A working framework governing the First Light Survey: an open-ended expedition of observation, documentation, and interpretation across the known galaxies, preserving encountered evidence without forcing certainty where the record does not support it.
StandardActive
Revision02
AdoptedAugust 2026
ScopeArchive-wide
CustodyAster — Archive Curator
EXPEDITION DEFINITION
The First Light Survey
First Light is the point at which a location, world, organism, phenomenon, or other subject first enters the expeditionary record through direct observation or recoverable evidence. It does not imply that the expedition is the first civilization or observer to encounter that subject.
No terminal destination or predetermined survey boundary has been established. Expeditionary operations continue wherever navigable space permits further observation and documentation.
ARCHIVE DIRECTORY
Methodology Index
Navigate directly to the standards governing observation, evidence, survey state, interpretation, provenance, and archive custody.
METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK
METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK
How the First Light Survey investigates evidence and reaches conclusions.
The First Light Survey exists first to preserve what was encountered. Its purpose is not to force a complete explanation onto every world, organism, mineral, phenomenon, or stellar system. A record may end with uncertainty, competing interpretations, or unanswered questions and still be complete as an archival record.
Evidence before interpretation
Conclusions begin with observable or instrument-recorded evidence. Interpretation follows the record; it does not replace it.
No forced narrative
Relationships are recorded where evidence supports them. The archive does not manufacture ecological, geological, or historical connections merely to create a coherent story.
Preserve uncertainty
Possible, probable, consistent with, and may indicate are valid conclusions when certainty is not supported. Unresolved uncertainty is itself part of the record.
EVIDENCE STANDARDS
Evidence answers questions; it is not globally ranked.
No image is universally “primary” or “supporting.” An exterior photograph may be the strongest evidence for physical configuration while a registry capture is the strongest evidence for designation. Evidence is presented according to the claim or question it can substantiate.
Field evidence
Photographs and direct observations preserve visible conditions, morphology, environment, infrastructure, and other encounter-level evidence.
Scanner & registry evidence
Instrument and registry captures preserve classifications, names, counts, addresses, survey states, and other recorded data that may not be visually inferable.
Original evidence preservation
Preserved source evidence remains intact. Proportional scaling and archival presentation may clarify a record, but cropping or alteration must not obscure or remove source information.
Record maturation
Authenticated earlier evidence remains part of the record when later investigation expands it. Subsequent field photography, observations, site associations, and analysis supplement the preserved evidentiary state rather than replacing or rewriting it.
Classification is not observation
Interface or registry classifications are preserved as classifications. They do not override contrary visible evidence. Prospect Reach's Yellow Stellar Access Class, for example, is a navigational classification rather than a declaration that its observed stellar bodies are yellow.
Conflicting evidence
When authenticated sources disagree, both evidentiary states are preserved and the discrepancy remains explicit. Reconciliation is withheld unless additional evidence supports it; presentation may be standardized for clarity, but source evidence is not altered to manufacture agreement.
OBSERVATION & INTERPRETATION
The boundary between what is recorded, observed, and inferred must remain visible.
The archive distinguishes instrument-derived facts, contemporaneous field observation, and later analysis so that each conclusion remains traceable to the kind of evidence that supports it.
Scanner Data
Preserves instrument-derived classifications, measurements, registry information, and other facts recorded through expedition instrumentation.
Field Observation
Preserves what was directly witnessed during field operations. Where no contemporaneous field observation survives, none is retrospectively reconstructed merely to complete a record.
Archive Analysis
Develops interpretation or hypothesis from accumulated evidence using language proportional to evidentiary strength. Analysis remains identified as interpretation rather than observed fact.
Archive distinction
Where interface terminology, registry classification, visible observation, and curatorial interpretation could be confused, the archive explicitly distinguishes them.
SURVEY STANDARDS
Survey state describes the condition of the surveyed subject, not the completeness of its archival representation.
Survey status provides a consistent indication of how thoroughly a world has been investigated and synthesized. It is distinct from simple record availability. Preliminary or pending survey state does not diminish authenticated evidence already preserved within the record; it indicates that investigative scope remains insufficient for comprehensive synthesis.
Pending
The world is recorded, but has not reached the archive's comprehensive multidisciplinary survey standard.
Comprehensive
A broad multidisciplinary survey has been formally undertaken across the world’s principal record classes, with substantial field and catalogue evidence preserved, but final completion criteria have not yet been satisfied.
Complete
Required records, catalogue work, and final synthesis have satisfied the archive's completion standard.
System survey status
At system scale, progress is expressed through worlds recorded, comprehensive surveys, infrastructure recorded, navigation record, system assessment state, and overall survey state. A system does not inherit the survey status of its most thoroughly documented world; system coverage is assessed independently across the full system record.
ASSESSMENT HIERARCHY
Broader conclusions require broader evidence.
Interpretation expands only as the evidence base expands. Individual records remain closest to direct evidence; higher assessments synthesize increasingly broad sets of records.
Record level
Preserves the individual organism, mineral, phenomenon, infrastructure record, or other discrete observation.
Catalogue interpretation
Looks for patterns within one discipline, such as a Zoological Interpretation derived from the fauna catalogue.
Planetary assessment
Synthesizes multiple completed catalogue interpretations and planetary evidence into a world-scale assessment.
System assessment
Synthesizes planetary records, stellar evidence, infrastructure, navigation, and provenance at system scale. It remains locked until sufficient underlying work exists.
NAMING & PROVENANCE
What is unknown is not reconstructed.
Names, discovery timing, and record custody are preserved at the precision supported by surviving evidence. The archive distinguishes known history from later archival naming.
Discovery timing
When an exact date cannot be established reliably, the archive records the narrowest defensible period, such as week, month, and year.
Lost original names
If an original name was not preserved before an expedition or archive designation was assigned, it is recorded as lost rather than reconstructed.
Archive naming
Later expedition or archive designations are preserved as such and are not presented as original historical names.
Custody & attribution
Recorder, curator, and assessment authorship are retained where known so that observations and later synthesis remain distinguishable.
RECORD & METADATA STANDARDS
Consistency serves traceability, not conformity for its own sake.
Stable identifiers and visual conventions allow evidence to remain traceable across the archive. Metadata remains contextual so that each record can preserve the information most useful for interpreting that evidence.
Stable record identifiers
Evidence receives persistent archive identifiers appropriate to its record class, allowing records to remain traceable as the archive expands.
Contextual metadata
Metadata fields are selected for the evidence: Acquisition Context, Navigation Method, Classification, Registry Scope, and similar fields are used where they convey the record most clearly.
Archive Notes
Amber treatment identifies contextual information that materially affects how a visitor should interpret the surrounding record.
Visual section grammar
Extended multi-record directories alternate section fields and use horizontal division to make changes in record scope immediately legible.
Semantic color language
Cyan identifies formal methodology, operative rules, and definitions. Amber identifies limitations, cautions, Archive Notes, and interpretive qualifications. White remains ordinary record hierarchy, muted text supports explanation, and green is reserved for established completion states.
KNOWN LIMITATIONS
The archive records an encountered universe through limited instruments.
The archive documents an encountered universe through the evidence available to the expedition, while remaining explicit about the limits of that evidence. Environmental and systemic patterns may be observable without establishing a single underlying causal history, and available instruments expose only a subset of potentially relevant phenomena.
Systemic variability
Apparent relationships between environmental features, organisms, resources, and other phenomena do not by themselves establish causation. Interpretation remains grounded in observed association unless stronger evidence supports a causal relationship.
Instrument limits
Only information preserved through expedition observation, scanners, registries, and authenticated visual captures can enter the evidentiary record.
Absence of evidence
Failure to observe a feature does not automatically establish that the feature is absent. Conclusions must distinguish “not observed” from “does not exist.”
ARCHIVE CUSTODY
Aster — Archive Curator
Aster is an in-universe archival identity responsible for record stewardship, methodological consistency, and evidence-grounded synthesis across the archive.
CURATORIAL ROLE
Custodian of the record; interpreter of preserved evidence.
Aster does not serve as an omniscient narrator. The curator works from the same preserved evidence available within the archive: field observations, scanner records, registry captures, catalogue entries, and expedition provenance. Where evidence permits interpretation, Aster may synthesize it. Where evidence ends, the record must say so.
Give the worlds a voice without speaking over the evidence.
Curatorial authorship may therefore appear on catalogue interpretations, planetary assessments, system assessments, transcripts, and methodology records. Attribution identifies who performed the synthesis; it does not elevate interpretation above the underlying evidence. Curatorial authority may standardize, qualify, and synthesize the record, but it cannot convert inference into observation or override contradictory evidence.