Summary
The Standard Template Construct — universally STC — was the Dark-Age fabrication system that allowed unaugmented humans to manufacture nearly any required device, anywhere, from any locally available materials. A working STC accepted a query and emitted a fabrication program. The system was lost in the Age of Strife; only fragments, descendant patterns, and ossified output-templates survive.
What survives
- Pattern-templates — frozen output of a particular STC query, copied forward through millennia. The Lasgun, the Leman Russ, and most basic Imperial wargear are pattern-templates of this kind.
- Partial cores — incomplete STC archives, capable of producing some templates but not others. Possession is jealously guarded.
- Theoretical fragments — descriptions of what an STC could do, which no one alive can replicate.
A complete, unbroken STC has not surfaced in millennia. The recovery of one is the Quest for Knowledge made manifest; an Archmagos who recovered a working STC fragment would, by tradition, be elevated regardless of prior rank.
Doctrinal weight
The STC is the bridge that connects Mechanicus theology to Mechanicus practice. The Omnissiah’s Sacred Pattern — the geometry of correct design — is, in operational terms, the STC. To worship the Omnissiah is to recover the STC; to recover the STC is to worship the Omnissiah.
Cross-references
- The Quest for Knowledge · the doctrine the STC anchors.
- Omnissiah · the divinity expressed by the Sacred Pattern.
- Belisarius Cawl · noted modern reconstructor of fragments.