You asked
How do I spend signal tokens during a scan action, and how many can I use in a single scan?
Answered counted as answeredAsked with: SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligencebg-418059-en-1e · SETI: Space Agenciesbg-445048-en-1e
To spend signal tokens during a scan action, you discard them; for each signal token discarded, you may discard 1 additional card from the card row and mark a signal in the matching sector.[1] You cannot use more than two signal tokens during a single scan action because the card row is replenished after you finish the whole scan action.[1]
🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
- outcome
- ANSWERED — Answered
- corpus profile
- live,vps
- answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
- gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
- timings
- search 87 ms · ask 3460 ms · total 3548 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 0 ms · generation 3548 ms
- retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
- [{"page": 12, "score": 0.032522, "snippet": "Pay 1 credit and 2 energy to scan nearby stars , using telescopes on Earth to map out sectors of the sky. This is a main action and allows you to listen for signals (represented by marking sectors with your player markers) and receive data without needing a probe. Scanning sectors is the primary way", "headingPath": "SCAN NEARBY STARS", "sharpsignalDocId": 251}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.032002, "snippet": "During play, you may have several opportunities to 'mark a signal in a sector'. Often, these come from Scan actions, but they can also come from card effects. You may never choose to skip placing a signal, it is a mandatory effect. To 'mark a signal in a sector', take the leftmost data token from th", "headingPath": "Marking Signals · Completing a Sector", "sharpsignalDocId": 251}, {"page": 25, "score": 0.031498, "snippet": "Mark your rival's signals as shown by the action. For signals from the card row, use the decision arrow to determine whether the leftmost or rightmost cards will be chosen. If the rival has a telescope tech tile, they discard it and mark an extra signal from the card row. After the rival has finishe", "headingPath": "TELESCOPE · LIFE TRACES -", "sharpsignalDocId": 251}, {"page": 17, "score": 0.03101, "snippet": "Probe techs improve the capabilities of your probes. You can have up to 2 probes on the solar system board at the same time. This already applies to this tech's immediate bonus, which lets you launch a probe for free. When you move to asteroids, gain 1 publicity. Asteroids no longer cost 1 extra mov", "headingPath": "PROBE TECHS · TELESCOPE TECHS · COMPUTER TECHS", "sharpsignalDocId": 251}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.030536, "snippet": "Pay 6 publicity to research a new technology as your main action. (Move your publicity counter down 6 spaces. If you aren't on space 6 or above, you cannot take this action, but remember that certain cards can be discarded for publicity as a free action.) When you research a tech, you start by rotat", "headingPath": "RESEARCH A TECH", "sharpsignalDocId": 251}, {"page": 26, "score": 0.029644, "snippet": "The rival can only take this action when their computer is full. If the rival computer is not full, skip this action and try the next action on the card instead. Remove all data from the rival computer (not the data pool), and give the rival the benefit shown on the action card. The rival also gains", "headingPath": "ANALYZE · SPECIES DISCOVERY · PASSING", "sharpsignalDocId": 251}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.029211, "snippet": "7 The 4 gold scoring tiles are double sided. Place them beside the board with a random side up. Place neutral markers above the 20- and 30-point spaces on the scoring track. Use markers of an unused color. For 1-player and 2-player games, place 2 markers above each of the two spaces. There are 12 di", "headingPath": "6 DATA · GOLD SCORING TILES · 8 NEUTRAL MILESTONES · 9 TECHNOLOGIES · 11 SOLAR SYSTEM ROTATION TOKENS", "sharpsignalDocId": 251}, {"page": 28, "score": 0.02879, "snippet": "If a card gives you a Launch action and specifically says you can ignore limits on probes in space, then you ignore your limits, but only for that action. (Later launches must respect the limit.) No, this is not possible. Only two resources of one kind can be traded for another resource. However, al", "headingPath": "How does ignoring the limit of probes in space work? · Can I exchange two different resources, say a card and an energy for one credit? · After I win a sector, will the marker I leave there help me win that sector again later? · Will I get if the solar system pushes my probe onto a space with a comet? · I ran out of markers. Can I still take a Scan action? · A Mascamite ate one of my rule sheets. Where can I find a copy?", "sharpsignalDocId": 251}]
- citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
- [{"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "SIGNAL TOKENS · USING SIGNAL TOKENS · FAQ · Can we play 5 rounds with organizations? · Can we play 4 rounds with quick start cards but without organizations? · Helion Assembly & Cosmos Strategy Group · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 896}]
- boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
-
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 251 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 251 boosted
- answered-before recall
-
this ruling was answered, so past rulings were not offered
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
- answer fence
- passed — letter density 0.95760 of 283 non-space chars (floor 0.45); 0 glyph-index tokens (max 2)
- debug row retained until
- Nov 12, 2026 23:49
retrieval — what the passage search returned
what this block IS: the PASSAGE SEARCH's own results — the same search that fills this page's closest-passages list — and NOT the passages the answerer read. Answering runs its OWN retrieval: a far wider candidate pool, re-ranked down to a final handful, plus floors this search never applies — the base rulebook, surviving errata corrections, and one slot per book on a multi-book read. Each of those armed only if THIS ask sent what it needs: the boost block names the ids it forwarded, and the scope line names the books it read. A document the answer CITES that no row here names is therefore EXPECTED, not a defect: two searches, two candidate pools, two orders. The answerer's own final rows are shown in their own block below, beside these and never mixed into them.
score = the fused retrieval score (reciprocal-rank fusion over the search arms) — NOT a cosine similarity. This ruling ran the THREE-ARM fuse (full-text + vector + the doc-priority boost arm, which carried the base rulebook and/or the errata corrections this query matched), whose arithmetic ceiling is 0.04918 — all three arms ranking the same chunk #1 (ceiling = arms/(k+1) at k=60). The measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 was measured on TWO-arm asks and does not bound this one: its high end is the two-arm ceiling, and a third arm has room above it. A chunk only one arm ranked highly lands near 0.016 (that one arm's #1 vote), so 0.03 here is an excellent hit, not a 3% match.
per-arm ranks (the rank each search arm gave a chunk): NOT DISCLOSED by the gateway. Fusion happens gateway-side and only the FUSED score crosses the wire, so rulesage cannot show them without a gateway change. The rank column below is the FUSED rank (position in the returned list), which is real.
token count per chunk: NOT DISCLOSED — chunk token counts are not reported on the ask path. The character counts below are of the bounded snippet/quote rulesage actually received — a real measurement of what we hold, never an estimate of the chunk.
| fused rank | document | heading | page | fused RRF score | snippet chars |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | RULEBOOK SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251) | SCAN NEARBY STARS | p.12 | 0.032522 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 |
| #2 | RULEBOOK SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251) | Marking Signals · Completing a Sector | p.13 | 0.032002 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 |
| #3 | RULEBOOK SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251) | TELESCOPE · LIFE TRACES - | p.25 | 0.031498 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 |
| #4 | RULEBOOK SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251) | PROBE TECHS · TELESCOPE TECHS · COMPUTER TECHS | p.17 | 0.03101 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 |
| #5 | RULEBOOK SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251) | RESEARCH A TECH | p.16 | 0.030536 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 |
| #6 | RULEBOOK SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251) | ANALYZE · SPECIES DISCOVERY · PASSING | p.26 | 0.029644 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 |
| #7 | RULEBOOK SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251) | 6 DATA · GOLD SCORING TILES · 8 NEUTRAL MILESTONES · 9 TECHNOLOGIES · 11 SOLAR SYSTEM ROTATION TOKENS | p.5 | 0.029211 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 |
| #8 | RULEBOOK SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251) | How does ignoring the limit of probes in space work? · Can I exchange two different resources, say a card and an energy for one credit? · After I win a sector, will the marker I leave there help me win that sector again later? · Will I get if the solar system pushes my probe onto a space with a comet? · I ran out of markers. Can I still take a Scan action? · A Mascamite ate one of my rule sheets. Where can I find a copy? | p.28 | 0.02879 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 |
what the answerer read — the passages it actually had in front of it
what this block IS: the passages the ANSWERING read put in front of the answerer, in the order it read them — the other half of the two reads described above, and the one that decides what the answer could possibly say. Each row names the book it came from and where in that book it sits, what it scored when the search arms were fused, which arm carried it there, and whether the re-ranker chose it or a floor guaranteed it a slot. A row here that no passage-search row names is EXPECTED: a far wider pool, re-ranked, with floors the passage search never applies.
candidate pool: the answering read scored 52 passages, out of a ceiling of 80 set gateway-side. Both figures are reported by the gateway for THIS ask — measurements of what actually happened, not constants read out of anyone's source and printed here on faith.
floors armed for this ask: the base rulebook — armed · surviving errata corrections — not armed · one slot per book on a multi-book read — armed. Every floor is stated on every ask, armed or not, so a floor that did not apply here is never mistaken for one this app does not know about.
arms fused for this ask: vector + full-text + the doc-priority boost arm. Stated separately from the rows because an arm that ran and carried nothing is a different fact from an arm that never ran.
| read at | document | heading | page | fused rank | fused RRF score | carried by | how it got its slot |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | RULEBOOK SETI: Space Agencies — Rulebook (corpus doc 896) | SIGNAL TOKENS · USING SIGNAL TOKENS · FAQ · Can we play 5 rounds with organizations? · Can we play 4 rounds with quick start cards but without organizations? · Helion Assembly & Cosmos Strategy Group · … | p.8 | #9 | 0.016393 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | vector | the re-ranker chose it |
| #2 | RULEBOOK SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251) | Marking Signals · Completing a Sector | p.13 | #2 | 0.032002 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | vector + the doc-priority boost arm | the re-ranker chose it |
| #3 | RULEBOOK SETI: Space Agencies — Rulebook (corpus doc 896) | COMPONENTS · SOLO GAME | p.2 | #11 | 0.014706 (below 0.016, the low end of the measured band — a weak fuse (that band was taken on two-arm asks; only its low end, one arm's #1 vote, carries over to a 3-arm one)) | vector | the re-ranker chose it |
| #4 | RULEBOOK SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251) | p.7 | #34 | 0.010638 (below 0.016, the low end of the measured band — a weak fuse (that band was taken on two-arm asks; only its low end, one arm's #1 vote, carries over to a 3-arm one)) | vector | the re-ranker chose it | |
| #5 | RULEBOOK SETI: Space Agencies — Rulebook (corpus doc 896) | p.5 | #12 | 0.013889 (below 0.016, the low end of the measured band — a weak fuse (that band was taken on two-arm asks; only its low end, one arm's #1 vote, carries over to a 3-arm one)) | vector | the re-ranker chose it | |
| #6 | RULEBOOK SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251) | How does ignoring the limit of probes in space work? · Can I exchange two different resources, say a card and an energy for one credit? · After I win a sector, will the marker I leave there help me win that sector again later? · Will I get if the solar system pushes my probe onto a space with a comet? · I ran out of markers. Can I still take a Scan action? · A Mascamite ate one of my rule sheets. Where can I find a copy? | p.28 | #8 | 0.02879 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | vector + the doc-priority boost arm | the re-ranker chose it |
| #7 | RULEBOOK SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251) | SCAN NEARBY STARS | p.12 | #1 | 0.032522 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | vector + the doc-priority boost arm | the re-ranker chose it |
| #8 | RULEBOOK SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — Rulebook (corpus doc 251) | PROBE TECHS · TELESCOPE TECHS · COMPUTER TECHS | p.17 | #4 | 0.03101 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | vector + the doc-priority boost arm | the re-ranker chose it |
chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited
token count per chunk: NOT DISCLOSED — chunk token counts are not reported on the ask path. The character counts below are of the bounded snippet/quote rulesage actually received — a real measurement of what we hold, never an estimate of the chunk.
| # | document | heading | page | quote chars |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| [1] | RULEBOOK SETI: Space Agencies — Rulebook (corpus doc 896) | SIGNAL TOKENS · USING SIGNAL TOKENS · FAQ · Can we play 5 rounds with organizations? · Can we play 4 rounds with quick start cards but without organizations? · Helion Assembly & Cosmos Strategy Group · … | p.8 | no quote on the wire |
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval 87 ms · first delta 2990 ms · total 3548 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
- full breakdown
- queued 0 ms · retrieval 87 ms · ask 3460 ms · gateway work 3548 ms · total 3548 ms
- tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
- 3165
- tokens out (what the answerer generated)
- 71
- tok/sec
- 139.2 tok/sec — 71 output tokens in 0.510 s of generation
- live seat (read from the running child)
- answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 46s ago)
- stream path
- streamed — the gateway pushed at least one accumulated draft
- watchdog
- first-token watchdog: 30s per arming window (rulesage.table.first-token-watchdog-seconds), re-armed once by the passages frame — so the worst case before a reader falls back to polling is 60s. Whether it actually fired is a BROWSER-side decision that never reaches the server, so it is not recorded here. The stream path above is the server's half of that story: whether a delta was emitted at all.
- num_ctx · think posture
- both are the CHILD's settings, not rulesage's, and no ask reply carries them — an answer never states which context window or think posture produced it. The live-seat line above reads them from the running child instead, where the gateway can answer for itself; it describes the child NOW, not this ask.
disposition
- outcome
- ANSWERED — Answered
- abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered)
- answered — no abstain rationale applies
setup-shape — why the checklist band did or didn't render
- decision
- NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question
errata registry — what the gate above had to match against
this game registers NO errata cards (edition 177), so "no registered errata card matched" above could never have matched one
Errata scope: the gate above matched this ruling's own edition only. When an ask also reads an expansion, that expansion's own registered errata cards stay outside the match — a stated phase-1 limitation, not a failed lookup.