Persistent Universe and Reset Loop
Status: historical campaign framework, not a current product plan. This note preserves a large-scale multiplayer structure and its unresolved progression choices. It does not establish release scope, cadence, or implementation status.
Canon Substrate
Temporal Nonlinearity owns the setting claim. Elysium separates species into temporal branches, monitors whether a branch’s prime species can continue existing, and can reset a branch when extinction becomes unavoidable. The inhabitants did not consent to become a managed continuity problem.
That substrate does not canonize a game season. A campaign lasting weeks or months, steadily escalating alien attacks, a player-visible extinction meter, a particular reset trigger, and any retained currency, equipment, reputation, or territory are design choices from this historical framework. The setting permits recurrence; it does not dictate one product loop.
Historical Campaign Arc
The proposed campaign followed three pressures:
- Expansion: players explore, establish institutions, open routes, build markets, and fight local wars.
- Dependency: specialization, consolidation, production, and faction leverage make survival more capable and more brittle. Routes, labor, maintenance, and supplies become commitments rather than conveniences.
- Triage: terminal pressure exposes what the civilization built. Hoarding, coordination, arms production, evacuation, rescue, research, abandonment, and betrayal compete for the same dwindling capacity.
The arc gives economic play a terminal question: not merely who accumulated the most, but what their arrangements could preserve when ordinary growth stopped solving problems.
Selective Carryover
Historical proposals disagreed about what survived a reset. Candidates included player knowledge, public history, relationships, and selected material advantage. The useful tension remains: too much carryover turns catastrophe into progression laundering; none makes the preceding civilization disposable.
No candidate is current policy. Any future design must name the owner of each persistent fact and distinguish player knowledge from knowledge available to a character, faction, corporation, or institution inside the next branch.
Procedural Postmortem
Failure should be reported through material consequence rather than moral scoring. A postmortem should show which systems held, which collapsed, who profited, who abandoned whom, what records survived, and which shortages became fatal. The game does not need to call anyone monstrous. It can show the evacuation queue closing.
Open Decisions
- What event ends a campaign, and how much warning can players reliably receive?
- Which facts, if any, persist across branches, and who owns each one?
- How does a postmortem preserve consequence without turning extinction into a reward screen?