Wiki / The world
The Fallow
What patrols the sectors - pre-Cinder machinery in four habits, a sector that remembers being left alone, the Gleaners that come to a wreck, and the Leviathan pods that walk a spine each season.
The Fallow is the game’s word for what lives in the sectors. It is not a faction. Nothing in it wants anything, nobody commands it, and it eats itself: what patrols a rung is equipment that outlived the world that set it running. Every sector carries a patrol; a home, a belt and a port carry none, which is why the Shallows and the Cinder are the places you cut rock.
The patrol
| Hulls on a rung | 4 × threat - four in a threat-1 sector, forty in a threat-10 one |
| Hull | 2,600 × (1 + 0.25 per band above the first) on average; a family’s share of it is heavier or lighter. No shield |
| Damage | about 70 a second on a pilot sitting still - one is a nuisance, three at once is the trouble |
| How it fires | rounds that land the instant they are fired, from inside 1.2 km, only with its nose on you. About a third miss a still target; flying across its line makes more of them miss, flying straight away does not |
| Provoked by | a shot, or coming inside its reach - 150 to 600 m by family |
| Then | a shot also wakes the rest of the patrol near the one you hit; it chases, gives up at 2.2 to 4.8 km and goes home, and never follows you out of its sector |
| Holds at | its own distance, 200 to 650 m |
| A wreck | back on its post after 45 s; scatters 8 units of silicon to scoop |
| Callsign | its family’s word, the sector and the post: HUSK 12-03 |
A patrol is something you can watch, follow and choose. Shooting one starts the fight; flying into its face is the other way. They fly the same physics you do - nothing here out-turns a rule you are bound by. A sector nobody is in is not simulated: its patrol sleeps where it stood and wakes, mid-chase if that is where it was, when the next pilot arrives. Combat and death.
The families
Twelve families, in four habits. A sector is dealt three of them (two if it holds fewer than twelve hulls), and which ones depends on its threat; the callsign over a hull says which you are looking at.
| Habit | Families | Wakes at | Holds at | Gives up at | Hull | Damage |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Skirmisher | MARQUE, WARREN, BLOOM | 480 m | 530 m | 4.2 km | lighter | heaviest |
| Bulwark | CORDON, LEVIATHAN, ROSARY | 180 m | 230 m | 2.6 km | heaviest | lighter |
| Stalker | HUSK, PALL, QUORUM | 150 m | 200 m | 4.8 km | even | a little more |
| Swarm | RESONANT, APERTURE, GLEANER | 600 m | 650 m | 2.2 km | a little lighter | lighter |
A Stalker lets you close and then does not let go; a Swarm hull is on you from far off and gives up soonest. The patrol’s total hull does not change with the mix - only how it is shared.
The grade - a sector remembers
Each sector past threat 1 keeps a count of how many of its patrol were culled this week. The quota is one full patrol, 4 × threat. Miss it and the week was quiet; quiet weeks in a row raise the grade, and any pilot of any Compact culling it back to quota resets it. Ember weeks count double.
| Quiet weeks | Grade | More on the patrol | Their hull | Wrecks and cull writs pay |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | in grade | - | ×1.00 | ×1.00 |
| 1 | patch | +2 | ×1.15 | ×1.25 |
| 3 | field | +4 | ×1.30 | ×1.50 |
| 5 | sovereign | +8 | ×1.50 | ×2.00 |
The nursery sectors (threat 1) never bloom; threat 2 stops at a patch. The extra hulls come from a pool that sleeps in the sector from the day the map was made and wake through respawn, so nothing changes in the middle of a fight; when the grade falls they do not come back.
The chart card says it in the survey’s own words - a quiet week is a patch · the wrecks pay a quarter more, a quiet month is a field · the wrecks pay half again, the survey word for that is sovereign · the wrecks pay double - and the map rail reads THE FALLOW · PATCH / FIELD / SOVEREIGN. The Arms post’s cull writ for that sector grows with the grade, and /cull on the relay calls the others: a sovereign rung is written to be more than one pilot can clear.
The Gleaners
A wreck that goes cold in a sector - a pilot’s death, or a convoy run lost there - is not left alone. Two hours later a package of two comes to it from the sector’s sleeping pool, and keeps coming back to it until eight hours after the wreck; once that is over, one killed goes back to sleep at its post. One package per sector at a time, and none in a threat-1 sector, which has no pool. The Circular tells a returning pilot where they are: A wreck went cold in Iron Shoal 3 hours ago. The Gleaners are already stripping it.
The Leviathan pods
Each season the pods walk one Compact’s spine - which one is the season’s own roll, never the common ladder - from week 3 to week 6, one sector-rung a week from the frontier inward. A rung they are on reads one grade up: more on the patrol, harder, paying better, through the same tables. The chart foretells it at the season’s opening - Chart warning: Leviathan pods due down Ashaari Long Watch, week 3. Graded traffic advised. - and the map rail reads THE FALLOW · MIGRATION while they are there. The pods are a grade, not a hull you can see; a LEVIATHAN on a callsign is an ordinary Bulwark family.
What is not Fallow
The one heavy hull at each home is the same machine flying for its Compact: foreigners on sight, never its own side. A Sentinel’s guns are the same: they fire only on another Compact’s pilots within a kilometre of them, and never on the Fallow. Siege. And the cutters that go out from a Mining post and come back are the belt’s own shift, not a patrol, and cannot be shot. Stations, the zones.