Gonex — the game as it stands Team Yodacon · captured 22 September 2026 · seed 20260922

01One law, two ledgers

Everything below is downstream of one rule, and it is the only rule in the game that can be proved rather than argued about.

Every ton in the game was put in the ground at genesis. From then on it can only move — out of the crust, into a warehouse, into a hold, across a lane, through a factory that changes what it is, and finally into a mouth or a slag heap. It is never minted.

A second ledger says the same of money: credits are minted at genesis and never again. Both are checked by an auditor that rolls every pool in the universe into one column — crusts, warehouses, holds, hull structure, wreck fields, the sink, and the two pools the player stands in — and compares the total. A pool left out of that call reads exactly like a leak, which is the correct failure: forgetting to count a warehouse is losing track of the mass in it.

The check is on the grand total, not per material, because transformation is the whole point of industry. A smelter is supposed to destroy ferrite and create steel. What no process may do is change how many tons there are.

109 ports · 730 simulated days · seed 20260922

  genesis        93,792 kt
  in the crust   85,200 kt
  in warehouses   4,655 kt
  afloat in holds    36 kt
  consumed/slag   3,801 kt
  ---
  mass           BALANCED at every checkpoint, every seed
  credits        BALANCED — 123,082,138 cr, every one in a purse

02The menus

The menu tree is konex's, kept deliberately: single player with three modes, options for display and player, and the save/load pair. Trader is the mode this project added — the commodity game with the reentry landing under it.

03Flight, war and the map

The flight view is konex's top-down arena, unchanged in feel: arrows turn and thrust, space fires, X brakes, Shift targets the nearest enemy. What changed is what the other ships are doing there.

04The voyage: warp, deorbit, reentry, takeoff

Getting to a planet's surface is four screens and about a minute of flying. Each is a real phase of the same trajectory rather than a transition.

The reentry corridor

This is the piece the project is really about, and the screen with the most physics in it. A 350-tonne freighter has the ballistic coefficient of a falling anvil; what makes it flyable is an MHD plasma aeroshell — a magnetic bubble inflated ahead of the nose that stands the shock off and sheds the heat.

05The concourse and its six screens

Landing ends on the concourse. Six sub-screens hang off it, and Esc from any of them returns here rather than opening the game menu.

06The Governor's Desk — four tabs

G at any dock. If you bought the first building at a world you hold its charter and the desk is writable; otherwise it is read-only and you are watching somebody else govern.

07The zero-sum economy

Under every screen above there is a simulation of everywhere: 109 ports digging, refining, eating, growing and trading, with roughly 195 hulls carrying the difference between them. It runs whether you are looking at it or not, and landing burns days — so a long delivery comes back to a market that has moved.

Matter: 30 materials in six tiers

The ordering is load-bearing in exactly one place: the first eight entries are the commodity board, in order, so a planet's warehouse and a ship's hold are a prefix of a full material vector and convert by copying.

Tier	Materials	Rule
Board (8)	Lumber · Ore · Rations · Medicine · Chips · Fuel cells · Pellets · Melt	what a port posts a price for, and all the player trades
Refined (10)	Steel · Copper · Silicon · Polymer · Grain · Lithex · Lithium · Heavylith · Acid · Fluid	made, not sold; what a smelter hands a fabricator
Yard (3)	Hull · Rounds · Missiles	what a fleet is made of and what it shoots
Returns (2)	Compost · Scrap	the only two places the flow goes back uphill
Crust (6)	Ferrite · Cuprite · Silicate · Volatiles · Biomass · Spodumene	finite; the only tier mining can produce
Sink (1)	Slag	counted, and worthless — which is what makes the books balance

Two predicates carry the travel rules, for two quite different reasons. Hot — pure lithium and heavylith travel in a shielded cask or not at all, because a cask that survives a jump costs more than the ton inside it, which is what pins the finishing plant beside the breeder rather than beside the customer. Bulkable — steel, concentrate, acid and hydraulic fluid are refined but ship like goods, because a city eats steel and the hot worlds import chemicals or run nothing.

Mass flow, every branch

Industry by composition

Seventeen chains are built from twenty-three primitives by one operator:

func (m *Module) Then(next *Module) *Module

Plug m's outputs into next's inputs; get back a module whose ports are whatever the pair could not satisfy internally. Because the result is itself a module, it plugs into a third the same way — a supermodule is not a special kind of thing with its own rules, it is a module that remembers what it was built from.

Two properties, both tested: mass balances, and the chain runs at its bottleneck, recorded at composition time because that is the only moment the shortfall is visible. And nobody authored a speciality — a world ranks the chains its own rocks could back and stands up the best two. A world that can smelt and fabricate has a chip industry; nobody wrote "chip industry" down.

The lithium cycle

Fuel is radioactive heavy lithium, and it comes off a five-stage line in two forms that are not interchangeable. Which one a hull can burn is a question about the reactor bolted into it — so the reactor decides which refineries in the galaxy are your suppliers.

Hostile worlds

A world's radiological dose and its spodumene seam are drawn from one number — the single place in the game where two facts about a world are forced to be the same fact. A clean world has no spodumene at all, however rich it is otherwise; a hot world's reserve scales with exactly how hot it is.

	clean	milling ≥0.10	smelting ≥0.35	breeding ≥0.55
population ceiling	32 M	~1.35 M	~975 k	~675 k → 40 k
growth	full	taxed up to 94 %
licensed line	—	Lithium milling	Radiant smelting	Fuel pellets / melt
worked by	a workforce	machines — dose that stops a city does not stop a machine
flag	a polity	whoever is paying — the free ports of the fuel trade

Prices as scarcity

Price is cover: how many days of real demand the warehouse holds. A short world pays up to 3×, a glutted one as little as 0.35×, and a producer sells cheap — which is what a producer is, and what gives a route its direction.

Two steepenings, each with an argument. Rations, ×7 — people will pay anything for the next meal, which turns a famine into the best-paying route on the board and gets it relieved without anybody scripting relief. A sited world's feedstock, ×5 — a refinery short of acid is not inconvenienced, it is shut.

And every finished good has an appetite, which is not decoration. The first cut gave chips, ore and steel no consumer, so they piled up in warehouses nobody would ever need them from and the whole network went quiet on day 104 with every hull idle. A commodity with no sink stops being traded the moment the first warehouse fills.

The trade loop

Five kinds of agent

Mission	What it does	Why it exists
Courier	free trade, routed by what pays today	the baseline
Convoy	a standing order to carry a named material A → B	a government overriding the market
Flight	moves hulls; arriving hostile it fights, friendly it garrisons, at peace it turns back	Konquest's war, conserved
Harvester	flies empty to a seam, lifts crust straight out of the ground into its hold against a royalty, carries it to the nearest port that wants it	a rich rock with nobody on it produced nothing, for ever — mining was capped by population
Survey	carries nothing, earns nothing; reads a seam and leaves. +45 % dig for 90 days where it lands, +20 % one jump out	the only thing that raises extraction without raising population

And the merchant fleet sizes itself. It opens proportional to worlds held — a trade network's size is a property of the map, not a constant somebody typed — and then every day each colour measures berth pressure, the unserved margin still on its board per hull afloat. Above 90 k cr/hull a yard presses plate; below 22 k it breaks a ship up and puts the tonnage back on the shelf. Nothing is minted: growth costs somebody a warehouse.

08Reentry physics

The magnetopause

The envelope the ship flies behind is not a heat shield, it is a magnetic bubble. The coil's dipole pushes outward with magnetic pressure; the oncoming flow pushes inward with ram pressure; and the stand-off is where they balance. Because a dipole falls off as r⁻³, its pressure falls as r⁻⁶:

    r_mp / R_n  =  ( p_mag / p_flow ) ^ 1/6        p_mag = B²/2μ₀

The confinement ladder

Nobody buys their way out of that exponent. To stand a shock off twice as far you need sixty-four times the magnetic pressure. What a yard can sell is a fix for one of four distinct ways the balance goes wrong — and each is a different piece of hardware because each is a different piece of physics.

Failure mode	Outfit	The hook
the field is too weak	HTS coil rewind +0.45 T	stand-off ∝ B^⅓ — honest, expensive, diminishing
the bottle leaks at the poles	Multipole cusp ring	plugs the cusps: more usable pressure, and two thirds less wake drag, which is where it really earns its price
the pillow is symmetric	Phased steering array	drives current asymmetrically and leans the envelope: +45 % commandable L/D, and MHD grip several km higher. Paid for on the power ledger
the air is too thin to grip	Seed injection ring	MHD needs a conducting continuum; high up there is nothing to push against however hard you push. Put the mass there yourself — inertial confinement, the only rung that works where the magnetic ones do not

That fourth rung is tested by the property that justifies it: at 88 km the injection ring beats tripling the coil, because tripling a field that has nothing to grip buys nothing at all.

09Ship reactors

A tonne of heavy lithium carries the same energy wherever it is loaded. What decides how much of it a ship can use is the machine it is loaded into.

Class	Takes	Burnup	Range	Breeds	Mass
Thermal pile — light-water moderated	Pellets	5.5 %	×1.0	—	stock
Sodium fast loop — unmoderated, molten salt	Melt	19.5 %	×3.5	—	+7 t
Shipboard breeder — fast loop + fertile blanket	Melt	25.0 %	×4.5	0.35 t/t	+16 t

The breeder is the third uphill loop in the game: it burns its charge and transmutes fertile lithium from a blanket it is carrying into fresh fissile material. It does not mint anything — the tonnage comes out of the blanket — which is precisely the distinction the books care about.

10Measured state

Full gazetteer, 109 ports, 730 simulated days, three seeds. The mechanics work; the balance does not, and the numbers say exactly where.

Measure	Measured	Should be
Pellets made	7.6 t/d	443 t/d of appetite — 2 %
Melt made	23.3 t/d	286 t/d of appetite — 8 %
Chips made	60.7 t/d	~815 t/d of appetite
Hull plate pressed	0.0 t/d	enough to replace losses
Shipyards in the galaxy	3	more than 3
Berth pressure	5,795–8,406 k	threshold is 90 k — 64–93× over, and it cannot fire
Mass & credits	BALANCED	✓ every checkpoint, every seed

One causal chain explains all six broken rows:

one world per system  →  copper is a one-jump good with nowhere to go
                      →  chips at 7% of demand
                      →  shipyards at 0% (chips are 15% of the yard recipe)
                      →  no hull plate
                      →  the fleet cannot grow however hard the board pays
                      →  too few hulls to fly acid to 15 scattered refineries
                      →  fuel at 2% of demand

Everything downstream of the first line is a symptom. Three bodies per system — one planet, one station, one nebula or asteroid field — is not a content item; it is the fix for the economy's only structural fault. Nothing above is a correctness bug. It is a map that cannot support the economy standing on it.

11Developer screens

The drop-down console (`) carries the economy: economy, routes, journal, world <id>, trifecta, standings, day <n>, govern, doctrine, priority, policy, tune, seed, plus konex's originals. GONEX_CMD="day 200;economy" runs them at boot and GONEX_SEED reproduces a universe exactly.

12What needs art

Everything in the game today is either konex's art, art recovered from the 1997 plugin, or drawn procedurally at runtime. Nothing added in the last two passes has a sprite. Here is the honest inventory.

What exists

Asset	Count	Source
Ship sprite banks (rotations, target, yard, comm art)	22	konex + 9 recovered 1997 banks
Planet discs	18	konex
Explosion frames	17	konex
Pickup items — health, money	2	konex
Landing views (CustPic)	13	recovered 1997
Spaceport metropolis, plasma, shock, field lines, gauges	—	procedural, per seed

Commodity icons none exist

The eight board goods need to be legible at ~16 px in a list and ~32 px on the board. The two fuels are the important pair — the whole reactor decision hangs on telling them apart at a glance, so they should differ in silhouette, not just colour: a clad cylinder versus a flask of liquid.

Icon	Reads as	Note
Lumber	stacked timber
Ore	crushed rock, bulk	the cheapest thing on the board
Rations	sealed tin / pack	the famine commodity — needs to read as food instantly
Medicine	ampoule / cross	luxury tier
Chips	wafer / die	luxury tier; the galaxy's scarcest good
Fuel cells	stacked cells	the old fuel — must not be confused with the two below
Pellets	clad cylinder, radiation trefoil	solid fuel · thermal piles
Melt	sealed flask, glowing liquid	liquid fuel · fast loops

Deeper material icons none exist

Twenty-two more, needed wherever the desk, journal and industry lines show a material: Steel · Copper · Silicon · Polymer · Grain · Lithex · Lithium · Heavylith · Acid · Fluid · Hull · Rounds · Missiles · Compost · Scrap · Ferrite · Cuprite · Silicate · Volatiles · Biomass · Spodumene · Slag. These can be a tighter, more schematic set than the board icons — a 12 px glyph beside a number, not a picture.

Three want a shared visual language because they are one chain: Lithex (dusty concentrate) → Lithium (bright metal) → Heavylith (the same metal, hotter) — ideally the same silhouette escalating in glow, with Spodumene as the raw ore that starts it.

Outfit icons none exist

Twelve shelf items, of which seven are new. The two ladders should read as ladders — a viewer should see at a glance that a breeder is above a fast loop, and that the four confinement rungs are siblings rather than a sequence.

Group	Items
Power grid	Auxiliary generator · Deep battery bank · Capacitor array · Radiator wing · Thermal mass sink
Reactor ladder	Thermal pile (stock) · Sodium fast loop · Shipboard breeder
Confinement ladder	HTS coil rewind · Multipole cusp ring · Phased steering array · Seed injection ring · Cryoplant uprate

Building icons none exist

Eight, for the Governor's Desk and the world tab: Spaceport · Works · Habitat · Exchange · Lane · Bastion · Picket · Silo. Each needs a level indicator (1–3) and a "genesis" state that reads as not bought.

Agent markers none exist

Five mission states want distinct markers on the chart and in the journal: Courier · Convoy · Flight · Harvester · Survey. Harvester and Survey are the two nobody has seen before and most need explaining visually — one is a ship working a rock, the other is a ship doing nothing visible at all.

New body types nothing exists

The planned three-bodies-per-system map needs two entirely new classes of landable object, and they have no art of any kind:

Body	Needs	Economic role
Space station	orbital disc/silhouette at flight scale, an approach view, and a landed concourse backdrop that is plainly not a planet	pure sink — population, no crust, imports everything
Nebula / asteroid field	a volumetric or particle field at flight scale, plus an ice-crystal cavern interior for the landed view	pure source — crust, no population; worked by harvesters
Hostile-world overlay	a dose indicator on the planet disc and on the chart — the 14–22 % of worlds that are refineries should be visible as hostile	the fuel industry's whole geography

Animations none exist

Stand-in loops would do for all of these; the point is that several important events currently happen with no visual at all.

• Hyperjump — entering and leaving the tunnel (the tunnel itself exists)
• Harvester working a seam — the only mining the player can watch
• Scoop — a hull lifting a wreck field, currently silent
• Refinery plume — a hot world under load, so a fuel world looks like one
• Commission / lay-up — plate leaving or returning to a yard
• Transmutation core design only — laser implosion and the arc field

Known visual bugs visible in the captures above

1. Notification overprint. The MARKET: lines at the top of every docked screen draw on top of each other — visible in nearly every screenshot on this page. They need a proper stacked queue with expiry.
2. Outfitter runs under the gauges. The new reactor and confinement rows have longer descriptions than the original five, and the text now passes beneath the fuel/hull/LI gauge cluster. The list needs a width budget or the gauges need to move.
3. Chart label collision. On the desk's CHART tab, system names in the dense core overlap into illegibility. Needs label de-confliction or zoom.

13The lab reports

Everything on this page is derived from four dated engineering write-ups. They carry the arguments, the measurements, and the faults found along the way.

Report	What it covers
Game mechanics overview	Every mechanic, the rule that defines it, and the test that fails if it stops being true — 56 cited tests, all of which exist and pass	built
The lithium fuel cycle	The build, the measurements over three seeds of the full gazetteer, and the eleven faults flying it turned up	built
The transmutation core	The nuclide chart read as a price list, the barium line where the Coulomb term overtakes binding energy, lithium as a charged battery made of matter	design
The resource cycle · The trade economy · The war economy	The three earlier plans this economy was built on	built

14What comes next

1. Three bodies per system. The unlock. Source, mixed and sink in every system, connected by 60 Mm shuttle hops instead of 240 Mm jumps — which is what the same-type rule was written for and has never once been true.
2. The field fills the planet's holes. Draw each asteroid field's crust from the inverse of its planet's barren mask, so every system can complete at least one chain locally while still trading for the finished goods.
3. Fuel as a jump consumable, so the reactor ladder is a constraint rather than a label.
4. The commodity detail screen — agents on mission, prices within N jumps, best-paying run from here. The data is all computed already.
5. The art above.