The Doorway is one of those colony events that start out completely harmless. A couple of years after you settle a new colony, your people report a strange air current, and the source turns out to be a dimensional portal quietly sucking a bit of atmosphere out of the planet. Nothing bad happens right away, but the question of where that portal leads is going to follow you for quite a while.
Read on to find out how the event starts, all five dimensions the portal can lead to, and what each of them means for your empire.
How The Doorway starts
The Doorway has a very small chance to fire 2 or 3 years after you found a colony. It cannot happen on a Ringworld or Habitat, and each empire will only get it once. With the Overlord DLC it can also come from the Sign of the Visitor situation.
Once it fires, the colony will get a Portal Research Area planetary feature and you will receive the special project Probe the Dimensional Portal. Finishing that project is where things get interesting.
Which dimension you get
Mind that there is no choice at the end of the project. The game rolls one of five outcomes at random:
- A Dimension of Suffering
- High-Energy Dimension
- The Null Void
- Mirror Mirror
- A Dimension of Static
The first four are equally likely. A Dimension of Static only has half their chance, and it cannot happen at all if your homeworld is artificial (Habitat, Ring World, Ecumenopolis, Hive World, Machine World, Relic World etc.), if you do not own your homeworld anymore, or if you already had this outcome before.
A Dimension of Suffering
This is the one you do not want. The portal leads to a realm that is, as the event puts it, opposed to the sapient mind on a fundamental level. Anyone who touches material from the other side suffers so badly that they start harming themselves, and even studying the recorded data causes discomfort and computer errors. As such, there is not much to gain here.
High-Energy Dimension and The Null Void
Both of these turn the portal into something you can harvest. The Null Void is the better documented of the two. Your researchers slowly figure out that there are currents on the other side pushing traces of Dark Matter through the portal. About five years later you will get the Probe the Void special project, and once that is done the Dimensional Portal Researcher and Dimensional Portal Drone jobs on the colony produce six times as much Dark Matter as before.
Mirror Mirror
This is probably the most fun result. The portal connects to a planet that looks exactly like your colony, and the one calling you through it is… you. Or rather, the version of your ruler from a dimension that split off from yours at some point in history.
After a bit of back and forth you can open trade through the portal. The colony gets the Inter-Dimensional Trade modifier, and every five years the game rolls whether trade gets better, worse or stays the same:
| Trade level | Amenities | Energy | Chance to drop | Chance to stay | Chance to rise |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Booming Inter-Dimensional Trade | 12 | 8 | 16.66% | 50% | 33.33% |
| Inter-Dimensional Trade | 6 | 6 | 12.5% | 75% | 12.5% |
| Reduced Inter-Dimensional Trade | 3 | 4 | 40% | 40% | 20% |
| Inter-Dimensional Crisis | 2 | 2 | – | – | – |
If it slides all the way down into the Crisis, you will eventually get an emergency broadcast from your twin. Their capital has been consumed by “Warp beasts”, their empire has fallen, and then the signal just ends. That is the end of your trade partner.
A Dimension of Static
At first this looks like a dud. The portal opens onto a white void full of black noise, the static starts seeping through, eats your stabilizers and the whole portal collapses. You get a chunk of physics research out of it (it scales with how far into the game you are) and that seems to be it.
It is not. About 30 months later your physics labs notice strange disruptions, which leads to the discovery of negative mass particles near your capital star. That gives you the Harvesting Negative Mass modifier (+5% monthly Physics research). Roughly a year after that, a rift opens next to your capital star and six Outdated Corvettes come through it. These are tier 1 ships without FTL drives, so pretty much any home defense will handle them.
Once they are dead, someone calls you through the rift using your own clearance codes from ten years ago. That kicks off the Plight of the Beta-Universe situation, where you decide what to do about a dying version of your homeworld. It is also the longest and most interesting branch The Doorway has.
Should you probe the portal?
In general, yes. Only one of the five results is actually bad, the harvesting outcomes pay off over a long game, and the Static branch leads into a whole situation of its own. The only real downside is that you cannot steer it, so do not count on any specific result when you plan your economy around that colony.
If one of your colonies finds something living underground instead, check out the Subterranean Civilization event. For an archaeology chain, there is also Mass Extinction Through the Ages.
