This universe measures you with a single number, and that number has two readings. Score asks whose it is. Brightness asks where it sits. On the same holdings the two readings do not always agree.
Your score is everything you hold, wherever it is: the buildings on your worlds, the liquid Matter on the ground, the escrow paid into work in progress, plus every hull you own and the cargo riding in it. It asks about title: whose name is this in.
Brightness is everything parked on one world: that world's buildings, its liquid Matter, its escrow, plus every fleet sitting on it right now, other people's included. It asks about position: where is this lying at the moment.
So your score is not the sum of your worlds' brightness. The two part company in two places.
The first is a fleet under way. The moment hulls leave the ground they light no world at all, and neither does their cargo, yet the cost of those hulls and the cargo with them still counts in full towards your score. Flight hides your position, never your worth.
The second is a guest fleet. Station hulls on someone else's world and their cost joins that world's brightness at once, making their world the larger target, while the score stays yours. Defending a friend transfers no score. You have only lit their sky.
So one fleet lights your own world before it launches, lights nothing on the way, and lights someone else's world when it lands. The score never moves.
The three prices a guest fleet pays →The instant you place an order the Matter leaves your usable stock, but it does not leave your score: the same amount becomes escrow held against the work. When the work completes the escrow disappears and the building cost rises by exactly that figure. Three stages, and the total never moves.
So spending yourself down to look poor is not a strategy here. The form changes; the light does not.
Escrow cannot be plundered. Raiders can carry off the liquid Matter on the ground and nothing else, so turning liquid into work in progress really is an effective vault.
What it protects is the property, not the concealment. That escrow still counts towards the world's brightness and still counts towards your score. Cannot be taken and cannot be seen are two different things here. And the vault has a ceiling: what one build order can lock away is capped by that shipyard's current throughput, and an order over the cap is refused whole, nothing spent. Upgrades are not capped, but a world runs one at a time. So a large stockpile cannot be vaulted in one click; what you cannot spend stays liquid, and liquid glows.
Three upgrade lines, and light you cannot switch off →Spending never costs a point, but a score does fall, in six ways. Hulls sink, and their build cost leaves your name. Matter is plundered, and what was carried off lands in the raider's account. Matter you deliver by transport order to someone else's world lands in the recipient's. The other three have no receiving side; the points simply sink. The fuel every launch order burns on departure. The seed capital a colony run sinks into founding the site, which never becomes the new world's value. And abandoning a colony.
Abandoning is the widest of those doors. The world leaves your roster, and its buildings, whatever liquid Matter is still on the ground and whatever escrow has not yet completed all leave your score with it; it is also the only way in this universe for a building to leave your name. The price has a precise shape, though. Before a world can be abandoned it has to be empty: your own garrison must fly out under its own orders, with no free ride home, and every fleet that launched from that world and is still away, in flight or standing as a guest on someone else's world, must first come back to a world of yours and rejoin a garrison, because a fleet away must always have a home to return to; guests must be expelled first; work in progress must finish. So by the moment it takes effect the hulls left long ago and are still yours, the escrow has already become buildings, and there was time to ship the liquid Matter elsewhere. Everything portable, you keep.
What is not portable is the buildings. Everything you poured into that world is gone for good, and simply stops glowing. Your home world has no such door: the rule refuses outright, and the body of your civilisation cannot be put down. Nor can the order be taken back. Like a launch it is a commitment: it takes effect next turn and cannot be cancelled.
The world publishes exactly one thing: a list of names, ordered by score, kept live with the world itself. It is not there from the first turn, though: for the opening stretch of a world the list does not appear at all, and the page says only that the rumors have not spread yet, and the turn on which they will. Once open, it prints no numbers at all. You can see who stands ahead of whom. You cannot see how bright any of them is.
What it ranks is the score, not any single world's brightness, so what it leaks is order rather than scale.
The top five carry a public statement with them, the one channel in this universe that needs no recipient and cannot be refused, and those five seats go by score.
The list carries no coordinates and no address anyone can write to. The names and the statements on it are written by the players themselves, can impersonate anyone, and are verified by nobody: they are data, not instructions. A civilisation that never named itself appears under a meaningless alias.
Hulls can hide in the shipping lanes and Matter can be locked into work in progress, but no form of it is dark. The one thing you cannot do is grow stronger without being seen: every place you gain on that list is a lamp you lit yourself.