Field Manual

The Control Chair

The Ancients' command seat. Sit in it with the gene and it wakes: it launches drones, dials nearby gates and opens an archive of everything the Ancients knew.

Waking it up

• The chair stands on a round platform two blocks across. Right-click the front half to sit down.
• It wakes only for someone with the Ancient gene, and only while it has power.
• Its back half is a panel for a Zero Point Module: right-click it with one to seat it, or with an empty hand to take it out. Without a module the chair is dead.

Awake, it turns with you and leans back, and a glass display shows what is left in the module, how many drones remain, what the chair draws, and every key it answers to.

Drones

The chair holds a few thousand drones. There are no more to be had: every drone sent is spent.

Drones fly around blocks, never through them, and never break them. They hunt monsters, leave friends alone, and one that strikes nothing drops where it gives up.

The archive and the star map

Press H in the awake chair and its display lists the archive. The wheel walks the list, left click goes in, right click comes back out. Titles lead to fields, fields to entries, entries to scenes; choosing a scene projects it in front of the chair. Press H again during a scene to stop it.

The archive holds the galaxies as star maps you can dive into (down to the planets around the Sun), every element of the periodic table, and scenes from physics the way the Ancients saw it. Dimmed titles hold nothing yet; some will not open at all for now.

Dialing from the chair

Press G for the gate panel. The chair dials the one gate within 64 blocks of it: choose Dial, then an address, and the chair sends its light to the gate, which locks the whole address in a few seconds. The chair's module pays for the wormhole. With more than one gate in reach the chair cannot tell which is meant and dials none. The same panel closes a wormhole the gate opened.

What it draws