Bluepritns

Blueprints represent digital records of technologies used for manufacturing.

Purpose

To begin production in a factory, a corresponding BLUEPRINT is usually required. Each manufactured item consumes one cycle of the blueprint.

Form

A blueprint is a digital record stored on a magnetic disk. These disks are kept in perfectly shielded casings to protect them from degradation caused by omnipresent cosmic radiation. Each use breaks this protection and reduces the readability of the stored data.

Blueprints therefore have a physical form and must be transported.

Durability

The cosmic environment and humanity’s exodus from Earth during the rise of digital technology did not allow people to develop sufficiently advanced methods of long-term data storage. Magnetic disks are vulnerable to cosmic radiation and degrade with each use. Humans also lack technologies for efficient data handling, and magnetic tape media quickly lose quality in space. Repeated reading and copying damage the data, leading to loss of usability.

Cycles

Each blueprint contains a specific number of cycles, indicating how many times it is stored on the medium — and therefore how many times it can be used in production. This number directly determines the maximum number of items that can be produced from that blueprint.

The notation consists of two values: the first shows the current number of remaining cycles, and the second shows the maximum capacity of the medium. For example, 2/3 means the blueprint allows the production of two items out of a total capacity of three cycles.

Creation

Blueprints are created during the process of signal hunting, in the phase when a downloaded and decoded signal is stored onto a medium.

Compression and Stacking

Blueprints can be compressed so that the medium contains more cycles than its normal capacity, for example [60/6]. This allows for a larger production queue. Special procedures and equipment are required for this process, represented by the game’s card mechanisms.

By unpacking compressed blueprints, the medium splits into multiple full-capacity blueprints, for example 10 × [6/6].

Trade

Blueprints can be traded on local station networks or on the Tradelink exchange. Only packed blueprints with full cycle capacity can be traded, for example [6/6].