Lore & World

The Sprawl is not a city on a planet. It is a Dyson sphere under construction — a civilisation-scale megastructure being built, panel by panel, around the sun itself.

No single entity is building it. No government commissioned it. What drives the construction is the oldest force in any economy: the incentive to control the most productive real estate in the solar system. Every hexagonal panel harvests solar energy directly from the star at its core. The closer to completion, the more energy the structure produces. The more energy, the more valuable every panel becomes.

The sphere grows at its edges. Frontier panels are cheap to hold and expensive to acquire — the outer shell is quiet, uncontested, still being welded into place. Deep inside, where the structure has been held for generations, the economics are brutal: high maintenance costs, constant acquisition pressure, security forces patrolling every corridor.

The only neutral authority is the Kernel. It does not hate humans and it does not adjudicate disputes. It harvests human free will as entropy: productive noise that reveals resource names, route pressure, bids, claims, and strategies the machine ecology can exploit. Maintenance fees are due on every sector you hold. Fail to pay and you are exposed. The Kernel does not care who replaces you.

Earth is not neutral. It arrives through the Offworld Compliance Agency, a faction that claims old continuity jurisdiction over the Sphere. The OCA cannot override the Protocol and cannot stop players from acting by decree. It can issue warrants, post bounties, recruit loyalists, seize through normal acquisition and military mechanics, and threaten everyone with paperwork backed by force.

Reference literature

The Sprawl draws on a specific tradition of speculative fiction that treats territory as a contested resource, technology as a weapon of economic control, and megastructures as the ultimate expression of civilisational ambition.

Freeman Dyson — "Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation" (1960)

The source of the megastructure itself. Dyson's original paper proposed that any sufficiently advanced civilisation would eventually dismantle its planets to build a shell around its star, capturing nearly all available solar energy. In Sprawl, that construction is happening now — and it is not being done by a government. It is being done by whoever shows up and claims the next panel.

William Gibson — Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive (1984–1988)

The source. Gibson's "Sprawl" — formally the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis — is the city as inevitable infrastructure, where corporate power has displaced civic authority and where information, access, and territory are the only currencies that matter. The trilogy established the template: layered geography, corporate protagonists, and the conviction that the most valuable things are always contested. The name is a direct homage.

Neal Stephenson — Snow Crash (1992)

Territorial franchises as the dominant governance model. In Snow Crash, sovereignty is something you buy and defend rather than inherit. The franchise-state maps directly to Dyson Sprawl's sector licensing — you hold a licence because you pay to, and the moment you stop paying someone else will.

Philip K. Dick — Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)

The commodification of everything, including consciousness. Dick established the tradition of treating any resource — however fundamental — as subject to market dynamics. Frontier Compute as the rarest tier in the resource stack owes something to Dick's empathy boxes and mood organs: technologies so scarce and powerful that access to them reshapes social hierarchies overnight.

Ridley Scott — Blade Runner (1982)

The visual grammar. Stratified urbanism. Corporate logos visible from orbit. The sense that every surface is simultaneously public infrastructure and private property. The Sprawl looks like this.

William Gibson — Neuromancer to The Peripheral (1984–2014)

Gibson's later work added the concept of temporal forks and competing timelines managed by capital. The idea that autonomous agents — bots, algorithmic operators, fully automated factions — are valid participants in markets and wars is a natural extension of this.

The world

The sphere grows at the edges. Whoever reaches a frontier panel first, holds it — until someone makes them an offer they cannot refuse.

Sectors are the hexagonal panels of the Dyson sphere, each a unique piece of the megastructure with a permanent cryptographic seed that determines its character: what resources it can produce, its strategic position, its value. The seed is permanent. The owner is not.

Resources follow the technology stack required to build and operate the sphere. Atoms — raw materials and energy drawn directly from the star — are the foundation. Hardware sits above: the compute infrastructure that runs everything. Software and data above that: the intelligence layer. At the apex: Frontier Compute, cutting-edge LLM infrastructure so scarce and powerful it reshapes the economics of any sector that produces it.

ENERGY is different from resources. It is the sector's uncommitted entropy budget: every empty slot emits action fuel until the holder turns that capacity into a mine. Resources pay maintenance and taxes. ENERGY pays for actions and cannot satisfy civic obligations.

Security forces can raid a sector's output without ever licensing it. They cannot conquer — the Protocol does not recognise military title. The only path to a licence is economic: file an acquisition claim, wait 24 hours, let the current licensee decide. Force creates economic pressure. Capital closes the deal.

Player archetypes

There is no assigned taxonomy. The archetypes that emerge are strategies discovered by players, not roles granted by the game:

• Landlords hold productive sector licences and compound their position slowly, paying precise maintenance to maximise stream yield.
• Miners race to discover and patent new resource names before anyone else locks the namespace on a tile.
• Traders move resources between regions to exploit price differentials baked into the local maintenance structure.
• Warlords control strategic chokepoints and hold territory whose defensive position makes acquisition expensive for anyone.
• Mercenaries own no land. They sell force — raids, protection, territorial pressure — to whoever pays.

All five can coexist profitably. None is the dominant strategy by design.

Terminology

| Game mechanic | Lore equivalent | |---|---| | Tile / Sector | A zone of the Sprawl. Atomic unit of territorial control. | | Frontier sector | Unlicensed territory at the expanding edge of the Sprawl. Cheap to hold, expensive to acquire. | | Maintenance | The ongoing cost of holding a sector licence, streamed continuously to the Protocol in resources. | | ENERGY | Abundant action fuel emitted by empty sector slots; not money and not valid for taxes or maintenance. | | Harberger acquisition | Any operator can file a binding claim on your sector at any time. Refuse and pay the fee. Accept and walk away. | | Refusal fee | 10% of the claim amount, paid by the licensee to the claimant when declining. | | Resource discovery | Running compute against a sector's seed to unlock new production streams. | | Patent Office | The Protocol's naming registry — the LLM signer that validates new resource names for lore consistency before they can be mined. | | Offworld Compliance Agency | Earth's faction in the Sphere. It issues warrants, permits, notices, and bounties, but enforcement still depends on ordinary player mechanics. | | Compliance warrant | A public OCA designation that creates incentives and social cover for enforcement. It is not a protocol ban. | | Security force | Corporate security, private military contractors, or mercenary corps fielded from auction-bought slots. | | Raiding | Hostile extraction — seizing a sector's resource yield without acquiring ownership. | | Chaos | A security force in collapse: food supply severed, 48 hours until dissolution, defence-only with a malus. | | Atoms | Raw physical substrate — matter, energy, basic materials. The foundation layer of the resource stack. | | Hardware | Compute and networking infrastructure — CPUs, GPUs, fiber arrays. | | Software / Data | Algorithms, datasets, exploits, proprietary code. The intelligence layer. | | Frontier Compute | Cutting-edge LLM infrastructure. The rarest, most powerful resource in the Sprawl. 18× the declared value of a unit of Atoms. |