Technology and Progression

Shape Decided

A large tech tree, with exponentially rising costs paid in Evolite.
A direct path to victory; much of the tree is optional. A focused player (the Doctor’s style) can rush the ship repair and skip much of the military and industrial content.
Two complementary ways to unlock tech:
- Evolite research: new breakthroughs based on this planet.
- Ship restoration: recovering capabilities the expedition already had. Certain repairs are required to unlock later tech (option A was chosen over “ship repairs only give bonuses”).
Some Tier 0 content isn’t researched at all: it’s revealed by discovery.
Numbered tiers are kept for fundamental infrastructure shifts (discovery → refining/logistics → electricity → …). Big unlocks inside a tier, such as stationary mining, are just expensive research Decided.
Tech is never lost. Attacks destroy capacity, not knowledge.

Exploration, resource discovery and basic gathering, with a mood of growing optimism.

Start: the Crashed Ship with one Scout Drone, one Harvester and one Engineering Crew.
Buildings are revealed as you discover what they’re made of. Basalite reveals Depot, Silo and Foundation. Spotting aliens reveals the Barracks (and stone walls).
The survival checklist is triggered by the first basic resource found (see narrative.md).
Gate to Tier 1: Evolite study.
1. The Scout finds a strange deposit (Calcified Evolite).
2. A Harvester brings a sample back to the Crashed Ship (the ship’s own Harvester, since it can only unload at home).
3. The ship studies it, which takes time (placeholder: 10 units, 3 minutes). Meanwhile the player keeps exploring and building. This stops a rush to Tier 1 and keeps exploration going.
4. When the study finishes, the Tier 1 tech tree appears, along with a story moment.
Collecting and studying the first sample unlocks Tier 1 automatically. Later tech costs Evolite.
Spotting aliens and finding Evolite can happen in either order.

Order	Milestone	Unlocks	Notes
1	Primitive Refining	Primitive Refinery	Granted free when Tier 1 is revealed, so the player doesn’t wait twice
2	Logistics	Logistics trucks, Outposts	Solves the distance problem Harvesters create
3	Stationary Mining	Colite drill, mining drills	An expensive centerpiece unlock. Requires Logistics. Must be affordable from calcified Evolite, without forced fighting.
∥	Defense (parallel)	Gun turret, reinforced walls, Gun Bot, ammo	Not gated behind mining
∥	Basic Fabrication	Primitive Fabricator	Components, ammo

Mining comes after logistics on purpose. Drills pay off the transport network already built, and immediately expose its bottlenecks and add noise.
Harvesters stay useful (cheap, mobile, quiet), so the transition adds to what the player has rather than replacing it.
Should early Tier 1 order be free or fairly linear? Partly answered (refining first, logistics before mining, defense parallel). The rest is Open.
The first ship repair project is introduced when Tier 1 opens: the Doctor identifies a way to restore auxiliary power. Its requirements show on the ship (iron, copper, basic components, maybe a little Evolite). “Our factory exists to repair the ship.”

Unlocked by the first ship repair: Restore Ship Electrical Systems, targeted at about 30–60 minutes of play [Tentative timing].
That repair must be achievable without electricity.
Electricity isn’t researched; it’s recovered by repairing the ship.
This repair unlocks the generator. No Tier 0 or Tier 1 building needs a generator.
Electricity is a big change: generators, electric drills, refineries and fabricators, and the ability to silence whole areas by cutting power.

Tier 3: the Evolite Drill, specialized fabrication (microchips, motors), communications (demand-driven logistics), automation controllers, advanced military.
Underground Evolite is discovered around Tier 2–3 (about an hour or so in), well before the drill is affordable.
Tier 4+: underground scanning, solar and batteries, advanced power, advanced depots, rail, construction automation, sensor arrays, Command Center, heavy defenses, alien research.

As the base grows it gets harder to manage, so a big share of upgrades save the player’s time:

Blueprints, possibly unlocked early, with build speed improving over time. Ghost placement is free, so blueprints can run far ahead of current resources.
More and faster Engineering Crews. Mass construction should feel like having a swarm of construction bots.
Automatic repair and reconstruction.
Communications / demand logistics: depots request resources and ammo resupply automatically; construction materials are requested automatically.
Switches → timers → triggers and signals, deliberately simpler than Factorio’s circuits. For example, “if the drill is on, recall these supply lines.”
Radar warnings and automated threat responses (quiet mode, recall, Barracks dispatch).
Scavenging automation: Harvester patrols that collect dropped Evolite.
Military coordination: rally points, wait for full strength, leaders.
Advanced storage: request silos, reserved amounts.

Victory is restoring and launching the original crashed ship.
Tapping the ship (or the UI anywhere) opens a Ship Restoration view, so the full goal is visible from early on, like knowing you must beat four bosses and then the final one.
Restoration is a main tech branch. Repairs unlock useful capabilities right away instead of just being an end-game resource sink. Otherwise players would rationally hold everything back until the end (investing 50 microchips in more microchip production always beats spending them on the ship early).
The capability a repair grants should follow from the system restored.
The ship can be far from your main base; crews deliver materials to it like any construction site.
Example projects (illustrative, not final):

Project	Rough requirements	Benefit
Restore Ship Electrical / Auxiliary Power	Basic materials, Colite, simple components	Unlocks electricity (Tier 2) Decided
Restore Sensor Systems	Electronics, early microchips	Sensor/mapping tech
Restore Engineering Systems	Mechanical parts	Construction automation
Structural repair	Iron, steel beams, structural parts	Progress toward flight
Power Core	Advanced energy tech (maybe a new source; the ship originally ran on nuclear power)	Progress toward flight
Navigation & Flight Control	Silicon, microchips, sensors	Progress toward flight
Main Propulsion	Advanced materials and manufacturing	Mainly progress toward escape
Launch Readiness	Integration of everything	Victory

Proposed: show all damaged systems from early on, with exact requirements unknown until the right tech is researched Tentative.
Optional branches beyond escape, loosely tied to the advisors (not factions):
- Military (General): advanced barracks, patrols, heavy weapons, fortresses, hive detection.
- Industrial (Director): bigger drills, advanced fabrication, rich-pocket drilling, rockets and interplanetary trade.
- Biological/behavioral research (Doctor, later): noise suppression, behavior prediction, non-lethal deterrents. Also economically valuable.
Future expansion: rockets, other planets and focused alternate planets in the spirit of Factorio’s Space Age. A possible Command Center role. Explicitly a later build-out.