Flarelight

Tutorial  ·  Version 1.0.0

How to begin

The game opens docked at Kerrek Station with a briefing panel across the centre of the screen. Read it and press Take the commission. That is your first day.

If you have played before, a panel offers your saved campaign instead. Resume it or start a fresh one; starting fresh generates a new sector and overwrites nothing until you save.

Before you launch, spend some of your starting credit. Two things are worth buying immediately:

• A cargo hold. A bigger hold means more ore per trip and, because your bunkers scale with it, more range.
• Sensors. A survey you cannot read is a world you cannot judge, and sensors are what make an orbital pass mark the good ground before you land.

Then top up your endurium and press Launch.

Reading the screen

Every view has the same three-column shape.

Where	What it holds
Top bar	Stardate, credits, endurium, hull, shields, bearings collected, and the flare index arc. The arc is your clock.
Left	Your six crew and their skills, and what is in the hold.
Centre	The view: the station, a system, a planet from orbit, a surface, or a ship you are talking to.
Right	Every order available right now, and readouts for whatever the centre is showing.

If an order is not in the right-hand column, it is not available from where you are standing. Nothing is hidden behind a menu.

Controls

Pointer or touch does everything. On a planet surface you can also drive from the keyboard:

Key	Does
W A S D	Drive north, west, south, east
Arrow keys	The same
Esc	Close any open panel

Driving onto a find collects it into the vehicle's bay. There is no separate "pick up" order.

Turn order

There are no rounds. Time passes when you do something that takes time, and the stardate in the top bar is the only turn counter in the game.

1. Actions at the station — buying, training, selling — are instant.
2. Moving between the station, the home system, orbit, and hyperspace costs days according to distance and your drive coils.
3. A survey costs a few days.
4. Every step the terrain vehicle takes costs hours, and rough ground costs more hours than smooth.
5. Conversation is free. You may talk as long as you like.
6. Combat exchanges cost no days but can cost you the ship.

Because talking is free and travelling is not, the cheapest way to learn anything in this game is to ask.

Movement

Between stars

From hyperspace, choose a destination on the sector chart. The jump spends endurium and days in proportion to distance, and both fall as your drive coils improve. Plan for the return leg: running dry between stars is survivable but expensive.

Mid-jump you may be intercepted, and who intercepts you depends on whose space you are crossing. You can also stop inside a species' territory and broadcast on open channels, which is the reliable way to meet somebody rather than waiting to be found.

In a system

Entering a system lists its worlds. Take orbit around one, survey it, and decide whether to land.

On a surface

The surface map is forty-eight tiles across by twenty-eight down. It wraps east to west; it does not wrap north to south. Liquid cannot be crossed. The map stays uncovered between visits, so a second trip to the same world starts from what you already know.

Combat and scoring

Combat

Engagements are fought across four range bands, from 3 (far) to 0 (alongside).

Order	Effect
Fire beams	Good damage, but only within the closer bands.
Launch torpedo	Reaches further; you carry a finite number and they cost credits.
Close	Move one band nearer.
Stand off	Move one band further out.
Break contact	Try to run. Easier from further out, easier with better engines, and easier on each repeated attempt.
Surrender	Always works. They strip the hold and let you go.

Shields absorb damage first and recover between exchanges. Hull does not recover without a yard. Crew can be injured, and an injured officer is a worse officer until the ship's doctor or the station puts them right.

You are a survey ship. Standing off and running is not cowardice, it is the correct order most of the time. Surrendering the hold costs you one prospecting trip; losing the ship costs you the campaign.

Scoring

Your final score rewards four things: reaching an ending at all, reaching it early, charting worlds you did not strictly need to chart, and coming home solvent. The score and the ending are both shown on the closing screen.

Winning

You win by reaching the hidden star and dealing with what is there.

1. Collect three bearings. One is cut into a relic in a Warden ruin. Two are held by species who will only answer questions once they trust you.
2. Cross them. With all three, the hidden star can be plotted from the chart.
3. Go there and land.
4. Drive to the gate and choose. Three endings are available at the gate. Which of them you are allowed to take depends on what you are carrying and what you have learned to say, so the fullest ending needs groundwork you can only do earlier.

Losing

There are three ways to fail.

• The commission expires. On day two thousand the flare cascade reaches the inner worlds wherever you happen to be. You get warnings well in advance; treat them as instructions.
• The ship is destroyed. Hull to zero in combat ends the campaign. Surrender is always available and always cheaper.
• You are stranded. No endurium, no cargo to refine into it, and no credit to buy more. The quartermaster will sign out a small ration once a month to prevent this from being permanent, but if you have run yourself dry far from home it may not be enough.

Saving and restarting

Save writes your campaign into this browser's local storage. There is one slot: saving again overwrites it. Load brings it back, and the game also offers it automatically when you open the page.

A save carries the sector seed, so a reloaded campaign is the same sector with the same worlds, the same buried ore, and the same ruins in the same places.

Restart abandons the current campaign and generates a new sector. It does not touch your saved game until you save over it.

Clearing site data for this page deletes the save. Nothing is stored anywhere else — the game makes no network requests at all.