to 60 % is SEV-2 MAJOR, and 60 % or more is SEV-1 CRITICAL. A hit older than 2 seconds when you died (a bleed, say) counts as the smallest.

The clock runs while you are logged out. None of the 4 touches movement.

Each fault’s status line, as the buff bar shows it:

• Pattern Misalignment: “Your pattern came back a few microns off true. Max HP reduced until it settles.”
• Thermal Drift: “Heat (or the lack of it) came through the buffer with you. Stamina recovers slower.”
• Bit Rot: “Corrupted blocks rode the transport in with you. Healing restores less.”
• Packet Loss: “Parts of your pattern arrived late. Gadget cooldowns run longer.”

Bit Rot cuts every heal: medkits, lifesteal, healing mist, the repair drone, party heals and resting.

On waking: “You re-materialise on a bed in the Medic Lab. fault, sevLabel. It wears off in timeLeft, sooner if someone treats it.” When it ends by itself: “fault cleared on its own. Nobody filed a ticket, but it is closed.”

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The Patient Scanner

A medic with the Medical implant gets the Patient Scanner panel in the station. It reads whoever is on the nearest bed.

The corner tag says where the patient is in the process.

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Well-patched

The reward for being treated properly: “A medic signed off on your pattern. You run slightly better than spec for a while.” It is +10 % max HP for 5 minutes. A second treatment renews it; it never stacks. It ends the moment you die. Max HP is headroom, not a heal.

RA-1

“Station recovery firmware in a chassis. Speeds up recovery and tops up HP. Does not diagnose, prescribe or have opinions.” It does three things.

• Tops up HP by 25 % of your max each tend, with Bit Rot scaling that.
• Speeds up the fault. Each 4 second tend takes 10 seconds off it (2 times as fast while you stay on the bed). A tend is followed by a 6 second pause. When the last tend finishes the fault, RA-1 closes the ticket: “fault is clear. Closing your ticket.”
• Announces arrivals. “RA-1: Patient inbound. name, fault, sevLabel.”

It never clears a SEV-1 CRITICAL: those get HP only. “RA-1: name arrived at SEV-1. I can keep them comfortable. A medic can fix it.” It never picks a treatment, and it never gives Well-patched.

Supplies

A treatment that grants Well-patched takes a Medical Supply Kit from the lab’s supply cabinet. When the cabinet has none, the fault is still fixed and the medic is still paid, but the patient gets no Well-patched and the scanner reads SUPPLIES OUT. The cabinet is refilled by a standing order with the warehouse, and it costs nothing to the medic. When it has run low the notice goes out: “STATION NOTICE: The Medic Lab at Offsite-1 is out of supplies. Treatment is limited to optimism. The warehouse has the order.”

RA-1 takes a Saline Pack for its first tend of each fault. With no saline it still tends, HP only, and says: “RA-1: Out of saline. I can still do the bandage. The bandage is not the saline.” The warehouse crew fills that order; see Receiving and the dock.

Procedures

Refusals, in the order they are checked: “Treatment beds need a Medical implant.” / “Treatments run at a bed. Get the patient onto one.” / “name’s pattern is within spec. Nothing to treat.” / “name was treated a moment ago. Give the pattern time to settle.” / “treatment does nothing for fault. The scanner recommends recommended.”

Decisions

Wait, or be treated

Doing nothing is a legitimate answer. The fault lasts at most 6 minutes and costs you a stat, never your movement. Treatment is faster, and each family treatment has a price that the patient pays, not the medic:

• Chassis Realignment halves your stamina regeneration for 60 seconds.
• Coolant Flush takes 10 % off your max HP for 60 seconds.
• Link Resync sets your stamina to empty.
• Checksum Scrub has no cost until it is run twice. A second scrub on the same patient inside 10 minutes is an overdose. The fault becomes Bit Rot, SEV-2 MAJOR, the medic is not paid and you get no Well-patched: “Second Checksum Scrub inside its window. The scrub has started rewriting good blocks.”

So a Resync is worth it when you are about to stand still anyway, and a Realignment is worth it when you are not about to run. A Flush costs the max HP you were about to fight with. What you get back is Well-patched: 10 % more max HP than you started with, for 5 minutes.

The chemistry route

Four vials in the Chemistry packet clear a fault without the lab and without a medic: Burn Gel (Thermal), Defrag Tonic (Corruption), Signal Booster (Signal), Hardware Patch (Hardware). They clear only their own family. They give no Well-patched, pay no medic, and cost a vial’s worth of ingredients. A Defrag Tonic is also the way around an overdose: the tonic has no scrub window. See Chemistry.

Which patient

A medic is paid for the same patient at most once every 10 minutes. A second treatment inside that window still works, and the line reads +0g, +0 XP, Station standing +0. A fault only comes from a death, so a patient cannot be re-treated for pay without dying again. The honest play is the patient who has just arrived, the worst severity first.

A busy lab sorts itself. RA-1 skips a patient a player medic is already standing next to (within 2 tiles). When a Medical implant comes aboard it announces: “RA-1: Medic on shift. Handing over the queue.”

What a medic earns

A cleared fault pays 16 gold and 20 XP at the base, scaled by your level and by the world the way every ticket is, plus 5 Station standing out of 100. XP moves with the world, so do not treat a printed number as a promise. Only a cleared fault pays. An overdose pays nothing.

Who’s watching

• The whole station. Arrivals are announced to everyone aboard. A critical one gets its own line.
• RA-1. “RA-1: No medic on shift. Recovery will run at standard speed. Thank you for your patience.”
• The scanner. Medics see every patient’s fault, severity and time left. Patients are not asked.
• Your Station standing. A cleared ticket adds to your sector standing for the Station, which stops at 100.

Bring

Procedure SF-710 · Chemistry

Chemistry

Vials, a shaker, a microwave and a fridge turn the things that fall off monsters into things that help or hurt. Every product is something you worked out. The grid at the top of the inventory says so itself: “Nothing is listed. Everything is earned.” This packet tells you where the machines are, how to learn without wasting a bag, and what is polite to throw at a colleague.

Readings

Substances

Substances are the ingredients. They stack in a Substances tab in the inventory once you hold one. They have no sell price, cannot be equipped and cannot be quick-used. Each has its own colour in its vial.

Where they come from

• The shredder. Carry a creature or a box to it and it grinds out units by species. A creature gives a substance from its family: a Coffee Golem gives caffeine extract, a Label Wraith gives toner and adhesive. Boxes give polymer and adhesive. See the shredder in Receiving and the dock.
• Samples. A kill in a zone has a 12 % chance to drop a sample of that zone’s substance, straight into the bag, and the log says so: “Sample: n substance from creature.” A zone rare (slag, brine, sap, crystal dust) has a 3 % chance, and a boss 25 %.
• Bosses and breaches. The bosses of the rifts and the wardens of a breach drop rift ichor.
• The microwave and the shaker themselves. Ozone, solder and magic smoke are made substances. They are ingredients, not snacks.

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The three machines and the fourth

The dial tooltip is “Power. Higher is faster, and louder.” The fridge prompt is “[E] Open fridge”. The shake panel says “Pick two or three.” Only one person uses the fridge at a time: “Someone is already cooking. Join the queue, or the ticket.”

The Recipe Grid

The GRID tab, beside MIX, is the catalogue of everything the game has taught you. One square per recipe, in 6 rows.

The counter reads n / total discovered. A square that has never been found on this server reads “Undiscovered on this server.” and one someone else found first reads “First discovered by name. You haven’t.”

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Products

20 products at the time of writing. Each is one of 5 forms: drink, inject, patch (on yourself), throw or spray (at somebody or something).

What the machine tells you when you are wrong

A wrong mix costs no ingredients and writes a line. The lines are the lessons.

A near-miss marks the recipe as hinted on your grid and the square flickers. A fizzle teaches nothing, and a few recipes are never hinted at all, so a fizzle is not proof that nothing is there.

Procedures

Decisions

Learning cheaply

The cheapest way to learn is to fail on purpose. A wrong mix costs nothing, the machine tells you which of five things went wrong, and the grid remembers what you saw. Run the lines in the table above in order: add heat before you add ingredients, and add ingredients before you give up on a pair. A square you have never seen is not a square you cannot get; it is a square nobody has hinted to you yet.

Three other routes:

• Watch. If you are within 4 tiles of someone making a thing you do not know, you get the hint for it, and a toast: “You saw name making something. Check the grid.”
• Notes. A kill can drop a recipe note: 1 % in a zone, 2 % in a tunnel, 25 % from a boss. It reads as a scrawl, never a list. Example: “Brown, brown, blue. Leave it in the fridge. Do not forget it again.”
• Be first. The first fresh discovery of a recipe on the server scores 50, a banner for everyone, and your name on that square for good: “+n score. For documentation.”

Pushing the microwave

Power is time, and it is risk. HIGH cooks in 7 seconds against 12 on LOW. Some recipes cannot stand HIGH. A row cooked above its limit loses half its batch (rounded down, so a batch of one comes to nothing) and a cloud of magic smoke escapes: “Magic smoke escapes. Half the batch goes with it.” There is a 20 % chance that the smoke leaves a vial behind: “A vial of magic smoke floats loose.” So overheating on purpose is a way to farm a throwable, at the price of the batch. It is not a recipe. It is a reflex.

Which products to carry

Carry what you will use before you die. The honest breakdown:

• Boosts pay in stamina and cooldowns and have a price on a second dose, below.
• Medical vials clear a fault without the lab, see Medical. Burn Gel heals as well.
• Throwables are crowd tools. Smoke makes enemies lose aggro. Cryo freezes, and a shock or a beam on a frozen enemy shatters it. Slag burns the floor. The EMP Cloud is the one that stops machines. Foam is a wall.
• Engineering vials put out fires. The Fire Suppressant puts out a burning microwave too, which ends the vendor’s rage.

Overdose

A second dose of the same group inside its window works, and then it costs you. The Energy Drink and the Overclock Shot are the two that bite. A second Energy Drink inside 20 seconds gives you Jitters, which halves your stamina regeneration for 10 seconds. A second Overclock Shot inside 30 seconds locks your gadgets for 10 seconds. The game says: “You’ve taken too much. Your pulse files a complaint.” and, at the end, “Your pulse settles. Nobody saw anything.” Cold Brew has no overdose, which is the entire point of Cold Brew.

How big a thrown thing is

A cloud is a circle, a splash is a puddle on the floor. Both hit everyone inside every half second to second, and both are capped: radius 3 tiles at most, 10 seconds at most. You may have one cloud and one splash out at a time; a new one of the same kind ends the old. They also end if you die or log off.

The Foam Canister is a wall of 3 tiles across your throw that lasts 20 seconds. It sets solid only when nobody is standing in it, so nobody is ever sealed inside: whoever is caught is stuck until they step out, and then the gap closes.

Hitting a colleague

Your own chemicals always reach you. A chemical reaches another player only where PvP is allowed: not in a safe zone, not in a tunnel, not in another zone, not through spawn protection and not a party member. Damage goes through the ordinary PvP rules, so it costs you score and a kill is a PvP kill. The game tells the victim: “Caught in thrower’s product.”

Aboard the Station

Chemistry is legal aboard. The same limits apply, plus the medic lab, which is a safe zone. A chemical that damages another player does a share of their max HP each tick, not yours: 4 %, up to 15. It ignores the thrower’s level and gear, so a level 10 and a level 292 are equally dangerous and equally squishy.

Who’s watching

• Security. On the Station, a landed chemical hit tags you AGGRESSOR for 30 seconds, and “Chemical harm to a player” is a chargeable act worth 3 minutes of review. See Security and Holding.
• The evidence locker. At booking, thrown and sprayed products (throw and spray) go into the locker with the rest of your kit.
• The log. Every throw is written down with the thrower and the maker. Traded or looted units read unknown for the maker.
• The server. A recipe first is a banner: “name discovered Product. A first on this server.”

Bring

Procedure SF-810 · Security and Holding

Security and Holding

Aboard the Station you can hit another player, and the Station keeps a record of it. This packet is what is free, what costs a strike, how a review works, how to shorten one, and what an officer does about it. It is also the packet that says plainly what the rules are, so nobody has to find out by being booked.

Readings

The tag

Hit a player aboard and the hit marks you AGGRESSOR over your head for 30 seconds, unless the hit was free. A ring counts the tag down. Anyone aboard may hit a tagged player back for free.

Tag card: “Marked for starting it. The station is disappointed, not angry.”

Strikes and the ladder

A tag is a strike. Strikes are kept for this shift (12 at most are remembered). What a new strike does depends on how many you already have:

A pending review is not served yet. It only ever grows, never shrinks, and it stays through logout and the end of the shift. The strikes themselves reset when the shift ends. With no storyteller running, a strike lapses after 2 hours instead.

At strike 2: “Strike 2. A review is pending. SD-9 is on its way.”

SD-9’s lamp

Lamp card: “Amber: first offence.” “Red: locked on.” “Purple: a firmware storm; may be wrong.”

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The wing

Three rooms behind the Security door: the office (the booking desk, the records terminal, the board), Holding (4 cells and an overflow bench, with a wall clock showing every review), and the PIP room.

Bench card: “For when Holding is full. Still Holding, only with a cushion.”

Desk card: “Everyone passes through here eventually. It has very good hours.”

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Your own review

Once you are booked you see a banner with the clock: “IN REVIEW. mm:ss remaining. You may talk, emote and read mail. That is the programme.”

The clock runs only while you are online, aboard, alive and in your place (your cell, the bench, or the PIP room). Log out and it pauses; restart the server and it keeps your time. Dying in Holding or boarding again seats you back in your place; neither is an escape.

Your kit goes into the evidence locker when you are booked: only chemistry products whose form is throw and spray. Your gear and everything else stay on you. It comes back at release.

On booking: “Booked. Cell n. Your kit is in the evidence locker with your name on it.”

On release: “Review served. Your kit has been returned. HR thanks you for your time, which was ours.”

Procedures

A free hit never provokes. Two people cannot trade free hits by each claiming self-defence: the first hit tags, the reply is free, and a reply to the reply is not.

You are put in the first free cell, or on the overflow bench if all 4 are taken. The clock starts at once.

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A review is never longer than 60 minutes, however much is stacked on it. A booking with grounds but no review time yet (you were tagged and nothing more) is a 2-minute review.

Each right tray takes 20 seconds off. The total is capped at 50 % of the review as it was booked. At the cap: “Tray correct. Your review is as short as this programme can make it.” Sorting carries on past it; the trays still feed the chute.

Right trays feed the parts chute: every 3 right trays, counted across everyone in Holding, send one fuse to the Station’s parts shelf, up to 10 a shift. Nobody is paid for them. “Parts chute: one part sent to the shelf. Your work is appreciated, anonymously.”

Door sign: “Performance Improvement. Voluntary.” “(The word "voluntary" has been reviewed.)”

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SD-9, on an upheld appeal: “Appeal upheld. The error has been filed under "weather".”

The leash breaks if you go down, leave the Station, log out, drop it, or stay more than 6 tiles away for 3 seconds. The cuffs then fall off 20 seconds later, or 3 minutes after cuffing if nobody has booked the prisoner.

A row that disappears (the person left, was cleared, or was booked by someone else) lapses your claim: “Order lapsed. The paperwork moved on.”

Decisions

What a hit costs

Aboard, a hit does a share of the victim’s max HP, capped, whatever level either of you is. A level 292 and a level 10 need the same number of wrench hits to drop the same player.

So aboard, level buys you nothing against a player. Ice shells and damage resistance still reduce the share. Off the Station, monsters and hazards are unchanged.

One tag covers a fight

Hit someone while you are already tagged and it refreshes the tag and adds that victim to it, but it is the same offence: no new strike. A brawl inside 30 seconds is one strike, not six. The price is that everyone aboard may hit you back for free the whole time, and a tag that keeps refreshing never fades.

The first one is a warning

Strike 1 books nothing. Once a shift you can hit someone, take the warning, and stop. The second strike is the one that costs a review. Strikes reset when the shift ends, so a long shift is a long record and a fresh one is a clean slate: “Fresh shift. Your strikes have been cleared.”

Who you can hit for free

• Anyone who hit you in the last 30 seconds.
• Anyone who is tagged. This is the bystander case: you did not have to be the victim.
• Anyone who is an escapee.

Killing a tagged aggressor is free as well.

A kill the game pays for, made as the aggressor, adds 5 minutes to your review on top of the ladder, at once: “Paid kill as aggressor. Review extended.” A kill that pays nothing keeps the tag and adds no time.

Turn in, or wait to be hunted

A pending review is a debt you can pay at half price or leave to SD-9.

You cannot step out of it. A pending review blocks the teleporter (“Your review is still open.”), so there is no leaving the Station to wait it out. Log out and the review stays; log in and SD-9 greets you with a 60-second grace in which it only watches and you can still turn in at half. After the grace: “The grace period has ended. This is the part where I become less pleasant.”

The bed rule

SD-9 never cuffs a player on a patient bed. It waits outside the medic lab door (“Patient in treatment. I will wait. I am very good at it.”) and resumes when you get up (“Treatment complete. So is my patience.”). A bed delays the cuffs; it does not cancel the review.

Weighing the PIP room

Trays take off at most 50 % of the review as it was booked. Turn in first and the booked review is already halved, so the cap is 50 % of the halved figure, not of the original: the two stack, and the PIP room never takes more than half of what you are actually serving. A wrong tray costs only the time it took: it gives nothing and deals a fresh one.

Breaking out

An escape costs more than the review you were serving. You become an escapee: wanted, with what was left of your review plus 5 minutes. Hits on you are free for everyone. SD-9 hunts you (“A resident has left Holding without clearance. This is a new form. I love new forms.”). Your kit stays in the evidence locker. Book yourself again and you serve the escape time.

An escapee’s flag lapses after 24 hours; the kit still in the locker is then posted to your mailbox.

The person who opens the door does it with a panel whose log carries their name. An escape is a thing two players do.

A storm review

Each firmware storm rolls once: 35 % of the time, SD-9 comes for the victim of the most recent tag instead of the aggressor. The lamp is purple for the whole storm. The victim can be appealed out (SF-815), and anyone may file it. The aggressor is still hunted afterwards. A storm can lose you a minute; it does not clear a record.

As an officer

• You have the same rules as everyone. An officer’s own strike 2 in a shift suspends the badge until the shift ends: “Badge on the desk. Your officer implant is suspended until the shift ends.” The PA says so too.
• A prisoner pays a booking at most once every 15 minutes: “That person was booked recently. Quality over quantity.”
• Cuffs need grounds. A tag is grounds for 30 seconds, a pending review for as long as it stands.
• The Detain order bonus is for booking the person you claimed. Booking someone else’s gets the base pay.

Chemicals and the Station

A chemical that hurts another player aboard tags and strikes like any hit (see Chemistry, Aboard the Station). Thrown and sprayed products are the kit that goes into the locker.

Who’s watching

• SD-9. It hunts every player aboard and alive with a pending review or an escape, and the lamp tells you how it feels about it.
• The PA. A review opening, a review served, a self-report, a breakout, an appeal, a suspended badge and a fresh shift each get a line. It names no one.
• The wall clock in Holding shows every cell’s remaining time.
• The board in the office lists who is in Holding.
• The panel logs. Every door panel names whoever touched it (Engineering), and the cell doors are no exception.
• The record is per shift. Strikes reset at the shift boundary; pending reviews do not.

Bring