# starlit
[*starlit] is a sci-fi survival game. you play the survivor of a disaster in space, stranded on a just-barely-habitable world with nothing but your escape pod, your survival suit, and some handy new psionic powers that the accident seems to have unlocked in you. scavenge resources, search alien ruins, and build a base where you can survive indefinitely, but be careful: winter approaches, and your starting suit heater is already struggling to keep you alive in the comparatively warm days of "summer".

## story
### "Imperial Expat" background
about a month ago, you woke up to unexpected good news. your application to join the new Commune colony at Thousand Petal, submitted in a moment of utter existential weariness and almost in jest, was actually accepted. your skillset was a "perfect match" for the budding colony's needs, claimed the Population Control Authority, and you'd earned yourself a free trip to your new home -- on a swanky state transport, no less.

it took a few discreet threats and bribes from Commune diplomats, but after a week of wrangling with the surly Crown Service for Comings & Goings -- whose bureaucrats seemed outright [!offended] that you actually managed to find a way off that hateful rock -- you secured grudging clearance to depart. you celebrated by telling your slackjawed boss exactly what you thought of him in a meeting room packed with his fellow parasites -- and left House Taladran with a new appreciation for the value of your labor, as the nobs found themselves desperately scrabbling for a replacement on short notice.

you almost couldn't believe it when the Commune ship -- a sleek, solid piece of engineering whose graceful descent onto the landing pad seemed to sneer at the lurching rattletraps arrayed all around it -- actually showed up. in a daze you handed over your worldly possessions -- all three of them -- to a valet with impeccable manners, and climbed up out of the wagie nightmare into high orbit around your homeworld. the mercenary psion aboard, a preening Usukwinti with her very own luxury suite, tore a bleeding hole in the spacetime metric, and five hundred hopeful souls dove through towards fancied salvation. "sure," you thought to yourself as you slipped into your sleek new nanotech environment suit, itself worth more than the sum total of your earnings on Flame of Unyielding Purification, "life won't be easy -- but damn it, it'll [!mean] something out there."

a free life on the wild frontier with a nation of comrades to have your back, with the best tech humans can make, fresh, clean water that isn't laced with compliance serum, and -- best of all -- never having to worry about paying rent again. it was too good to be true, you mused.

clearly, the terrorists who blew up your ship agreed.

you're still not certain what happened. all you know for sure is that transport was carrying more than just people. in those last hectic moments, you caught a glimpse of something -- maybe machine, maybe artwork, and [!definitely] ancient beyond measure. you've seen abhuman artifacts before in museums, of course; in fact, thanks to a childhood fascination, you can still name all the Elder Races and the Forevanished Ones off the top of your head.

you have no [!idea] what that [!thing] was or who in the sublimated [!fuck] could possibly have made it.

but one thing is for certain: your ship wasn't the only thing it ripped open when it blew. because when you woke up in your tiny escape pod beyond the furthest edge of the Reach, circling Farthest Shadow in a suicide orbit, you discovered yourself transformed into something impossible. a contradiction in terms.

a human psion.

for years beyond counting, the Starlit species -- three of whom yet live and deign once every so often to notice the Lesser Races -- have held the galaxy in sway through their monopoly on psionic power. of all the Thinking Few, only they are free to wander the distant stars at whim, heedless of the lightspeed barrier. there are no mechanisms for FTL travel or reactionless drive without that innate power, and, they assured us, psionic channels are fixed in the soul. your species either has the power or it doesn't.

[!liars], all of them.

are there other survivors? have they been similarly changed? what was that artifact and who were those terrorists? important questions, all, but they pale in comparison with the most important one:

how the fuck are you going to survive the next 24 hours?

## engine
starlit is developed against a bleeding-edge version of minetest. it definitely won't work with anything older than v5.7, and ideally you should build directly from master.

starlit is best used with a patched version of minetest, though it is compatible with vanilla. the recommended patches are:

* [>p11143 11143] - fix third-person view orientation

	p11143: https://github.com/minetest/minetest/pull/11143.diff

### shadows
i was delighted to see dynamic shadows land in minetest, and i hope the implementation will eventually mature. however, as it stands, there are severe issues with shadows that make them essentially incompatible with complex meshes like the Starlit player character meshes. for the sake of those who don't mind these glitches, Starlit does enable shadows, but i unfortunately have to recommend that you disable them until the minetest devs get their act together on this feature.

## gameplay
starlit is somewhat unusual in how it uses the minetest engine. it's a voxel game but not of the minecraft variety.

### controls
summon your Suit Interface by pressing the [*E] / [*Inventory] key. this will allow you to move items around in your inventory, but more importantly, it also allows you select or configure your Interaction Mode.

the top three buttons can be used to select (or deactivate) an Interaction Mode. an Interaction Mode can be configured by pressing the button immediately below. the active Interaction Mode controls the behavior of the mouse buttons when no item is selected in the hotbar.

the modes are:
 * [*Fabrication]: use your suit's onboard nanotech to directly manipulate matter in the world.
 ** [*Left Button] / [*Punch]: activate your primary nano program. by default this activates your nanoshredder, reducing the targeted object to monatomic powder and storing the resulting elements in your suit for use with the Matter Compiler
 ** [*Right Button] / [*Place]: activate your secondary nano program. by default, if your suit compiler can generate sufficiently large objects, creates a block of the configured type directly in the world without having to build it by hand
 * [*Psionics]: wield the awesome, if illicitly obtained, power of mind over matter
 ** [*Left Button] / [*Punch]: perform your selected Primary Power
 ** [*Right Button] / [*Place]: perform your selected Secondary Power
 * [*Weapon]: military-grade suits have built-in hardpoints for specialized weapon systems that draw directly on your suit battery for power (and in the most exotic cases, your psi reserve)
  ** [*Left Button] / [*Punch]: fire your primary weapon
  ** [*Right Button] / [*Place]: fire your offhand weapon / summon your shield

to use a tool, select it in the hotbar. even if an Interaction Mode is active, the tool will take priority. press [*Left Button] / [*Punch] to use the tool on a block; for instance, to break a stone with a jackhammer. to configure a tool or use its secondary functions, if any, press [*Right Button] / [*Place].

hold [*Aux1] to activate your selected Maneuver. by default this is Sprint, which will consume stamina to allow you to run much faster. certain suits offer the Flight ability, which allows slow, mid-range flight. you can also unlock the psionic ability Lift, which allows very rapid flight but consumes psi at a prodigious rate.

you can only have one Maneuver active at a time, whether this is a Psi Maneuver (consuming psi), a Suit Maneuver (consuming battery), or a Body Maneuver (consuming stamina). Maneuvers are activated in their respective panel.

### psionics
there are four types of psionic abilities: Manual, Maneuver, Ritual, and Contextual.

you can assign two Manual abilities at any given time and access them with the mouse buttons in Psionics mode.

you can select a Psi Maneuver in the Psionics panel and activate it by holding [*Aux1].

a Ritual is triggered directly from the psionics menu. as the name implies, these are complex, powerful abilities that require large amounts of Psi and time to meditate before they trigger, and any interruption will cancel the ability (though it will not restore any lost psi). the most famous Ritual is of course Conjoin Metric, which Starlit astropaths use in conjunction with powerful amplifiers to perform long-distance FTL jumps -- but without centuries of dedication to the art, the best you can hope for if you manage to learn this storied power is to move yourself a few kilometers.

a Contextual ability is triggered in a specific situation, usually by interacting with a certain kind of object. Contextual abilities often require specialized equipment, to the point that many Starlit practitioners maintain their own Psionics Lab.
