Techlevel measures the difficulty and sophistication of a civilization's most advanced individual technology. Complements Class (overall capability including reach) and Kardashev Rating (energy use).
Key principle: Only the hardest-to-invent and/or most advanced technology matters, not the scale or reach or quantity of a civilization:
Magic, psionics, and other non-technological capabilities are rated by the equivalent technological effect they achieve (e.g. psionic teleportation = TL 10).
| TL | Name | Defining Technologies |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pre-Tool | No manufactured tools, no controlled fire. Found objects, instinct only. |
| 2 | Primitive | Controlled fire, shaped stone/bone/wood tools, language, simple agriculture. |
| 3 | Metal | Smelting metals (bronze, iron, steel), writing, the wheel, sailing vessels, architecture. |
| 4 | Mechanical | Complex machines (clockwork, windmills), gunpowder, printing, optics, precision instruments. |
| 5 | Industrial | Heat engines (steam, combustion), electrical power, mass production, telegraphy, chemistry. |
| 6 | Atomic | Nuclear fission, electronic computing, semiconductor electronics, rocketry, early spaceflight, incl. early fusion power. |
| 7 | Fusion | Controlled fusion, general AI, advanced bioengineering, mature in-system spaceflight. |
| 8 | Nanotech | Molecular nanotechnology (dry nano), antimatter production, utility fog, programmable matter, relativistic drives. |
| 9 | FTL | Faster-than-light travel, energy shields/force fields, directed energy weapons, artificial gravity, subspace communication. Includes psionics-enabled FTL. |
| 10 | Matter Mastery | Matter-energy conversion on demand (replicators, transporters), holographic matter, industrial transmutation. Includes psionic teleportation/transmutation. |
| 11 | Exotic Matter | Creation and engineering of exotic matter: magnetic monopoles, magmatter, monopole-catalyzed conversion technology. |
| 12 | Wormhole Engineering | Creation of traversable wormholes, basic spacetime metric manipulation, weylforge technology. |
| 13 | Spacetime Mastery | Advanced metric engineering: void factories, reactionless drives (void bubbles), metric weapons, W-brains, Halo drives. |
| 14 | Universe Engineering | Pocket/basement universe creation, higher-dimensional manipulation, dimensional transcendence. |
| 15 | Transcendent | Alteration of physical constants, universe-scale reality manipulation, omnipotent-tier capabilities. |
| TL | GURPS | Orion's Arm | d20 Modern |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | sub-TL0 | - | PL0- |
| 2 | TL0 | Primtech | PL0 |
| 3 | TL1-3 | Lotech | PL1-2 |
| 4 | TL4 | Midtech | PL2-3 |
| 5 | TL5-6 | Midtech | PL4 |
| 6 | TL7-8 | Hitech | PL5 |
| 7 | TL9-10 | late Hitech | PL6 |
| 8 | TL10-11 | Ultratech (S0) | PL7-8 |
| 9 | TL12 | - (no FTL in OA) | PL7-8 |
| 10 | post-TL12 | S1 | PL9 |
| 11 | - | S2 | - |
| 12 | - | S3-S4 | - |
| 13 | - | S4-S5 | - |
| 14 | - | S6 | - |
| 15 | - | - | - |
1: Pre-Tool
2: Primitive
3: Metal
4: Mechanical
5: Industrial
6: Atomic
7: Fusion
8: Nanotech
9: FTL
10: Matter Mastery
11: Exotic Matter
12: Wormhole Engineering
13: Spacetime Mastery
14: Universe Engineering
15: Transcendent