5.1.0 — The catalogue costs something
Above the black hole the ladder keeps going: every body comes round again with a designation
from AA to ZZ, sixteen thousand rungs of it. It was far too cheap.
Unlocking the catalogue takes eight galaxies, and anyone who has eight galaxies is producing
many orders of magnitude more than the black hole costs. The first designation used to sit a
single 3.65 % step above it — so the first several hundred rungs went past faster than you could
read them.
Setting foot on the catalogue now costs a million times the black hole. Everything below
that is still the black hole, so entering the catalogue is an event rather than a footnote you
scrolled past.
Each rung costs a little more than before — 3.75 % over the one below it, up from 3.65 %.
And each rung produces less — 3.00 %, down from 3.30 %.
That last pair is the one that matters. The gap between what a rung costs and what it pays is
the entire difficulty of the ladder, and it compounds: a rung used to be 0.34 % harder than the
one below it and is now 0.73 %. Over two thousand rungs that is the difference between the climb
getting nine hundred times harder and it getting two million times harder.
If you are wondering why the cost per rung only moved a little: it is at its ceiling. The
thresholds are a geometric series over sixteen thousand rungs, and the number that holds them
runs out somewhere past 1e308. The ladder now ends around 1e301. A steeper rate would not make
the climb harder — it would make the top of it infinite.