Design seed

Design seeds, also known as "ship-seeds" were pieces of technology used by Forerunner Builders to encode data that would be used to quickly assemble a machine at the appropriate time. The Librarian somehow acquired a design seed that was placed inside a mountain near the Didact's Cryptum on Erde-Tyrene, which then gave birth to a large ship for his escape.

Design and operation
A design seed was comprised of software which contained the schematics for the machine, as well as machinery, which would obtain construction materials on-site and turn them into several main components; a large octagonal platform surrounded by eight curved pillars, each rising a thousand meters from the ground. The machinery worked remarkably quickly; the mountain at the center of Djamonkin Crater was dismantled and reshaped into the core components within a single night.

When the machine was activated, these pillars would begin to rotate around the central platform. As they spun, they projected Hard Light components, which used raw materials obtained on-site and reconstituted them into the alloys and components needed to build a ship or other machine. The construction process was extraordinarily rapid; the Didact's ship was approximately one kilometer long, and yet the entire vessel was materialized within a matter of minutes.

List of appearances

 * Halo: Cryptum