The Unfallen/Gameplay

An ancient race who have lived simple, harmonious lives for millennia, the Unfallen seek peace with the other races of the galaxy.

About
**Gameplay**
Traits
Ships
Strategy

## Guardians

These are a special population type only accessible via curiosity exploration. They're described in detail in the Traits tab.

## Celestial Vines

The Unfallen completely replace the normal colonization mechanic.

In order to colonize planets, they need to create a special entity viewable on the galactic map, called a Celestial Vine. Starting from their home system, these "vines" are able to extend to nearby systems; this works by performing a special action to "add" a new system to the network of vines; once it's added, if any nearby systems are in range, a "vine" will extend out to them from every nearby system that's also vined.

Once a system has been vined, you can instantly colonize a planet (that you have the colonization tech for) on it immediately and without any cost. You don't need to have a ship in orbit to do this last colonization step, and it costs no resources (critically; unlike other factions, you do not consume your ship). It instantly turns from an outpost into a full colony, so you neither have to take the food hit for a developing outpost, nor do you have to wait.

Note that, like the Vaulters' and the Academy's "instant colonization mechanics", even if you've fully vined a system, you cannot colonize it if another faction has outposts anywhere on it. If these are enemy outposts, you'll need to siege them down, if they're friendly outposts, you either will have to diplomatically negotiate for them or just accept that the system won't be yours.

## Vineships

Vining is accomplished via special vineships. You move these ships into a star node you'd like to vine, you then start the vining process (a unique button similar to probe exploration), and if they manage to continue doing it for the required number of turns, the system will be vined (once vined, it stays vined, but if you're interrupted at any point, or stop at any point, your % progress will rapidly decay, being lost in roughly half the time it took to build up). It is worth mentioning again (since ship consumption is so universal of a mechanic for colonization) that at no point in the process are your vineships "used up/consumed" - this is one of the benefits of playing Unfallen; their colony-ship equivalent is much more expensive, but it's permanent unless lost in battle.

**Stacking multiple copies of vineships, in a single fleet, divides the time taken to vine.** On normal speed the default is 20 turns, two vineships drops that to 10, 3 drop it to 5, etc. A large group of them can vine in one turn, but it always takes at least one turn. Note that they must be in the same fleet for this effect to take place. Note that a fleet in the midst of vining can pause, add more members, and immediately resume vining without losing progress.

The number of ships required to vine a node in 2 turns, on normal speed, is 8 ships; in 1 turn, is 15 ships. (The "real" number for required ships in 2 turns is 7.5 ships, but there's no such thing as 'half a ship', so you need to round up.)

## Vine Benefits

### Food/Approval

Vines provide a number of buffs - a system that has been vined, which belongs to either you or an empire at peace or alliance, will receive +10% , and +10 . An enemy system (specifically; a faction with a relation of either cold war or war) will receive -10% , and -10 . However; since being an enemy of the unfallen will gradually un-vine a system, this penalty only lasts for several turns.

### Movement

Vines also accelerate movement of both civilian and military ships - by exactly double. (The internal implementation of this works by taking whatever the calculated cost for the path is, and dividing it by 2.) This applies not only to movement on starlanes, but also to off-starlane travel (i.e. "Warp"/"Free Movement"), as long as it's tracing the path of a vine. This also applies to friendly (i.e. peace/allied) ships. This can be used to accelerate movement between constellations, and acts as a sort of "poor man's wormhole" before wormhole technology is developed, or in paths which wormholes do not trace.

Furthermore, it also cuts the cost of using wormholes themselves, allowing you to only consume half of your moves upon using a wormhole - this very particular piece happens to have a really important bit of "lawyer's fine print" on it. Regardless of who you're playing, you can always use a wormhole even if you have the tiniest fraction-of-a-point of move speed, albeit for most factions, that's "it" - once you've travelled the wormhole, all of your movepoints are consumed, and you have 0 moves left.

But for the Unfallen, a particularity about how wormhole travel is implemented kicks in - wormholes don't "forcibly set" your final movement left to zero; they just subtract whatever you have left. If a wormhole is vined, this subtracted value is set to half, and much more importantly: even though the game only shows "whole numbers" for remaining moves, *fractional values are tracked internally*. A fleet may "say" it has 0 moves left, but in reality it might be 0.45 -- and that's enough to use a wormhole, again (notably, it works much like the level 3 collection bonus of Riftborn). It's useless for anything else, but it's enough to go through one wormhole, and then immediately go through a second one. More importantly - because dividing any number by 2 will never give "0" for an answer, you will always have a tiny fraction of a movepoint left after going through a wormhole. The end result is that if you have a chain of back-to-back wormholes, all of which are vined, you're always able to travel the full sequence of them no matter how few move points you have. *Along those chained wormholes, your movement is essentially infinite.*

Vines also slow enemy ships moving along the vine network, again, by half.

### Hacking Speed

Unfallen vines also grant 2x  for all friendly hacks (including ones initiated by the owning Unfallen) for all hacks passing through the vined node. They also grant 1/2x  for all hostile or neutral hacks passing through the vined node.

### Influence and Territory

Celestials Vines also replace the normal mechanic of having a large circle around your systems indicating "owned territory". Instead, systems which are vined are considered within your influence circle, and systems which aren't, are outside it. This means that a vined system is susceptible to "pacific conversion" once the Unfallen have the technology to do that.

### Vining Special Nodes

The Unfallen aren't just able to vine nodes with planets in them, but also "special nodes" like Nebulas, Black Holes, and Asteroid Fields; upon doing so, the resource bonuses of the node are applied only to your home system, not to the closest system. This essentially 'tags' the system as being under your influence circle, so it also denies anyone else access to that node.

### Minor Faction Assimilation

In order to assimilate a minor faction, the Unfallen must first vine their system. The Unfallen can interact with them and spend influence on them beforehand, but cannot complete the assimilation step by either quest or buyout until the system is vined. (Most likely this is a check-and-balance against the Unfallen's staggering  growth, since they would otherwise grab almost every minor they encountered long before any other factions would have a chance).

### Vine range

The distance at which you're allowed to "vine" is **23 units** from a system that's off the vine network, to any node that's on the vine network (you don't need a direct starlane connection, which means isolated systems off the hyperlane network are fair game for vining). This is the distance that a ship, with a full engine speed of 23, could travel in a turn. Note also that I believe there's a waiver for this rule where you're always able to vine nodes if they're directly connected to another one, which would be relevant for very long wormhole links.

## Colonization Speed

As a sort of side-effect, not directly related to the celestial vines mechanic, but thematically related, the Unfallen don't consume  to colonize planets on a system they already inhabit, i.e., one where they already inhabit a single planet, and are trying to expand to other planets in the system by queuing a build command in the system management UI.

Instead of consuming , it just consumes a fixed number of turns (like a luxury-based "System Development Upgrade"). Fertile worlds consume 1 turn, non-fertile/non-sterile worlds consume 2, sterile worlds consume 3, and gas planets consume 4.

For brand-new systems with no population, this is a powerful asset because planets that would take other factions perhaps 15 turns to colonize on a new system take only 2 or 3 for the Unfallen. This becomes slightly counter-productive if a system is highly populated and has high , but often will only cost "a turn more than usual" in the worst-case, and ends up costing "several turns less" in most cases. The one downside is you cannot buyout planetary colonization with .