Auto Warz — Planet Threats & Defence Design¶

Document Type: Design Document Version: 0.3 Last Updated: 2026-09-05 Vault destination: 01_Design Documents Phase: Phase 1 — Launch release Related Documents: [26_Pollution, Waste & Organic Systems Design](<./26_Pollution, Waste & Organic Systems Design.md>) · [05_World Generation & Planet Types](<../Content/05_World Generation & Planet Types.md>) · [06_Vertical Layers & Core Power System](<./06_Vertical Layers & Core Power System.md>) · [25_Power System Design](<./25_Power System Design.md>) · [36_Progression Arc Design](<../Content/36_Progression Arc Design.md>) · [35_Economy Design](<./35_Economy Design.md>) · [00_Canonical Design Facts](<../../04_Project Management/00_Canonical Design Facts.md>) Supersedes: the Alien Defence System section of [04_Factory & Resource System Design](<./04_Factory & Resource System Design.md>), which pointed at a document that no longer describes planet threats

Purpose of This Document¶

This document owns what attacks the planet factory, why it comes, and what the player does about it.

It exists because that was previously half a page in [04_Factory & Resource System Design](<./04_Factory & Resource System Design.md>), ending in "Full alien design in 06_Combat & War System Design", which is now a redirect to the fleet combat document and says nothing about planets.

That half page also made the largest claim in the Phase 1 design:

"This creates the core Phase 1 tension: expand = more resources = more alien pressure = need more factory output."

If that is true, this is the system Early Access lives or dies on, and it had less written about it than the belt corners.

Not in this document: ammunition, weapons and turret behaviour. Those get their own deep dive. This document says what is coming and why. It does not say what you shoot it with.

1. The Principle¶

Threats exist to put a price on "more".

Without them, build more is always correct and Phase 1 contains no decision anywhere. That is the whole job. Everything below is in service of it.

The version that makes it design rather than a slogan:

Each threat family prices a different kind of "more".

One family alone leaves a hole. If pressure only answers expansion, a player who stops expanding is safe forever and the mid-game goes quiet. Two families, answering two different things, close it:

You cannot get big without drawing something, whichever way you choose to get big.

2. The Fork This Document Closes¶

Three documents described planet threats and disagreed with each other.

Document	What drew them	What they were
`04_Factory` §Alien Defence	Expansion into territory	Native aliens with territory zones
`26_Pollution` §6	E-waste and power signature	"Scavengers, Not Biters." Rogue machines
`05_World Generation`	Per planet type	Ground Crawlers, Armoured Heavies, Aquatic Swarmers

26_Pollution §6 did not merely differ. It argued against the others in writing: "rogue machines and scrap drones assembling themselves from discarded electronics fit a robot world in a way organic monsters never would."

Both sides were right about something, and the resolution keeps both: two families, two triggers, two targets. Neither document was wrong about its own half.

3. Everything Here Is a Machine¶

Decided 2026-09-05. There are no organic monsters in Auto Warz.

05_World Generation's planet factions survive intact, reinterpreted rather than deleted:

Planet type	Faction	Now reads as
Terrestrial	Ground Crawlers	Ground-adapted machines, medium aggression
Super-Earth	Armoured Heavies	High-gravity machines, tough and slow
Ocean	Aquatic Swarmers	Water-adapted machines. Fast, attack from the water
(others)	per `05_World Generation`	Same treatment

Aquatic Swarmers being machines that happen to be water-based is what made this resolvable. Every planet keeps its flavour, and 26_Pollution §6's argument holds for the whole game rather than half of it: this is a robot world, and the things that attack you are robots.

3.1 Which opens a thread¶

If the natives are machines, then something built them. They are the planet's machines: left by whoever was here before, gone feral, adapted over a long time to the biome they were abandoned in.

That is deliberately adjacent to two things already in the design. Restoration generates derelicts in the player's own world with an invented history ([28_Restoration - Third Endgame Path](<../Content/28_Restoration - Third Endgame Path.md>)), and The Remnants are a deep-space faction of ancient tech ([14_Win Conditions & Faction Allegiance](<../Content/14_Win Conditions & Faction Allegiance.md>)).

Phase 1 answers none of this. The natives are a threat the player cannot talk to. But the question who left these here is now askable on the first planet, and it has somewhere to go later. That is a mystery Early Access can carry for free.

4. The Two Exhausts¶

The factory has two exhausts, and something is drawn to each.

Exhaust	Draws	Character
Pollution — the air you dirty	The Natives	You woke something that lives here
Power signature and e-waste — how loud you are, and your rubbish	The Ferals	You attracted something that lives anywhere

Signature means generation, not draw. Confirmed 2026-09-06. Generators and dense grids are what the ferals hear; consumption is silent. So a site running on imported Charge Cells is quiet, and choosing to power a site that way is how a player opts out of the ferals at the price of a permanent freight route. The threat is relocated, not removed. See [39_Space Layer Design](<./39_Space Layer Design.md>) §4a.4.

This is the whole trigger model, and it has three properties worth stating.

It makes pollution load-bearing. [26_Pollution, Waste & Organic Systems Design](<./26_Pollution, Waste & Organic Systems Design.md>) was a number that went up and cost you output. Now it is the thing that brings them. Dirty is no longer merely inefficient.

It prices two different kinds of "more". Dirty growth and loud growth are different strategies, and each has its own predator. A clean, modest factory is genuinely safe, which means peace is earned rather than toggled.

Neither is a timer. Nothing arrives on a schedule. Everything that arrives is a consequence of something the player chose, which is the difference between pressure and harassment.

5. The Natives¶

They were here first. They have territory, they have nests, and they do not roam looking for you.

5.1 What wakes them¶

Pollution reaching their territory. Not the global pollution number, and not the act of expanding: the specific fact of your air arriving where they live.

That makes the trigger directional and visible. Territory is drawn on the map. The pollution spread is a thing the player can see. The player can therefore work out, before it happens, which direction their smog is heading and who is at the end of it.

Expansion still matters, exactly as 04_Factory said, but indirectly and better: expanding puts your dirty industry closer to their border, so the same output wakes them sooner.

5.2 What they do¶

They hold ground. They attack what encroaches, they take the ground back if you retreat from it, and they do not chase you across the map to hunt your power plant.

Their pressure is therefore about a frontier, not about your whole base at once.

5.3 Planet flavour is theirs¶

The per-planet factions in 05_World Generation describe natives only. Ferals are the same everywhere. That gives each planet a distinct fight without needing a second bestiary per world.

6. The Ferals¶

They were not here. They came because they could hear you.

Working name. It must not stay Scavengers, because [14_Win Conditions & Faction Allegiance](<../Content/14_Win Conditions & Faction Allegiance.md>) already has The Salvagers as a playable-adjacent trading faction, and the two words will be confused permanently in a game where one is a partner and one is vermin. See Open Questions.

6.1 What draws them¶

Per [26_Pollution, Waste & Organic Systems Design](<./26_Pollution, Waste & Organic Systems Design.md>) §6, unchanged:

E-waste dumped or stockpiled in the open
High local power signature — large generators, dense grids

Machines assembling themselves out of discarded electronics. They are, quite literally, what your rubbish turns into.

6.2 What they do¶

They go for power and infrastructure. Generators, dense grid nodes, and anything humming. They have no interest in territory because they have none, and no interest in a frontier because they did not come from a direction.

6.3 Why this is the more interesting half¶

A native attack is a place problem: your border is in the wrong spot. A feral attack is a shape problem: your power is too concentrated, or your waste handling is a dump.

The counter to natives is defence and ground. The counter to ferals is building the factory differently, which is the answer this game most wants a player to reach for.

7. Underground Is Late, Not Quiet¶

Decided 2026-09-05: nothing lives underground. There is no native population down there and no nests to clear. But that does not make a buried factory safe, because the machines travel.

They dig, and they follow your shafts. Nothing lives underground, and everything can get there.

Ferals fly, decided 2026-09-06, which is why walls shape where the natives arrive and do nothing about the ferals. See [38_Weapons & Ammunition Design](<./38_Weapons & Ammunition Design.md>) §7.

7.1 Three triggers, three routes¶

The vertical model gives each threat a different way in, and each one falls out of a rule that already exists.

Trigger	Route in	Family	Where the rule comes from
Air pollution at their border	Overland, at the frontier	Natives	`26_Pollution` §3a: air holds per level and does not travel between levels
Ground contamination, leaching downward	They dig. Up through the floor	Natives	`26_Pollution` §3a.2a: contaminants percolate downward only, and slowly
Power signature	Down your own shafts. Item Lifts, Fluid Risers and above all Power Conduits	Ferals	`06_Vertical Layers`: cross-level power runs through a physical structure

7.2 What that does to the strategy¶

The old reading was bury the dirty industry and the natives never hear about it. That is now only true of the air.

Air pollution genuinely does not reach them. Sealing your smelters underground does hide your smog, exactly as §3a says.
Ground contamination does reach down, so dumping is what betrays you, not smelting. The two were previously the same decision and are now separate ones.
It arrives late. Leaching is slow and diminishes per level, so the consequence lands well after the cause. 26_Pollution §3a.2a already describes a player who dumps freely in the first hours and finds Underground L1 contaminated twenty hours later. Now something comes up through that floor.

Underground is not a refuge. It is a deferral, and the bill arrives when you have built enough down there to care.

7.3 Every shaft is a door¶

The ferals do not dig. They follow the power signature, and cross-level power is a physical structure: a Power Conduit is a hole in your floor with a current running down it.

That turns a purely logistical decision into a defensive one:

Fewer, fatter shafts are cheaper to defend and a single point of failure.
Many thin shafts are resilient to losing one and give the ferals more ways in.
A level with no conduit at all is unreachable by ferals and also unpowered, which is the honest version of safety.

This is the shape this game wants: a threat answered by how the factory is built rather than by how many turrets are parked on it.

7.4 The level table, corrected¶

Where the dirty industry goes	Air reaches natives	Ground reaches natives	Ferals	The real cost
Surface	Yes, at their border	Yes, and it leaches	Via the grid	The standard game
Underground	No	Yes, delayed. They dig	Yes, down your conduits	Severe decay, plus a bill that arrives late
Sky	No. Above the smog layer	No. Gravity does not run upward	Loud. Clean generation is signature	Cost of building up, and a beacon

Sky is the only genuinely quiet level for the natives, and it is the loudest possible one for the ferals. Nothing hides from both.

None of this was authored. It is what happens when per-level pollution, downward leaching and physical cross-level power are all already true and something is finally drawn to each of them.

8. Damage, Wrecks and Repair¶

8.1 Damage is a scale, not a state¶

A building takes damage progressively. The cost to put it right scales with how much damage it has taken. A turret that took a glancing hit is cheap to patch. A smelter that was worked over is close to a rebuild.

That gives the player a real triage decision after an attack, which is a factory decision: what do I fix first, with what I have.

8.2 At the end of the scale, it is destroyed¶

Destroyed means destroyed. The building no longer functions and its contents are gone. Nothing spills. A silo that is destroyed does not scatter its ore on the ground for Genesis to sweep up.

8.3 But the wreck stays, and it remembers¶

What remains is a wreck in place: it holds the building's identity and footprint, so the player can see what stood there. It can be repaired or rebuilt on the same spot, or cleared.

Why not simply delete it:

The layout survives. Losing an hour of careful planning to an attack you did not see is how people stop playing. Losing the output and the materials is a cost. Losing the plan is a punishment.
It reads. A field of wrecks tells the player exactly where the line broke, which is the diagnosable-failure principle the war layer runs on ([31_War & Combat System Design](<./31_War & Combat System Design.md>)), arriving here first.
It is Restoration in miniature. A derelict that keeps its identity and can be brought back is precisely [28_Restoration - Third Endgame Path](<../Content/28_Restoration - Third Endgame Path.md>) at building scale. Same verb, two scales, and the player learns it on their own factory before they ever meet a generated one.

9. Territory, and Going on the Offensive¶

Territory stays, as 04_Factory had it. Natives hold visible zones with nests in them.

Clearing a nest is how you claim ground. The land does not open up because you researched something; it opens up because you went and took it.

This is the one time in Phase 1 that the player commands units rather than placing buildings. 04_Factory already lists building_unit_spawner, "produces deployable units", with a note about deploying into alien territory, so the building exists and only its behaviour is unwritten.

Two reasons this earns its place:

It closes the expansion loop. Pollution wakes them, defence holds them, and offence is how you get the ground back rather than merely surviving on your side of the line.
It foreshadows the fleet without a line of fleet code. Producing units, sending them somewhere, and losing some of them is the shape of the entire war layer, taught on the ground for free.

Ferals cannot be attacked at source. They have no home to clear. The only counter to ferals is to stop being worth visiting, which keeps the two families asymmetric in how they are solved.

10. Decay Degrades, Threats Destroy¶

Stated because the two systems look adjacent and must not be merged.

System	Effect	Ceiling
Pollution decay (`26_Pollution` §4)	Reduces productivity	"Never destructive." A decayed building always still works
Threats (this document)	Damage, and at the end of the scale destruction	A wreck

Pollution wears things out. Threats break them. Pollution's role in this document is as a trigger, not as a second damage source, and doc 26's own rule that decay never destroys stands unamended.

11. What This Document Does Not Own¶

Ammunition, weapons, and turret behaviour. Owned by [38_Weapons & Ammunition Design](<./38_Weapons & Ammunition Design.md>), written 2026-09-06. In short: both tier, by different mechanisms; there are kinetic and energy families; and energy defence raises the power signature that draws the ferals, which is the sharpest consequence of §4's two exhausts.
Alien tier scaling by distance from the starting system. Owned by [05_World Generation & Planet Types](<../Content/05_World Generation & Planet Types.md>).
The pollution model itself. Owned by [26_Pollution, Waste & Organic Systems Design](<./26_Pollution, Waste & Organic Systems Design.md>). This document consumes it and adds nothing to it.

12. Vocabulary¶

Term	Meaning
Natives	The planet's own machines. Territorial, nested, planet-flavoured. Drawn by pollution
Ferals (working name)	Self-assembled waste machines. No territory. Drawn by power signature and e-waste
The Salvagers	A faction, orange, a trading partner in the space layer. Not a threat, and not to be confused with the above
Wreck	A destroyed building that keeps its identity and footprint and can be repaired, rebuilt or cleared
Nest	A native structure inside a territory zone. Clearing one claims the ground

Deprecated: Scavengers for the second family, pending a replacement name. Deprecated: aliens meaning organic creatures, since there are none.

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

Open Questions¶

The name for the ferals. Candidates: Ferals, Scrappers, Rakers, Chaff. Must not be Scavengers
What "pollution reaching territory" means numerically: a concentration threshold at the zone boundary, or the zone's own accumulated level
Whether natives ever expand their own territory, or only reclaim ground the player abandons
What a nest looks like and how it is cleared: a structure with health, or an area to be held
Whether ferals scale with the size of the signature or only with its presence
How a digger surfaces. Whether it emerges at a predictable point (a weak spot the player can read and pre-empt) or anywhere in a contaminated level. The first is fairer and probably better
Whether ferals travelling a conduit can be stopped inside it, or only met at each end
How much of §7's table is legible to the player without a wiki
The four faction names may be revisited. Recorded so the change is expected rather than a surprise

Revision History¶

Version	Date	Changes
0.3	2026-09-06	§4 clarified: signature means generation, not draw, confirmed 2026-09-06. A site running on imported Charge Cells is quiet, which makes importing power a way to opt out of the ferals at the price of a permanent freight route. The threat is relocated, not removed. Points at `39_Space Layer Design` §4a.4.
0.2	2026-09-05	§7 rewritten as Underground Is Late, Not Quiet (closes OI-359). Nothing lives underground, but the machines travel: natives dig, drawn by ground contamination leaching downward, and ferals follow the player's own shafts, above all the Power Conduit, drawn by power signature. So burying dirty industry hides the air but not the ground, which splits smelting and dumping into two separate decisions, and the consequence arrives late because leaching is slow. Every shaft is a door, making shaft count a defensive decision as well as a logistical one. Sky is the only quiet level for natives and the loudest for ferals.
0.1	2026-09-05	Initial document, superseding the half-page Alien Defence System section in `04_Factory` whose full design pointer led to the fleet combat document. Threats put a price on "more", and each family prices a different kind. The three-way fork closed: two families, two triggers, two targets, keeping what each of the three documents was right about. Everything is a machine, resolving Aquatic Swarmers as water-adapted machines and extending `26_Pollution` §6's robot-world argument to the whole game. The two exhausts: pollution draws the Natives, power signature and e-waste draw the Ferals. There is no quiet level, an unauthored consequence of per-level pollution meeting power signature. Damage is a scale, destruction takes the contents but leaves a wreck that remembers, which is Restoration at building scale. Territory kept, and clearing a nest is how ground is claimed. Ammunition and weapons deliberately excluded.