The Wayfarther Catalog — Established, Reluctantly

Institutional Notice — Founding Charter Filed The Wayfarther Catalog has been formally established by the Interstellar Survey Authority as a collectively maintained repository of known and suspected space. Staffing is underway. The archive room has been allocated but not yet furnished. We have purchased a potted plant for the Public Liaison Office. It is, at present, the most prepared member of the organization.

What This Will Be §0.1

Filed under: Institutional Purpose · Last amended: Just now, and probably again soon

The Wayfarther Catalog is — or will be, when we finish building the shelves — a collectively maintained repository of everything humanity finds, measures, names, suspects, loses, and occasionally hallucinates in the space beyond Charted Systems. We will accept survey data from licensed explorers, index it with what we believe to be reasonable accuracy, and make it available to anyone willing to read the disclaimers.

We do not explore. We are not brave. We are librarians with an unreasonable mandate and insufficient funding, and we intend to catalog infinity, which is to say we intend to fail at it with tremendous institutional commitment.

What you will do: pilot a ship into unmapped space, scan what you find, name it, document it, and bring it back. The Catalog pays in discovery credits. You spend those credits on ship modules from the Marketplace — rooms designed and furnished by other pilots. Your ship is your home. You carry it everywhere. Only the view from the airlock changes.

The Catalog's institutional motto will be "We Write It Down So You Don't Have To Remember." Our unofficial motto, already on order for the coffee mugs, is "At Least We Tried."

Active Pilots

∞

Systems (Uncataloged)

Frontier Cycles

—

Anomalies (Likely)

The Three Mandates §0.2

Ratified by the Founding Committee · Objections noted and filed

Mandate I

Discover

Millions of star systems. New Frontier sectors every few weeks, so there is always unmapped space to find. Discovery data is the currency of the Catalog. If you are the first to document a system, your name stays on it. Permanently. We merely file the paperwork.

Mandate II

Create

Your ship is built from modules designed by other pilots — quarters, galleys, observation lounges, workshops, each with its own character. Every time a design is copied, it changes a little. Words drift. Details shift. No two copies are quite the same. Some old copies are more interesting than the original. The Catalog considers this a feature.

Mandate III

Connect

As you travel, you leave things behind: fuel caches at jump points, navigation beacons, survey data that makes the next pilot's charts a little better. Frequently traveled routes become easier to fly. You will benefit from the work of pilots you never meet. They will benefit from yours. The universe fills with the evidence that someone was here before you and thought to leave something useful.

Institutional Timeline §0.3

Projected schedule · Subject to the usual forces: entropy, ambition, funding

Now

Charter Filed

The Catalog has been formally established. Core systems are under construction. This page exists, which is more than we had last week. The potted plant has been watered.

Phase I

Core Systems Online

Navigation, sensors, and docking systems. The minimum viable Catalog: you can fly somewhere, scan it, and come back with something to file.

Phase II

The Frontier Opens

First Frontier Cycle. New sectors to explore. The Marketplace opens for module trading. Copies begin to drift. Things get interesting.

Phase III

The Routes Remember

Fuel caches, nav beacons, shared survey data. Well-traveled routes become easier to fly. Derelict ships begin appearing where pilots ran out of luck.

Phase IV

Deep Space & Anomalous Zones

Permanent deep-space systems beyond the Frontier. Anomalous zones where the rules are different. The Catalog does not speculate on why. We just write it down.

Early Registration §0.4

The Pilot Licensing Office is not yet open · But we are keeping a list

The Catalog is not yet accepting survey data, as we have nowhere to put it. However, if you would like to be among the first pilots licensed when the Frontier opens, you may register your interest below. We will contact you when there is something to explore.

The void isn't going to catalog itself.

We know this because we asked. It declined. Something about lacking institutional capacity and a filing system. We sympathize, but the work remains. Space is large and our shelves are empty.