Machines in Fabricated

In the world of Fabricated life as we know it has been lost to a distant tragedy forgotten by most. In place of that life, is now a sprawling world of machines. Above that, the system itself is their lifeblood and that from which they were born. These machines are broken down into the following categories: POP Units, Beeps, Bloops, and Dots.

Each player becomes a POP Unit in the fiction of the game, and interacts with other machines of all types.

POP units are machines with special privileges. Only POP units can recognize another POP unit at a glance. All other machines see them as one of their own, so POP units get to blend into most situations until they take action that makes them stand out. Once that happens, other units see them as faulty machines of their type and often respond badly.

So what is a POP unit? It is a machine built for the Perfectly Ordinary Person (POP) program of the system. Each unit has a Brain-AI-Technology (BAT) Core at it's heart, which is the hardware that contains it's mind. The units call this their Code. It is moving Fiber around run by that Code, and all wrapped up in Metal. There are a lot of details under the ideas of Code, Fiber, and Metal:

• Code: This is the technology of the BAT core and how it links into (and through) the Fiber of the unit. Code has both a Width and a Complexity. Width gives the unit the ability to multitask, as the cost of action effectiveness. Complexity changes the way the unit connects to other machines, relating to protocol and cryptographic functions.
• Fiber: This is what makes the machine move. Code moves through fiber so they are closely linked. Fiber has both a Process and an Endurance. The Process describes how the fiber was made, and impacts a lot of machine stats. Endurance is a straight relationship to maximum output power and hold-up time, you can have one but not the other.
• Metal: This is the casing of the Fiber and Code. Metal has both a Size Class and Print Generation. The Size class impacts how the machine can interact with the world around it, and the Print generation tells us which factory made it. As changes to the production of unit machines changed over the eons, the factories themselves changed. However none of them ever shut down, and machines are still produced as each.

Oh, and on top of that, each machine is made to a profile:

• Profile: The general design of the machine. The profile supplies Features of the machine, which are like something special about that. Maybe they can jump very far, or fire wire from their arms, and so on. Profiles are linked to Size class, so a specific profile is only available in one Size class.

These special machines also have three resources at their disposal:

• Mmoss: Say “M-OH-SS”. This is left over untapped free nanite solution, that wasn't printed during the fabrication process. Mmoss can be used to regenerate damage to the machine, and with special functions enhance some of it's abilities.
• Gel: This is a form of stable energy that the machine can tap for action. It can enhance almost anything about the unit, and can be used to activate Features (from a machine's profile).
• Auth: This is code tags that allows the machine access to the system itself.

That is enough for the overview. For more detail about POP units, see POP Unit Fabrication & Specs.

A Beep is a machine fully integrated into the system. It is ususaly in working order, and serves some minor purpose to the overall harmony of the system. POP units can consider Beeps safe and harmless unless they act in a manner that active their Threat Detection System (TDS). POP Units can speak to Beeps to make them aware of their status as POP units, which helps with the TDS issue.

A Bloops is a machine no longer integrated into the system. It could be a damaged machine, one that has gone rogue, or even a banned POP unit.

A Dot is something the system can't identify. One of the ways POP units service the system is to clear Dots. They do this by figuring out what the Dot is and dealing with it, usually turning it into a Beep or a Bloop.

POP Units follow a much deeper exploration of their specs, but for other machines a simpler universal spec system is used. Each rating falls into the range of 1 to 15, with 3.5 considered 'average', 7 exceptional. Here are the ratings for all non-POP unit machines:

• Size: The size of the machine.
  • Mapping into unit classes → 1-3 is Class-E, 4-5 is Class-H, 6+ is Class-U. 12+ is Class-X (Holy cow).
• Rush: The speed of the machine.
• Power: The strength of the machine.
• cClock: The processing power of the machine.

These machines are often still around, but reminders of lost eons.

The first drones imbued with Machine-AI-Programming (MAP) cores. Few still remain from the Dark Ages.

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