Content

What exists in the galaxy, in what quantity, and generated how — because with one person and coding agents, generated how is the only question that determines whether it exists at all.

The rule

If it cannot be generated, it is not content. If it must be authored, it is a part, and parts are assembled by generation.

Everything in this game is one of three things:

The third row is the entire art budget. Twelve room modules and a layout grammar produce every ship interior in the game; forty hull sections produce every ship. The moment a design requires a hundred hand-made unique things, it is not a design this project can build, and it should be cut or restated as a parts problem.

Status against the roadmap

Mirrors docs/roadmap.md, which is the engineering-facing view of this same table.

Bodies

Distribution

Where the catalog is silent, generation fills in — and it should fill in plausibly, which means the generator's statistics should look like the real ones rather than like a designer's preferences.

The generator already does the astrophysics honestly — main-sequence mass–luminosity, a frost line that scales with luminosity, densities that separate rocky worlds from giants — and its own comment says the point is that swapping in something better later is a change to one file. That is the right posture.

Body kinds

Below about 200 km a body stops being a spheroid and starts being a shape — see ADR-0013. That is a rendering and data distinction. Character contact reads the canonical datum and terrain field, not that shape mesh. Gravity remains a radial point-mass model, so traversing a measured irregular figure is not yet a physically matched surface walk.

Terrain

The single most visible shallowness today and the natural next milestone. The engineering sequence is in docs/roadmap.md; this is what it has to produce.

flowchart LR
    Q["quadtree LOD<br/>fine underfoot,<br/>coarse to the horizon"] --> S["edge stitching<br/>across faces<br/>and levels"]
    Q --> G["geology<br/>craters, plates, volcanism,<br/>from a per-body grammar"]
    G --> M["materials + biomes<br/>from latitude,<br/>altitude, slope"]
    M --> SC["scatter<br/>rocks now,<br/>flora post-MVP"]

    style SC fill:#0369a1,stroke:#0c4a6e,color:#fff

Geology

Derived, never authored, from the same facts the record already carries. ADR-0019 is the decision record: a SurfaceGrammar turns mass, radius, air, temperature and the tide a primary raises into which bands a body has and how loud each is, a per-body sketch places plate nuclei and hotspots and sets the crater field's lattice ladder, and six bands evaluate against them. What that produces is a body that looks like itself — Mercury saturated with craters under one unmoving lid, Earth with plates and orogens along their margins, Venus the same size and stagnant because it has no ocean to weaken its lithosphere, Enceladus with four parallel fractures across a shell nothing has had time to hit.

Biomes

Derived, never authored. A biome is a lookup from three values the generator already computes per vertex — latitude, altitude, slope — plus body-level properties (temperature, atmosphere, water presence).

Eight biomes, six of them airless or near-airless, is the right MVP set: it covers the great majority of landable real bodies, and it avoids the flora problem entirely until after launch. The three rows between them are what ADR-0026 added without geometry — a seabed, a riverbed and a pigment are colors the cover carries, and a temperate world reads as one from orbit before a single plant is modeled.

Materials are the art budget. Each biome needs a PBR material set — albedo, roughness, normal, and a detail layer — and those are the few dozen authored assets the whole game rests on. See art.

Until they exist, ADR-0020 draws the six from a parameterized palette: a reflectance ratio, a roughness, a grain and a bump per deposit, expressed against the body's own published color so that Mars stays ochre and Callisto stays gray while both get the same internal contrast. The lookup is split by who can answer — latitude, altitude and slope per pixel from the mesh, and an eight-byte cover per vertex for what only the generator knows: where the flood basalt is, where a young crater has thrown fresh material, which way the crust's composition varies, where the volatiles have condensed. A body with a published map wears it, and the invented channels switch off, because the maria are in the photograph already.

Scatter

Rocks before plants, and the rocks are built — ADR-0021 is the record. A boulder is an address rather than an entry in a list: regionScatter answers "does r:…/o:837 hold a rock" with a hash over 1,024 candidate slots in a 256 m region, gated by the surface cover the vertex already carries, and slot 837 is slot 837 whichever call resolves it. Four generated shapes are instanced with the terrain's own material, so a rock comes out bedrock on its steep faces and regolith on its top, in the palette of the ground it is lying on.

The cheapness is the point and it holds: a handful of instanced meshes with a rotation and a scale apiece do more for the feeling of standing on a world than any amount of additional terrain frequency, and the whole population inside 212 m is a few hundred kilobytes against the quadtree's hundreds of megabytes.

Not yet here: outcrops and debris beside the boulders, the fade that scales a rock in from zero rather than popping it in at two pixels (art), and collision — a rock is presentational, and the contact test does not know it exists. On foot is the layer that changes the last of those.

Systems and stations

Inhabited space is deliberately small — a bubble of a few hundred light-years around Sol, thinning outward, with nothing beyond it. That is both the honest consequence of a setting that has had the Reference Drive for a short time and the reason the frontier means something.

Content volume at launch

For the MVP, the numbers that have to be true:

The authored column totals roughly 20 meshes and 8 material sets. The rock shapes are generated rather than modeled, which is twenty meshes the art budget does not have to spend. That is the number that has to be affordable, and it is. Everything else in the table is a function.

Related

• galaxy — where the real data comes from
• art — what the material sets have to look like
• production — when each row lands
• docs/roadmap.md — the engineering view of this table