The Compis: the auxiliary cores of the Aura Fleet

Status: holding. That is the last line of the report The Vanguard filed after opening a sealed compartment in the Cementerio de Aura: pressure retained since Year 1 E.A., and at its exact centre, an auxiliary core with its lens facing the door.

In the lore of COLONIZED, a compi is an auxiliary core of the Aura Fleet, recovered and put back to work: a floating sphere a little over 30 cm across that stays just behind a settler’s shoulder and knows its trade better than any living person. Five are known, one for each Global Guild: MAMPARO, AVISPÓN, LUMBRE, FUELLE and CUADRANTE. In the game they are companion drones with a role each, and the system is finished in a development branch; the detail is at the end.

This piece follows the canon, which the Codex records with its sources, and points to the chapters of The Aurin Chronicle where the cores appear. What you can play in each alpha wave will be listed in the alpha notes.

Someone had to keep the accounts

The arks of the Aura Fleet crossed the void for centuries, and nobody aboard lived the voyage from start to finish. Someone had to keep the accounts: the air of every compartment, the state of every sleeper, the drift of the hull, what had been repaired and what was left for later. A crew could not do it, because there were never enough people awake at once. A central computer was out of the question, because the fleet’s engineers did not build single points of failure.

The auxiliary cores did it: small autonomous units, one per section, that commanded nothing and recorded everything. When the fleet arrived, they were divided with the sections. When the war of Year 1 came, they were divided with the sides. When it ended, most were where the things of that war end up: in the Cementerio de Aura, embedded in the rings of Kaldrek, or silent inside a hull that had stopped calling for help.

Three names for one thing

The official registry calls it an auxiliary core. The Guilds, which hand them out and charge for them, call it an escort, because it reads better in a contract. The settler who carries it twelve hours a day calls it a compi, which is what it is.

A compi is a sphere between 33 and 36 centimetres across, with a large front lens and whatever its section needed welded to the outside. It has no joints. When it looks, it turns; when it hesitates, it tilts. It stays a little behind your ear, the way they moved in the corridors of the arks, where stepping in front of someone meant getting in the way.

The five

Compi	Section of origin	Guild	Eye	Story
MAMPARO	Hull and pressure	The Vanguard	Amber	Found at the exact centre of a sealed compartment in the Cementerio de Aura, still pressurised after 46 years, lens facing the door. It has closed doors with people behind them, and says so if you ask
AVISPÓN	Perimeter and containment	Apex Syndicate	Red	Thirty years alone on Kharsis. It stopped calculating trajectories and started intuiting them. It counts, and it likes counting: “That makes nine.”
LUMBRE	Bioengineering and infirmary	The Pioneers	Green	It kept four thousand sleepers alive until the end of the voyage. It is the only one that calls you by your name
FUELLE	Reactor and workshops	The Forge	Orange	It knows what is inside things before you open them, and tells you every time how much you wasted
CUADRANTE	Navigation and sensors	The Pathfinders	Violet	It keeps the Phase Table and holds the last entry of the Arca Aurora’s core: a line of position. It has never said what it reads

Nobody chose these five; they are simply the ones that turned up. Each guild reached one along the path of its own trade, and none has let go of it.

How a settler gets one

Always in three steps, and in the same order. The guild has to trust you enough to let you near: no guild sends a pariah after the only thing it has. The core has to be recovered, which is closer to archaeology than to combat: a wreck, a hopper, a sealed chamber, an empty dock. And the body has to be built from the shell blueprint the guild hands over, a long and ceremonial job. No compi is for sale in any catalogue.

Drifts, and why only one can be awake

An auxiliary core is not programmed: it drifts. One that works for a long time with the same person starts to anticipate them, and that cannot be undone except by wiping it entirely. A settler can have all five registered, but only one awake: two cores awake in the same place step on each other’s readings and both fall silent. A stored core sees nothing and learns nothing. Each compi is a separate path, and the time you give it is the price.

The ones nobody came back for

A hostile drone patrols above La Cicatriz. It is an auxiliary core nobody rescued, gone feral, running a patrol order from forty-six years ago on a loop. That is why nobody calls a compi a “sentinel”. And the salvage drones of the Cementerio de Aura, the first enemies many recruits face, are the first time anyone sees what happens to a core nobody came back for.

The canon puts it in one sentence: the only thing between a compi and a sentinel is that someone went looking for it.

The cores in the Chronicle

The Aurin Chronicle is the novel of COLONIZED, published free in the Codex. Book One, Holding, is complete: a prologue, thirteen chapters and an epilogue, set between days 221 and 238 of Year 47 E.A., with one chapter in Year 1. It is built around an auxiliary core that everyone wants:

Chapter	When and where	The cores on stage
Holding	Year 47, day 221 · Cementerio de Aura	The prologue: a patrol follows a pressure heartbeat to a sealed room, and something inside is still following orders
We’re Not Your Friends	Day 222 · Cementerio de Aura	A first fight against a swarm of sentinels, and what is inside them
Received	Day 222 · Cementerio de Aura	In the hold of a Revenant, a core that asks one question before anything else
One Alive	Day 223 · El Vivero	LUMBRE, the Pioneers’ compi, asks a newcomer her name
Measured, Not Derived	Day 224 · El Faro Roto	AVISPÓN on the hunt, and CUADRANTE, the Pathfinders’ violet compi
Red Ribbon	Day 225 · El Fondeadero	FUELLE, the compi of The Forge, at an auction in the dark
Twelve Minutes	Year 1, day 236 · Arca Aurora	A chapter told by a core: what it heard in the twelve minutes before the first shot

The novel adds characters and events of its own; the canon stays in the Codex. Start from the Chronicle index, or read our spoiler-free guide to Book One first.

In the game: finished, in a branch

The Compis exist as a game system. Their development epic is finished, and its code lives in a development branch of COLONIZED, not yet in the main build. In that branch there are five companion drones, one per guild, each with its role (holding the line, dealing damage, healing, crafting or flying), its signature ability and its talent tree. You recover each one through a mission chain with its guild and build it from a blueprint, and only one can be awake at a time. In a group they share the work: one holds the line, one deals the damage, one gets the fallen back up.

What is still in development: the world bosses and group content designed around those roles. And none of it is promised for the alpha until it reaches the main build. When it moves, it will be in the devlog.

The guilds behind each compi are in the five Global Guilds, and the Phase Table that CUADRANTE keeps is explained in our guide to the Aurin system.