The Bionet

The Bionet is the map of dishes a lab plays across. Every node on it is one dish: entering a node generates that dish and starts a run in it, and winning that run claims the node. Taking a node opens every node bordering it, and the root is open from the start. A node the lab has already been into is resumed on re-entry, with its colony and its eaten ground as they were left, rather than generated again.

Rings

The board is a lattice grown from one seed, minted the first time it loads and never changed after. Every node’s ground, name and dish are derived from that seed, so the same node generates the same region however late the board grows out to it. The board is stored per player rather than per lab, and the first lab to take a node keeps it.

At the centre is the root, named NEUTRAL, on ring 0. Rings run outward from it, and a ring holds nodes in proportion to its own number, so the board widens as it deepens. It has no edge: rings are appended ahead of the deepest ring any claim sits on, and a ring that already exists is never regenerated.

A node is drawn when it is the lab’s home, when it is claimed, when it borders either of those, or when it is one step further out again. Capturing a node is the only thing that pushes that edge outward. An interior node borders six others; a node on the outermost generated ring borders fewer, until the board grows past it.

Depth

How far out a node sits is its severity. It climbs quickly over the first few rings and flattens far out, and it drives most of what separates one node from another.

Deeper rings may also field a plasmodium rival instead of a ciliate.

How far a node’s conditions sit off neutral is rolled separately from severity: mostly radial, with harsher and softer pockets off it, so a nasty node can sit near home and a mild one far out. Ring 1’s roll is capped outright, because it is the first claimable ground.

Reading a node

A node’s name is a code for its ground: its axis tokens, then its ring. ALK-PYR-R1 is alkaline, hot ground on ring 1.

An axis names the code only when it is far enough off neutral to be a selection pressure a strain would have to be bred for: more than 0.4 pH from 7, or more than 4 °C from 37. Milder ground names no axis, which is why the rings near home read NTR. Media and terrain lead the code only when neither pH nor temperature is directional; either can still take the second token.

Selecting a node puts its dish on the card at the centre of the board, with its conditions under it and one line on the lab’s own stock: either that a named strain survives here, or that none tolerate above or below a stated bound. That line counts only strains that could actually be brought, so an archived line or one with no stock is not consulted. With nothing preserved at all there is no line.

Reach

A node can be entered when it is the root, when one of its neighbours is claimed, or when one of its neighbours is the lab’s home node. Reach is global rather than per lab: a node bordering any lab’s conquest is open ground. A lab’s home is its site on the board and not a holding, so a new lab holds nothing at all and the root is the first fight available to it.

A claim does not close a dish. Once a lab is past its first capture, ENTER opens whichever node is selected whether or not it is already held; only reach refuses.

Entering a node

First entry generates the dish from the node’s own conditions and seed, and places the specimens staged out of the cryobank, on tiles the player pinned or on tiles the board picks. Rival cells are seeded on that first entry only, sized off the colony that walked in. A resumed dish already holds whatever survived the last session and seeds nothing further.

A deployed specimen is lent to the run rather than spent. It comes back to the bank when the run ends in defeat, extinction or a forfeit; a win holds it for the salvage phase instead.

Every node keeps its own plate and its own run record, so several node dishes can be in progress at once and entering one disturbs none of the others. More cells may be staged into a dish that is already alive.

The first claim is the exception. Until a lab has captured anything, the board steers it to a shallow reachable node and ENTER runs that node as a staged contest with authored objectives in place of the ordinary win: take the marked zone, then either of two marked zones, then take the last zone from the contaminants and hold all four at once. ENTER anywhere else answers CLAIM YOUR FIRST NODE FIRST. The ambient bacteria roll is suppressed for that run. Its authored opposition is the rival the deploy places, the contaminants painted into the last zone, and one bacteria wave that arrives with the fork.

Home zones

Every lab in an ordinary node dish has a home zone: the zone nearest where that lab’s colony landed. A lab is eliminated when an opponent holds its home zone through 120 unbroken seconds of scaled sim time. A rival taking the player’s home zone that way is the loss; every rival in the dish eliminated is the win.

Any dip re-arms the whole window from the start, on both sides. Elimination is a latch: taking a home zone back afterwards does not put a lab back in the run, and it leaves the eliminated lab’s cells playing on.

Every other zone feeds trophin and compounds and decides nothing. Holding all of a dish’s zones is not a win condition, and neither is banked trophin, on any dish. A dish that fields no rival at all cannot be won under this rule.

Ending a run

Every ending except a forfeit is the market’s clock. It advances the trend graphs by one point, and every strain the run deployed or that held ground in it takes a point on its own value line.

What a claim grants

A claim is permanent. Conquest is recorded once, the first lab to take a node keeps the tag, and nothing on the board takes it back.

The first three claims a lab makes each grant one intervention tool, in a fixed order: Crystal Emitter, then Sterilization Field, then Mutagen Burst. Past the third a claim grants no tool. Opening the board at all grants the Crystal Emitter as a backstop, so a career lab that reaches the Bionet without capturing anything still has it.