COMMIT­MENTS

Most of this site describes a game that is still being built, and most of what it describes will change. How a system ends up implemented, what a scene finally looks like, which platforms it runs on, when it arrives — all of that moves, and dates move most of all. We would rather move one than ship something we do not stand behind.

The commitments on this page are the part that does not move. Six things about Stellar Mariner are not features we are attempting; they are the terms on which this studio exists, and if we abandoned any of them there would be no reason for us to be making this rather than something else. They are set out below one at a time, each with its own address, so that any one of them can be quoted back to us on its own.

There is one persistent world and you are always in it. One economy, one history, one record of what has happened. Your credits, your ship, the wreck you left in a canyon, the claim you registered, the price ore sold for this morning — each of those is the same fact for every player, with exactly one authoritative version of it. Which region hosts the server you are on decides how far your shot travels to be settled and nothing else. It is a preference you can override, not a wall between you and anybody.

Busy places are the part we want to be straight about, because they are the part with a cost. What a server runs out of is not room for people but time: five hundred players spread across a system barely touch each other, while five hundred in one hangar make something like a hundred and twenty-five thousand pairs that all have to stay consistent every tick. Past a point that stops being a frame rate anybody wants to fight in. So a crowded location can be running more than once at the same moment, and two people in the same place will not always be in the same room. Where that happens, every copy is named, its population is shown to you before you go in, and you can pick the one your friends are in. A crew is placed together or not at all. And a contested claim never runs twice: when somebody comes for your structure there is one fight over it and one outcome.

What is never copied is the world itself. We instance the people, never the place — every wreck, structure, claim and price refers back to the same underlying state, regardless of which instance you happen to be standing in. Underneath, there is only one of each. A structure being fought over is the clearest case: a contested claim never opens a second instance, so there is one fight over it and one outcome, and everybody else is told what happened rather than shown a second version of it.

What this rules out:

• A private copy of the universe, created for your group and discarded afterwards.
• Being routed somewhere without being told — a copy of a place whose population you cannot see, and cannot leave for another.
• Being handed a shard of your own, or a world whose state is not the state everybody else is playing in.
• A region you cannot play outside of, or people you cannot reach because of where you live.

Persistence means the universe keeps one continuous record of the things that matter, and that history is never cleared simply to start again. Ownership, reputation, structures, discoveries, economic activity and the lasting consequences of what players do become part of the state the universe carries forward. A wreck can remain where it fell because it exists as part of the world, not as session state waiting to disappear when a process restarts.

That is harder to build than a game which forgets, and it constrains everything downstream. Systems have to distinguish what the universe should remember from what only needs to exist for a moment, while preserving the events and objects whose continued existence gives that history meaning. We would rather carry that constraint than ship a universe that quietly resets itself.

This applies to the live universe. Before launch, while the game is being tested, progress may be wiped between builds — that is what testing is, and we will say plainly which phases carry it. The commitment is about the universe once it is real: from that point, its history accumulates and is not taken away from the people who made it.

What this rules out:

• Wiping the live universe to rebalance it, to refresh interest, or to make a later start feel fairer.
• Retiring what you built or earned because it belongs to an older version of the game.
• Clearing progress, standing or wealth on a schedule, so that everyone starts again together.

The interesting things come out of systems meeting each other rather than out of a writer deciding in advance what your evening looks like. A shortage in one place is somebody's opportunity in another, and nobody at the studio has to write what happens in between.

This is a commitment about where the game's events come from, not a promise that it will never contain written material. It means the economy, the risk and the consequences are simulated rather than staged, and that what happens to you is the result of other people and real conditions rather than of a script deciding it was your turn.

What this rules out:

• Presenting a staged encounter as something that emerged naturally from the state of the world.
• An economy whose prices are set by design decisions rather than by what is being mined, hauled and sold.
• Outcomes decided in advance and dressed as emergent.

Paying to keep this running will never be the same thing as paying to win in it, and the game will not be tuned to make not paying feel bad.

A game of this size has to be paid for, and we would rather be direct about that than pretend otherwise. What we will not do is build the game so that the pressure to spend is the design. If a system is only frustrating until you pay, then the frustration was designed in on purpose. That is the line.

What this rules out:

• Anything bought with money that cannot be earned by playing, where the advantage is competitive rather than cosmetic.
• Costs, timers or friction tuned upward so that paying feels like relief.
• Progression paced to sell the shortcut past it.

This commitment comes from experience rather than theory. We know what it is like to buy a ship that exists only as a picture, then wait for something that may be years away or may never arrive at all. We know the other side of that transaction, and it is not one we want Rynua to reproduce.

If we sell a functional item for Stellar Mariner before it is finished, it must already exist as something real in our own build. A render is not enough. A specification written around an idea is not enough. A blocked-out placeholder that has never worked in the game is not enough.

Before money changes hands, you will know what the item is, what it is for, how far through development it actually is and when we expect to deliver it. Its progress will remain visible until it reaches the game. If we eventually establish delivery windows by class or production stage, those windows will be based on a pipeline we have actually demonstrated rather than one we predicted years beforehand.

This covers anything you would use in the game — ships, vehicles, weapons, components, anything with a function. Backing the project itself, or buying access for when it opens, is a different transaction and this commitment does not speak to it. What we will not do is blur the two: an item is not a support tier because we chose to call it one.

What this rules out:

• Selling a render of something nobody has built yet.
• Selling a whitebox that has never functioned in the game.
• Taking money without telling the buyer the item’s actual development state.
• Going silent on something already sold.

The specification on the store page is what arrives. The class, the dimensions, the hangar it needs, the crew it takes, the job it is for — if that was on the page on the day you paid, it is what turns up in your hangar.

There is one exception and it is not a loophole. Balance figures move: damage, handling, capacities and the rest get tuned for as long as the game is alive, and they move for everybody at once. That is a different thing from a hull arriving a class smaller than the one you bought, needing a hangar you were never told about, or turning out to do a different job than the one it was sold to do.

If something that defines what an item is has to change — its class, its size, the hangar it needs, or the job it is for — we say so before it ships, and anyone who has already bought it can have their money back in full, however long ago they bought it and whatever the statutory window says. Tuning is not that. Damage, handling, capacities and the rest move for as long as the game is alive and they move for everybody at once, so a rebalance does not open a refund beyond the rights you already have by law. Nobody is obliged to keep a different thing from the one they paid for.

Whatever the legal minimum requires, we want the principle stated here plainly: quietly redefining an item somewhere between sale and delivery is not acceptable to us.

What this rules out:

• Reclassifying an item after it is sold, so that a capital hull arrives as something smaller or a role changes between the store page and delivery.
• Changing the hangar an item needs, so that what you bought no longer fits what you have.
• Removing a capability that was on the specification on the day you paid for it.
• Calling a redefinition a balance change, so that no refund is offered for it.

All six commitments come back to the same principle: fair play. One world, and everybody plays in it. A universe that keeps what you did in it. What happens to you in the world comes out of its systems rather than out of a script. No advantage for sale at any price. Nothing on the store that is not built and dated, and what arrives is what the page said it would be.

They are not a description written after the fact. They are constraints we design against. When a system is specified it gets checked against this page, and if it cannot be built without breaking one of them then the system changes and the commitment does not. That is the whole mechanism and it is deliberately unglamorous: almost all of the work of keeping a promise happens long before anybody would notice it being broken.

Publishing them this early costs us something, and we know exactly what. Every one of these is easier to promise now than it will be to keep in five years, and putting them here with a date on them means any retreat is a matter of record. If we break one it will be seen, it will cost us credibility, and it will follow the studio for a long time.

We think that is the right trade. A studio that has written down six specific things is one you can judge before you spend an hour or a euro on it, and this genre has no shortage of the other kind. If one of them ever does stop being true you will hear it from us, plainly and in public — but the purpose of this page is to make sure that day does not arrive.