Codex
The newest major addition to VERZ is the “Codex”. This is the primary channel for you to discover and record the lore and the science of the VERZ universe. Your ship’s onboard computer is constantly taking notes, recording your experiences, and cross-referencing all the available data. We’ve built this in a way that Codex entries evolve over time as you explore and learn more. As you can see below, known entries have 4 stages of illumination.
???: Effectively unknown. A hint of a rumor. Maybe you heard the drunkards at the spaceport mention something
Signal Weak: A thread is beginning to form. You can be reasonably confident this thing exists; though you may know it in name or deed only.
Logged: You’ve seen it for sure. Many people can agree that it exists (or at least you can convince them that it does)
Confirmed: It’s fully known and understood. You have incontrovertible proof and/or robust experience with this thing.
The Codex is further divided into relevant sections based on your experience. You can navigate each section and page to review what you’ve learned or figure out what you still don’t know. A page is counted as “discovered” once you reach stage two “Signal Weak”. For the completionists among us, you may have to track progress towards “Confirmed” on your own! We hope this gradual approach to unlocking the stories makes exploration and savoring the small moments of space life worthwhile.
Security Updates
If you’re at all online (which presumably you’re reading this online), you heard about the recent PHP vulnerabilities that affected a crazy ~70% of the internet. Actually insane. For our part, we had to take a couple weeks to assess and remediate our exposure, as we use PHP and Brotli. Even as small as we are, the risk is never zero, so we figured it was worth the time and effort. Moving forward, we’re happy to share that we are proof against the known PHP vulnerabilities!
AI Use Disclosure
We use generative AI in a few specific places to fill skill gaps on our team in order to deliver a game we want to play, and we want to be transparent about what, where, and why.
AI-generated content in use today:
- Monster NPCs (with the exception of pirate NPCs)
- Commodity and currency icons
- Electromagnetic Spectrograph and Missile Pod equipments and actions
These assets were made with Midjourney and Leonardo.ai over 2025 and 2026 using their basic-tier models. Some have been touched up by hand (e.g. recoloring, cutting off weird proboscises), and many are used as generated. In either case, everything in the game has been reviewed and accepted by everyone on the team.
Everything else you see is made by us. Ultimately, we would like to replace all AI-generated assets with human-made work over time. We’re already planning to work with vector artists on new commodity icons. We don’t have a plan yet for the monster NPCs, and if you’re an artist who’d like to contribute your talents, we’d love to hear from you.
