Buildings

• Ledger and dossier
• Structures and the wider corpus
• Building as commitment
• Official source
• Related reading

Buildings is the colony structure ledger: what stands on your worlds, what upgrading each thing costs, and a three-dimensional dossier for the structures themselves. It is where a colony stops being a name in a register and becomes a set of decisions — because in a strategy game of this shape, what you build is what you have chosen to be good at, and the ledger is that choice made visible.

Ledger and dossier#

The two halves do different work. The ledger is comparative and numerical: it is how you decide. The 3D dossiers are descriptive: they are how you understand what a structure actually is. Players tend to live in the first and forget the second, which is a small loss — the dossiers connect the game to the Universe's documented architecture.

Structures and the wider corpus#

Terminus buildings draw on the Universe's documented technology: Mechanum citadels, forging complexes, research and innovation centres, and the Architectonica material in the Codex. The game's structures are an interpretation of that corpus, and reading the Codex alongside them makes the technology tree legible rather than arbitrary.

Building as commitment#

Upgrades compound and cannot be undone in a world that does not reset. That is the argument for reading the manual before a first large investment rather than after.

Official source#

Canonical source for this subject: Buildings — Terminus. Checked 21 August 2026 — where this guide and the live service disagree, the service is right.

Related reading#

• Colonies — The holdings register for worlds you hold, survey or have yet to claim.
• Research — Developing frontier technology branches and what they gate.
• Mechanum and Cyberion Sources — Networks, citadels, vaults, automata and the Datasphere as Codex records.