| # | Player | Elo |
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| # | Player | Elo |
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| Match | Result |
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| # | Player | Net worth | Rating |
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A hex world, 50 × 50 for solo, 60 × 60 for 1v1 and 80 × 80 for four players. It wraps around west to east like a cylinder — keep walking and you come back where you started — while the north and south edges are the ends of the world, capped with polar ice.
| WASD | pan the camera up, left, down and right while held |
| 1–4 | centre on player 1–4's HQ (red, blue, green, yellow). The same jumps sit in the camera buttons at the bottom left |
| drag | pan the view; east and west wrap around |
| N | music on/off |
| C | claim mode on/off: click tiles to claim them (does nothing with no claims left) |
| B | pin the market's construction icons open while you scroll the rail. They already sit beside the row of the good each building makes; Esc releases a build mode too |
| I | inspect mode: pin the tile card to the tile under the pointer so it stays put while you pan (click the pin button on the card for the same) |
| construction | the market's last column carries one icon per building, level with the row of the good it makes, so the power row holds both the geothermal plant and the solar panel. They sit there always; a click puts you in build mode: Q quarry, M mine, P water pump, F farm, R electrolysis reactor, G glass kiln, E electronics factory, Shift+G geothermal, L solar panel, T steel mill, H chemical plant. Hovering or focusing an icon shows its recipe, build time and the cost to buy whatever your stock is short of |
| click a tile | in claim or build mode, claim or build there; otherwise centre the view on it (and move a pinned card to it). At the start of the game this places your HQ instead: the cell under the pointer, the neighbour the pointer leans toward, and the two cells touching both. It can't go on ice or another player's HQ. Deposits under it are squished into your stock: 10, 20 or 30 units per low, medium or high cell |
| competitors panel | each company's row shows its stock price, 10 segments (one per stock, coloured by holder, dark when unowned) and a BUY button. Click it to buy one stock, at the price shown, or as a takeover once none are unowned at double the price plus 10% for every stock held; Shift+click sweeps every stock you don't already hold at a flat double price each, with no premium, all or nothing; right-click sells one of your own stocks back at the plain price |
| scroll / +- | zoom. Zooming out stops once half the height of the world fits on screen |
| F1 ? | open or close this manual |
| X | Act on your tile under the pointer. If no building has completed there, undo the claim and return it. This also cancels first construction. Construction costs are not refunded. Once a building completes, deconstruction keeps the claim and sends stored goods home. The inspect card offers Undo claim or Deconstruct for its displayed tile. |
| ' | centre on the colony |
| Ctrl+click | pause or resume your building under the pointer; a paused building makes, uses and ships nothing. The inspect card's Pause/Resume button does the same |
| Ctrl+Shift+click | pause or resume every building of that type: all stop if the clicked one ran, all run if it was paused |
| hold Z | hide every building and show the deposit under each one; the market counts the free deposits of each grade, and the free geothermal vents on the power row. Click a count while holding Z to move the camera to the nearest of them, and click again for the next. Dashed lines run from your HQ to the nearest free deposit of the best grade left of each good, and to the nearest free vent; build mode for a quarry, mine, water pump or geothermal plant shows the same lines for what it can stand on |
| Alt+Shift+↓ | sell your whole stock of every good at once |
| U | with the pointer or the pinned card on your HQ, upgrade it |
| Esc | close the topmost of: a dialog, the manual, the match menu, claim/build mode, the pinned construction icons, or a pinned card (right click does the same for the modes) |
| the row's − / + + Shift Ctrl Alt | every resource row reads as its icon, your net rate a second under Rate, the stock between a − and a + under Quantity, and the price. − sells the selected quantity, + buys it; 10 by default, and the qty buttons by the Claim land button at the foot of the rail pick 1, 10, 100 or everything. With Shift it is 100, Ctrl 1, Alt everything you can. Ctrl+Shift on − toggles auto-sell: from then on, new stock of that good is sold each tick while what you already held is kept (the button stays lit) |
After placing your HQ you get 5 claims: press C for claim mode and click tiles to claim them. The market shows its construction icons beside the matching goods: click one or press a building hotkey, and Claim land at the foot of the rail (or C) is claim mode itself. In build mode, clicking a matching deposit builds there, spending a claim if the tile isn't yours yet. The hovered tile turns green where a click would work and red where it wouldn't, and the mode banner says why. Esc leaves a mode. Collectors produce 1, 1.5 or 2 units a second for low, medium or high grade, and take +50% for each collector of yours that touches them and works the same deposit — two neighbouring iron mines boost each other, an iron mine beside an aluminium one boosts nobody. In territory connected to your HQ (a chain of your claims touching it) that goes straight into stock; anywhere else it piles up and flies home in crates of 20 at one hex a second. Each truck burns 0.2 fuel per second of flight, paid when it leaves.
Processors go on any claimable tile (a deposit under one is left untouched) and turn goods from your HQ stock into new ones, always moving exactly 40 units at a time. A processor runs at 0.75 of its rated rate, and each neighbouring processor of yours that makes the same thing adds a third of the rate it runs at — a lone farm runs at three quarters, two neighbouring farms at their full rated rate, three at 1½ times it. The boost scales what the building eats and what it makes together, so the recipe's ratio never changes, and it never touches the power the building draws. The rated rates are: a farm 1 water → 1 food a second (0.1 power), an electrolysis reactor 1 water → 1 fuel and 0.5 oxygen (0.3 power), a steel mill 1 iron → 1 steel (0.3 power), a glass kiln 1 silicon + 0.25 oxygen → 1 glass (0.1 power), a chemical plant 1 carbon + 0.5 fuel → 1 chemicals (0.2 power), and an electronics factory 0.5 silicon + 0.5 carbon + 0.5 aluminium → 0.5 electronics (0.3 power). Building one costs 30 steel (farm: 10 steel and 10 glass; steel mill: 20 iron; glass kiln: 30 steel and 20 silicon; chemical plant: 40 steel and 20 carbon; electronics factory: 40 steel, 20 silicon and 20 aluminium), bought from the market if you're short and not refunded when you deconstruct; collectors are free. Geothermal plants (80 steel, 40 aluminium) can only go on rare geothermal vents (glowing fissures on the map), take 60 seconds to build and make 2 power a second — they are neither collectors nor processors, so adjacency does nothing for them — which your buildings use first; any power left over is sold to the market automatically (toggle with the auto button on the power row), and what it earns pays your debt down before any of it becomes cash (see Debt & life support). Power is a flow rather than a stock: with auto-sell off the surplus is vented instead of accumulating, since power can't be sold by hand and never does anything but run your buildings. In build mode the banner shows what the hovered site would cost, including constructor fuel, and how many credits buying the shortfall takes; the tile turns red if you can't afford it. Inputs are ordered from HQ stock in batches of 40 (whatever stock is short is bought from the market) and output goes home in batches of 40. A processor connected to your HQ keeps no stock at all: it draws its inputs straight from your HQ stock (buying what's short) and its output goes straight in, continuously. Elsewhere trucks carry the batches both ways, burning fuel. A processor whose input bin runs dry stalls. Collectors take 10 seconds to build, geothermal 60, everything else 20. A site not connected to your HQ first waits for a constructor to fly out to it, at one hex a second, burning fuel like a truck.
HQ upgrades (U with the pointer on your HQ, or the Upgrade HQ button on its inspect card) raise it a level and add claims; missing materials are bought from the market. HQs start at level I and go up to V, shown as a numeral on the roof. To II: 80 aluminium, 80 steel, 20 glass (+4 claims). To III: 160/160/40 (+4). To IV: 240/240/60 (+3). To V: 320/320/80 (+3). Every level above I also puts your HQ's own people on life support (see Debt & life support), which draws from your stock and can run on credit.
Every running building also draws power: 0.1 a second for most, 0.2 for a water pump or chemical plant and 0.3 for an electrolysis reactor, steel mill or electronics factory — adjacency never changes this, however much it boosts a building's output. Power can't be traded by hand; buildings buy it from the market as they need it, and truck fuel you don't have is bought the same way. A building that can't afford its power or a truck for its full batch, or a processor missing inputs, stalls (its badge turns grey) until it can. The market's net/s column shows your net production per second: output minus power and average truck fuel.
The world runs on a sol: a mean Mars solar day of 24 h 39 min 35.244 s, or 88,775.244 Earth seconds (NASA GISS). Only the sun is counted that way. One economy tick is 15 minutes of that solar clock, which makes a sol 98.63916 ticks — deliberately not a whole number of them, so the sun never lands on the same longitude on the same tick and the cycle cannot settle into a shorter repeat. Production, construction, transport and the match clock keep their own timings, one second a tick.
Daylight is a band that travels east to west around the cylinder: it is local noon where the sun is overhead, and that meridian drifts west — toward decreasing map x, lapping the world once a sol. How bright a tile is depends only on its longitude, never on latitude or season: 100% at local noon, fading to 0 at sunrise and sunset and staying there all night, with opposite longitudes in exact opposition — noon on one side of the world is midnight on the other. Hover or pin any tile for its Sun row: the daylight there, the local time that goes with it and the sol the match is in. The map is shaded to match, darkest on the night side, and buildings keep most of their colour so they stay readable.
Solar panels (L, on any claimable tile: 20 steel, 15 glass and 10 aluminium, 30 seconds, missing materials bought from the market) make 2 power a second at local noon — the same rate as a geothermal plant, for less than half the materials and no vent to find — and nothing after sunset. The sun is up for half the sol and averages 2/π of its noon height while it is up, so a panel averages 2/π ≈ 0.64 power/s over a whole sol: a third of its rating, and the price of not needing a vent. Their rate follows the sun over their own longitude, so a panel in the dark is a claim making nothing until sunrise, and a paused or stalled one is drawn as dark as the sun leaves it. Power reaches your stock from anywhere, so a panel parked far out in your territory still feeds the grid, and power stays a flow — your buildings draw what they need first, and only what is left over is auto-sold. Because the sun is folded out of simulation time rather than the wall clock, a replay sees exactly the sky the live match saw.
Each world has a colony: a seven-hex city that buys 0.4 water, 0.6 food and 0.2 oxygen a second from the market, plus a quarter of that for each biosphere around it. It pays from its own savings (starting at $5,000) and earns $40, $60 and $80 for every unit of water, food and oxygen it buys, so it makes money while prices sit below those amounts and loses it above. Its runway is savings divided by what it loses per second: over 300 seconds it grows a biosphere about every minute, buying 20 steel, 10 glass and 10 aluminium for each (no biosphere unless it can still afford 300 seconds of runway at its new size afterwards), between 60 and 300 it holds, and below 60 biospheres die off, up to four times as fast as savings run out. The colony is the one economy that never borrows (see Debt & life support): it pays for every purchase out of savings, buys nothing it cannot afford, and one that cannot buy what it needs at all is razed down to its central spire (freeing its tiles). Nobody can build on colony or biosphere tiles.
Every match runs on credit. With auto pay off, automatic operating purchases go entirely into debt, even when you have cash: the power your buildings draw, the fuel a truck or a constructor burns, and your HQ's life support. Everything else has to be paid for out of cash — the materials for a new building, the inputs a processor eats, HQ upgrades, and every trade you place by hand. On a mixed bill cash pays for the goods that cannot be borrowed, and eligible purchases become debt unless auto pay covers them with the remaining cash; a bill that cannot meet that fails whole, so a failed payment never creates credit.
Life support is the upkeep an HQ pays for its own population, per level above I: 0.2 water, 0.3 food and 0.1 oxygen a second at level II, twice that at III, three times at IV, four times at V. A level-I HQ pays nothing. It comes out of your stock first and is bought from the market when stock runs out, on credit, or from available cash with auto pay enabled. The colony pays its own 0.4 water, 0.6 food and 0.2 oxygen out of its savings instead: it never borrows, and what it cannot afford it goes without.
What you owe is rated against your gross net worth — credits plus holdings, before any debt is taken off — and charged interest every sol, on the same 88,775.244-second solar clock the sun keeps (about 98.64 ticks), so the rate below is the rate per Martian day:
| no debt | AAA · 3% a sol |
| under 10% of gross worth | AAA · 3% a sol |
| 10–20% | AA · 5% |
| 20–30% | A · 7% |
| 30–40% | BBB · 10% |
| 40–50% | BB · 14% |
| 50–65% | B · 18% |
| 65–80% | CCC · 22% |
| 80–100% | CC · 25% |
| 100–150% | C · 28% |
| 150% and up, or no positive worth to rate against | D · 30% |
Interest is charged a tick at a time out of your cash, and whatever the cash cannot cover is added to the debt, so a debt left alone grows on itself. Pay it down by hand with the Pay Debt button at the top left of the rail, beside your cash: $1,000 a click, Shift-click for $10,000, or Alt-click for all debt. Payments are capped at what you owe and require enough cash for the selected amount. Ctrl+Shift-click Pay Debt to toggle auto pay (off by default). When enabled, available cash pays for new automatic operating purchases; only the shortfall becomes debt. Interest is paid from available cash as usual. Auto pay never pays down existing principal; use a normal click for that. The one repayment you don't click for is your surplus power: when the market buys it, what it earns pays down what you owe before any of it becomes spendable cash, so a surplus grid services its own debt. The button reads Pay Debt · auto while enabled; you can toggle it even with no debt. The rating and the rate a sol are behind the Rate & interest disclosure under the button, so they cost no room in the rail. The colony never carries debt at all, in any match: it pays for its own life support out of its savings, and simply goes without when they run out.
Debt costs you more than its interest: 20% of what you owe is taken off your scored net worth — the figure the ranking, the solo goal and the dominance lead all use. The rating above is worked out from your gross worth before that deduction. A debt big enough to leave you negative is no way to win either: a lead is only awarded to a player worth at least twice everyone else's combined and the rest of the field has to be worth something positive, so nobody is crowned for being the least ruined.
Log in, then play solo (unranked, starts at once, on a 50×50 world; it ends early when you reach $1,000,000 net worth) or queue for ranked 1v1 (60×60 world) or 4-player free-for-all (80×80), each with its own Elo ladder (everyone starts at 1200). Ratings are never edited: they are recomputed from the full match history, which is never deleted. Players share one world and one market: your trades move everyone's prices. The match clock starts when the first HQ is placed. You can resign from the match menu, which asks first and then ranks you below everyone still playing; a player offline for 3 minutes resigns automatically, and the match ends when only one player is left. A company's stock price follows its worth with a lag: each second it moves 5% of the way to its net worth divided by ten. Every stock you hold, your own company's included, counts in your net worth at that company's current price, so a plain purchase swaps cash for stock at the same value; a takeover or sweep at double price costs you the difference. Net worth is credits plus what selling all your holdings would fetch right now, slippage included, plus the stock you hold, plus $20,000 for each HQ level ($20,000 at HQ I, $100,000 at HQ V), less 20% of any debt (see Debt & life support). Only players who have placed an HQ count. A player whose net worth stays at least twice everyone else's combined for 5 minutes wins outright (a timer next to their name counts it down); otherwise the match ends after 2 hours (every mode, solo included) and the highest net worth wins. Ratings then move pairwise: you gain against everyone you finished above and lose against everyone above you. The end-of-match summary lists placements, net worth and rating changes, and you can keep looking at the final map or head back to the lobby from it. Every finished match can be watched as a replay from the lobby: the server re-runs the match from its seed and the recorded actions, at up to 32× speed.
| Terrain / Deposit | what that cell is made of, and any ore on it |
| Facility | the building on the cell, its owner, and — for a production building — the rate adjacency leaves it at, its estimated running cost, what its output is worth at today's prices and the resulting profit, including truck fuel if it is off your HQ's territory |
| Sun | the daylight over the cell under the pointer, as a share of full noon sun, with the local time and the sol; a solar panel adds what it is making right now |
| Resource row | one market row per good: its icon under Resources, your net rate a second under Rate, the stock held between a − and a + under Quantity (click to sell or buy the quantity picked by the qty buttons), and its price under Price. The icons past the price are the buildings that make that good, one per buildable structure, each level with the good it makes. Power is a flow rather than a stock, so its row carries the auto toggle alone. The HQ block at the foot of the rail shows its level and the claims left, with Claim land for claim mode (C), the trade quantity, the camera buttons, and the key hints |
| Narrow window | below 900px the market folds away so the map stays usable — the Market button beside Pay Debt brings it back — and on a short screen the market rows scroll inside the rail while the cash and the HQ block stay in view |
| Debt / Rating / Interest | what you owe, its rating, the rate a sol and how big it is against your gross worth, and the button that pays $1,000 of it off (Shift: $10,000; Alt: all; Ctrl+Shift: toggle auto pay); each player's rating and debt ride along with their name in the competitors panel |
| day/night shading | the band of daylight travelling east to west: ground under the night side is darkened, buildings only slightly |
| bright teal outline | the cell under the pointer, the one the HUD is describing; a pinned card keeps a second outline on the tile it describes |
Press F1 any time to return here.
Connecting…
Hex World