Welcome

... to the world of PlutoCrat. Digital Gamers, Inc. is now accepting applications from gamers interested in participating in the PlutoCrat alpha test program. If you wish to become a playtester, fill out the application found here.

If you are admitted to the alpha test program, you will receive an email (usually within 24 hours) with further instructions.

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What is PlutoCrat?

PlutoCrat is a game of interstellar commerce and exploration. Players take on the role of a young man or woman embarking on a career in a civilization that has just recovered the secret of interstellar travel after centuries of isolation.

New players choose a starting profession for their character, which determines the starting skills for their character. These skills affect how well the character performs various tasks in the game. (New players need not worry about making a mistake here; every character can learn any skill in the game, and the in-game university system allows characters to quickly learn new skills).

Players may choose from a variety of activities for their character. Merchants buy goods and transport them to other star systems for sale. Scientists examine technological relics hoping to unravel the secrets of lost technologies. Explorers attempt to find and open contact with other lost human colonies. Surveyors and prospectors explore far-flung worlds looking for valuable new resources.

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ITC Cuts More Subsidies

The Interstellar Trade Commission completed a second round of cuts to trade subsidies this week, eliminating price supports for a broad range of agricultural products. Markets began to react almost immediately, with spot prices on some agricultural goods rising as much as 1200%.

Read the full article here.

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Flight to the Stars

... a brief overview of the history of the PlutoCrat universe, covering the Exodus, the Great Plague, the Long Darkness, and the Renaissance.

In the waning years of the twenty-first century, the stars opened to man. Solutions to the Einstein equations that allowed for faster-than-light travel had been known since the last decade of the twentieth century. As the end of the twenty-first century approached, advences in engineering and physics led to production of the space-twisting machines that made interstellar travel possible, and sufficient quantities of the exotic matter necessary to power them. Read more ...

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PlutoCrat Wallpapers

640 by 480

800 by 600

1024 by 768

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Featured Commodity: Cork

Raw cork and articles manufactured from cork. Synthetic materials can be produced at such low cost locally that cork is not worth shipping except as a luxury.

Sources: Good sources are agricultural worlds and hospitable or very hospitable worlds with low to moderate populations.

Markets: Good markets are highly industrialized, high population, high technology worlds and wealthy worlds that can afford the luxury of imported cork for use in manufactured items.

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Space Ports

The Long Darkness was not uniformly dark throughout human space. Those worlds that could maintained contact with each other through radio communication. The greater portion of the message traffic was scientific information; most of the remainder was cultural. But in addition to the exchange of knowledge these worlds traded plans for the future. One day, they reasoned, man will travel between the stars again. And so they laid out a legal and economic framework for that time.

Space ports are the most visible element of that framework. Under the Interstellar Trade Charter, member star systems designate a zone for use as a space port. This extraterritorial zone is not subject to local law, but is instead governed by a commission drawn from member systems. All ports provide at least minimal services for housing cargo and passengers; the more advanced ports provide mearly any service a traveller could desire.

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Hefa

Hefa was colonized in the middle of the twenty-second century by refugee populations who had spent the last seven decades living in exile communities in the United States. As the first of the Great Diaspora colonies, it shares with the Luther colony the distinction of being a precursor to the large-scale ethnic migrations that would begin half a century later.

Culturally the population still longs to return to their promised land. That desire is no longer really practical due to three facts:

1. the location of Old Earth is now lost to history;
2. the likelihood is that there are still reservoirs of the plague on Old Earth that would make it too dangerous to return even if the location was known;
3. the population of the Hefa system alone now numbers in the billions.

Hefa is a binary star system. The majority of the system population resides on Hefa; a satellite orbitting the innermost world of the second star in the system. There are agricultural colonies on Sarai and Judith, satellites orbitting the same world.