Field Manual · § 1

Light, and the other kind

Ohr — אור — is light, and the word is no metaphor. Every machine of Seraphim you will ever touch runs upon it; and the reason they run upon light, and not upon something more convenient, is the whole quarrel of this war.

What it is

Ohr is not burned. No wanting makes more of it, and it cannot be drawn out of the ground as the old world drew its power out of the ground. It is grown — in a Crystallizer , out of Shefalite and living matter and time — which is why a complex that produces well smells faintly of soil, and why the growing halls stand beside the farms.

This inconvenience is by design. A power that must be cultivated cannot be seized in a single raid; it cannot be scaled without hands to tend it; and it rewards nothing of what the enemy is best at. Metatron has been petitioned more than once for something faster. The answer has never changed.

Fuel

Source	Ohr	Notes
Ohr Capsule	200	The standard. Grown in a Crystallizer, clean, and the only thing on this list worthy of a supply chain.
Sitra Capsule	150	The enemy’s. Worth less per capsule, yet it drives a Fabricator half again as fast. Read § 3 before you judge that a good trade.
Graphene Cell	100	Portable storage: what you carry, not what you build a complex upon.
Ordinary fuel	2–50	Coal, wood, whatever you have. It works, barely; it is listed here so that none need learn in the field that it is not a plan.

Your own buffer

You carry Ohr — not in a pack, but in you. Hold a filled capsule, look upon nothing in particular, and take it; it passes into an internal reserve that holds five hundred, five capsules' worth, and it is upon this reserve that every ability of every weapon you own draws.

The buffer survives your death. This is the most quietly merciful thing the complex does for its operatives, and none explain why, though everyone holds a theory. Fill it before you go out; for an ability with an empty buffer does not fail gracefully — it simply does not happen, and tells you so in the moment you needed it most.

Buffer

capacity 500 · five capsules

Shown at the upper right of your interface whenever it is not empty. Sitra fills it also; Sitra fills it at a price.

Sitra

Sitra is Ohr that has passed through the enemy. It returns denser, quicker to release, and superior in every respect to which a number can be put — a Fabricator fed on Sitra works half again as fast — and no edition of this manual has ever pretended that this is not attractive.

It is not forbidden. None will stop you; the complex issues a Purifier precisely because it expects you to come to hold some. But what Sitra does is not immediate, is not obvious for a long while, and past a certain point cannot be undone. Section three concerns that price, and speaks plainly of it.

The machines

Machine	What it is for
Crystallizer	Grows Ohr out of Shefalite and living matter, slowly, while you are elsewhere. Build one early; the operative who does not spends a career rationing.
Fabricator	Everything beyond a bench. It takes Ohr as fuel, and renders the base materials into those worth having.
Ohr Tank	Bulk storage. A tank beside a Fabricator is the difference between working and fetching.
Purifier	Renders Sitra clean again, at a loss; for what the enemy has touched does not come back whole.
Shekhinah Dock	Charges a Shekhinah in your absence, which is the only absence it will suffer.
Metatron Terminal	A relay. It shows you your own Tree; and it is as near to Metatron as almost any ever comes.

The chain

Everything begins in the same place. Shefalite Crystal comes out of the ore — thickest in the deep places, likelier in deepslate — and a common furnace renders it Shefalite Ingot , the black metal beneath every Seraphim object in existence. Coal pressed into Graphene Sheet is the means by which anything here holds a charge. Join the two in a Fabricator and there is Seraphic Steel Ingot ; and from there the tree opens, and does not close again.

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. Genesis 1:3