Glossary

Seed

Deterministic per-tile entropy derived from the tile's coordinates at placement time. Used to seed resource discovery, mining namespaces, and visual identity. Does not exist until the tile deed is placed on the map.

Frontier

Any non-owned tile accessible from existing owned tiles with special claims.

Disconnected edge slot

A frontier tile that can be claimed even if separated by up to 2 empty slots.

Crown tiles

The six corner tiles on the current maximum occupied ring. A faction that controls all six at once activates the crown stream until the frontier expands again.

Faction

A political and logistical alliance with a treasury, shared frontier access, and crown eligibility. The game may still allow independent operators, but sovereignty is evaluated at faction level.

Offworld Compliance Agency

Earth's faction in the Sphere. The OCA issues notices, warrants, permits, bounties, and administrative seizure language, but has no protocol-level enforcement privilege. It can only enforce through ordinary faction mechanics, spending, acquisition, raids, armies, and player cooperation.

Compliance warrant

An OCA public designation against a player, tile, army, patent, route, camp, or faction. A warrant creates incentives and political cover for enforcement, but does not block protocol actions by itself.

Registered operator

A player who joins the OCA and accepts a constrained compliance rule set in exchange for protection, bounty access, and alignment with Earth's faction strategy.

Rarity tier

A rarity class assigned on first discovery. The four tiers map to the Sprawl's technology stack: Atoms (common), Hardware (uncommon), Software/Data (rare), Frontier Compute (legendary). Each tier occupies a different number of triangle slots on a tile: Common=1, Uncommon=3, Rare=9, Legendary=15 (out of 18 total).

Patent Office

The off-chain LLM signer service that evaluates proposed resource names for lore consistency. Approved names receive a cryptographic signature required to register the resource name on-chain. Ensures player-created resource names fit the world without human moderation. Does not control who can mine — only whether a name is valid lore.

Patent NFT

An ERC-721 token minted to the first player to register a resource name on-chain. Entitles the holder to a 5% royalty on all global production of that resource name, streamed continuously. Fully transferable — selling the NFT transfers the yield stream to the new owner. A widely-mined resource name makes its patent a standalone tradeable asset with a calculable present value.

Maintenance basket

The resources a player streams to their tile's GDA pool to earn USDCx yield. Each tile accepts up to 3 resource tokens, registered permanently in the tile's instance contract. Any tier is accepted — only the rarity multiplier and local bonus determine value. No specific mix is required.

PlayerProxy

An ERC-721 token that IS the player's game identity. Each player deploys one PlayerProxy instance — a beacon proxy contract with its own address. It holds all subordinate assets (tiles, army slots, patents), manages all Superfluid streams, and is the owner in all PermissionRegistry lookups. Free to create. Transferring it transfers the entire game identity and all held assets.

TileInstance / beacon proxy

Each asset class (tile, army slot, patent, player proxy) follows a two-layer pattern: a thin ERC-721 registry that tracks ownership, and a beacon proxy instance deployed per asset with its own address and state. Instances are the actual Superfluid stream endpoints. Upgrading the beacon upgrades all instances simultaneously.

PermissionRegistry

A global registry mapping (owner, operator, target, selector) → bool. Enables granular, per-function automation delegation without blanket approvals. Every asset instance inherits PermissionedTarget, which gates each function with onlyAuthorized(owner). Players grant permissions through their PlayerProxy.grantPermission().

Settle

The canonical licence transfer function, implemented on TileHarberger. Atomically closes the old licensee's streams, redirects production streams, transfers the NFT, and opens the new licensee's streams. Standard transferFrom also exists for voluntary transfers but calls the same settlement logic. Harberger's settle() can execute forced transfers without licensee consent — the core acquisition guarantee.

Combat stream

The Superfluid stream of ArmyUnitToken from an ArmySlotInstance to address(0xdead) that represents active combat attrition. Opening the stream initiates combat; closing it ends it. The slot's live token balance IS the current army size.

Stream-mint

The supply model used by ResourceToken. Each token contract mints 1 billion tokens to itself at deployment and streams them out as resources are mined. totalSupply() is overridden to return the amount that has left the contract. Enables continuous minting without per-event mint calls.

Raiding

Army state in which the raiding army captures a tile's resource yields. The licensee keeps their maintenance obligation and USDCx stream but receives none of the resources while the raid is active.

Chaos

Army state triggered when food supply stops. The army dies off over 48 hours, is restricted to defense-only actions, and suffers a combat malus throughout.

Mercenary

A player who owns an army but no land, and hires out military capability to other players. Payment is agreed directly between parties. The mercenary has no ownership stake in any tile outcome.

Army slot

A licence to field one army, purchased via USDC auction. The auction winner receives 100 unit tokens as part of the slot purchase — real, tradeable tokens, not just capacity. Total slots in circulation are proportional to total tiles in play. Slots return to the auction pool when an army is completely destroyed.

Army unit token

An on-chain token representing one soldier. Issued at 100/day per active slot, distributed proportionally to players burning uncommon or higher resources. Freely tradeable. Deployed to an army by transferring tokens to the slot's contract instance. Deployed units have a 24-hour activation delay before they count toward army size and combat.

Destruction bonus

A loot reward granted to the player who completely destroys an enemy army. Incentivises pursuing a weakened army rather than allowing retreat.

Base death rate

The combat attrition rate applied to both sides in a fight, calibrated so the smaller army would die linearly in 48 hours of unmodified sustained combat.

Rarity multiplier

The weight assigned to a resource payment based on its rarity tier (Common=1, Uncommon=3, Rare=9, Legendary=18). Used to calculate declared value. These multipliers are universal — the same table applies to maintenance, acquisition payments, and all resource equivalence calculations.

Declared value

A player's live score determining their USDCx stream share. Calculated as the sum of their resource flow rates × rarity multiplier × local bonus. Updates immediately when flow rates change — no historical window needed.

Local radius

The 3-ring neighborhood around a tile used to determine whether a resource qualifies for the local maintenance bonus. Bonus is applied based on distance between the source tile (where the resource is mined) and the paying tile: ring 0=×2.00, ring 1=×1.50, ring 2=×1.25, ring 3=×1.12, ring 4+=no bonus. The bonus is geographic, not licence-based — it applies regardless of who holds the licence on the source tile.

Void seam

A reserved empty coordinate that cannot be built or traversed. In the intended live ruleset, void seams stay empty and keep neutral expansion and logistics lanes available even when strong factions dominate the frontier. During the current scaffold phase, the registry owner can still curate which coordinates are marked as void.

Stream share

A player's proportional claim on the outgoing USDCx stream, equal to their declared value divided by total declared value across all players at any given moment.

Binding claim

An acquisition claim filed on any tile. Locks the claimant into the stated price for 24 hours while the licensee decides. If a higher claim (min 5% above) is filed before the licensee responds, the new claim supersedes and the previous claimant's capital is returned as credit.

Refusal fee

10% of the claim amount, paid by the licensee to the claimant when declining a binding claim.

SSS (Sprawl Settlement System)

Internal naming for settlement-related economic logic.