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Complete Drifter's Guide coverage for the Deep Frontier. 61 new entries from hop 3 (Cairnside) to hop 23 (Abzu), plus updated gttr-deep.md index with all 61 deep systems. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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THE DRIFTER'S GUIDE TO THE REACH — CANDEIA
CANDEIA is Portuguese for "oil lamp" — a small light, a personal light, the kind you carry when the larger lights have gone out. The name is accurate and modest and was chosen by forty-three people at hop 21 who understood their position in the corridor and named themselves for it.
Founded to Serve a Corridor
Wave-5, twenty years old, forty-three settlers. The founding charter intent reads: "Establishment of a waypoint community for the support and provisioning of deep corridor transit." Most settlements are founded to farm, to mine, to build — to extract value from the system's resources for the community's benefit. Candeia was founded to serve the corridor. The corridor that runs through it. The corridor that leads, two hops further, to Abzu.
Twenty years is not enough time to establish a self-sustaining community at hop 21, and Candeia's settlers know this. Their agricultural development is in its earliest stages. The community imports the majority of its food from Dalim and, through the corridor, from settlements behind. The supply chain is the longest in the Settled Reach: twenty-one hops of corridor, each hop adding transit time and attrition risk, held together by the thin traffic of deep frontier trade and the specific willingness of each intermediate community to forward supply one hop further into the dark.
The waypoint station is better equipped than the residential infrastructure, which tells you where the priorities are.
What Candeia Has Noticed
The people heading deeper rarely come back. Not never — some return weeks or months later, transit through without stopping, and rejoin the corridor heading inward. But the return rate is lower than the departure rate by a margin the community finds difficult to explain by ordinary frontier attrition. The people who go to Abzu tend to stay.
Candeia's residents do not discuss this pattern with travelers. They discuss it among themselves, quietly, in the particular tone of people who have observed something they do not fully understand and have decided that understanding is not their responsibility. Their responsibility is the waypoint. The waypoint works.
Practical Information
Candeia is twenty-one hops from Gateway with two apertures connecting to GJ 7547 and Dalim. The F5V primary is bright. Basic reprovisioning is available — water, atmosphere cycling, basic nutrition, minor equipment repair. The forty-three original settlers and the handful of children born since founding participate in community decisions by direct discussion. No institutional presence. No formal governance charter beyond the founding agreement. The corridor continues past here.
Adams of the Guide rates Candeia: A small light at hop 21. Keeps burning for the travelers who keep not coming back.