Tideglass Studio
The eight stages

Beyond the eight stages · LV 8 to 10

The Long After

Gains: Awakening · Reaching World · Reach

After Living World come three more levels. Your world takes its name at LV 8 and learns to reach by LV 10.

Given enough time, a living world reaches past its own sky.

A living world glowing with golden city lights on its night side.

Deep time

Life, once it takes, is stubborn. A living world can stay alive for billions of years, long enough for its small lives to look up, name the stars, and wonder how far the dark goes. You have all the time there is, and for an age, you simply live.

The bright edge of a vast world, with a smaller world and a moon hanging in the dark above it.

Reaching into the dark

Then the story changes hands. A world that has gathered everything near it learns to reach for what is far. Not to wait for the cold to deliver, the way you once did, but to take, to draw distant worlds across the dark and carry their riches home, and to grow larger still.

A red giant star looming over a distant silhouetted world in the far future.

Larger still

Far enough into the long after, even a star is not forever. Your own sun will swell into a red giant and the inner worlds will end in its light. But a world that learned to reach does not simply wait for that. It has already become something the universe rarely makes, and the dark, for once, makes room.

True things

  • Earth has stayed continuously habitable for more than 3.5 billion years.
  • In about 5 billion years the Sun will swell into a red giant and likely swallow the inner planets.
  • In Accretion, The Long After runs from LV 8 to LV 10: your world awakens at LV 8, its gravity tears moons loose at LV 9, and at LV 10 it fires Reach.