15  Tools

16 First Factories

Human units that can turn utterly raw materials into more refined and concentrated resources, and then use those resources to build other tools and factories, eventually being able to reconstruct any other Human facility, as long as enough resources are locally available.

The most common type of first factory are backjumps¹, factories specialized to build successively better tools to eventually build a single-use jump point, allowing the ship that jumped to that system to jump back.

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1. Although I’m sure I’ve called them something different elsewhere and with something that couldn’t be worse than this.