Wiki / Scenarios

Scenarios

A scenario places a world and wires its objectives. It is the same machinery whether it is a five-minute tutorial or a combat sandbox: some objects, and a reactive events-filters-actions script over a set of variables.

What a scenario places

A scenario spawns a handful of object kinds:

• Asteroids - mobile rocks with a radar signature. They feel gravity but never source a well. A rock has no health: it is carved away by what hits it, and how big it is decides how long that takes (see Shooting rock). Every rock can be shot apart.
• Planets - whole worlds, and the thing to place when you want a body rather than a big rock. A type and a seed draw the terrain, the biomes and the polar cap; the radius is the real size, not a designation the mesh reaches past. Nothing can destroy a planet - nothing carves one - and it carries a gravity well like any other body.
• Spaceships - multi-section builds under a player or AI controller, each spawn holding what the ship is permitted to do.
• Nav beacons - lockable waypoints visible to radar within 12 km by default, with authorable signatures for longer legs and optional trigger areas.
• Lights - the scene's own key/rim/fill lighting; a scenario that spawns none renders black.

Trigger areas - invisible volumes that fire on-enter / on-exit events - are created by an action rather than spawned as objects.

Objectives: events, filters, actions

Objectives are wired with a three-layer reactive system. An event fires under a named condition, a filter gates whether it applies, and an action runs when both match - all reading and writing typed variables (numbers, strings, booleans) with arithmetic and comparisons. This is the vocabulary Basic Training is built from - each beat is an event handler that grants the next capability, posts the next objective, and moves a beat counter forward.

What that buys you as a player is that a scenario reacts. Fly into a marked volume and something answers; neutralize the right ship and the objective completes on its own; clamp onto the hull you were sent to and the next leg is waiting when you let go; a won chapter plays a short outro of comms beats over the live world before any victory screen appears, so the moment lands before the overlay does.

The full construct catalog - every event, filter and action by name, with its fields - is the authoring contract and lives in the Create docs.

The shipped scenarios

• Open World - what New Game starts: the ship of the start role you pick, with its kit of credits and cargo, in a world generated from the seed you pick. Each weapon the hull carries is bound for you: point-defense mounts on the trigger, a railgun on R, a torpedo bay on F and a mining beam on V. The world's ships are generated from the civilizations that reach each place, each one siding Enemy, Player or Neutral: an intact ship flies an AI crew on that side, patrolling a loop near where it spawned; a trader among them now and then docks at a station within 20 km, trades its own cargo and credits there, posts its jobs and undocks a minute later, and a derelict wreck is still nobody's - its hull and docking ports are all that still work. Each civilization also builds its own stations near its home clusters: a ring, a spire or a yard, larger, better armed and better stocked the more advanced it is. An extinct civilization leaves one dead station. Every one starts with role-specific goods and a credit balance scaled by its civilization's advancement; a wreck's is roughly half the goods and a fraction of the credits of an intact ship at the same standing, and it may hold no hull plates at all. Dock with a derelict, or a ship you neutralized, and Take its goods, or Take credits for its whole balance, in the Inventory pane - a calm ally or Neutral ship trades instead, and one that is Hostile, Enemy, or fighting refuses the dock. A ship that would appear where you stand waits until you move clear. Its asteroids can be carved and destroyed; its planetoids are planets and cannot be. Destruction and looting persist: an unloaded sector keeps what you did there, and a destroyed asteroid or an emptied wreck stays as you left it when you return. A station or trader you sold out comes back toward its stock after you have flown elsewhere for a while - play time, not real time, and not on a reload alone. Each civilization holds a stance toward you - Ally, Neutral or Enemy - seeded with the world and moved by what you do: three of its intact hulls neutralized within an hour of play turn it a step colder, three jobs handed in at its stations a step warmer, and a civilization you turn colder drags its allied neighbours one step down and lets its rivals warm one step up; nothing reaches further. An Enemy civilization's stations refuse your dock (<NAME> REFUSES DOCKING on the HUD) and its ships fight you; only an Ally's stations sell themselves or hire out escorts. Firing on a Neutral or Ally hull past its patience turns its whole civilization on you for a quarter hour of play. Pay an Enemy's fine at any station of its neighbours that still admits you, with Pay fine in the Map's chart view STANCES block while docked there (see the Map); its advancement sets the fine. Or wait: an Enemy you made returns to Neutral after two hours of play without a new offence. On the desktop build the world itself is saved as you play, and Load brings it back the same way (see Saved worlds); the web build keeps no saved worlds. You begin docked at your starting station, the nearest station of a civilization that begins as your Ally. The open world posts no scenario objective; your held jobs and your start role's goal are what you have to do, and both list in the Map's chart view OBJECTIVES block; see the Map.
• Basic Training - the first-flight course: the Fleet gunnery range, where Range Control talks a cadet through a qualification card in an armed trainer, one gesture per beat (burn, STOP, the thrusters, a combat lock, the gun), then five target hulks and two range drones that go live and shoot back. No story; the reward is a posting.
• Menu backdrops - the living scenes behind the menus, in a shuffled rotation: each scene plays its act, then the menu cuts to another, and every scene plays once before any plays again. Torpedo Gauntlet (a line warship's six PDC mounts swat torpedoes streaming in from both flanks until its hard magazines run dry and the stand falls), Asteroid Weave (a mining tug threading a dense rock band on real patrol waypoints, hugging its nav beacons), Duel Cycle (an interceptor and a raider dogfight through the open center; a siege torpedo erases the winner), and Waystation Traffic (a freighter convoy circling a freight stop under amber dock lights). All of it is the real simulation, not a cutscene. Mods can ship their own by declaring a scenario role: Backdrop.

The public Story archive presents campaigns as digital comics with page controls and a contents display.

Browsing and replaying scenarios

The Scenarios tab lists every scenario the installed content offers, and launches any of them directly - so a chapter you have already flown is one click away for a replay. The scenes that drift behind the main menu are scenery rather than levels and are never listed.

A campaign folds its chapters under a collapsible header - click the [-]/[+] to expand or fold it - and lists them in play order, mid-story chapters included. Scenarios that belong to no campaign list on their own below the campaigns. A fresh install shows one of each: Season 1 with its first chapter under it, and Basic Training on its own.

You can author your own scenarios and mods in RON - see the Create docs.