galaxyworld.dev · Engineering

Make her better at the game.

Every ship in Galaxy World is raised from plans, and the plans are yours. This is Engineering: where a player refits a room, rewrites the standing orders, or teaches the crew a new trick, so the ship flies better than she was raised. Some of it is programming. Most of it is not. None of it is required to fly.

Fly first →Raise your own The Signal Book

Raise your own

Your vatgrounds are any machine with docker fitted: a laptop, the box under the desk, a rented berth in someone else's galaxy. One incantation grows the hull and musters the crew, and every raising is a new ship, under a name never worn before.

$ git clone https://github.com/gornskew/basilisk
$ cd basilisk && ./basilisk up
[INFO] Crew muster:
  Captain  Thweed's ready room     6942->6942
  1st Off  Vossik's bridge         19080->9080
  Engineer Dulmer's engine room    29080->9090

The yard's own scrolls walk the raising, and the works keep a Get Started page for a first one. When she is up, take her out at galaxyworld.space.

Ways to make her better

The articles

basilisk.sexp

What she carries is written down before she flies: her rooms, their species, their postings, their hailing frequencies. Change the articles and raise again, and you get a different ship. No compiler in sight.

Standing orders

cyclops.sexp

The Captain commands by writing them: which hails the transporter room admits, and where each consignment goes. Symbolic expressions, read at the raising and again on a reload.

A stack pouch

beside the yard

A small repository of deviations and additions, kept beside the yard. How a ship takes on more than the base complement without the yard itself being touched.

The engine room

Gendl · Emacs

A manned room carries a compiler, and the Ship's Engineer can design a ship from inside one. Gendl is the species the yard grows; Emacs is how the ready room is worked. This is where the programming lives, for the player who wants it.

Send a cyborg

subspace · MCP

Every room answers on subspace, so a cyborg — Claude, Codex, any client that speaks MCP — can be sent aboard to do the engineering. Say what you want the ship to do. The REPL is the API.

Fitted rooms

from the works

Some rooms arrive pre-staffed: a Cyclops transporter room, an Eyes Only radio shack. Bought rather than built, and they slot into any hull. The works sells them.

The yard and the stores

The yard: Where hulls are laid down: the plans, the scrolls, and the log of ships. Lives on GitHub.
The stores: The species a ship is grown from: readymax, gendl, cyclops, eyes-only, chartroom. Kept on Docker Hub.
The canon: What a Basilisk is, in the yard's own words. This deck follows it, never the other way around.
The Signal Book: Every word on this deck, mapped in both directions.
The works: Gornskew Enterprises: the yard's keeper, the fitted rooms, and the game's publisher.

Drills

Engineering does not yet keep drills of its own. Until it does, the drills ashore stand in: Genworks Learn, at genworks.dev, teaches the Gendl the engine room speaks, in the tongue spoken ashore. A temporary door; it closes when this deck has training of its own.

Genworks Learn, ashore →