The story behind the games, written as an encyclopedia. Everything here comes from the games' own design documents. Where those documents disagree or stop short, the entry says so.
The canon is still being written. Some points are open, and an open point is marked as such.
Sources: Cantorite: Harrowfall design documents (PLAN.md, docs/gameplay, docs/umbra, docs/harrow) and the Cantorite: Hush Money world notes (docs/design/world.md).
Cantorite grows in branching lattices and stores energy like a battery. Under a microscope it repeats its own structure at every scale. Troops call it "cant". The Swarm call it the Ledger and the Umbra call it the Choir. When it is cut, it rings, and every tonne cut is a note the Harrow can hear. It regrows, which the Directorate calls a recovery and the canon calls recomputing. The crystal is a crop, sown across the Reach long ago by something that tends worlds the way a farmer tends fields.
Three powers strip-mine the Reach. Some smaller factions and the Harrow, which no one can play, sit beside them.
The disciplined, institutional power of the Reach. A federation run by committees and supply chains, with professional soldiers. Its flaw is that it measures everything and understands little it cannot measure. Motto on every hull: "Hold the line. Hold the light."
LookPale steel and one cyan light. Panels at 90 and 45 degrees.
A distributed, patient people. Individuals are cheap and the count is sacred. They have tended the crystal for ten thousand years, and they speak in numbers. Regrowth is their belief: nothing is lost that is counted.
LookPlum and charcoal-green chitin with amber-green veins.
Former miners, colonists and deserters who heard the Hum and let it rewire them. They graft scavenged tech onto themselves, cloak and tunnel, and preach that the crystal is a Choir singing towards a note that will free everyone who listens. Often right about the Directorate's lies, and dangerous.
LookMatte black and graphite with one violet light. High-tech, not scrap.
The invader nobody can play. A machine-crystalline intelligence that reaps the worlds it sowed. Mining makes the crystal ring; when the world rings loudly enough, the Harrow comes to strip the fields and everything that fed on them. It does not conquer, and it never speaks. Its sound is glass chimes, a choral drone and a bell.
LookCut-gem facets in smoked quartz and ivory, mirror-symmetric, hovering around a bright core.
Charter towns that defend themselves. Tired, armed and honest. Their town of Harlan's Rest is the nearest thing the freelancers have to home.
Look: Navy and cream.
Hover-barge caravans, debts and routes. "Price is price. War is weather." Their barge, the Patience, is a freelancer's hub.
Look: Burnt orange and umber.
Salvage clans, feuds and the Bring the Wreck. They live from what other people leave behind.
Look: Khaki, dust, black-and-white checker clan marks.
A quiet order that keeps fields silent. Bells without clappers. They refuse gold, and they teach that a quiet field is a safe one.
Look: Slate and chalk.
The surveyors who scan, catalogue and retrieve lost drones. They speak in survey codes.
Look: White ceramic and signal pink.
Miners whose joints have crystal growing through them. Some stand guard over hand-mined caches and some eat a crystal cache for their masters.
Look: Bone and sackcloth.
Swarm exiles who stopped counting. They are the way Swarm biotech reaches a freelancer.
Look: Plum and charcoal-green chitin with amber-green veins.
A nine-world star system on no chart that matters, until a survey drone finds the crystal. The nine Reach worlds are the biomes of the Harrowfall battle maps, and each has a hazard cycle or crystal colour of its own.
The landing world. The Directorate's beachhead in its campaign, with wrecked dropships on the landing zone.
Monoliths here are ruins of the Auditors, the power the campaign suspects is coming back to read the result.
One of the nine Reach worlds.
A world of vents. Its hazard cycle is the vents.
The quota race. Stane Mining Consolidated, a contractor working Directorate claims, is in it, and a space elevator is a signature map here.
Media Silence: Stane broadcasts that Umbra massacred a colony. Here a transmitter must be defended while the truth uploads.
A world of tides. A dam here can be blown, and the tide comes in and goes out on its own rhythm.
Toppled columns in the dressing are Auditor ruins.
Where the Directorate campaign's last light falls: the Umbra plan to overload the Reach is revealed here.
The Directorate's homeworld.
The Swarm's homeworld.
The Umbra's world: black glass under magenta seams.
A world the Harrow has already reaped.
The sources give no years for most of this, so the events are in story order, not dates.
Long ago, something seeds cantorite across the Reach. It is a planetary-scale computer, running a calculation nobody alive started.
The Swarm have tended the crystal for ten thousand years, and believe the calculation is their god's census.
The Swarm leave their homeworld ahead of a reaping. Their numbers and their regrowth are what they keep.
A Directorate survey drone finds cantorite. The Directorate comes to mine it, and finds the Swarm already there.
Miners who handle the crystal too long hear the Hum. Some of them become the Umbra.
The first reaping. The Directorate recovers Harrow wreckage and reverse-engineers its crystal sciences from it. Every rail the Directorate fires was a Harrow lance first.
Three factions strip-mine the crystal, and the louder they mine, the sooner the Harrow comes to reap. Freelancers take contracts from all sides.
The campaign's name for whoever seeded the calculation. The canon says it is the Harrow. The campaign's finale is still to come.
Whether the Auditors are the Harrow, and whether the Swarm hire freelancers directly, are not settled in the sources.