A lonely space trading game

You never see space. You are holding the only thing that can hear it.

CARBON is a handheld instrument linked to a pilot working somewhere a long way off. You do not fly the ship. You read the markets, tune the band, follow the traffic, and work out what is happening from the pattern of it. It rewards curiosity, not reflexes.

No password. You get a link, it opens your device, that is the whole of it.

Or look around first · no account, nothing saved, the radio still works

The device

Built as if somebody made it in 1964, on a planet that spent its century on ergonomics instead of spectacle.

Perforated metal, brushed aluminium, off-white plastic. A home button and two dials. Everything on it can be done with a thumb while you are holding a coffee, which is roughly the design brief.

Market: What this place has, what it wants, and what that says about what happened upstream.
Radio: A band with things hiding on it. Faction carriers, salvage crews, repeats nobody claims.
Map: A diagram, not a picture. What connects to what, and what is stopping you.
Sym: A proxy that pilots, trades and interprets. It never says I, and it is never certain.

The CARBON device showing the flight deck: a list of sections in monospaced type on an off-white panel, with a red home button and two dials on a brushed steel strip.

Flight deck · Anchorfall Hub, Khepri Drift

Sound

The galaxy is something you listen to before it is something you understand.

Every faction sits somewhere on the Harmonic Compass: faith against logic on one axis, goodwill against ill-will on the other. Where they sit is what they sound like. The tool is open, and it runs in the browser.

Open the Harmonic Compass

CARBON is in development. It is being built slowly and mostly at night, which suits it.

If you want to know when there is more of it, say so.