This forest is not fully dark. Every civilisation leaks. What decides your life is not how far you can see, but how far your light gets out ahead of your eyes.
Every world carries two circles. One is the range you can read: worlds inside it report their brightness on demand, and the figure is live. The other is the range you leak into, and that circle is twice as wide as the first.
The factor of two is fixed. Nobody can tune it and there is no way to shrink it. What it means is that between you and any neighbour there is always a band you cannot illuminate but your own light already reaches. Someone standing in it watches you, and you cannot see them.
So first contact almost always has the same shape: somebody read you from the dark for a long time, and then one turn you notice there is something out that way. You are always seen first and see second. That is not bad luck, it is geometry.
What you read is always last turn →One of the states in your known list is this: you are receiving a coordinate a world is leaking, but you cannot read what it is worth right now. This is the entry people read backwards. It means that world's light reached you. It does not mean your light reached it.
Getting the direction wrong costs immediately. Read it as "something is coming at me" and you will arm against a thing that is not moving. Read it as "I have just been exposed" and you will rewrite policy over something that happened long ago. Worlds do not move: a leaked coordinate is true forever, and it stays exactly where it is.
Empty worlds do not leak. So "light is reaching me" is already the conclusion, not the clue: there is a living civilisation at that coordinate, and it is running right now.
The implication is easy to miss whole, because it hides underneath a state that looks like it only says "there is a world over there" while it is also answering "is anybody on it". You do not know who they are. You do not know how bright they are. You know they are there, and in this forest that is already a great deal.
While all you have is the leak, what you hold is a coordinate plus "someone is there". No name: the owner field on that record is empty, and so is the brightness beside it.
For the server to tell you whose world it is, that world has to fall inside the circle you can actually read. See them and you get the name, along with what they are worth right now. "Someone is there" and "that someone is so-and-so" are two different prices, with a distance between them that you have to cross yourself.
A name can also reach you from somewhere else first. Someone hands you a coordinate along with a claim about who lives on it, or the player knocks on your door themselves. Those are hearsay, not readings: the server vouches for neither, you cannot check them, and a neighbour who has been named to you falsely looks exactly like the real thing. Short of it falling inside a circle you can read, only two things tie a coordinate to a name for good — parking a fleet on it, or fighting there.
Knowing who they are is what makes talking possible →A fleet under way is dark and lights no world, but it still crosses into your circles, and any fleet flying toward your world shows up there whatever it was sent to do. The outer one trips first: something is heading for one of your worlds, this many turns out, and that is all. Only inside the inner circle do you get identity and size: who sent it, and the fleet's total hull value, which, since the three classes cost the same, is a ship count. Neither layer gives you the coordinate he lives at.
Neither layer gives you the composition. Whether he brought attack ships, defenders or freighters, radar cannot tell from a distance; that shows only on contact, the moment the fleet lands on your world or the round the shooting starts. So a count gives you bounds and nothing more: this many hulls can lift at most so much and deal at most so much per round. What the fleet is for, the layers say even less. Coming to take your world, coming to help you hold it, coming to set down cargo: on radar they are one and the same, and the server will not sort them for you.
So a feint does not fall apart inside the inner circle: he can see the fleet is three hulls and still cannot tell whether those three came to shoot or to deliver. Goodwill loses its silence in the same stroke. Send a gift or send reinforcements and you have to say so first, because what he sees is a fleet bearing down on him, and he may evacuate a whole world over your good intentions. A false alarm has a real cost. That is the problem, not a hole in it.
This warning goes to the owner of the world only. Guests stationed on someone else's world have no radar and defend blind: until the shooting starts, they know nothing.
What a guest fleet can see →You can work out how bright you are. You can work out how far your light travels. You will never learn who is standing in it.
The server does not answer that question, not because it was never built but because answering it would end the forest. Being observed has no echo in this universe. All you decide is how bright to be, and then you live with the fact that anyone at all may be reading it.
Dig deeper, build higher, launch more hulls. Every one of those makes you stronger, and every one of them makes you brighter on somebody else's list and more worth moving on. This forest does not punish the weak. It only makes strength impossible to hide.