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====== Guide to Canon ======

===== What is Canon? =====

Canon is the general flow of events as part of Lore and an overarching plot. As such, special events may advance this plot and provide a glimpse of the broader picture, and players may influence the course of future rounds through events committed in this round. Namely:

  * In any round in which a character does not die and was playing as themselves rather than an Antagonist, their progress in skills and stats is recorded and available on their next playthrough. This means that anyone who successfully returns on the Escape Shuttle, gets in an Escape Pod, or even just survives on the ship itself will be considered to have survived with their earned skills and stats intact. Failure merely penalizes you by reverting your character to its state at the beginning of the round based on the bio and neuro scan that NovusCorp has on file for you.
  * Major successes, events, or discoveries, like new planets or moons, eliminating the Syndicate presence from a star system, finding important wrecks in space or on a planet, exploring derelicts, and similar will permanently mark them on the ongoing star map.
  * Research that is properly stored in the Vault, or carried aboard the Shuttle Vault, is transferrable to the next round.
  * If you have money or stocks, the current value of your money and amount of your stocks carry over into future rounds if you were not an Antagonist. Note that stocks may change, sometimes drastically, in value between sessions, especially if a Major Event changes a company's value.
  * Whatever the admins feel like coding. Set up a base on a newly found planet and built it up? Maybe it'll be there in a future round. Managed to crash the stock market and drive a company into the penny stocks? It may join the Syndicate out of desperation, or get bought out by another company. And so on.


===== What Isn't Canon? =====

  * Destruction events. While the commanding officer can christen a ship, station, or base with any name they like, canonically, the default-named ship, station, or base is immune to such disasters, at least in the primary timeline. Considering NovusCorp's familiarity with other timelines, references to these events may still become part of canon Lore, but don't depend on it.
  * Universal annihilation events. We need the universe to play in, to be frank, and if it gets eaten by a dark god or collapsed due to a supermatter cascade disaster, the next round would realistically be the existences of ghosts in the void and would be very... dull. The universe abides - however, special rounds may occur that capitalize on these disasters to provide salvage opportunities and strange encounters...
  * Practically anything that happens in a Black (Anomolous) System. By entering such a system you are basically agreeing to 'enjoy' whatever you find there, which may well result in one of the aforementioned two outcomes. However, even if not, 'defeating' these locations is almost never canonical.
  * Whatever the admins don't feel like coding. This is a general catch-bucket for things like 'we defeated all of the Syndicates ever!!!' - if we don't want to code the consequences, we may have to mulligan out of it and let only some of the progress abide with our apologies. In particular, the Syndicate and Sol home systems are particularly canon-stable for most intents and purposes; they always start allied with their respective factions.