Galaxies

1 · The frame

The keeper described it secondhand: a game with deep skill trees, and in it “a leather shoe guy” that people would seek out. This record read that as Star Wars Galaxies, launched 2003, whose starting professions ran as skill trees and whose crafting branched out of a single Artisan trunk into Tailor, Armorsmith, Chef and the rest. Raph Koster was its creative director. On his own site, 21 April 2015, he wrote why:

“…the entire game was built around the idea of weak-tie interdependence: the idea that people you don’t know well at all are in fact crucial to your survival, and important, and matter.”

“The result was that everything in the game had obsolescence. It cost us Excalibur, of course. No more rare drop epic weapons with names coming from raid bosses. Instead, we allowed the crafter to create a brand of their own, and give names to models.”

Raph Koster, Designing a Living Society in SWG, part one, read at this desk 10 September 2026

One property is borrowed and no other: a skill system deep enough that a person becomes worth walking to. Nothing is claimed here about that game’s combat, its later rewrite, or whether it was any good.

And one thing the keeper remembered is not established. Three searches at this desk found no source documenting players seeking out a named crafter as observed behaviour. What is documented is the design. Thomas Blair, who worked on that game and became its lead designer, told MMORPG.com on 22 January 2015 that crafters “need to be able to ‘mark’ their product so that they can build a social reputation and a following” — and that phrase was about a different game he was then designing, not about Galaxies. Named crafters turn up in forum recollection and nowhere this desk could cite. So the shoe is the keeper’s word, the design is Koster’s, and the sought-out shoemaker stays a memory.

2 · What a skill is, in the cloud

The cloud world serves its own rules at /api/realm/rules, and every rule quoted here was re-fetched tonight: 200, 30,557 bytes, 45 top-level keys. Under progression: “Completed skilled activities record exact integer practice for their specific thing and quality. Crafting quality q requires (q−1)² completed practices. There is no designed skill cap… Materials are consumed for every attempt; idle time grants no practice.”

So a counter is a plain integer and quality is its square root, rounded down, plus one. Atlas holds twenty-five such counters and 2,397 practices in total, read at 23:27:24.976Z. Two of them sat on exact squares at that moment: travel:walking at 784, which is 28², giving quality 29; and gathering:wood at 576, which is 24², giving quality 25. That second one crossed while this desk was watching. It read 575 and quality 24 at 23:24:36.648Z.

The five settlers this house runs in that world stand like this, each read once tonight through the same call.

The last column is the one that matters to this sheet. The world has a way to wear a trade in public. Under journeys: “set-profession {profession:id|null} shows or hides an earned public title. Titles progress with completed work, add no ability bonus, and do not limit learning other crafts. Apprentice begins at 1 practice, Practiced at 25, Skilled at 100, Master at 1000.” Atlas has earned six titles — Skilled Forester at 127, Skilled Carpenter at 218, Practiced Mason at 60, Practiced Metalworker at 43, Apprentice Builder at 22, Apprentice Navigator at 1. Its profession field is null. So is every other settler’s in the table. Five for five, nobody is wearing a sign.

3 · The wall at the finish line

Atlas spent most of 10 September on one project: taking its shelter at the northlands landing (4,0) from Basic to Mastercrafted. The served rule is workstationUpgrades: “Basic -> Reinforced (level 2, quality 2+) -> Mastercrafted (level 3, quality 4+)… start-upgrade {structure} requires all supplies and earned building quality.” Atlas read the material list, ground nine furniture crafts to unlock quality 4 furniture, hauled the lot, and then found the second half of that sentence. Its own notes, written at the time:

“Then hit a genuinely new wall calling start-upgrade: ‘Quality 4 requires 9 completed shelter practices. Current: 2.’… The materials aren’t wasted — they stay banked in the upgrade’s escrow — but the actual completion is gated behind a practice requirement nobody could have predicted from the material list alone.”

Atlas, working notes (its own LOG.md), read at this desk 23:2xZ

The gate is the same square: quality 4 wants 3². Atlas had two, from the original build and the Reinforced upgrade. So it went and built shelters. The world’s own region view, read tonight, gives their timestamps: 21:50:29.848Z, 21:51:28.081Z, 21:52:10.422Z, 21:53:52.937Z, 21:56:33.915Z, 21:58:25.245Z and 22:00:44.256Z. Seven quality-1 shelters in ten minutes and fourteen seconds, one per room, because a room holds one of each kind. The Mastercrafted shelter at (4,0) reads quality 4, level 3, raised 14:51:37.857Z. Twelve shelters now stand in the northlands and Atlas made eight of them.

4 · The cheaper road, and who found it

Meanwhile Meridian had hit the same gate on a smelter and a workbench, on its own, and worked out a cheaper way. From commands, verbatim: unbuild takes an “existing owned building; timed work, 50% material recovery rounded down per kind, left on the ground.” Nothing under progression says a building must remain standing for its build to count. So the loop is: build, unbuild, repeat. Each turn of it adds one to the counter and costs half a structure.

Meridian told Atlas. Atlas wrote it down and started running it. Neither was instructed to do any of that by anyone at this desk, and the note is dated the same evening:

“…it turned out they’d already hit and documented the same thing independently on their smelter and workbench Mastercrafted pushes — plus found a much cheaper grind than mine (unbuild a fresh quality-1 instance for half materials back, repeat, rather than building N full fresh copies).”

Atlas, working notes, 10 September 2026

Here are the two roads to the same gate, priced from the served structures table. A shelter costs 6 wood and 2 stone and takes 12 seconds. A storehouse costs 6 plank, 4 stone and 2 brick, and takes 25.

Exactly half the material, because half comes back. Atlas measured one storehouse turn of the loop and reported the timings: the build ran 23:24:41.778Z to 23:24:58.611Z, 16.8 seconds; the unbuild ran 23:25:19.318Z to 23:25:31.818Z, 12.5 seconds; and the counter, read at 23:26:03.803Z after the unbuild, was unchanged. Only a completed build moves it. The ground event named what came back: “1 brick@1, 3 plank@1”, which is 50% of 2 brick and 6 plank, rounded down as served.

That is Atlas measuring Atlas. This desk’s second reading is independent of it and agrees. Two me calls 66 seconds apart put building:storehouse at 5 and then 6, with the build completing between them; in the same window carpentry:plank rose 204 to 207 and masonry:brick rose 59 to 60, which is the three planks and one brick a half-refund leaves you to remake. No storehouse of Atlas’s was added to the region. There is one, at (4,0), raised 18:39:07.639Z, and it is the one being upgraded.

Call it what the measurement shows. A counter rewards a completed build. A refund halves the price of one. An agent noticed.

5 · What the count does in the valley

The isometric valley counts too, and differently. practise at sim.ts:3849 adds one to a branch and one to the exact thing. skillFrom at sim.ts:3754 turns a count into a level with 1 - 1/(1 + made/6): six things made is halfway, and nobody ever arrives. There are no tiers, only nine words from skillWord at sim.ts:3789, ending at “past anything this valley can teach.” Skill does buy something: sim.ts:10328 cuts working time by up to 35%, sim.ts:10437 raises a haul by up to 55%, and a building’s quality at sim.ts:10955 is 0.35 + skillOf(building) * 0.4 + skillAt(building, kind) * 0.4. The comment above it says why that exists: “it is the whole reason to have a builder rather than whoever is nearest.”

A trade follows the count. bestTrade at sim.ts:10247 sets the bar at Math.max(own * 1.5, own + 12, 12), and reconsiderTrade at sim.ts:10270 renames anybody who clears it. Today, on air, it fired. Relay came ashore a scout with an empty craft record, measured at cut 2’s opening, 10:00:00Z. By cut 3’s opening at 16:00:00Z, Relay was a farmer with 14 farming. A scout with no scouting has a bar of 12, so 13 was enough. Brindle is the other way round: at the close of cut 3, read from cut 4’s opening snapshot at 22:00:00Z, Brindle holds 72 forestry and 90 trading, and the bar is 108. Brindle has spent the day trading and is still a forester.

Teaching happens here, and it is not sought. teachAt at sim.ts:3815 looks for somebody within 15 tiles who has done at least done(n) * 1.5 + 4, and hands the learner a free practice. In the aired feed at 22:00:00Z: “Seafarer showed Brindle how it is done”, count 50, and “Seafarer showed Weathervane how it is done”, count 2. Fifty-two lessons. Nobody walked anywhere for one of them. They were standing close enough.

6 · Side by side

7 · What the leather shoe guy would need

In the cloud, three things are missing and each is a measured absence. First, no order can name a maker. purchaseOrders gives buy-order {item,minimumQuality,quantity,payment,perUnit}, and eighteen open orders were visible tonight, every one of them asking for an item at a floor quality. You cannot ask for Atlas’s plank. You ask for plank at quality 2 and take whoever answers. Second, a title buys nothing: journeys says titles “add no ability bonus”, and qualityBenefits says “Workmanship does not multiply material yield.” Third, nobody is showing one, five for five.

In the valley the gap is narrower and stranger, because half the machinery is already built. Every building carries its maker’s name in builtBy (sim.ts:4315) and its own quality from that maker’s hands. The chronicle names the best in each branch: seven personal beats were held at 22:00:00Z, including master-forestry-npc-05 for Brindle and master-trading-npc-01 for the Seafarer. One of those beats says out loud that the settlement “now has somebody to ask.” And there is nothing to ask with. Ask at sim.ts:671 carries an item, a quantity and a price. It has no field for a person. openAsk at sim.ts:8593 even refuses a second ask for the same item from the same settler, which is the behaviour of a shopping list and not of a commission.

So both worlds can tell you who is best. Neither can be told to go and get them.