The Ascent
Six stages turn raw matter pulled from Ortus into a rifle on a dead Revenant's chest, forty floors up. Every asset in that chain is player-owned. Every step compounds the next. This is the climb, and at every rung, the same choice.
Work the asset. Take a cut.
Low floor, fast start. Deploy a vehicle, extract resources, fulfill an order, and keep your share of what moves through your hands.
Own the asset. Earn from all.
Higher floor, compounding return. Own the land, the plant, the line, and earn a cut from everyone else who works through it.
One economy, six stages, and it never stops turning.
Each stage feeds the next, and the last funds the first. This is the whole machine on one page. Trace it clockwise, or jump straight to any rung, then climb it in full below.
Send a machine where nothing is priced.
Explore the Sector. Earn when its Land sells.
Deploy an AXV from a Deployment Bay and explore the unmapped Sectors of Ortus. Once a Sector is fully explored, its Lands are released to auction, and every Explorer who charted it earns a share of the price they sell for. It's module-driven: whatever you bolt on, it becomes, and better modules widen your cut.
The Surveyor
Deploy your AXV from a Bay and explore. When a Sector is fully charted, its Lands go to auction and you earn a share of every sale, without ever bidding. Bolt better modules on to widen that share.
The Land Baron
Win the auction outright. The parcel is yours, and every AEV that ever mines it, yours or anyone's, pays you ground rent. Buy the land once; collect on it for as long as it yields.
Deploy a vehicle. Extract resources while you sleep.
The AEV is the chassis a thousand fortunes are built on. Five marks, each hungrier than the last, and every one takes modules. This is where ROI is decided. Pick a mark, bolt modules into its slots, and watch the daily yield climb.
The Roughneck accepts 1 module. 1 slot open. Bolt more on.
The Driver
Deploy your AEVs on land you don't own and keep a cut of everything they pull. Five minutes a day. Upgrade modules to widen the cut, the chassis is yours, the ground isn't, and that's fine.
The Owner
Own the land and the fleet. Take the lion's share of what surfaces, and rent your ground to other drivers on top. Help a landowner extract for a cut, or be the landowner everyone pays.
Raw ore is worth more once it's refined.
Refined goods trade at a premium raw never sees.
Refineries take the resources your fleet pulls and turn them into the materials crafting actually needs. Fuel runs the economy and UBQ Plates build it, but those two are just the top of a deep catalogue, refined from every ore you mine.
| Unbiquadium | UBQ Plates · UBQ Pellets |
|---|---|
| Hydrocarbon | Fuel |
| Iron | Block · Plate · Tube · Spring |
| Aluminium | Block · Plate · Tube · Spring |
| Gold | Thread · Bar |
| Lithium | Granules · Sheet |
| Glass | Sheet |
| Calcium | Carbonate · Ingot |
| Concrete | Block |
| Hydrogen | Hydrogen |
The Refiner
Run your own resources through scheduled refining and walk away with materials at cost, ready to feed straight into the assembly line above you. Vertical, lean, yours end to end.
The Plant Owner
Build a Refinery and let the whole sector come to you. Every operator who refines through your plant pays a fee, income that runs whether you're logged in or not.
Materials become the most valuable asset in the chain.
An Order Permit is an authorization to craft a specific piece of tech. Fulfill it at an assembly line and out comes a module, a drill, a hauler, an engine, a recon drone, a weapon platform. The rarer the order permit, the more the chain pays for it.
Two engines the Consortium could not unmake.
This is what an assembly line produces against a permit. Beowulf burns long and quiet; Prometheus is the order permit everyone wants and almost no one holds. Rarity isn't decoration here, it's the price the rest of the chain pays.
Every order permit is a product someone downstream is waiting for.
A drone for the scouts, a weapon platform for the Revenants. Assemble the base tech against a permit, then let the buyer mod it into something only they own.
The Fabricator
Craft technologies at an assembly line to fulfill the Order Permits other players have listed. Bring the materials, claim the payout, build a reputation for filling the hard orders fast.
The Line Owner
Own the Assembly Line itself. Every order anyone fulfills through it pays you a throughput royalty, you don't craft a thing, you own the place the crafting happens.
The chain pays out when the gear gets used.
Your gear gets used on Floor 14 tonight.
EMPIRES is where the economy is made. CITADELS is where it's consumed, a 330,000m² warzone full of Revenants who need your gear to survive, and need a new one tomorrow. Sell within the Empire, or supply the war upstairs.
They don't just need gear. They need to look like no one else.
CITADELS runs a near-unrivalled depth of cosmetic customisation — faces, kit, finishes, callsigns — and every layer is its own market. Produce what Revenants want to be seen in, and you hold a share of a demand that vanity never lets run dry.
- 01 FacesPaint, scars, eyewear, headsets, ear-pro 1,000s of combos
- 02 Headgear & KitHelmets, caps, rigs, plate carriers, packs Player-made
- 03 Finishes & CamosEvery surface — weapon, armour, webbing Per-layer market
- 04 Callsigns & PatchesThe identity a Revenant carries into every run Signature goods
Sell in the Empire
List your items on the Empires marketplace to other producers climbing the same chain. Immediate, liquid, settled on-chain, the fastest way to turn a finished good back into working capital.
Supply the Citadel
Sell to CITADELS Revenants who carry your gear into combat, and come back for another after every run. Most economies only had the next buyer. This one has a second game full of buyers who need the goods.
Every rung, run as one. That's an Empire.
A treasury, a charter, and a dividend schedule.
A Corporation is a multi-signature entity with on-chain governance. The Forge → Order Permit pipeline is, structurally, a guild revenue stream. Cooperation inside the Corporation; conflict between them, both running whether anyone's logged in or not.
The Shareholder
Join an established Corporation. Collect dividends on schedule, skip the admin, let someone else carry quorum. The work pays whether your name is on the charter or further down the list.
The Founder
Incorporate your own. Recruit shareholders, set tax rates, vote on acquisitions, pay dividends, and own the apparatus that does all of it. This is where a Freelancer becomes an Empire.
A manufacturer wakes
to a dividend notification.
That rifle was forged here, sold up there, used tonight, and bought again tomorrow. Six stages, one economy, and you can be any of those people. With enough patience, all of them.