Expand Aetheria game design hierarchy

Aetheria/Game Design/A Different Sort of Space.md

@@ -7,3 +7,18 @@
 Aetheria does not chase hard realism. It treats space as a place of awe, menace, and expressive scale, where gravity can become architecture and the void can feel almost inviting.
 
 That choice is deliberate. The setting wants wonder first: a galaxy dreamlike enough to be memorable and physical enough to feel dangerous. The point is not to abandon consequence, but to make the environment feel strange in ways the politics and technologies can still meaningfully inhabit.
+
+## Design Use
+
+Space is not only a backdrop. It is the board, the weather, the road network, the hiding place, the market boundary, and the source of most bad ideas. Aetheria can stylize space heavily as long as the stylization produces readable play: dangerous zones, navigation choices, sensor language, thermal exposure, faction territory, route value, and environmental identity.
+
+The legacy implementation already points toward this with galaxy generation, map layers, zone rendering, gravity objects, suns, gas giants, volumetric clouds, wormholes, and custom visual effects. The art direction should keep leaning into the surviving principle: beautiful enough to remember, structured enough to use, hostile enough to respect.
+
+The old GDD's environment list is still useful as design vocabulary: stars, protostars, water masses, black holes, dark energy, dark stars, planets, battle aftermaths, asteroid fields, electrical storms, plasma, wormholes, hostile swarms, clouds, and stardust. The current canon can rename and refine them, but the gameplay instinct is sound: the environment should do things.
+
+## Playable Principles
+
+- A route should look and feel different when it is safe, surveilled, abandoned, contested, or strange.
+- Environmental spectacle should teach the player something about local risk.
+- Stylized physics should remain consistent enough for planning and tactics.
+- The void should invite exploration without pretending exploration is harmless.

Aetheria/Game Design/Action RPG Layer.md

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+# Action RPG Layer
+
+The action RPG layer is Aetheria at human speed: the ship on screen, the route ahead, the damaged component, the hostile contact, the suspicious contract, the cargo bay that is suddenly too small, and the faction whose logo makes the local dockmaster change tone.
+
+## Core Loop
+
+The player accepts or discovers a reason to move through space, prepares a ship, travels through generated sectors, resolves combat or avoidance, manages damage and cargo, makes narrative choices, and returns with money, parts, information, obligations, or a worse problem wearing nicer clothes.
+
+The loop should be legible even when the simulation under it is deep:
+
+- choose a route
+- prepare a loadout
+- survive the space between points
+- exploit or endure what the local economy produced
+- upgrade, repair, sell, betray, report, or run
+
+## Tactical Combat
+
+Combat is built around ship equipment rather than character stats floating in a vacuum. The legacy implementation exposes distinct weapon systems, hardpoints, shields, radiators, thrusters, reactors, capacitors, aether drives, visibility, sensors, heat storage, mines, projectiles, lasers, lightning, guided weapons, and weapon group assignment.
+
+The design opportunity is to make combat read as engineering under stress. A fight is not just health bars and cooldowns. It is heat debt, power draw, visibility, velocity, durability, weapon arcs, shield timing, cargo risk, and the sick little moment when a clever build becomes a maintenance liability.
+
+The archival ARPG GDD makes the combat premise sharper: shields can absorb far more than armor, so combat is largely about overwhelming the enemy's heat dissipation capacity. Ballistics, missiles, lasers, warp projectors, area effects, cryo variants, and damage types are all ways of attacking the target's ability to remain functional.
+
+## Ship Management
+
+The ship is the action RPG's character sheet. Hull shape, grid placement, hardpoint type, equipment quality, cargo layout, and behavior interactions should matter. The schematic display and inventory/trade interfaces in the old codebase point toward a game where the player understands the ship as a working object, not just a skin wrapped around numbers.
+
+## Mission Pressure
+
+Missions should not feel pasted onto the galaxy after the fact. Ink narrative, zone constraints, faction presence checks, route selection, and location binding all point toward missions that can be placed into generated space according to political and spatial logic.
+
+The ideal mission is specific in story and systemic in placement: a smuggler rendezvous where the faction actually has reach, a rescue near a contested route, a sabotage job that makes sense because the local supply chain is already strained.
+
+The planning docs also point to contracts, NPCs, repeatable stories, once-per-reset narrative events, station contacts, and dangerous subspace dungeons reached through peculiar wormholes. Those ideas should be treated as recoverable patterns, not binding feature promises. The design should keep the useful shape: one mission ecology rather than separate content bins.
+
+## Terminus Slice
+
+[[End of the Line|Aetheria: Terminus]] focuses this layer into a rogue-lite route across hostile space. It does not need every corporate system online. It does need every run to feel like a compressed encounter with the wider setting: travel, risk, salvage, pursuit, factional texture, and the possibility that freedom is just another product tier.

Aetheria/Game Design/Colonies and Population.md

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+# Colonies and Population
+
+The corporate strategy layer begins with people reduced to station math, which is exactly why the system matters. The archival `Profits Rising` document frames each player as a newly formed corporation with a small population and starting capital. That population has desires, aptitudes, and personality traits that shape production, consumption, growth, and eventually the culture of each colony.
+
+## Colony Expansion
+
+Expansion happens through colony vessels. Building one subtracts population from the parent station and moves that seed population into a new station: surface settlement, asteroid attachment, or orbital platform. This gives expansion a demographic cost instead of letting bases appear as sterile icons.
+
+A new colony should therefore inherit more than ownership. It inherits labor habits, demand patterns, production affinities, and the quiet institutional damage of whoever built the vessel.
+
+## Population Attributes
+
+The planning docs use five base population attributes. These are historical mechanics, not final canon names:
+
+- Openness
+- Agreeableness
+- Conscientiousness
+- Extraversion
+- Neuroticism
+
+These are not personality trivia. They are economic parameters. A population better matched to a production profile works faster, cheaper, and better. A population whose needs are met grows and produces more reliably. A population forced through the same work and consumption patterns gradually changes.
+
+## Satisfaction And Actualization
+
+`Satisfaction` measures how well available goods meet demand. `Actualization` measures how well the population's work matches its attributes. Both affect productivity and growth.
+
+This gives the strategy layer a sharp little trap: the most profitable arrangement may not be the most stable one, and the most stable one may require letting the population become something less convenient.
+
+## Demand And Influence
+
+Every product can have a demand profile and an influence profile. People want goods based on how those goods fit their current attributes, then consumption nudges them toward the product's influence profile. Demand can therefore become self-modifying.
+
+That is very Aetheria. The market does not merely satisfy desire. It trains desire until the sales forecast starts looking like culture.
+
+## Design Use
+
+Colonies should make corporate play feel human without requiring constant melodrama. A station's demographic profile should affect production choices, market demand, research strengths, unrest risk, hiring quality, migration, and the kinds of missions generated nearby.

Aetheria/Game Design/Corporate Strategy Layer.md

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+# Corporate Strategy Layer
+
+The corporate strategy layer is Aetheria from the distance at which people become allocation problems. It is the part of the design that asks what happens when players do not merely buy from the economy, but become one of the entities producing scarcity, infrastructure, labor discipline, and opportunity for everyone else.
+
+## Player Role
+
+The player corporation defines population roles, gathers resources, builds infrastructure, researches technology, manufactures items, expands into territory, and competes for money and influence. That archival `Profits Rising` premise matters because it makes the galaxy's cruelty operational rather than merely atmospheric.
+
+A corporation does not have to personally fire a shot to hurt people. It can underfund route security, overproduce disposable ships, monopolize a resource node, lock a settlement into maintenance dependence, or price repairs just high enough that desperate pilots accept worse contracts.
+
+`Profits Rising` starts corporations with capital, a colonist population, and population traits that shape what people demand and what they produce well. That means a corporation begins as a social design problem wearing a finance hat. Naturally everyone involved insists this is normal.
+
+## Strategic Outputs
+
+The strategy layer should produce conditions the action layer can feel:
+
+- resource shortages
+- surplus goods and cheap equipment
+- patrol density and security zones
+- contested stations and vulnerable routes
+- local faction influence
+- research unlocks and prototype gear
+- contracts, bounties, sabotage, rescue, and courier work
+
+These outputs are the meeting point between the spreadsheet and the cockpit. If the strategy layer cannot create pressure the field layer understands, it is just a second game standing next to the first one in an expensive coat.
+
+## Population And Labor
+
+Population roles should be more than production slots. Aetheria's setting is obsessed, correctly and unpleasantly, with how institutions turn personhood into categories. Workers, specialists, pilots, researchers, security personnel, administrators, uploads, uplifted labor, and engineered crews should all carry different costs, risks, legal statuses, and political consequences.
+
+See [[Colonies and Population]] for the population model recovered from the planning docs: personality attributes, satisfaction, actualization, demand profiles, influence profiles, and production affinity.
+
+## Research And Production
+
+Research should not be a clean ladder of bigger numbers. It should alter what a corporation can build, which materials it needs, what risks it externalizes, and which factions become rivals or suppliers. Production should inherit quality, material origin, blueprint design, labor conditions, and manufacturing doctrine where the game can support it without turning every bolt into a tax filing.
+
+The planning docs give research a patent window: completed technologies grant exclusive rights for a time before becoming licensable by others. That is much more interesting than permanent unlock hoarding. It lets research create temporary monopoly, licensing revenue, arms races, and the brief corporate ecstasy of mistaking first-mover advantage for virtue.
+
+## Conflict
+
+Strategy conflict is economic before it is military. Route denial, contract manipulation, supply interruption, standards capture, sabotage, insurance pricing, infrastructure enclosure, and hostile acquisition all fit Aetheria better than simple conquest. Open violence still exists, but the setting is strongest when coercion comes with invoices.
+
+The strategy GDD also includes police protocol, pirates/privateers, independent traders, AI corporations, and alien escalation. The current design may rename, replace, or cut them, but the actor roles are still useful: they keep the corporate layer from becoming a closed optimization puzzle. The market has predators, referees, parasites, and the occasional existential correction.

Aetheria/Game Design/Design Pillars.md

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+# Design Pillars
+
+Aetheria should make systems feel lived in rather than merely large. The player is not visiting a decorative galaxy. They are moving through a machine that prices motion, identity, risk, labor, repair, heat, allegiance, and survival.
+
+## Scale With Consequence
+
+Scale matters only when it changes behavior. A galaxy of empty dots is just a loading screen with delusions. Aetheria's scale should produce route dependency, local scarcity, asymmetric information, frontier cultures, stranded assets, factional enclaves, and the need to choose which risks are worth crossing space for.
+
+## One World, Multiple Distances
+
+The action RPG and corporate strategy layers are different distances from the same situation. A freelance pilot experiences a shortage as a dangerous contract, a failed repair, a bribe, or a fight they cannot afford. A corporate player experiences that same shortage as procurement pressure, logistics exposure, pricing opportunity, or a reason to send someone else into trouble.
+
+## Ships As Material Arguments
+
+Ships are not generic avatars. A ship is a body, home, tool, workplace, balance sheet, and political artifact. Its hull, hardpoints, heat budget, cargo capacity, weapons, docking options, and manufacturer logic should all say something about who built it and what compromises they expect its owner to accept.
+
+## Economy Before Spectacle
+
+Combat should be exciting, but the setting is not held together by combat alone. Production, transport, extraction, salvage, research, maintenance, market access, and security doctrine decide what violence is possible and what it costs. Guns are louder. Supply chains are meaner.
+
+## Failure Has History
+
+The persistent universe is not meant to be permanently winnable. Alien pressure eventually overwhelms the human branch, Elysium resets the timeline, and the next cycle begins with more player knowledge and possibly new content injected into the same long argument. The point is not a clean victory state. The point is watching civilizations make different compromises under pressure and seeing which ones buy time.
+
+## Accessible Depth
+
+The project wants simulation depth without forcing every player to become an accountant, thermal engineer, and procurement officer before breakfast. Interfaces should surface playable decisions first and reveal deeper mechanics when the player needs them.

Aetheria/Game Design/Economy and Production.md

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+# Economy and Production
+
+Aetheria's economy is not a vendor table with lore wallpaper. It is the main pressure system. The world should make the player feel that every weapon, hull, route, station, repair, and contract came from somewhere, passed through someone's control, and left someone else with the risk.
+
+## Commodities And Cargo
+
+The legacy implementation already contains simple and compound commodity categories, cargo bays, cargo transfer, docking bays, trade UI, inventory UI, and item storage geometry. That points toward an economy where goods are physical enough to matter. Cargo is not just a number. It occupies volume, constrains ship design, invites theft, and turns travel into exposure.
+
+## Blueprints And Quality
+
+Blueprints define ingredients for craftable items, and ingredients can influence performance stats. That is a quietly excellent foundation. It means production can carry history: a weapon's quality can reflect material choice, manufacturing chain, supplier competence, and corporate doctrine instead of appearing fully formed from the sacred vending fog.
+
+`Profits Rising` adds production tradeoffs directly: every piece of infrastructure can choose between speed and quality, while cost depends on ingredient spending. Fast, cheap, good. Pick your poison and then advertise it as innovation.
+
+## Performance As Material History
+
+The codebase's `PerformanceStat` model connects item performance to durability, temperature, and crafting quality. This is exactly the kind of mechanic Aetheria should protect. It ties engineering, combat, economics, and maintenance together. A cheap reactor should not merely have smaller numbers. It should fail differently, run hotter, wear harder, and make its owner's options narrower.
+
+## Markets And Leverage
+
+Markets should express power. Prices, availability, quality, legal access, docking permission, route safety, and repair capacity are all ways factions exert control. A poor pilot does not just pay more. They get pushed toward worse risks and worse obligations.
+
+The strategy GDD models local demand, station stock, active transfers, arbitrage, independent traders, and prices that respond to supply and demand rather than allowing infinite profit loops. Independent traders explore, collect market data, then calculate profitable cyclic paths. That is exactly the kind of background activity that can make a galaxy feel economically alive without requiring every hauler to be hand-authored.
+
+## Production Doctrine
+
+Different corporations should produce different kinds of compromise. [[Worldbuilding/Pre-Elysium/Factions/Powers/Major/Zhestokost|Zhestokost]] favors rugged force and controlled deprivation. [[Worldbuilding/Pre-Elysium/Factions/Powers/Major/Aeronautics Unlimited|Aeronautics Unlimited]] favors frontier expansion and scalable logistics. [[Worldbuilding/Pre-Elysium/Factions/Powers/Major/Cryonix|Cryonix]] makes thermal margins political. [[Worldbuilding/Pre-Elysium/Factions/Powers/Major/Finch Cybernetics|Finch]] turns care and enhancement into dependency.
+
+The economy layer should make those identities playable through supply chains, item behavior, market access, and maintenance expectations.

Aetheria/Game Design/End of the Line.md

@@ -9,3 +9,23 @@ Aetheria: Terminus is the first sharp cut into the wider universe: a rogue-lite
 The destination is Terminus. Everything between you and it wants you dead, owned, or broken first. Procedural routes, megacorporate opposition, and the general indifference of space turn every run into a negotiation between risk, speed, and survival.
 
 This is the smaller blade by design. It tests the material pressures of the wider setting without asking the first public slice to carry the full weight of Aetheria's galactic ambition problem all by itself.
+
+## Design Role
+
+Terminus is the proof slice for the [[Action RPG Layer]]. It should make ship handling, combat, route choice, faction pressure, loot, repairs, trade, and mission consequences feel like one system rather than a sampler plate.
+
+The wider game wants persistent corporations and a shared economy. Terminus does not need to simulate all of that on day one. It does need to make the player feel that those systems exist beyond the edge of the run: someone manufactured the weapons, someone owns the docks, someone controls the safe routes, and someone has already decided how much your freedom is allowed to cost.
+
+## Run Structure
+
+Each run should be a compressed crossing of hostile space:
+
+- choose or discover a route toward Terminus
+- prepare a ship around limited resources and known risks
+- fight, evade, bargain, scavenge, or betray through the route
+- carry forward damage, cargo, debts, and narrative obligations
+- reach a temporary victory or become another cautionary entry in a corporate actuarial table
+
+## What It Proves
+
+Terminus proves the parts of Aetheria that must feel good before scale matters: readable combat, meaningful ship builds, dangerous travel, useful loot, faction identity, route pressure, and story events that feel native to generated space.

Aetheria/Game Design/Galaxy and Navigation.md

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+# Galaxy and Navigation
+
+Aetheria's galaxy should feel generated, but not arbitrary. The map is a field of pressure: routes, chokepoints, faction homes, resources, security gradients, station placement, alien reach, and the bad decisions people make because the safer path costs too much.
+
+## Generated Structure
+
+The legacy codebase already includes galaxy generation, map layer data, density maps, star placement, links between stars, zone generation, wormholes, faction home zones, distance maps, and map UI. The old README describes star placement along a space-filling Hilbert curve and route links created through Delaunay tessellation before being filtered for sparsity.
+
+That machinery points toward a galaxy where topology matters. If every destination is equally reachable, there is no logistics game. Routes need friction, concentration, exposure, and local character.
+
+## Map Layers
+
+Map layers can define more than star density. They can describe resources, life, security, zone radius, faction interest, anomaly distribution, alien pressure, or economic intensity. This lets the galaxy become a stack of overlapping gradients rather than a bag of points.
+
+## Routes And Chokepoints
+
+Route structure is where strategy and action can meet. Corporate players care because routes move goods, labor, patrols, and influence. ARPG players care because routes decide what dangers they must cross and which opportunities are worth the detour.
+
+Good routes create arguments:
+
+- faster but hostile
+- safer but expensive
+- legal but surveilled
+- obscure but poorly supplied
+- profitable but likely to become a grave with nicer margins
+
+## Local Space
+
+Zones should carry local identity through bodies, orbits, stations, resources, faction presence, security level, narrative hooks, and environmental hazards. A generated sector does not need a novel's worth of bespoke prose. It needs enough material logic that a player can understand why this place produces this kind of trouble.
+
+## Navigation As Commitment
+
+Travel should not be frictionless menu teleportation. Even when abstracted, navigation should ask the player what they are risking: time, fuel, visibility, cargo exposure, heat buildup, enemy contact, missed opportunity, reputation, or the patience of whoever sent the contract.

Aetheria/Game Design/Gravity and Locomotion.md

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+# Gravity and Locomotion
+
+Aetheria's movement model begins with the Grid: a two-dimensional play surface where the vertical axis visualizes gravitational potential. Ships glide across that surface while stars, planets, wormholes, projectors, and other bodies deform it.
+
+This is not hard realism. It is a playable translation of gravity into terrain.
+
+## The Grid
+
+The Grid makes gravitational force readable. Slopes pull ships. Wells become terrain. Field lines, contour lines, minimap shaders, and dynamic displacement all help turn invisible physics into something the player can steer through.
+
+The shader planning document treats this as one of Aetheria's signature historical ideas: where other games might place static environmental art, Aetheria paints gravity into render textures and renders the environment from dynamic fields.
+
+## Thrusters
+
+Conventional thrusters change ship direction and velocity. Mass matters through inertia. Some ships thrust mostly forward; others can strafe more freely. That difference should make hull identity tactile. A heavy ship should feel committed. A nimble ship should feel expensive in all the ways nimble things usually are.
+
+## Warp Locomotion
+
+Warp drives and projectors alter velocity by creating localized gravity fields. A ship can push itself, bend the local field, or project force at range. This gives movement and combat the same grammar: gravity is terrain, engine, weapon, and hazard.
+
+## Grid Traction
+
+Some hulls can grip the Grid, rotating their velocity vector forward and producing a flight feel closer to atmospheric maneuvering. At higher levels, traction can let ships park or maneuver on gravity slopes in ways other ships cannot.
+
+Design implication: traction is not merely easier steering. It is a tactical identity, useful for ambush, silent movement, positional control, and weird maneuvers around wells.
+
+## Wormholes And Fast Travel
+
+Special wormholes can connect distant parts of the galaxy. The old GDD makes fast travel costly: the required item consumes major energy and produces crippling heat. The exact implementation can change, but the principle is worth preserving: keep the punishment attached to the miracle.
+
+Fast travel should solve distance while creating exposure. If a jump is always clean, it is a menu button. If it leaves the ship hot, visible, drained, or dependent on rare infrastructure, it becomes a decision.

Aetheria/Game Design/Heat, Stealth, and Detection.md

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+# Heat, Stealth, and Detection
+
+Heat is one of Aetheria's central mechanics because it refuses to stay in one design box. It is endurance, performance, damage, stealth, engineering, economy, and tactical timing. A civilized mechanic. Rude in all the right ways.
+
+## Heat As Staying Power
+
+Equipment use generates heat. Heat must be moved, stored, dumped, radiated, or endured. The archival ARPG GDD describes heat as a combined pressure similar to health and mana, except with stronger implications for stealth and component failure.
+
+Every item can have a heat/performance curve. Temperature affects efficiency and output. At poor performance thresholds, items start taking durability damage. At the zero point, they fail.
+
+## Thermal Layout
+
+Ships have hull-specific heat transfer graphs based on the schematic proximity of mounting points. Refrigeration configurations can maintain target temperatures, ignore points, prioritize parts, or designate heat dumps.
+
+That gives shipbuilding a real interior logic. A component is not just installed. It is placed into a thermal neighborhood with consequences.
+
+## Stealth
+
+A ship can hide by controlling emissions. Visibility comes from reflected light, active sensor illumination, radiator output, hull temperature, thrust, and firing signatures. Radiator placement can bias emissions directionally.
+
+Stealth is therefore not invisibility. It is debt management. The ship can delay, redirect, mask, or time its emissions, but it cannot make consequence disappear because physics is one of the few institutions in Aetheria that still files paperwork correctly.
+
+## Detection And Identification
+
+Detection reveals position. Identification takes longer and depends on the ratio between visibility and sensitivity, plus scanner capability. The planning docs distinguish sensors, ship scanners, planet scanners, jammers, radiance, radiance masking, sensitivity, item rarity, and lore/tech thresholds.
+
+This suggests a layered information game:
+
+- see that something is there
+- learn what class of thing it is
+- identify equipment and cargo
+- decide whether the target is worth the heat, time, law, and risk
+
+## Design Use
+
+Heat and detection should bind combat, piracy, scouting, travel, and trade. Firing a weapon, thrusting hard, scanning actively, jumping through a wormhole, or overdriving a reactor should all create signatures other actors can exploit.

Aetheria/Game Design/Implementation Signals.md

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+# Implementation Signals
+
+This note records what the legacy `Aetheria-Economy` codebase reveals about the design, without pretending old implementation detail is sacred canon. Code is evidence. Sometimes embarrassing evidence. Still evidence.
+
+## Shared Simulation
+
+The repository has a Unity client, a .NET server, and a substantial `Assets/Scripts/ServerShared` layer. Shared classes cover entities, ships, zones, galaxies, factions, items, behaviors, serialization, player settings, saved games, network messages, and world generation.
+
+Design implication: Aetheria has long wanted a common simulation substrate rather than separate bespoke logic for client, server, and tools.
+
+## Data-Driven Content
+
+Persistent game data is built around database entries, GUIDs, MessagePack, JSON serialization, RethinkDB tooling, item managers, database inspectors, and local backups. Items, behaviors, factions, commodities, galaxies, and settings are all treated as editable data.
+
+Design implication: the game should preserve a content pipeline where designers can create ships, gear, commodities, factions, map layers, and behavior combinations without hardcoding every variant.
+
+## Ships And Behaviors
+
+Ships are entities with hulls, equipment, cargo bays, docking bays, heat maps, durability, visibility, faction hostility, and behavior-driven components. Behaviors cover weapons, shields, radiators, reactors, capacitors, aether drives, thrusters, sensors, mining tools, stat modifiers, switches, triggers, heat storage, velocity limits, and more.
+
+Design implication: ship identity should emerge from component interaction. The system already wants builds to be physical, thermal, spatial, and economic.
+
+## Economy Surface
+
+The code includes cargo transfer, simple and compound commodities, crafted item instances, blueprints, performance stats, quality, durability, inventory, trade menus, and database-backed item data.
+
+Design implication: Aetheria's economy should be more than price lists. Materials, manufacturing quality, cargo geometry, and maintenance condition can all become playable.
+
+## Galaxy And Missions
+
+Galaxy generation, map layers, star links, faction home zones, zone generation, wormholes, map rendering, sector rendering, Ink stories, quest files, story processing, zone constraints, and faction-aware mission placement all exist or are sketched.
+
+Design implication: the game should keep connecting procedural structure to authored context. Generated space becomes useful when missions and factions know how to inhabit it.
+
+## Near-Term Lesson
+
+The current work should not try to expose every old system immediately. The sane path is to use [[End of the Line|Terminus]] as the playable test chamber, keep the data model compatible with the larger dream where that still helps, and only promote a system into the design hierarchy when it creates better player pressure.
+
+## Planning-Time Coverage
+
+The exported GDDs are broad enough to justify the current section hierarchy as an archival map. They cover gravity, environmental entities, locomotion, heat, stealth, identification, energy, item classes, combat, death, looting, scavenging, progression, licenses, contracts, dungeons, NPCs, trading, drones, station management, building, mining, gas harvesting, crafting, defense, colony management, population attributes, production profiles, demand and influence profiles, research patents, independent traders, pirates, privateers, police, AI corporations, user interface tabs, and shader-driven gravitational terrain.
+
+Design implication: the game design section should stay hierarchical. A flat pile of notes would be a crime scene with links.

Aetheria/Game Design/Narrative and Missions.md

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+# Narrative and Missions
+
+Aetheria's narrative systems should let authored story inhabit generated space without turning the galaxy into a row of cardboard quest booths. The codebase already points in that direction with Ink files, location data, quest data, a `StoryProcessor`, zone constraints, faction resolvers, and selectors that can place content according to distance, ownership, and faction presence.
+
+## Mission Placement
+
+The best mission placement starts from conditions:
+
+- which faction owns or influences the zone
+- how far it is from a named point
+- whether a route is contested
+- whether a station, resource, or population is present
+- what local security allows
+- what the current economy has made scarce or valuable
+
+This lets authored missions feel less like stickers. A spy rendezvous, extraction job, factory incident, sabotage request, or rescue should appear where the setting says such a thing would plausibly happen.
+
+## Authored Pressure
+
+The Ink material in `GameData/Narrative` suggests a tone that can be sharp, funny, dangerous, and politically messy without becoming weightless. Missions should preserve that bite. Aetheria can have jokes. It should also remember who gets billed for them.
+
+The ARPG GDD describes scattered interactive stories, some repeatable and some happening only once per reset with consequences that echo through the timeline. Many begin through station NPCs but can remain active after undocking or even follow the player indefinitely.
+
+## Faction Voice
+
+Faction missions are one of the cleanest ways to teach the setting. A job from [[Worldbuilding/Pre-Elysium/Factions/Powers/Major/Lucent Media|Lucent Media]] should not feel like a job from [[Worldbuilding/Pre-Elysium/Factions/Powers/Major/Sol Dominion|Sol Dominion]], [[Worldbuilding/Pre-Elysium/Factions/Powers/Major/Framgång]], or the [[Worldbuilding/Pre-Elysium/Factions/Powers/Major/Pirate Coalition|Pirate Coalition]]. The objective, payment structure, euphemisms, risk transfer, and failure language should all expose the institution behind the request.
+
+## Consequence
+
+Narrative consequence does not always need a branching cinematic. Sometimes consequence is a market shift, a new patrol, a closed dock, a cheaper weapon, a hostile faction, a worker population displaced into another system, or a rumor that changes how a station greets the player.
+
+## Campaign And Rogue-Lite Use
+
+[[End of the Line|Terminus]] can use narrative as run texture and long-form campaign memory: route events, faction encounters, mission chains, shipboard conversations, and recurring obligations. The full persistent game can use the same grammar at larger scale, where corporate actions create the mission ecology field players keep mistaking for bad luck.
+
+Subspace dungeons from the old GDD are especially useful for Terminus-scale structure: dangerous wormholes leading into chaotic maze-like space, with escalating enemies, exits, bosses, and rewards. They should be adapted carefully into current cosmology rather than copied as a loose arcade appendage.

Aetheria/Game Design/Persistent Universe and Reset Loop.md

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+# Persistent Universe and Reset Loop
+
+Aetheria's full campaign structure is a persistent human branch inside Elysium that eventually fails. The alien pressure rises until humanity can no longer hold the line, the population collapses, and the branch resets. Everyone gets another run at civilization. This is not mercy. It is containment with a progress bar.
+
+The older GDD names this as an Isolation Bubble maintained by the Timeless: entities outside linear time that collect novelty through repeating histories. The current lore frames the same underlying function through Elysium and [[Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Concepts/Temporal Nonlinearity|Temporal Nonlinearity]]. Different vocabulary, same bad news in better clothes.
+
+## Campaign Arc
+
+Each instance of the universe is envisioned as a long multiplayer campaign lasting weeks or months. Early play is expansion, exploration, market formation, local warfare, and institutional setup. Midgame play is consolidation, specialization, route dependency, factional leverage, and increasing exposure to external threat. Endgame play is triage.
+
+The escalating alien threat gives the economy a terminal condition. Hoarding, exploitation, coordination, arms production, rescue, evacuation, research, and betrayal all become different answers to the same question: how long can this branch keep itself alive?
+
+## Reset Logic
+
+The reset loop is part of the setting's metaphysics through [[Worldbuilding/Post-Elysium/Concepts/Temporal Nonlinearity|Temporal Nonlinearity]]. Elysium does not simply allow extinction to conclude. It branches, monitors, and resets, turning history into an experiment none of the participants consented to run.
+
+In game terms, resets justify repeated campaigns without pretending the previous one did not matter. Player knowledge survives outside the fiction. New content, factions, routes, systems, and timeline variations can enter later loops as the project grows.
+
+## Player Memory
+
+The design should be careful about what persists. If too much carries over, resets become progression laundering. If nothing carries over, the campaign becomes disposable. The cleanest persistence is knowledge, unlocked context, public history, faction reputation where appropriate, and design-space expansion between loops.
+
+The ARPG planning doc allowed players to retain specific items and knowledge after an early encounter with a Timeless One. `Profits Rising` instead suggests reset capital scaling from capital growth during the prior timeline. Both point toward persistence as selective carryover, not total continuity.
+
+## Failure As Pressure
+
+Failure should not be framed as a moral lecture. It should be procedural. Players see which systems held, which collapsed, who profited, who abandoned whom, and what shortages became fatal. The game does not need to call anyone monstrous. It can show the evacuation queue closing.

Aetheria/Game Design/Playable Layers.md

@@ -0,0 +1,31 @@
+# Playable Layers
+
+Aetheria's oldest design ambition is not just "big MMO, but in space." It is two different game fantasies sharing one persistent context: cockpit-scale action and boardroom-scale exploitation, both pretending they are the main character while the universe quietly sharpens the knife.
+
+## Action RPG Layer
+
+The ARPG layer is the player's embodied experience of the galaxy. It covers ship control, combat, missions, trade, travel, exploration, salvage, docking, crew-facing narrative, and the constant practical question of whether the next jump is worth the damage it may cost.
+
+This layer is where [[End of the Line|Aetheria: Terminus]] starts. Terminus can prove the felt game before the full simulation arrives: routes, loadouts, enemies, story pressure, procedural structure, and ship survival under hostile conditions.
+
+## Corporate Strategy Layer
+
+The strategy layer lets players operate as corporations rather than lone operators. The archival `Profits Rising` planning line points toward corporations defining population roles, gathering resources, building infrastructure, researching technology, producing items, and competing for economic dominance.
+
+This layer should create the material conditions the ARPG layer has to inhabit. A corporate decision is not only a menu choice. It becomes a shortage, a patrol, a cheap weapon flooding the market, a station that needs protection, a new route worth raiding, or a worker population trapped inside somebody else's growth plan.
+
+## Shared Persistent World
+
+The shared world is the hard part, naturally. The legacy `Aetheria-Economy` codebase gestures toward it with shared server/client simulation code, common serialization, factions, zones, galaxies, generated routes, cargo, equipment, narrative placement, and a server process intended to own persistent state.
+
+The design problem is to decide which interactions must be live and which can be summarized. Not every corporate decision needs to spawn a bespoke cockpit encounter. Not every player dogfight needs to update a quarterly report. The useful overlap is where one layer creates pressure the other layer can understand.
+
+## Near-Term Shape
+
+The release path should keep the layers honest without requiring them all to ship at once:
+
+1. Prove the ARPG slice with [[End of the Line|Terminus]].
+2. Preserve the design language of corporate pressure even when the first playable build is single-player or limited-scope.
+3. Keep data models and content categories compatible with later economy simulation.
+4. Introduce strategy-scale systems only when their outputs create better field play.
+5. Let the full persistent loop emerge from working slices instead of demanding worship from a cathedral made of TODO comments.

Aetheria/Game Design/Progression, Claims, and Consequence.md

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+# Progression, Claims, and Consequence
+
+Aetheria's progression should unlock ways of interacting with systems, not just larger numbers for the same stale behavior. The old GDD frames progression through experience, skill points, licenses, and claims around death, wreckage, looting, stations, drones, and construction. Those are historical mechanics; this note keeps the parts that still explain useful player pressure.
+
+## Licenses
+
+Licenses gate equipment categories and mechanics:
+
+- item licenses for hulls, shields, heat management, reactors, thrusters, warp traction, jamming, sensors, scanning, AI cores, mining tools, and similar systems
+- mechanical licenses for navigation, item lore, drone deployment, drone programming, trading, and station management
+- passive licenses for benefits such as docking or flight dynamics
+
+The design strength here is that licenses can teach the player what kind of operator they are becoming. A navigation specialist, drone handler, station manager, pirate, scanner expert, and heat engineer should have different daily problems.
+
+## Death And Escape
+
+The GDD avoids simple permadeath. If life support fails, the player ejects in an escape pod. If the ship is not critically destroyed, they may wait for it to cool and re-enter. Otherwise they can go to a station with another stored ship and pay towing fees to reclaim the wreck.
+
+This keeps failure material. The player survives, but the ship, cargo, components, location, and claim status still matter.
+
+## Looting And Scavenging
+
+Wrecks create timed claims. The attacker can loot while vulnerable, spending time identifying and removing contents. Item rarity affects identification time. Mass and size affect removal time. After the claim window, the wreck can become property of the system owner or scavengers.
+
+This is a strong interaction model because looting is not instant moral confetti. It is a risky industrial process performed near evidence.
+
+## Stations And Exposure
+
+Station construction, defense, and ownership should carry risk. Building outside protected space exposes installations to attack and takeover. Defenses can delay threats, but ownership remains a political and logistical fact, not an achievement badge nailed to the map.
+
+## Drones And Automation
+
+AI cores can turn outfitted ships into drones, constrained by skills, slots, hull tech, and behavior complexity. Drones can follow, fight, patrol, move goods, or execute simple scripts. Automation should make the player feel powerful while also widening the surface area of failure. A drone is not a free hand. It is a new liability with engines.

Aetheria/Game Design/Ship-shape and Up to Specs.md

@@ -7,3 +7,32 @@
 Ships in Aetheria are tools, homes, status symbols, and compressed ideological arguments with engines attached.
 
 Customization goes deep: components with distinct behavior, megacorporate manufacturers with their own priorities and specialties, and plenty of room to tune a vessel for violence, trade, survival, logistics, or prestige. The point is not only personal expression. It is to make every ship feel like a material compromise between who built it, who owns it, what it must survive, and what sort of life it is expected to enforce.
+
+## Mechanical Identity
+
+The legacy implementation treats ships as entities built from hulls, equipped items, behaviors, cargo bays, docking bays, heat maps, durability, visibility, faction relationships, and weapon groups. That is the correct disease. Keep it.
+
+A ship build should express:
+
+- hull shape and hardpoint layout
+- power generation and storage
+- heat production, routing, buffering, and radiation
+- weapon timing, range, and damage profile
+- shield behavior and vulnerability windows
+- cargo and docking capacity
+- sensor range, visibility, and stealth tradeoffs
+- manufacturer doctrine and material quality
+
+## Design Consequence
+
+Aetheria's best ship customization is not "more slots means more better." It is choosing what kind of trouble the vessel is allowed to survive. A combat ship can become logistically useless. A trader can become a slow coffin. A stealth build can win one encounter and then cook itself in silence. A luxury hull can be exquisite right up until it discovers what cheap repair infrastructure thinks of exquisite people.
+
+## Link To Economy
+
+Ships should carry production history. Blueprints, component quality, commodity inputs, corporate standards, and maintenance access should affect performance. A cheap gun, a premium radiator, a copied hull plan, and a black-market reactor all belong to the same argument: every advantage came from somewhere, and somewhere usually wants payment.
+
+## Planned Item Families
+
+The planning docs define a broad ship equipment grammar: hulls, weapons, shields, coolers, reactors, thrusters, warp thrusters, sensors, heatsinks, AI cores, jammers, ship scanners, planet scanners, anchors, mining tools, and cargo infrastructure. The final list can change, but the shared attribute layer is still valuable: mass, size, draw, tech level, rarity, thermal conductivity, specific heat, performance curves, ruggedness, and durability.
+
+That common attribute layer is what lets equipment belong to one simulation instead of becoming a zoo of unrelated exceptions.

Aetheria/Game Design/Visual and Sensory Direction.md

@@ -0,0 +1,29 @@
+# Visual and Sensory Direction
+
+Aetheria should look expensive in the places that teach the player how the world works. Not merely shiny. Legible, strange, forceful, and system-revealing.
+
+## Expressive Space
+
+[[A Different Sort of Space]] sets the tone: Aetheria does not chase hard-SF austerity. Space can be dreamlike, luminous, dangerous, and physically expressive. The player should feel awe without losing consequence.
+
+That means beauty should still carry information. A storm, ring, nebula, station silhouette, shield flare, thermal bloom, weapon discharge, or cloud layer should help the player understand where they are and what kind of trouble lives there.
+
+## Shader And Atmosphere Work
+
+The old planning links include `Aetheria Shader Implementation`, and the legacy codebase contains custom rendering work for volumetric clouds, suns, gas giants, gravity objects, zone display, weapon effects, and background rendering. This is not garnish. It is part of the game's promise: a galaxy that feels materially present even when it is stylized.
+
+The shader document is especially clear about the gravitational terrain system: gameplay occurs on an infinite XZ-aligned surface, while dedicated orthographic cameras paint layers into floating-point render textures. Brush shaders define displacement, fog surfaces, fog patches, waves, wormholes, noise, and field effects. The Grid, minimap, volumetric sun, gas giant, and stardust particle systems are all built from that same premise.
+
+## Combat Readability
+
+Weapon effects should distinguish function, not just color. Lasers, lightning, projectiles, mines, shields, charge effects, radiators, aether drives, and explosions all need readable timing and threat language. The player should learn what is happening before the combat log politely confirms they are already ruined.
+
+## Interface Tone
+
+The interface has to bridge cockpit fantasy and spreadsheet machinery. Inventory, trade, maps, schematic displays, weapon groups, property panels, and debug tools all point toward a game where information is dense but should remain playable.
+
+Good UI in Aetheria should feel like operational equipment: practical, layered, a little corporate, and quietly indifferent to the user's emotional needs.
+
+## Sound And Feedback
+
+The Wwise project and soundbank data expose attention to weapon, UI, shield, docking, undocking, wormhole, and drive feedback. Sound should reinforce the material model: heat, mass, power, malfunction, range, impact, and the difference between a clean system and one being asked to die professionally.

Aetheria/Game Design/index.md

@@ -2,15 +2,49 @@
 
 *"The setting is a machine. The playable problem is deciding which gears the player gets to touch first."*
 
-Aetheria at full scale wants to simulate a galaxy where freelance operators, corporate logistics, military doctrine, supply chains, and market failures all feed one another. The first releases do not need to ship the whole monster at once, but they do need to prove the mood, pressure, and social logic that make the wider project worth building.
+Aetheria's design begins from an old, unreasonable ambition and then tries to make it survivable: two different games sharing the same doomed universe. One layer is a tactical action RPG about ships, crews, missions, routes, and violence up close. The other is a corporate strategy game about production, infrastructure, population roles, research, and economic dominance. Both are meant to feed the same persistent galaxy, where field players collide with shortages and opportunities created by the people running the machinery.
 
-## Current Entry Points
+That is the full beast. The current public path starts smaller with [[End of the Line|Aetheria: Terminus]], a rogue-lite ARPG slice designed to prove combat, traversal, ship customization, narrative pressure, and the setting's corporate logic before the project tries to swallow the whole sun and asks politely for seconds.
+
+## Design Stack
+
+- [[Design Pillars]] - the compact doctrine for what the game is trying to make playable.
+- [[Playable Layers]] - how the ARPG, corporate strategy layer, and shared world are supposed to meet.
+- [[Action RPG Layer]] - cockpit-scale play: travel, combat, loadouts, risk, quests, and survival.
+- [[Corporate Strategy Layer]] - spreadsheet-scale play: corporations, labor, production, research, logistics, and market pressure.
+- [[Persistent Universe and Reset Loop]] - the long campaign structure, alien escalation, extinction, and temporal reset.
+
+## Systems
+
+- [[Economy and Production]] - commodities, blueprints, crafting quality, supply chains, and corporate leverage.
+- [[Colonies and Population]] - colony vessels, station populations, demographic attributes, production affinity, demand, and influence.
+- [[Galaxy and Navigation]] - generated stars, map layers, zone links, routes, sectors, and frontier topology.
+- [[Gravity and Locomotion]] - the Grid, gravitational terrain, thrusters, warp fields, traction, wormholes, and fast travel heat costs.
+- [[Heat, Stealth, and Detection]] - thermal performance, emissions, sensors, scanning, jamming, and identification.
+- [[Ship-shape and Up to Specs]] - ships as loadouts, homes, status objects, and thermal compromises with weapons attached.
+- [[Progression, Claims, and Consequence]] - licenses, death, escape pods, wreck claims, looting, scavenging, and station exposure.
+- [[Narrative and Missions]] - Ink-driven quests, location constraints, faction presence, and story inside generated space.
+- [[A Different Sort of Space]] - the visual and physical feel of Aetheria's non-hard-SF void.
+- [[Visual and Sensory Direction]] - shaders, clouds, weapon effects, audio, and readable spectacle.
+- [[Implementation Signals]] - what the legacy `Aetheria-Economy` codebase reveals about the design.
+
+## Release Path
 
 - [[End of the Line]]
 - [[../Lore/Welcome to Elysium|Welcome to Elysium]]
 - [[A Different Sort of Space]]
 - [[Ship-shape and Up to Specs]]
 
+## Historical Sources
+
+The legacy `Aetheria-Economy` repository points to three planning-time documents:
+
+- [Aetheria GDD](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iULu1WsbuQoUM3c87XkGseb1P-8R5xlruoiyg03TsSE/edit?usp=sharing) - the action RPG design document.
+- [Profits Rising](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U3uGFqQboAiFJ_Y-nUOGpyixbXUHRbc5DiCuB59GM4w/edit?usp=sharing) - the corporate strategy / RTS design document.
+- [Aetheria Shader Implementation](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AFycvCtW6hA1jkKq1ZmYd3k6_uEWaaCqcZ4fYj4vU6A/edit?usp=sharing) - shader and rendering notes.
+
+These documents and the old repository README are historical design strata, not current marching orders. They are useful because they preserve mechanic intent: the time loop, tactical ship combat, heat and stealth, licenses, contracts, dungeons, drones, station management, production, population attributes, demand profiles, market arbitrage, research patents, independent traders, police protocol, AI corporations, and shader-driven gravitational terrain. The live hierarchy treats them as raw inheritance, then filters them through the current canonical vault and the active project direction. The codebase shape is also evidence, but not law: shared simulation classes, `ServerShared` data models, galaxy generation, equipment behaviors, cargo and trade UI, Ink narrative processing, map rendering, debug tools, and the old server architecture show long-running ambitions that still need current judgment.
+
 ## Setting Pressures
 
 - [[Introduction]]