Restoration — Third Endgame Path¶

Document Type: Design Document Version: 0.1 (Draft) Status: In Progress Last Updated: 2026-08-25 Vault destination: 01_Design Documents Amends: 01_Master GDD endgame section Related: [26_Pollution, Waste & Organic Systems Design](<./26_Pollution, Waste & Organic Systems Design.md>) · [06_Outpost/07_Reclaim](<../06_Outpost/07_Reclaim.md>) · [[08_Economy & Progression Design]]

1. Summary¶

The endgame is currently open after Milestone 3, with two directions: war effort or supply chain provider. This document proposes a third: restoration.

Take a planet that has been wrecked, by the player or by another player in the shared persistent galaxy, and bring it back.

It is the peaceful path, and it uses systems that already exist rather than requiring new ones.

2. The Core Idea: You Inherit a Factory¶

The interesting part is not the cleanup. It is what you are cleaning up.

You arrive at a working but filthy base. It is producing. It is also poisoning everything beneath it. The job is retooling a live system:

Swap coal and biomass generation for solar, wind, geothermal or nuclear
Reroute belts around dumps you are clearing
Dismantle what should not be there without stopping what should
Add Air Scrubbers, Water Treatment and Soil Remediation into a layout that never planned for them
Restore the deepest levels last, because contamination leached down and the sink is at the bottom

Fixing a bad factory is a different puzzle from designing a good one. Almost nothing in the genre offers it, and it needs no new mechanics — only a starting condition.

3. Why It Needs the Persistent Galaxy¶

The loop only works because worlds persist and are shared.

Player A industrialises hard and fast, because dirty is quicker
        ↓
Planet reaches high output, high contamination
        ↓
Player A moves on to a fresh world
        ↓
The wrecked planet is now CONTENT for Player B

Player A is not punished, they made a legitimate speed choice. Player B gets a challenge that no procedural generator could author, because it was made by a real person solving a real problem badly.

Damaged planets should also be seeded procedurally, so the path is available before enough players have wrecked anything.

4. Measuring It¶

A Planet Health rating, derived from:

Ground contamination across every level, weighted by depth
Atmospheric pollution per level
Waste in open dumps
Proportion of generation that is clean vs dirty
Ecosystem presence (farms, restored land)

Visible as a single score, drillable into per-level detail, mirroring how the Power tab handles grids.

Open items for this document are tracked in docs/open-items.md.

5. The Economy¶

Restoration becomes a service economy rather than a solo goal.

A player with a wrecked planet posts a restoration contract
Another player fulfils it, and is paid
Uses the Trade Station and transport ships already planned for async player-to-player trade

This makes restoration a job someone can specialise in, in the same way supply chain provider is a job. It is an extension of planned systems, not a new one.

Open items for this document are tracked in docs/open-items.md.

6. Naming — Collision With Outpost¶

⚠️ Outpost Mode already uses RECLAIM for the action of locking in a restored building (06_Outpost/07_Reclaim, milestone OM7).

If planet-scale restoration uses the same word, that is either pleasing consistency (the same verb at two scales, reinforcing that the modes share a philosophy) or confusing overload (two different mechanics, one word, in the same product).

Decide deliberately. Candidate alternatives at planet scale: Restore, Rehabilitate, Terraform, Renew.

6a. Restoration Mode — Standalone Game Mode¶

Restoration also works as a separate game mode, not only as an endgame path. The two are complementary: the endgame path is open-ended and lives in the persistent galaxy; the mode is bounded, repeatable and competitive.

6a.1 It solves the gating problem¶

As an endgame path, restoration sits behind Milestone 3. As a mode it is available in hour one.

It is also a good teacher. A wrecked factory demonstrates what not to do far more memorably than a tutorial explaining it. Learning by fixing someone else's mistakes is a strong onboarding pattern.

6a.2 It can carry a leaderboard¶

This is the strongest argument for the mode, and it is something factory games are normally bad at.

Conventional factory games cannot support meaningful leaderboards because every player starts from open ground with no shared problem. A restoration scenario is a closed problem with a measurable outcome: identical wrecked factory, identical starting conditions.

Scoring candidates: - Time to reach full Planet Health - Least material spent - Highest Planet Health achieved while keeping output above a threshold - Fewest buildings demolished (elegance of the fix)

This mirrors Outpost Mode's existing structure exactly, which already runs Progression (fixed seeds), Seasonal (monthly rotation, leaderboard) and Sandbox (player seeds, no contribution). The same three-mode pattern applies directly.

6a.3 Where the scenarios come from¶

Authoring wrecked factories by hand is expensive. Procedurally generating one that reads as badly built by a person rather than randomly scattered is genuinely hard — the difference between a bad layout and noise is intent.

Harvest real player wrecks. The persistent galaxy is full of abandoned, contaminated planets built by actual people solving actual problems badly.

Player A's abandoned mess becomes next month's Seasonal scenario
With permission, or anonymised
Content generation for free, and authentic in a way no generator could match

Open items for this document are tracked in docs/open-items.md.

6a.4 Demo candidate¶

A bounded two-hour restoration scenario shows every system in the game — factory, power, pollution, logistics, vertical layers — inside a package with a beginning and an end.

That is a far better Steam demo than a slice of an open-ended sandbox, which usually ends with the player unsure whether they have seen the game.

7. Why This Fits the Existing Design¶

Existing system	How restoration uses it
Pollution and contamination model	Provides the problem
Air Scrubber, Water Treatment, Soil Remediation	Provides the tools
Farming	Feeds bio-remediation. Farming gains a second customer.
Persistent shared galaxy	Provides wrecked planets authored by real players
Trade Station, transport ships	Provides the contract economy
Power system	Clean generation is the substitute for dirty generation
Vertical layers	Contamination leached down, so depth is the difficulty curve

No new core system is required. This is a goal and a starting condition assembled from parts that already exist.

Open items for this document are tracked in docs/open-items.md, area restoration.

9. Revision History¶

Version	Date	Changes
0.1	2026-08-25	Initial draft. Inherit-a-factory framing, persistent galaxy loop, Planet Health, contract economy, RECLAIM naming collision.