Control Room

The Control Room is a top-level page for cards: script-driven panels that draw live dashboards and can issue commands through shared game APIs. Open the Control Room page, click + New Card, and a fresh panel script is bound to a canvas.

A panel script runs every game tick. The pattern is always the same:

while True:
  panel.clear()
  # ... call panel.draw_X(...) and panel.widget(...) here ...

Your script controls the layout, colors, data shown, and update cadence. The same read APIs you use from machine scripts work here too: get_component(...), clock.get_elevation(), orders.list_orders(). Panels can read component state; they change the base only through shared authorities such as power_control, shop, comms, inventory, or atmosphere.

Common uses

Panels can read any component exposed to scripts. Common uses include:

• Atmospheric history: three progress bars for O₂ / N₂ / pressure with a 50-tick spark line below
• Fleet status board: one row per vehicle with a status dot, name, current activity, and battery bar
• Sun-tracker monitor: three gauges for sun elevation, panel tilt, and solar efficiency
• Tank levels: a bar chart showing every fluid buffer at the base, with net flow text below
• Active order briefing: wrapped text of the contractor’s brief plus an iron-ingot icon and progress bar
• Storage inventory: every storage bin’s icon, name, fill percent, and count

The data comes from existing APIs; panels provide a canvas and widgets for displaying it.

The widget set

Fifteen named widgets for common patterns:

• Layout: card, divider, label
• Indicators: status_dot, toggle, pill, counter
• Bars: progress_bar, vertical_bar, bar_chart
• Curves: gauge, spark_line
• Interactive (the player clicks them): button, switch, slider. Read them each tick to act on the player’s input.

Ten primitives for everything the named widgets don’t cover:

• draw_text (with optional wrap), draw_icon
• draw_rect / fill_rect, draw_circle / fill_circle, draw_line
• clear, width, height

Every widget that takes a color parameter accepts theme tokens: "accent", "success", "warning", "error", "text-bright", "text-secondary", "text-muted", "text-value". Cards can also paint with surface tokens: bg-base, bg-surface, bg-panel, border, border-dim. Wrap a card(x, y, w, h, title) for the bordered and titled frame, fill zones with fill_rect(x, y, w, h, "bg-surface"), and a manage-style row is status_dot (green) + draw_text (name) + button (play/manage). Theme tokens resolve from the active theme whenever the script redraws the card.

See Panel API for the full method list.

A complete working example

A fleet status panel:

rover = get_component("rover_1")
pioneer = get_component("pioneer_1")

while True:
  panel.clear()
  panel.label(12, 22, "FLEET", "caption")

  panel.status_dot(20, 50, 5, "running")
  panel.draw_text(38, 50, rover.name(), 13)
  panel.progress_bar(360, 44, 110, 10, rover.battery.level(), "success")

  panel.status_dot(20, 80, 5, "running")
  panel.draw_text(38, 80, pioneer.name(), 13)
  panel.progress_bar(360, 74, 110, 10, pioneer.battery.level(), "success")

No sleep() needed: the interpreter paces the loop automatically. The panel repaints every game tick.

Watch for…

Cards command only through shared authorities

A card has no self over a machine, so a machine’s own actions (set_throttle, set_recipe, move_to, mine) don’t work from a card. It can still call shared authorities such as power_control (breakers), shop (buy/sell), comms (Signal Bus), inventory, and atmosphere. Treat cards as trusted automation because they can change base state.

The canvas does not auto-clear

Always call panel.clear() at the top of every loop iteration, or old paint will pile up under new paint and the panel will look smeared.

Coordinates are in logical pixels. A 1×1 card is 500×200; two-column cards are 1000 pixels wide and two-row cards are 400 pixels high. CSS scales the visual to the screen, so use panel.width() / panel.height() when the script must adapt to the card’s span.

Limits

• 50 cards per save, max. Past that, + New Card is grayed out. Delete one to make room.
• Board density: choose 2-6 columns from the selector above the board. The untouched default uses 2 for ordinary workspaces, 4 for 4K-class workspaces, and 6 for sufficiently wide ultrawides. A manual choice persists.
• Four card sizes: 1×1, 2×1 (wide), 1×2 (tall), and 2×2 (big), selected directly from the card-size menu. The logical canvas scales with the span, so draw relative to width() / height() and your card reflows at any size.
• One script per card. Want separate concerns? Make multiple cards.