THE TORIZE TIMES
Short reports on the asteroid programme, written down as the work happens. The paper ran for six years under two names and stopped when the company went quiet. It is writing again.
Editions go out when there is something worth reporting, which in practice means every week or two rather than to a fixed day. Nothing here carries field designations, coordinates or deposit locations.
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Crew get their own marked sets, and Blackstone's signature goes up
Any Torize crewman can now have a marked set of their own: avatars for the Combine, a separate one for Discord, and a signature card hosted on torize.com. Jake Blackstone's went live this week. Xpofer's has been up since Day 283. Anyone else who wants one only has to ask.
The kit
A set is six images. Three Combine avatars at 90, 100 and 200 pixels; one Discord avatar built separately; and a signature card at 400x130 and 800x260. The Discord one is a separate build on purpose. Discord crops an avatar to a circle and the Combine versions do not survive it, the corner mark sliced and the gold band cut at both ends. It gets judged at 40 pixels in a circle, which is where anyone actually sees it, rather than at 512 where everything looks fine. The signatures are hosted on the site rather than on Discord because Discord's own image links are signed and stop working inside a day. The ones on torize.com will still be there next year.
What it cost
The first attempt at Jake's set inset a crop of his portrait into the frame, on the reasoning that cutting the background out would leave a grey silhouette. That reasoning was never tested. When it finally was, the tool lifted the figure cleanly on the first pass — a crisp helmet rim, an intact visor, and a cyan glow that reads far harder against the navy than it ever did against the painting's mist. A prediction had been stated as a constraint. The rebuild cost an evening, and the lesson was to run the tool before predicting what the tool will do.
Hiring
Four seats are open: field prospector, city engineer, logistics and freight, and fleet crew. Paid weekly from the first week, and two of the four need no prior experience at all. On the missions board, a full city — slabbing the ground and putting up every structure on it — pays ten million.
If you want a set, send the art you want used and it will be built.
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Blackstone returns, and seventeen ships go back on the deposits
Jake Blackstone is back. He has been with this company longer than most of what it owns, he went quiet for a while, and he has come back and put nine squads of Y-8s to work. That is the whole of this edition and it is enough.
The fields
Seventeen hulls are mining as this goes out, all of them working deposits in one field. The current cycle is committed to a little over eighty thousand units of ore across six minerals. The richest deposits on the books are running at close to thirty per cent and turning around in under three days; the rest are working ten and eleven per cent ground on an eight-day clock.
What that costs
Roughly thirty-two million credits for the cycle, an average of just under four hundred credits a unit. The spread underneath that average is the thing worth knowing: the cheapest ore in the programme is coming in at sixty credits a unit and the dearest at nearly two thousand. Deposit choice is worth more than hull count, and the survey work that finds the rich ground is worth more than either.
Still idle
Twelve hulls are sitting. Some have no pilot at all. Every one of them is a deposit not being worked, and that is the plainest possible answer to why this company is hiring.
Hiring
Prospecting and barque seats are open. Paid jobs go on the missions board for anyone who wants an afternoon of it, no commitment either way. Terms are on the careers page.
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The paper restarts, and the yards do not stop
Publication resumes after a long gap. The company spent it building rather than writing, which is the better order to do those two things in, and there is a backlog of work to account for.
The estate
Twenty-eight cities are standing across thirteen asteroids, with a fourteenth rock under construction. Every one of them pays on the weekly facility run, which is the income the whole operation sits on.
The fields
Nine prospecting fields are held, six of them producing. Ten mining operations are running against a hundred and seven live deposits. Deposits decay in roughly six months whether they are worked or not, so extraction, not discovery, is the constraint that decides how fast the estate grows.
The yards
Sixty stations, twenty-five of them shipyards and eight factory stations. Thirty-two are in production. The barque line feeds the mining run directly: every hull off it is another operation working against the clock.
Hiring
The company is short of people and nothing else. Materials and ground already in hand cover another seventy-six cities. Four seats are open on the asteroid crew and paid work is posted on the missions board for anyone who wants an afternoon of it. Terms are on the careers page.
Under Czerka
Torize operates as a division of the Czerka Corporation. Contract construction on Czerka ground continues alongside the asteroid work, with Czerka supplying the minerals, the ships and the fees.
Editions are posted here and in the Czerka Discord. If you want to know what the work involves, the terms are here, or start here if the game is new to you.