Game Overview

In one breath, for players: Taurion is a giant shared sci-fi world where you build and command a fleet of vehicles. You pick one of three factions (teams), then mine the planet for ore, refine that ore into building materials, dig up ancient artefacts and turn them into blueprints, construct your own vehicles and buildings, trade with other players, and fight rival factions for territory and glory. Combat runs by itself — you decide where your vehicles go and what gear they carry, and the game fights the battles for you. Everything you do is a permanent, public action recorded on a blockchain (think of it as a tamper-proof shared save file every player reads from), so the world keeps running even when you log off and no central company owns your stuff.

This is the end-to-end explanation of Taurion, a fully on-chain real-time strategy / sandbox MMO built on the Xaya platform, running on Polygon (Xaya is the blockchain-gaming framework; Polygon is the public blockchain it runs on). It is written for two audiences: players who want to understand how the game works without ever reading code, and game designers / client developers building a brand-new AAA UX from scratch. It explains the core fantasy, the gameplay loop, the faction system, how every subsystem connects, and what a player can actually do — with a link into the precise, source-cited detail doc for each topic.

What is the "GSP"? The Game State Processor (tauriond) is the program that reads everyone's moves off the blockchain and computes the resulting state of the world. Because every player's computer runs the same GSP rules over the same moves, everyone agrees on what happened — there is no central server that can be cheated.

Single source of truth. All rules come from the Game State Processor (GSP) C++ in the GSP source tree (this repository; the on-chain engine). The official web client supplies human display names and shows which APIs the UI consumes. Every nontrivial claim in the detail docs is cited as file:line. Display names are the ones shown in the game UI; codes are normative on-chain.

Two currencies, never confuse them.

• WCHI — the real on-chain Polygon coin (ERC-20). Has market value. Used to pay for character creation (to the dev address) and to mint vCHI (burned to the burn address). (Economy & Accounts §1, §5.)
• vCHI / "Cubit" — the in-game soft currency, minted only by burning WCHI in the burnsale. Pays for all in-game services (refining, crafting, repair, DEX fees). Stored in account.balance. Internally an int64 of satoshi (1 coin = COIN = 100,000,000). (Economy & Accounts §1; database/amount.hpp:31.)

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1. Core fantasy#

You command a fleet of vehicles in a vast, shared, persistent world built on a grid of hexagons (a hex world — the map is tiled with six-sided cells, so vehicles move between neighbouring hexes). Every vehicle is piloted by a "character" (the pilot / avatar) that is always inside a vehicle (Vehicles; src/spawn.cpp:116-152). You belong to one of three warring factions (teams), mine the planet for ore, refine it into materials, reverse-engineer ancient artefacts into blueprints, construct buildings and a fleet of combat / hauling / scout vehicles, trade on a per-building order-book DEX (a decentralised exchange — a marketplace where players post buy and sell orders that the game matches automatically, like a stock exchange for in-game items), and fight rival factions for territory and fame (your kill-glory score, gained by destroying enemies; Combat, Economy & Accounts §6). Combat is fully automatic and deterministic — you position and equip; the engine resolves the rest, and every node computes the identical outcome (Combat). Everything is on-chain: each action is a Xaya move (a small chunk of JSON attached to a blockchain transaction), re-run identically by every node so the result is never in dispute.

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2. The gameplay loop#

                        ┌─────────────── BURNSALE (WCHI → vCHI) ───────────────┐
                        │                                                       │
   spawn ─► prospect ─► mine ─► haul ─► refine ─► build ─► craft ─► fight ─► trade
     │         │         │       │        │         │        │        │        │
   pick a    find ore  fill    move    ore →     found &  blueprints vehicles  per-building
   faction   in a      cargo   cargo   materials finish   → copies → die,      order-book
   + create  region    from a  to a    (burn     a        → vehicles loot      DEX (escrow,
   pilots    (timed)   region  building vCHI)    building  & fitments drops    fees, history)

1. Spawn. Choose a faction (permanent), then pay 10 WCHI per character to the dev address to create pilots. Each new pilot spawns inside its faction's command centre in a free starter vehicle with one Light Rail Gun (lf gun) fitted. (Economy & Accounts §2, §5; src/spawn.cpp:116-152.)
2. Prospect. Drive a vehicle onto a region and run prospect (a timed ongoing op). On completion the region reveals a mineable ore + amount, and may drop an ancient artefact and/or a finite prospecting prize. (Prospecting & Mining.)
3. Mine. With the region prospected, run mine; every block the vehicle pulls a random yield of ore into cargo until the region is exhausted or cargo is full. (Prospecting & Mining §3.)
4. Haul. Move the loaded vehicle to a building and drop the ore into the building's inventory (transports carry up to 2.6 billion units). (Movement & the World; Moves Reference §5.10.)
5. Refine. In a building that offers refining (or with a Mobile Refinery fitment in the field), turn ore into refined materials, burning vCHI per step. (Services & Crafting §4; Items & Materials §3.)
6. Build. Found a foundation (fb) from cargo, then drop the full-building materials into it to auto-start construction; after the build time it becomes a finished building offering services and a DEX. (Buildings.)
7. Craft. Reverse-engineer artefacts into blueprint originals (bpo), optionally copy them into single-use copies (bpc), then construct vehicles and fitments from blueprints + materials (burning vCHI). (Services & Crafting §6-§8; Items & Materials §4-§5.)
8. Fight. Equip weapons/defence/utility fitments, position your vehicles, and the engine auto-targets and resolves combat every block. Kills transfer fame and drop loot. (Combat.)
9. Trade. Deposit items into a building and place bids/asks on its per-item DEX, or transfer items directly to another account inside the building. (Trading & the DEX.)

The loop is a flywheel: ore funds materials, materials + blueprints fund a fleet, a fleet enables territory/combat/hauling, combat creates scarcity (loot loss), scarcity drives trade, trade and prizes fund expansion.

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3. The faction system#

Three player factions plus a neutral one (database/faction.cpp, Game State Schema §2.4):

Faction facts that shape design (Buildings, Vehicles, Combat):

• Faction is permanent. Chosen once via a.init; it can never be changed (Moves Reference §3). It gates which vehicles/buildings/fitments you can build and which buildings you can enter.
• All three vehicle lines share identical base stats except equipment-slot layout. Red skews high slots (weapons), Blue skews mid slots (defence/control), Green skews low slots (utility/support). This is the only intrinsic mechanical asymmetry. (Vehicles §3.4.)
• Faction-locked fitments: Plasma Cannon (laser) & Vostock (selfdestruct) are Red; Tracking Disrupter (hitred) & Targeting System Disruptor (mentecon) are Blue; Tritanian Plating (plating) & Zerkozis (lowhpboost) are Green (Items & Materials §4A.2).
• Enemies = different faction; friendlies = same faction. Ancient buildings are enemies to everyone. Combat auto-targets the closest enemy (Combat §2).
• Starter safe zones (radius 300 around each faction's command centre) are no-combat and impassable to outsiders, but give their owners 3× travel speed inside (Movement & the World §4). Founding buildings is forbidden inside any safe zone. Prospecting within an L1 distance of 1250 hexes of a faction spawn (L1 = hex-grid step distance, the number of single-hex moves between two cells) is a low-prize zone (×0.55 prize odds) (Prospecting & Mining §2.9).
• Service fee is faction-blind: anyone inside a building can use its services; only the outputs are faction-filtered. (Buildings §5.3.)

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4. Systems map (how everything connects)#

            WCHI (real)                         ┌──────────── Xaya names = accounts ────────────┐
                │ burn                           │  faction(perm) · balance(vCHI) · kills · fame  │
                ▼                                └──────────────────────────────────────────────┘
           BURNSALE ──────────► vCHI balance ◄──── transfers (vc.t) ──── other accounts
                                     │  ▲                          ▲
                  pay 10 WCHI→dev    │  └── service fee / DEX owner fee (to building owners)
                       │             │
                       ▼             ├──► refining base cost ─┐
   CHARACTER (pilot) ──┘             ├──► reveng/copy/build  ─┤  all BURN vCHI (sinks)
        │ always inside a            └──► DEX base 3% fee     ─┘
        ▼
     VEHICLE (cargo/speed/HP/slots/mining/prospecting)
        │  + FITMENTS (weapons / defence / utility; complexity & slot budget)
        │
   ┌────┴───────────────┬──────────────┬───────────────┬───────────────┐
   ▼                    ▼              ▼               ▼               ▼
 MOVEMENT           PROSPECT/MINE    COMBAT          SERVICES        DEX (per building)
 hex world,         regions →        auto-target,    refine, fix,    bids/asks/transfer,
 waypoints,         ore + artefacts  damage, fame,   reveng, copy,   escrow, fees,
 obstacles,         + prizes         loot drops      construct       trade history
 safe zones             │                │               │               │
                        ▼                ▼               ▼               ▼
                   ORE/ARTEFACTS ─► REFINE ─► MATERIALS ─► CRAFT ─► VEHICLES/FITMENTS/BUILDINGS
                                                              ▲                    │
                                                     blueprints (bpo/bpc) ◄── reverse-engineer artefacts

 Time base: 1 tick = 1 Polygon block. Timed actions (prospect, repair, copy,
 construct, building construction, config update) are "ongoing operations"
 keyed to a completion block height.  (see: Block Lifecycle)

Key connective rules a new client must internalise:

• Every action is a move; there is no "submit move" RPC. Moves go on-chain via the XayaAccounts.move(...) contract; the GSP RPC is read-only (state + pending mempool + stateless map/path helpers). (RPC & REST API.)
• One game tick per block. All durations are in blocks; block height is the universal clock. (Block Lifecycle.)
• Per-block order is consensus-critical: moves → combat/kills → ongoings → mining → movement → enter-buildings → target-finding. Combat resolves first, so a "busy" character can die before its ongoing completes. (Block Lifecycle §1.)
• Buildings are the hubs: services, the DEX, item storage, refit/vehicle-swap, and spawn all happen inside buildings. Foundations cannot host services or trade. (Buildings, Services & Crafting, Trading & the DEX.)
• Loss is real: on-map vehicle death always drops cargo (and 20% per fitment), destroying the vehicle; building destruction drops only ~30% of contents. (Combat §7.)

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5. Glossary — display name ↔ internal code#

5.1 Ores (raw resources) — Items & Materials §2#

5.2 Refined materials — Items & Materials §3#

5.3 Artefacts — Items & Materials §5#

5.4 Vehicle classes (role suffix) — Vehicles#

Vehicle code = <faction prefix> <role suffix>, e.g. rv st, bv l, gv vla. Base stats are identical per role across factions; only slot layout differs.

5.5 Building classes (class code) — Buildings#

Building type = <faction prefix> <class code> for player-buildable types (e.g. r cc, g r, b vb); ancient/neutral types have no prefix.

5.6 Fitment families (29) — Items & Materials §4A#

Fitment code = <tier> <family>, tier ∈ lf (Light) / mf (Medium) / hf (Heavy) / vhf (Very Heavy). 104 fitment items total. Slot ∈ high/mid/low.

5.7 Blueprints & prizes#

• Blueprints are auto-generated per blueprintable item: <item> bpo (original, reusable) and <item> bpc (copy, single-use), e.g. rv s bpo, lf gun bpc. (Items & Materials §4.)
• Prizes are auto-generated "<name> prize" items (e.g. "cash prize"), partner- game collectibles won by prospecting. Display names are the ones shown in the game UI; the codes are what appears on-chain. (Prospecting & Mining §2.9; Economy & Accounts §8.)

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6. Player actions — master list#

Every action a player can take, the move/RPC that performs it, and where the exact schema, validation, costs and edge cases live. Unless noted, the on-chain move is a top-level key inside the Xaya move object; the GSP processes keys in a fixed order (Moves Reference §1).

6.1 Account & economy#

6.2 Movement & world#

6.3 Resources#

6.4 Building & crafting (services)#

Services run under the s array inside a building; preview with getserviceinfo.

6.5 Buildings you own#

6.6 Trading (DEX, per building)#

6.7 Combat (no direct action)#

Combat takes no player move — it is automatic. The player influence is indirect: where the vehicle is, what is fitted, whether it is in a building or safe zone (both grant immunity). See Combat for targeting, damage, fame, death/loot.

6.8 Reading state (client / RPC)#

All reads go through the GSP JSON-RPC (read-only): getcharacters, getbuildings, getaccounts, getregions/getbootstrapdata, getgroundloot, getongoings, getmoneysupply, getprizestats, gettradehistory, plus long-poll waitforchange / waitforpendingchange and stateless helpers (getregionat, getbuildingshape, encodewaypoints, findpath, getserviceinfo). Full catalog: RPC & REST API; state shapes: Game State Schema.

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7. Mainnet vs testnet/regtest (one-line summary)#

Game content (vehicle/fitment/building stats, recipes, map, safe zones) is shared across chains. The economic tuning differs on regtest/Ganache (and a few on testnet): construction/copy cost ×100 and time ×10, DEX base fee 10% vs 3%, building_update_delay 10 vs 120, prospection_expiry_blocks 100 vs 5000, region ore 10–20 vs 2M–100M, reveng base chance 1/1 vs 1/10, and a small 3-tier prize list. Mainnet GameStart fork activates at Polygon height 80,528,098 (src/forks.cpp:71); GSP genesis sync at 88,343,264 (src/logic.cpp:141-144). See each detail doc's "Mainnet vs testnet/regtest" section for exact values.

Note for designers: god_mode: true is set in the checked-in mainnet params.pb.text:31. As-built this enables admin teleport/build/gift/sethp commands on every chain, contradicting the unit test that asserts god mode is off on Chain::MAIN. Whether the released mainnet binary disables it is not determinable from source. See the consolidated Open questions in About & Open Questions.

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8. Where to go next#

Read About & Open Questions for the full index of detail docs and the consolidated list of Open questions (genuine ambiguities found across all docs that a designer must resolve). Each subsystem doc is exhaustive and source-cited; this overview is the map, those are the territory.