Existence

The game's Venus: a world under ninety-two atmospheres of carbon dioxide at 737 K, and the most hostile place a ship can reach.

The numbers

These are the figures the map's card shows when you hold your finger on Existence, plus the two speeds that decide what a flight there costs. Low orbit speed is how fast you must be going, sideways, to stay up just above the surface. Escape speed is how fast you must be going to leave altogether. Sphere of influence is how far Existence's pull reaches before something bigger takes over.

Stationary orbit is the height where one trip round takes exactly one of the world’s days, so a ship there hangs over the same spot on the ground. See Stationary orbits.

What it is made of

What the world is built from. It is not something a ship measures, but it is why the ground looks and behaves as it does — an ice moon takes an impact differently from an iron one.

The air

Ninety-six per cent carbon dioxide, and hot enough at the surface to melt lead. The temperature falls fast on the way up — 8 K for every kilometre, the steepest lapse rate anywhere — so the survivable part of the flight is the top of the air, not the bottom of it.

Pressure falls off as you climb: every 11,229 m of height, there is half as much air around you. A Barometer reads that fall directly, and a Thermometer reads the cooling beside it — 8 K for every kilometre, until the air bottoms out at 180 K (−93 °C) and stops getting colder.

What the air is made of

The mix changes with height. Each column is a measured level; between two of them the game blends one into the other, and above the top one there is nothing left to breathe. A Mass Spectrometer reads this table itself: its figure is the mean molar mass of the mix where the reading is taken, and beside it the line names the biggest gases it found. See the Mass Spectrometer.

Clouds

Cloud decks stand at fixed heights and are drawn wherever you fly. You climb through them on the way up and see them from above afterwards. A cloud is drawn in front of your ship: inside a thick one you lose sight of it until you fly out, so pick your way round the big ones. Each deck mixes several kinds of cloud — sheets, lenses, rows of small cloudlets, wisps, hooks and veils — drawn in this world's own colour.

The ground

Volcanic, and violent with it: the shield volcanoes throw the ground more than three kilometres either side of its mean, and the rift canyons sit 800 m below the datum.

Where is the band's place round the world, in degrees from the world's own 0°, running out to ±180° on the far side. Typical height is where that biome's ground sits against the datum the map measures altitude from, and roughness is how far it wanders either side of that.

On the map Existence is drawn from a painted picture, and the six biomes are its six sectors, 60° each: the pale Shield Volcanoes just before 0° and the folded Tessera Highlands just after it, the bright Sulphur Flats beyond those, the dark Rift Canyons, the Ashen Plains and the Scorch Basins with their fissures round the far side. The colour under you as you come down is the colour of that sector.

Named landforms

Existence's ground is drawn from a table of named features rather than noise alone, as every world you can stand on is. Where you come to rest is recorded by name, which is why some achievements ask for a summit, a crater floor or a plateau rather than just a landing. All 9 of them are below, in order round the world, from the far side back to 0° and on round.

Where is the landform's place round the world, and height is how far it stands above (or below) the ground around it. Flat ground is the level run it promises — the width of the ledge, floor or summit a ship can set down on.

Getting there

The air is the problem, not the pull. Pressure at the surface is ninety times Earth's and the atmosphere stands more than three times as tall, so a ship sent down is not coming back. Two achievements pay for going anyway: Existence Is Pain for reaching its sphere of influence, and Ninety-Two Atmospheres for a pressure reading deep inside the air.

Existence has no line of its own on the Δv ladder. The nearest figure is its own planet's orbit. Getting down from there and back up again costs about its escape speed — 3,180 m/s — each way on top of that, less whatever its air takes off the descent.

What it pays

Every place nobody has measured before pays discovery the first time an instrument reads it, and how much depends on how far from home the world is. Existence counts as 3.28 against Earth's 1.00, so every place on it pays that many times what the same place at home would.

A place is a world, a band of altitude and — on the ground — the biome you are standing in, and each instrument surveys each place separately. Science and readings explains the whole of it.

What it pays out for

Existence is named by 2 achievements: Existence Is Pain, Ninety-Two Atmospheres.

The full list, with what each one pays, is on the Achievements reference.