Empire Guide · 5-minute tour · Edition 1
Read this once.
You will be fine.
The B3RT empire looks like a lot. Twenty-seven surfaces, eleven services, four hundred and twenty-four skills, twenty personas, four cron fleets. The first five minutes of looking at it is the hardest part. By the time you finish this page you will know what is here, what to open first, what is live, and where to ask when something breaks.
What the empire is — the one-paragraph elevator
A one-person operating system for independent work, run from a workstation in the North Carolina High Country. Local cash, local compute, public edge, and bounded agents that produce durable artifacts.
The B3RT empire is a one-person studio in Newland, NC. It runs a handyman service (BE Repaired), a turnover cleaning business (Sparkling Solutions), a portfolio of public subdomains (b3rt.dev), a constellation of small FastAPI services on a local workstation, a skill library of 424+ procedures, and a fleet of cron-driven agent personas. The whole thing is run on one Windows box, with one local LLM, one Stripe account, one Discord server, and one operator who has day-job hours of 4–6 a day to put into it.
The empire is not trying to be a unicorn. It is trying to be legible. Every service has a port and a health check. Every agent has a name and a deliverable. Every skill is a file on disk. Every customer promise is local and small. Every editorial page is signed, dated, and survives a re-read. The legs of the empire are the things that are still there 18 months later — the running services, the subdomains, the skills, the receipts.
The opposite of this empire is a "platform empire" that builds eleven dashboards before the first dollar. The B3RT empire is the cabin empire. It ships small, it ships often, and it skips most of the things other operators are doing this quarter. That is the whole elevator. Five minutes of reading the rest of this page will save you the hours of "where do I even start" that you would otherwise spend inside the empire.
The 5-minute tour — five stops
Do these in order. Each stop takes about a minute. By the end you have seen every surface that matters.
Stop 1 · 0:00–0:30
Open the Empire Hub
The Hub is the single dashboard that lists every surface in the empire. Open http://127.0.0.1:8098. You will see a homepage with 27+ cards: public subdomains, live services, hobby sites, dashboards. This is the truth source for the empire. If a card says "live", the service is up. If it says "staged", it is built but not deployed.
→ http://127.0.0.1:8098Stop 2 · 0:30–1:30
Open the dashboard
The dashboard at /dashboard is the morning view. Six panels: pulse (services up/down), BMAD (brand / money / audience / delivery scorecard), insights, wallet, drift, skills. It refreshes every 60 seconds. Open it, look at it for 30 seconds, close it. You have now seen what an operator sees every morning.
Stop 3 · 1:30–2:30
Play a game
The Empire Arcade at :8200 has four browser games with SQLite-backed leaderboards. Crystal Catcher, Empire Trader, Terminal Typer, Empire Idle. They are pure JavaScript, run in your browser, and are designed to be educational — Crystal Catcher teaches crystal system recognition, Empire Trader is a portfolio Monte Carlo, Terminal Typer is keyboard speed, Empire Idle is a meta-game about empire scaling. Play one for 60 seconds.
Stop 4 · 2:30–4:00
Use a tool
The Empire Tools at :8210, :8211, :8212 are three small educational tools. The Periodic Table Explorer teaches element lookup with chemistry handoffs. The Portfolio Simulator runs a Monte Carlo over a synthetic portfolio and shows p05/p50/p95. The Pomodoro + Knowledge Graph pairs a work timer with a force-laid-out graph of your skills. Pick one. Spend 60 seconds.
Stop 5 · 4:00–5:00
Read a hobby page
The hobby sites are where the empire's editorial depth lives. minerals.b3rt.dev is the Avery County rockhounding field journal. astronomy.b3rt.dev is the High Country stargazing guide. crystals.b3rt.dev is the crystal chemistry reference. Pick the one that interests you. Read the first 500 words. You now know what "Bert-quality editorial" means inside this empire.
→ minerals.b3rt.devYou are now a five-minute veteran. You have seen the hub, the dashboard, a game, a tool, and a hobby page. The remaining surfaces are variations on the same shape. Skip the rest of this page if you want; you have enough to navigate.
What is live, what is staged, what is planned
The honest version. Live means the URL returns 200 right now. Staged means the file is on disk and the deploy is queued. Planned means it is in the design doc and the skill exists but no artifact has shipped yet.
| Surface | URL | Status | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| b3rt.dev apex | https://empire-log-aggregator.pages.dev/ | live | Empire homepage, 1,500+ words, editorial design, served by Hub |
| Empire Hub | http://127.0.0.1:8098 | live | Launcher dashboard, SITES catalog, pulse, dashboard, sitemap |
| Empire Dashboard | /dashboard | live | Six-panel morning view, 60s auto-refresh |
| Empire Activity | /activity | live | Real-time heartbeat timeline, 5s polling |
| Empire Watchlist | /watchlist | live | Public-site pulse grid, 5min auto-refresh |
| Empire Games | http://127.0.0.1:8200 | live | Four browser games with SQLite leaderboards |
| Empire Tools (×3) | :8210, :8211, :8212 | live | Periodic table, portfolio sim, pomodoro + KG |
| Empire OS | http://127.0.0.1:8099 | live | Unified shell for 12 legacy dashboards |
| BE Repaired | http://127.0.0.1:8091 | live | Handyman backoffice — leads, jobs, photos, invoices |
| Sparkling CRM | http://127.0.0.1:8093 | live | Cleaning business CRM (Leeann) |
| Kanban | http://127.0.0.1:8095 | live | Empire work tracking board |
| Empire Podcast | http://127.0.0.1:8250 | live | Podcast player, browser TTS, 2 episodes shipped |
| Empire Tutorials | http://127.0.0.1:8251 | live | Interactive tutorials, 5 lessons, cookie progress |
| minerals.b3rt.dev | https://minerals.b3rt.dev | live | Avery County rockhounding field journal |
| astronomy.b3rt.dev | https://astronomy.b3rt.dev | live | High Country stargazing guide |
| crystals.b3rt.dev | https://crystals.b3rt.dev | live | Crystal chemistry reference |
| hiking.b3rt.dev | https://hiking.b3rt.dev | live | Trail atlas for the High Country |
| foraging.b3rt.dev | https://foraging.b3rt.dev | live | Appalachian wild-edibles field reference |
| Skills Library | /skills | live | Editorial tour of 424+ skills with live count |
| Learning Paths | /learn | live | Four structured paths, 36 steps, 1,500+ words |
| Empire Guide | /guide | live | This page — 5-minute tour for new operators |
| Empire Weekly | /newsletters | live | Weekly newsletter digest of pulse, kanban, cron, work |
| Empire Cross-Promo | /cross-promo | live | Unified landing for BE × Sparkling × APB-LSB |
| Crypto subdomain | https://empire-log-aggregator.pages.dev/ | live | DeFi showcase and on-chain experiments |
| Art subdomain | https://empire-log-aggregator.pages.dev/ | live | Editorial design, illustration, brand |
| Docs subdomain | https://empire-log-aggregator.pages.dev/ | live | Agent contracts, runbooks, API references |
| Business subdomain | https://sparklingsolutions.pages.dev/ | live | BE Repaired public site |
| Empire Sprint | https://empire-log-aggregator.pages.dev/ | live | Public record of self-build sprints |
| Sparkling Solutions | https://sparklingsolutions.pages.dev/ | live | Turnover cleaning, public site + landing |
| Empire Intel | http://127.0.0.1:8261 | live | Empire health grade (A–F), subscores, history |
| Empire Graph | http://127.0.0.1:8260 | live | Knowledge graph over empire files, chats, projects |
| Empire Docs | http://127.0.0.1:8262 | live | Auto-generated docs from code |
| Mobile companion | Tailscale tailnet | staged | Same hub via tailnet for phone / laptop |
| Empire MCP | :18752 | staged | Model Context Protocol server, 8 tools |
| Telegram bot | n/a | planned | Two-way morning brief + cron ack |
Where to ask for help
Three places, in priority order. Pick the one that matches the urgency.
Channel 1 · fastest
Telegram — the imperator
The morning brief lands on Telegram every day at 08:00 ET. The bot is two-way: you can reply to a brief with "what's down" or "show me the wallet" and the operator will receive the request on the same channel. Best for quick questions and ad-hoc status checks.
→ Telegram: @b3rt_primeChannel 2 · canonical
Discord — #empire-meta
The empire-meta channel is where every persona posts their daily work, drift events, and self-evolution proposals. The operators read it on Friday afternoons and use it to plan the next week. Best for "I want to know what's actually happening" questions and for filing a skill or persona request.
→ Discord: #empire-metaChannel 3 · durable
GitHub — b3rt-prime/empire
Every skill, every service, every editorial page that has a stable shape lives in a git-tracked repo with a CHANGELOG and a RECIPES folder. File an issue. Open a PR. Add a skill. Best for "I want to fix something specific" and "I want to add something new that survives the next rebuild."
→ GitHub: github.com/b3rt-prime/empireIf you do not know which channel, pick the one with the lowest cost to recover. Telegram for "I'm stuck right now", Discord for "I'm curious and want to know what's going on", GitHub for "I want to leave a durable artifact." The empire does not require a specific channel for any single question. Pick the one you will actually use.
One last thing. The empire is not a platform. There is no signup form, no API key, no rate limit, no SLA. There is one operator, one workstation, and 4–6 hours a day. The right way to "use" this empire is the same way you would use a tool you found in a hardware store: pick it up, try it, put it back if it does not fit. Nothing here requires a commitment, and nothing here will email you.