Reading Stars and Worlds

The chart tells you two different things about a stellar system. Class is what each star is: Red Giant, Yellow Star, Red Dwarf, Orange K-type, Blue-white Hot Star, White Dwarf, Neutron Star, or Black Hole. Multiplicity is how many stars share the system. “Binary” is an arrangement, not a kind of star.

Nebulae are listed separately under system features. They are dust and gas around the system, never a stellar class.

You can read much of a star before the scanner finishes naming it:

• Red giants are broad ember-red discs with long red prominences. Eos is the local example, and its warm light stains the bright edge of every world around it.
• Yellow and orange stars are the quiet baseline: broad gold or amber convection cells turn slowly beneath a compact, irregular corona. Their prominences are occasional accents rather than a permanent firework. Red dwarfs are smaller and darker; blue-white stars burn hotter and throw colder light.
• White dwarfs are compact exposed remnants: a hard, nearly overexposed blue-white bead inside a thin, optically transparent remnant halo. That cool glow is scattered light around the star, not an atmosphere; sunlike spikes, prominences, and deep ejecta are almost absent.
• Blue supergiants are rare O/B-type exemplars rather than another chart class: a compact blue-white furnace under fast differential shear, asymmetric flare fans, and a broad wind-torn corona. Their one-sided violence separates them from the steadier shared Blue-white Hot Star at a glance.
• Our Wolf-Rayet exemplar represents a transitional WN/C spectrum: an exposed hot helium core inside a dense continuous wind carrying both nitrogen- and carbon-bright emission structure. That fast inner wind piles into one slower irregular outer bubble wall, torn open by ruptures and leaking wisps. The wall glows red-orange where older hydrogen- and nitrogen-bearing ejecta are ionized, even though the exposed star and its present wind remain blue-white. Other Wolf-Rayet families emphasize different lines—and some retain hydrogen—but all read through extreme mass loss rather than a quiet symmetric corona.
• Carbon-rich evolved giants are slower and less orderly: dark lanes and incandescent cells boil through an optically thick red envelope while old mass-loss fronts drift around its ragged outer limb.
• Neutron stars and pulsars are smaller still: an intense central bead between two narrow opposed beams. The lower, receding lobe passes behind the broken pulsar-wind plane while the upper, approaching lobe crosses in front; the central bead occludes both. On a busy canopy, look for the o|o read. The Marches is the charted example past Karda — a frontier warzone under a pulsar, not a soft sun. Bastion is a bare rock world and Telen an ice remnant — post-collapse crusts, not garden planets; the militia and pirates fight in the cold between lighthouse sweeps.
• In a close multiple, wisps of corona occasionally float loose from the bigger, cooler star and stream across the gap — soft drifting filaments peeling from the donor’s outer corona and narrowing as the hot compact companion draws them under its own surface. It is a proximity effect, not a permanent web and not a lane. Karda’s blue-white companion vampires its yellow primary this way.
• Rarely, a star throws a deeper ejection: a curling arc that spirals out well past its usual corona and flares before fading. Sparse, and always the same hue as the star underneath it — just farther, and stranger.

At close range, a sun that reaches the edge of your canopy can leave a faint optical bloom and a pair of soft reflections across the substrate. They remain anchored to the sun and fade when it falls well outside the canopy. Multiple suns share one brightness limit, so a close binary does not wash out flight data. This response is a flight cue only; the chart suppresses it completely.

World classes are equally literal:

• Rock means airless. The crust, craters, and geology turn together as one body. There is no cloud deck and no atmospheric rim.
• Toxic World means the old “moving rock” warning made honest: a harsh mineral surface under independently moving corrosive cloud layers. Karda’s Rim is the charted example.
• Terrestrial, Water, Ice, Gas, and Lava Worlds keep their own surface and atmospheric signatures. A visible atmosphere has a narrow limb whose color is nudged by the system’s actual starlight; it should never become a white bloom that hides the planet’s own palette.
• Surface and weather do not share one clock. Cloud decks can overtake the terrain beneath them or run against it entirely. Uranus turns retrograde; Neptune’s body turns prograde beneath much faster retrograde equatorial weather, so its blue bands visibly shear the other way.

When in doubt, trust silhouette before color: solid cratered disc means bare rock, sliding upper layers mean weather, and a compact blue-white core inside a broken rotating wind plane—with narrow opposed lighthouse beams—means a neutron-star pulsar. The faint diagonal cross is optical glare; the longer misaligned pair marks the magnetic poles and can cut clear across your view when you enter its system.

The sky behind those bodies belongs to the system too. A nebula is not a random filter laid over every jump: each charted system has its own fixed cloud density, scale, turbulence, drift, and opacity. Eos keeps a calm green haze, Karda a broader dusty-orange flow, Veil fine violet turbulence, and the Marches a sparse cool wash under its pulsar. Returning to a system returns to the same pattern; the field does not reroll between visits.