The Game

SPAR Sector is a multiplayer, turn-based, text-first sci-fi merchant empire game built for Discord. It is not a narrative RPG. It is not a shooter. It is a simulation of industrial competition inside a 1000-sector finite match, and its soul is merchant competition under pressure.

Setting

The Sector is an inhabited volume of space split into five concentric zones (S0 through S4) ringing a civilized core. Jump routes are directed, sometimes one-way, and occasional wormholes stitch distant systems together. Fog of war hides everything you have not personally explored or been told about.

S0 Core - law-abiding, taxed, heavily patrolled, thin margins.
S1 Inner - settled and productive, Navy and Mining Guild prominent.
S2 Middle - frontier economies, mixed factions, more upside and more risk.
S3 Outer - Raider territory, rare materials, lawless trade hubs.
S4 Fringe - edge of the map. Legends, leviathans, and legendary payouts.

About forty percent of the outer zones (S3 and S4) is wilderness - systems with no hub, no population, no Trade Floor, no Navy patrol. Just the star, the bodies, and whatever you bring. M-SPARs deploy there; pirates hunt there; nothing else happens there. The frontier is meant to feel sparse.

Each system contains resource-bearing bodies (planets, moons, asteroid belts, gas giants, comets, nebulae, debris fields) and optional infrastructure (starports, stardocks, pirate enclaves, alien ruins). Control is not ownership - it is presence, intelligence, and supply.

Currency: The Solari (SOL)

Solari is a two-tier custody system:

Ship wallet - fast, convenient, and loseable in combat. Carry what you need.
ISP Bank account - safe, interest-bearing, with a one-turn delay on deposits and withdrawals. Settlement happens at turn compile.

The bank is a real risk/reward lever. Keeping cash liquid buys speed; parking it in ISP buys survival.

Per-System Trade Floors

No two hubs carry the same catalog. Each Trade Floor is scoped to its system’s population tier, economy specialty, platform composition, body composition, and zone

a frontier outpost with a water processor trades maybe a dozen materials; a Core metropolis with four factories and a research lab trades hundreds. The 765-material master catalog is still the ceiling, but no single Trade Floor ever sees all of it.

This changes the game. A rare refinery output that’s common at the refinery itself is a rare import everywhere else. A research station’s blueprint output may be the only supply in the entire sector. MULEs and milk runs become load-bearing because they are how you bridge between catalogs, not just how you clip a spread.

The SPAR Production Chain

The game’s industrial economy runs on autonomous assets called SPARs - Self-Contained Processing Autonomous Robotic modules, designed by Johnny Mofarlow, self-proclaimed Trader Pioneer Prince, back when Zone 1 and Zone 2 were still frontier. Mofarlow’s insight was the orchestration: nano, pico and micro bots wired under a semi-AI conductor that ingests “rock recombine stuff” and builds itself, on-site, into whatever profile the blueprint specifies. Snub-ship sized. Fully automated. The hardware patents are public domain - opened by Hegemony Senate decree after Trader’s Syndicate lobbying - but the blueprints stayed Mofarlow’s under pre-Hegemony copyright. Two centuries later a Free Pirate open-source movement briefly distributed basic profiles freely until the Central Judge’s Council Board disbanded organized open-source as a copyright breach. The compromise stands today: basic SPAR profiles ship with the hardware as standard issue. Advanced profiles you have to beg, borrow, or steal.

The prefix letter is the processing mode:

M-SPAR (Mining) - deploys to a body, extracts raw materials using body-specific ratio tables (16 body types, isotope sub-splits, hazard events).
R-SPAR (Refining) - processes raw material from cargo input into refined output, recipe-driven, seven refining module types.
X-SPAR (Manufacturing) - converts refined stock into finished goods, prioritized by value.

Each SPAR has dual cargo holds (input + output) and can be docked to a ship, left on station, or chained to a MULE route. The chain runs during the PRODUCTION phase of every turn compile.

MULEs and Autonomous Logistics

MULE - Mobile haUL Expediters. A MULE is a total Frankenhull by Trader Joe from Mexico (TJfM, now a legend - no longer with us): a hold strapped to a bootstrap warp drive, a docking port, four clamps, and a standard- issue NavComFTLComm unit. Nothing more. TJfM’s whole pitch was that a MULE had no business existing as a starship and yet there it was, hauling cargo between two podunk frontier outposts at margins real haulers couldn’t touch. The first units were chickenwire and space-duct tape; he refined the design over a decade and filed a Trader’s Patent through the Syndicate so the Hegemony Senate couldn’t do to him what they had done to Mofarlow. The onboard AI is commodity hardware - no proprietary software, no copyright surface, no blueprint gate. Trader Joe is gone; the lot still operates under his name. Every working trader in the Sector still has a story that starts with “so I got this MULE off TJfM’s lot…”

MULE haulers execute standing trade orders between trade floors and SPARs. Four route types are supported:

TF → TF - classic arbitrage between star-system trade floors.
TF → SPAR - feed a refining or manufacturing SPAR from market stock.
SPAR → TF - empty a SPAR’s output hold into a market.
SPAR → SPAR - chain extraction directly into refining or manufacturing.

Routes enforce a 20% minimum margin check, inherit the owning player’s licenses, and run during the LOGISTICS phase. For repeated trips, /ssmilkrun configures multi-leg milk runs.

MULEs come in 4 variants (per CR-249 May 2026 design call): Standard (100 IHu) and Expanded (200 IHu), each with optional Shielded (+S) cargo class. Late-game cargo scales by docking more MULEs and bigger ship hulls, not by climbing a tier ladder. Routing respects containment class: a regular MULE refuses a shielded plutonium route; a Shielded MULE accepts both regular and shielded routes per mixed-envelope. Exotic + data routes need the matching bolt-on (xPod or BMB) fitted on the MULE itself - bolt-ons fit on MULEs and SPARs the same way they fit on ships, via the Shipyard’s Refit menu. SPARs come in 12 variants (3 types × 4 cargo classes), so a Shielded M-SPAR can mine heavy isotope bodies that a regular M-SPAR can’t touch.

Sidequests at the Pub

Every hub has a Pub, and every Pub posts a small Job Board: a handful of tavern-style contracts from named NPCs that ask you to carry something somewhere or take someone someplace. Pick one up, complete it, get paid in Solari plus a faction reputation bump.

The slim contract format is: Destination → Mission → Fork → Return. Old Wattle the harbormaster needs 200 IHu of refined copper to Tao Ceti 5 by next cycle. Xiao Ming Ji the xenobiology researcher wants passage to a planet where Plasma Beasts migrate, and a ride home when she’s done. Vex the Bone-Trader has a sealed parcel that needs to be at Vega - no inspection, no conversation, the fee is the contract.

Couriers come in three flavors: pickup (cargo waits on the dock), purchase (client deposits a sourcing budget, you buy at the origin Trade Floor and keep any surplus), and package (an opaque parcel, contents undisclosed - trader’s honor goes both ways). Cargo respects the same four containment classes as the rest of the game: regular, shielded, exotic, and data. A data courier needs a Memory Bank fitted; an exotic courier needs an xPod. Higher-class cargo pays better.

Solo passengers ride in the cockpit - no cargo slot, no warp penalty. Some want a round trip, some want a one-way. Jobs expire two turns after acceptance, hard. The clock is the cost; let it run out and your cargo just becomes regular salable stock, your passenger walks off at the next port, the bonus payout is gone.

More verbs land in Slice 2 (Hunt, Bounty, Salvage, Excavate, Trophy Hunt, Patrol, Escort Convoy, Defense Contract, Evacuation, Distress Response). For now, fly safe, deliver clean, and don’t accept work you can’t finish in two turns.

WISKER Probes

WISKER - Warp-capable Intelligence Survey Kit, Exploration & Recon. Spelled without the H on purpose (in-world brand name; the Hegemony Patent Office’s clerk added the K herself, allegedly, to differentiate it from an earlier Mofarlow trademark application). A WISKER is a small disposable warp-capable sensor pod you launch into an unknown system to peel back fog of war before you commit a real ship or a MULE route. They survey, ping back, and then either return for refit or burn out at the destination, depending on tier. Loadable from a Bridge WISKER Bay (SHM013) or carried in regular cargo. The in-game command is still /sswhisker until the runtime rename ships, but the canon spelling on the website and in lore is WISKER.

Materials, Tiers, and Licenses

765 materials across five tiers - raw, refined, parts, finished, and non-physical

are organized into 43 display groups with 49 prefix families and scientific-notation short codes. Trade Floors are scoped per system: each hub renders only the catalog its economy, population, platforms, and bodies justify. A mining outpost might show a dozen entries; the Core metropolis shows hundreds. Navigation is still two levels - five top categories, then sub-category toggles that stay under Discord’s 25-option Select limit. The Materials page has the full catalog with short codes, UOMs, and the platforms that buy or sell each row.

Trading is gated by a two-axis licensing system:

Material tier - T1 / T2 / T3. Everyone starts at T1.
Sector authorization - S0 through S4. Permissions are cumulative: S2 covers S0, S1, and S2.

Only Trade Floor buys and sells are gated. MULEs inherit their owner’s licenses. Unsellable cargo can be jettisoned. Licenses are purchased from the Guild License Store at starport hubs.

The Data Economy

Four data-family prefixes trade alongside physical materials: RDX (raw datasets), MDL (trained models), BPT (blueprints), and INT (intelligence reports). Every data good is digital - it lives in your Bridge Memory Bank (BMB), not your cargo hold. Cargo capacity (IHu, regular Interstellar Hold Units) is untouched by data trades. Your BMB has its own capacity (dIHu) which scales with the BMB tier you’ve installed.

Every starter ship ships with a free BMB001 (50 dIHu). Upgrading to BMB002 (250 dIHu) or BMB003 (1500 dIHu) is what unlocks bulk data trading.

Two platform types refine data:

PLT-SL Research Lab - consumes raw feedstock and produces specialty outputs: alien telemetry, astronavigation models, exotic containment blueprints.
PLT-DA Data Archive - the general-purpose refiner: raw datasets plus optical storage and hardware come in; population models, market pricing models, ecosystem models, and faction intel come out.

Patient-trade is the whole point. Buy RDX cheap at a field site, hold it for weeks, sell the trained MDL at a metropolis that needs the forecast. Data and cargo are separate counters, so you can stockpile data on every physical run.

The physical / data boundary is deliberate. Alien artifacts (ART prefix) are in the non-physical tier for catalog organization, but they are physical objects and charge regular cargo normally - an Alien Relic is 1 IHu in the hold, not a file in the BMB.

Containment Classes

Cargo isn’t a single bucket. The Sector ships four containment classes of material, each with its own physics and storage requirements:

Regular IHu - bulk goods, ores, refined ingots, finished parts, structurally stable solids. Standard cargo holds (SHM001 / SHM002).
Shielded sIHu - warp-bubble-hazardous radioactives. Cobalt-60+, Strontium-90+, Uranium-235+, Plutonium, Americium, Californium, Thorium-232. Need a Shielded Hold variant (SHM010 / SHM011) swapped into a cargo hold slot. Shielded holds are mixed-envelope - they carry regular cargo too, not just shielded.
Exotic xIHu - active-state matter requiring electromagnetic particle-trap containment. Plasmas, antimatter, dark-matter trace, phased materials. Need an xPod bolt-on (SHX001 / SHX002 / SHX003) installed in the dedicated exotic_bolton slot. Strict separation - xPod cells hold only exotic material.
Data dIHu - covered above, lives in the Bridge Memory Bank.

Each containment slot type is independent. A vessel can fit a Shielded hold variant + an xPod + a BMB simultaneously and carry all four classes on the same trip. The Trade Floor will refuse a buy with a friendly error if the required slot isn’t fitted (“install an xPod at the Shipyard before buying PLZ001”).

A handful of stable solids - Time Crystal, Axion Crystal, Phonon Crystal, Photonic Crystal, Spin Ice, Zero-Point Crystal, Stellarite, Plasma Crystal, Warp Crystal, Raw Dilithium, Aetherium Fragment, Super-Conducting Lattice, Metamaterial Substrate, Majorana Composite, Weyl Semimetal, Topological Insulator Shard, Negative Index Material - stay regular IHu even though their prefix is exotic. Crystals are crystals; only active-state matter needs the xPod.

Ships and Modules

Every player flies a single SPAR Carrier. All three hulls - base, medium, large - are the same ship with a different number of hold frames bolted on. One bridge, one stardrive, one power plant, and N hold frames where N = 1, 2, or 3.

Hull tier = hold-frame count. Base is 1, medium is 2, large is 3. A hold frame carries 1 hold module (cargo / pressurized / hazmat), 4 beam hardpoints for weapons and drone packs, and 4 face clamps that grip MULEs or SPARs during transit.
Fittings are rows, not JSONB. Each module is a row in ss_ship_fittings keyed by (ship_id, slot_position). The mount-rule matrix enforces cloaks only on bridge/stardrive mounts, exotic holds on the aft-top mount only, weapons and drone packs anywhere.
Shield cap is 2 per ship. No stacking five shields to become a bunker.
Power budget. Every module has a power_draw; power plants have a power_output. Overloaded ships refuse to fit more.
Warp AP scales with mass. A fully-loaded large hull costs more AP per hop than an empty base. The engine tier (StarDrive T1 / T2 / T3) is the biggest knob, but hull mass and loaded mass stack.

The starter package provisions a base hull with T1 StarDrive, a Bridge Module, a 100 IHu Standard Cargo Hold, a Fusion Reactor (Small), a Basic Shield Generator, two Gauss Cannon turrets, a BMB001 Bridge Memory Bank (50 dIHu), a T1 Commercial License, Sector-4 Frontier authorization, and 10,000 SOL, dropped at a random spawn system.

Shipyard & Retrofit

The Shipyard sells modules, frames, and hulls. Fitting anything to your ship costs Action Points, and the AP cost is the retrofit clock - while you’re burning AP at the yard, your docked MULEs keep running their trade routes and your SPARs keep extracting, because AP spent advances the automation-tick counter. Big retrofits are productive downtime.

Four cost bands:

Free (0 AP) - restocking consumables: ammo, missiles, torpedoes, fuel. Trade Floor buys, not fittings actions.
Bolt-on (1 AP) - adding or removing a hardpoint module: weapon, drone pack, cloak, shield. Ground crew torques four fasteners at the corner terminals, plugs the power and data leads, sensor auto-calibrates.
Structural (5 AP) - installing or swapping a hold module, a power plant, or bolting on a new hold frame to extend the hull. The yard crew unbolts the adjacent frames, slides the target in on rail grips, bolts it back, hooks up the power / data / cooling / hydraulic buses, bleeds the lines, vacuums and fills the coolant and hydraulic circuits, and runs a load test. The work is the same physical job whether the rail grip is carrying a hold module, a reactor, or an empty hold frame.
Premium (10 AP) - StarDrive swap. The combo unit (thrusters + fusion core + jump drive) needs alignment and inductive coupling.

The bridge is fixed. SHA007 is the ship’s identity, never swapped. Ships don’t get new bridges; they get new hulls around the bridge.

Hull extension is add-on, not swap. Going base→medium→large bolts on one more hold frame at 5 AP. The new frame arrives empty - the player chooses whether to fill it (another 5 AP for the hold module), upgrade the power plant to carry the new mass (another 5 AP), and/or swap to a better StarDrive to keep warp times down (another 10 AP). A max-everything upgrade from base to a filled medium burns ~25 AP across a round, and your autonomous fleet runs the whole time.

Combat

Weapon damage resolves against shield → armor → hull. Outcomes include destroy, disable, capture, or retreat. Retreat attempts cost AP and can fail. PvP engagements respect cloaking and dock state; monster encounters roll per-hop during navigation.

Ten factions shape the sandbox, from the corporate and the lawful to the doctrinal and the predatory:

Trader’s Syndicate - organized crime, gray-market brokerage.
Deep Rock Mining Guild - extraction licensors and industrial enforcers.
Sector Naval Command - lawful patrol in the core zones.
Free Traders Collective - the loose confederation of independents you may become.
Void Reavers - predators; standing with them is a liability everywhere the Navy flies.
Arimuz Combine - expansionist industrial logistics.
Jesuite Synod - a doctrinal, preservationist order.
Cognate Directorate - technocrats and data-and-AI researchers.
Meridian Concord - a banking and financial cartel.
Verge Compact - frontier colonists and independents.

Factions and Territory

The factions are not just flavor. They like and dislike each other, and your standing with each (a scale from -5 to +5) is a real economic lever.

Earn standing by completing a faction’s jobs at the Pub. Doing a faction a favor often works against its rivals: a haul for the Arimuz Combine sinks your standing with the Jesuite Synod at the same time. You cannot please everyone, so you pick sides - and the job board shows you the trade (+Arimuz / -Jesuite) before you accept.
About a quarter of populated systems are faction-controlled, scattered across every sector (deliberately not clustered, so the politics follow you wherever you fly). The other three-quarters are neutral - always a safe, modifier-free port to fall back on.
Standing sets your prices at a faction’s ports. Favored: cheaper on everything you buy, better payouts on everything you sell, and free docking. Disliked: a surcharge on all purchases, weaker sells, and a docking fee on arrival.

Check /ssfactions (or the console Factions panel) for your standing across all ten, the star map for who controls what, and a system scan to read a port’s controlling faction and its price climate before you commit to docking.

Turns and Action Points

SPAR Sector uses a hybrid turn model:

Each round grants 100 AP (maximum 150 carryover bank).
Actions cost AP: warp = 2 per hop, deploy, attack, etc.
Every 10 AP spent triggers an automation tick - MULEs move cargo, SPARs produce, markets regenerate.
Trading on a local Trade Floor is free (no AP cost).
/sswait burns AP for automation without moving the ship.
/ssprocess runs the full turn compiler once all submissions are in.

Phases, in order: NAVIGATION → PRODUCTION → LOGISTICS → ECONOMY → COMBAT → SETTLEMENT → ADVANCE.

The Player Arc

SPAR Sector plays out in four loose phases, gated by license progression:

Survival - stabilize cash flow; don’t die to pirates or bad routes.
Growth - deploy your first M-SPAR, run a MULE loop that actually pays.
Dominance - build refining chains, expand into S2/S3, buy sector authorizations.
Empire - T3 licenses, multi-system industrial footprint, known by name to rivals.

No one wins. You just stop losing faster than the other players.