Technological Achievement Tier

The **Technological Achievement Tier** is a level of categorization used by the Forerunners and the Ancient Chozo to assess the technological advancement of civilizations. This system was adopted by several civilizations over the course of time, including the Covenant, and eventually the Galactic Federation. There are a total of seven tiers, and the lower the Tier number, the more advanced the civilization's technology is.

## Tier 7: Pre-Industrial

Tier 7 is one of the most common and stable states, with limited weaponry and environmental threats. Societies tend to be small and scattered, driven by subsistence farming, foraging, or hunter-gathering needs. Technology is limited to simple hand made tools, weapons, or agrarian implements and methods, but a very broad understanding of planetary and solar mechanics is not uncommon.

## Tier 6: Industrial

Tier 6 is the outset for massive urbanization. Agrarian societies can remain stable in the pre-industrial stage, but Tier 6 population strain and mechanized food production invariably create political and economic pressures very few can balance. Moving past this usually promises advancement. Some societies improve environmental and medical understanding concurrently with mechanical and transport advancement. Those that do not are frequently doomed.

## Tier 5: Atomic Age

Tier 5 species usually begin focusing on clean energy production. The occasional belligerent species will use atomic energy for weapons, often resulting in mass extinctions. In-atmosphere craft are a hallmark, often leading to manned space flight, albeit in short-range scales. Medical technology has begun to develop functional artificial limb prosthetics and some mechanical organ replacements.

## Tier 4: Space Age

Tier 4 is often the final resting place for species intelligent enough to break free from their cradle's surface only to fill the gulf surrounding it with war. Their comfort-focused technology can include medical advances into artificially grown organ replacement, advanced cybernetic limb prosthetics, and mass food production innovations, while some levels of off-planet habitation has been achieved, such as contained space stations or habitat domes. Actual planetary biosphere conversion, however, has not yet been achieved.

## Tier 3: Stellar

Species has usable, albeit limited, translight capabilities and stellar astronavigational technologies, biosphere conversion and enviro-forming, holocrystal digital data mediums and semi-sentient Artificial intelligence. Weapons technologies often are magnetically accelerated ballistics with some development into direct-energy armaments. Energy production is approaching, if not reaching, a level equal to the average energy level received by a planet from its parent star. Safer and more efficient cryostasis for long term travel is a very common and nearly required advancement for this level. Such civilizations that reach this point often have begun colonizing nearby star systems within a range of deca-parsecs.

## Tier 2: Interstellar

The civilization has the ability to perform exceedingly accurate translight navigation, some levels of gravitational manipulation, near-instantaneous-interstellar communication, organically fabricated organ replacements and highly advanced cyber-limb prosthetics, and man-portable application of energy manipulation. This can include some limited form of energy-matter conversion technologies, and the capability to manipulate energy-based barrier fields and hard light constructs, while weapons technology often has reached an advanced state of direct-energy armaments, and energy production well exceeds the energy received by a planet from its parent star. The Galactic Federation as a whole, the Sangheili Nation States, and the Banished are general examples of this level of advancement to varying degrees.

## Tier 1: World Builder

The civilization has the ability to manipulate gravitational forces on immense scales(up to and including the creation of artificially ignited stars and entire planets), create AI with full unhindered sentience, fabricate almost any mundane(non-exotic) material via energy-matter conversion, limited-to-network translocation, harness energy levels equal to that produced by an entire star, perform rapid intergalactic scale translight travel, and the ability to wholesale design and create pre-sapient species . The Forerunners and the Chozo Ancients were the most prominent civilizations known within the Sol-Daiban Galaxy to have reached this level, while the Machine Empire of Andromeda can be considered of this tier as well.

## Tier 0: Transcendent

As neither the Forerunners nor the Ancient Chozo had any examples of civilizations with technological accomplishments greater than themselves—with the exception of the Precursors—this is a theoretical level. It is suspected that such a civilization can travel between galactic clusters with incredible ease, create stellar level structures, and accelerate the evolution of intelligent life. Any civilization that has attained this level of achievement would be likened unto deities or god entities.

## Trivia

The technological achievement scale is similar to the real-world Kardashev scale, which measures technological advancement based upon the total amount of energy a civilization is capable of harnessing. Similar categorical scales are commonly found in science fiction.