Nightsown
A first season, explained. Everything below is how this copy of the game actually behaves: the figures are read out of the same files the game reads.
1. The charter comes first
Before a hull is laid down or a world is sown, you decide what your people are. A charter is bought from a budget of 135 points across:
- A band of tolerance on each of three axes — gravity, warmth, radiance. The centre of a band is free; its width costs. Tolerance runs from 0.08 to 0.45.
- Growth, from 0.04 to 0.20 a season — the single most expensive thing on the sheet, and the one that decides the ledger.
- Mining and foundry skill.
- An affinity in each of the six fields of study: kinetics, aether, drives, fabric, optics, vitalism. Below one is keen and costs points; above one is slow and refunds them.
- At most 2 traits and 2 flaws. A flaw refunds points, and a flaw you can live with is the cheapest thing in the game.
The six written charters shipped with the game spend their budgets like this:
| Charter | Traits | Points | Flaws |
|---|---|---|---|
| Verdant Compact | cradleborn | 125 | — |
| Cinderfolk | deepminers | 130 | dim_eyes |
| Glasswrights | shipwrights | 127 | brittle_hulls |
| Stoneborn | stonehearts | 130 | no_terraform |
| Marrowreavers | shipwrights | 129 | brittle_hulls, no_terraform |
| The Tideless | long_sight | 124 | dim_eyes, slow_hands |
A charter's cost prices the width of a band, never its centre. Worlds are generated flat across each axis, so sitting your people in the middle of the scale buys nothing. Where you sit is flavour; how wide you sit is the bill.
2. The first season
You open with a home world, some seedships, some scouts, and an escort. In The First Sowing that is 22,000 souls, 8 mines, 8 foundries and 2 seedships. Do these four things before you press End season:
- Send the scouts out. Click a squadron, click a hex. You cannot sow a world you have never seen, and the commanders opposite you are already looking.
- Fill a seedship. Select it over your home world, press Take colonists, then send it to a world that suits your charter. When it arrives, press Sow. The sowing rig is spent doing it — a seedship founds one colony, not many.
- Lay down mines and foundries in the World panel. Mines dig ore; foundries turn hands and ore into works; works build everything else.
- Set your study. In the Study panel, decide what share of your works goes to scholars rather than to hulls, and how the effort is split across the six fields.
3. What the plate is telling you
You see what your scanners reach — a world reads at 4 hexes, and a dust veil costs 2 of that. Three states are drawn differently: sky you are watching now, sky you have seen and now only remember (drawn dimmer — a squadron shown there is where it was), and sky never scanned at all.
| Terrain | Move cost | Scan penalty | Damage | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open void | 1 | 0 | 0 | Empty sky. A hull crosses it at its rated speed. |
| Dust veil | 2 | 2 | 0 | Cold dust. Slows a hull, blinds a scanner, and hides what sits inside it. |
| Ember drift | 2 | 1 | 6 | Burning debris. Scours plate off anything that ends a season inside. |
| Gravity shoal | impassable | 0 | 0 | A knot of dead mass. Nothing under sail crosses it. |
| Ion reef | 1 | 0 | 0 | Charged shallows. Screens will not hold here, so a fight in a reef is fought on plate. |
| Star | 1 | 0 | 0 | A star and its world. Ships may hold orbit, land, mine and build. |
4. The yard
Nothing is bought off a list. A hull is a frame with slots; a design is what you fit into them. Fitting is legal only within the marks your scholars have taken.
| Hull | Role | Structure | Slots |
|---|---|---|---|
| Needle | survey | 60 | 1 drive, 1 screen, 1 plate, 2 scanner, 1 special |
| Drover | freight | 130 | 1 drive, 1 screen, 2 plate, 1 scanner, 4 hold, 1 special |
| Seedship | colony | 110 | 1 drive, 1 screen, 1 plate, 1 scanner, 2 hold, 2 special |
| Cutter | escort | 150 | 1 drive, 2 gun, 1 screen, 2 plate, 1 scanner, 1 special |
| Lancer | line | 300 | 1 drive, 4 gun, 2 screen, 3 plate, 1 scanner, 1 hold, 1 special |
| Bastion | heavy | 620 | 1 drive, 6 gun, 3 screen, 5 plate, 1 scanner, 1 hold, 2 special |
| Ossuary | siege | 420 | 1 drive, 3 gun, 2 screen, 3 plate, 1 scanner, 4 hold, 3 special |
| Redoubt | fixed | 500 | 5 gun, 4 screen, 4 plate, 2 scanner, 1 special |
The special slot is where a design stops being a warship and becomes a tool:
| Special | Needs | |
|---|---|---|
| Sowing rig | none | Turns a hold of colonists into a colony. Consumed in the sowing. |
| Legion bay | vitalism 2 | Two legions and the racks to land them. |
| Burner | vitalism 4 | Burns works and people off a world from orbit. |
| Veil cloak | optics 5 | Shortens a rival's reading of you by three hexes. |
| Engine works | fabric 5 | Mends eight parts in a hundred each season in orbit. |
| Seeker screen | optics 4 | Shoots racks out of the sky before they arrive. |
| Tempering rig | vitalism 4, fabric 3 | Tempers a world one step toward the charter's tolerance. |
The commonest mistake in a first game: building a war fleet with no legion bay in it. Such a fleet can beat every squadron a neighbour owns, burn their yards, and never take a single world. Guns win the sky; legions take the ground.
5. The ore runs out
A world's crust holds iron, cinder and glass, and it does not refill. As reserves fall, concentration falls with them, so the same mines yield less every season. A world worked hard for forty seasons is not the world you settled.
This is the clock the whole game runs on. Expansion is not greed; it is the only way to keep a foundry fed.
6. The season resolves at once
Every charter gives its orders, and then the season runs for all of them together over 6 impulses: movement and battles, then hazards, standing orders, the economy, repair, what each charter now believes, and finally the victory test. Nobody moves second, and nobody sees your orders before giving theirs.
7. How it ends
- Conquest — every other charter is driven from the sky.
- Ascendancy — meet the current world-share threshold (scaled by the number of surviving charters), hold at least 1.7x as many worlds as the runner-up, and keep both thresholds for 5 consecutive seasons.
- The ledger — at the horizon, the deepest ledger wins: 10 a world, 1 per thousand souls, 1 a foundry, 4 a research mark, 2 a hull.
Population dominates that ledger, which is why a charter that only fights is usually a charter that only comes second.
8. The scenarios
| Scenario | Charters | Seasons | Sky |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Contested Verge | 3 | 70 | The Contested Verge |
| The First Sowing | 2 | 40 | The Cradle |
| The Long Dark | 5 | 100 | The Long Dark |
Thirty worlds and three charters, none of them far enough from the others. The Verge is the standard game of Nightsown: sow wide, mine deep, design the hull that answers what your neighbour built, and settle it before the ore runs out.
9. Controls
| Do this | Get that |
|---|---|
| Click a squadron | select it |
| Click a hex | set a course |
| Click a shared orbit again | cycle through the squadrons there |
| Shift-drag | move the plate |
| + / - | close in, draw back |
| H | centre on your first world |
| Enter | end the season |
Nightsown is an original game. It is not a recreation of any published title. Generated from the shipped data on 2026-08-04.