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.

Ennead, the Trine home, sets two of these worlds side by side. Triune is a Water world you can read as inhabited from orbit: warm coral city-light glows on its night side, where the bubble cities cluster on the sea. Just outside it Ninefold is an Ice world, its blue-white shell crazed with a branching fissure network and coral light leaking up through the cracks from the ocean beneath. The dirty ice quarried off Ninefold is what the Trine load into their railguns — and locked deep in that same ice sits an Ancient station the Trine have never freed. On your chart it is only a structure, whatever the sellers of headings say it computes.

The other homes each read differently on approach, and the night side is where you read them. Warrant, in Charter, is the brightest inhabited world you will find: an unbroken lit grid running to the terminator, because an authority that licenses everything lights everything. Depot, in Bond, lights only bands — long lit shipping corridors with black country between them, a world where nobody bothered to illuminate anything that wasn’t moving cargo. Scour, in Reave, is a bare rock scarred with open cuts, and its lights are scattered camps rather than cities: a thousand separate claims, none of them a capital.

Two homes have no city lights at all, for opposite reasons. Clutch, in Teem, is a dun and ochre desert world whose only glow is acid-green venting from the ground itself — not settlement, just the world breathing. Note the orbit inside it: Husk is the same kind of world with the vents gone cold, and passing it on the way in tells you what the Gorrath do to a system. And Gyre, in Squall, is not a surface at all. It is a banded storm giant of indigo and dusk violet, and the Sen’Ther live in its upper air — the only inhabited world in the charts where the inhabitants have never once stood on the ground, and nothing on the night side glows because nothing they build stays in one place long enough to.

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.

Count the stars before you trust a system’s sky. Karda’s pair reads as a duel — the yellow bleeding into its compact white partner across a coronal bridge. Furnace runs three: a white dwarf holding court over a yellow and a swollen red, both leaking toward it, under an amber haze the smelters never let clear. Multiple stars mean multiple belts on staggered rings, and a station on every one — where the light is crowded, so is the work.