The Vigil lives around a pair of bodies: a black hole, Vesper, and a small orange star, Ember, which circle each other every 188 days at 1.5 AU. Around them are machines in five bands, A to E, and one small hot world, Kindling, where the seed landed in 2453.
Each place has a page of its own, and the ones the sim's chapters visit say which chapter of the Record shows them. A place page opens with the guide, says how big the place is, explains the physical reason it sits where it does, gives its key numbers and links to the topic pages that explain the science.
Where should I start?
Start with Vesper, the reason for everything else. Then read Ember and Kindling, the two bodies the Vigil began with: one supplied the light, and the other supplied the ground.
The swarm and its zones explains the five bands, and is the best single page if you read only one. The pages for its parts follow: the Engine, where matter turns into light, a computing node, where residents run, and the Ashfall, the cold belt where the Vigil mines. The Record ends the tour, as the archive that every date and number comes from.
Why is each place where it is?
Each place exists for one physical reason. Orbits decide where machinery can stay: beyond 0.66 AU from Vesper, Ember's pull takes over. Light time decides how big a single thought can be: 50 to 200 seconds from Vesper to zone C. Heat decides how much room the films take: 43 Earths of radiating surface for one petawatt, which is 21 Earths of two-sided film. These are physics, and the details of the setting are fiction; each page says which is which with a basis tag.
The pictures are painted references from the project's style frames and are not final art. Each caption says what in the image is illustrative or styled.