These are the sixteen homes the people who join your settlement left behind, and sixteen societies your own settlement could come to resemble.
This setting is still in development, so details may change. All artwork on this page is concept art.
Pick a planet to jump to its entry.
Land civilization has never touched. There's nothing here but forests and fields. When a scrap of metal happens to drift in, the whole village takes turns using it. Winter isn't the cold season but the hungry season, and in lean hunting years the old cut back their own shares first. Anyone who has lived through a few of those years can smell wet earth and tell what passed through days ago.
On the Ruins Planet, people don't quarry stone. They dig up collapsed houses. Villages were built again on top of an old city that sank whole, and even now, break through a wall and you find someone's kitchen from a hundred years ago. In districts where the pillars still stand, the groups that got there first block the roads and charge tolls. So the people of this planet think nothing of using other people's things. Whoever owned what they dig up died a hundred years ago.
The owners vanished long ago, but the factory still runs. People tend the machines according to the duty roster on the wall and get food in proportion to what they tend. Miss a single shift and the overseer machine cuts that day's ration. The smell of oil soaked into their clothes never washes out, so you can pick out someone from the Factory Planet the moment you share a room.
The most expensive thing here is the filter that goes into your mask. Breathe barefaced and you won't last many years. Fights break out not over the pollution but over the price of filters. Families who couldn't pay washed their used filters and put them back in, and their children were the first to get sick in the lungs. People from the Toxic Planet can tell how long someone will last just from the sound of their breathing.
The homeworld dropped people off and cut contact. In Frontier Planet villages, half-built buildings still stand as they were, and abandoned materials sit piled in the rain. Every winter the adults argued over which project should get the leftover materials first, and the families that lost spent that winter without a roof. People who grew up here count the buildings first when they arrive somewhere new: how many are finished and how many aren't.
Go out onto the surface and people don't last long. Every village on the Underground Planet is inside the earth or under the ice, and air and water go to the upper districts first. When a lower tunnel collapsed, the people above didn't dig it out. They just covered it over. Someone who spent a whole life down there looks up at the ceiling first, wherever they are. The first time under an open sky, they say, they didn't know how to breathe.
The Starship Fleet has no ground to stand on. People lash old ships together and spend their whole lives inside. With no fields, no one has ever set foot on soil. To have a child, a place on a ship had to open up, so the day someone was born was usually also the day someone died. Stand in a corridor and a low vibration keeps rising through the soles of your feet.
In the Machine Civilization, swapping out an arm, a leg or an eye is nothing special. On cold days the replaced joints make a small sound. Good parts can't be bought with money. There's a waiting list, and the front of it always goes to those at the top, so more than a few people die waiting their turn. Few have ever carved anything by hand. Everything they used came out of the machines.
A planet that uses the same techniques on people that it once used on seeds and livestock. Before a child is born, the parents choose its height, its grip strength, even the diseases it will withstand. Children who grew up well joined good lineages, and those who didn't were given other work early. People raised this way don't know how much of their own body they were born with. When someone praises their body, the answer comes a beat late.
The power of the mind is handed down by a master sitting beside a disciple for years. Those without the power cooked meals and supplied clothes in the houses of those masters and disciples. When the power awakened in a child, the masters took the child away and gave it a new name. So here it's good manners not to let your thoughts wander in front of others. Someone who reads minds might be sitting right beside you.
When sickness spreads, the village council calls a shaman. In the Shamanic Civilization, that's standard procedure. When a shaman strikes a deal with the unknown, someone has to pay the price, and the villagers gather to decide who. Households that put off the price were written into the council's ledger and called up first the next time. Anyone who has ever searched that ledger for their own family's name hates the sound of turning pages.
Children on the War Planet learn to hold a gun and clear away bodies before they learn to read. When they grow up, men and women alike go onto the front-line roster, and most names entered in the same year move to the list of the dead within a few years. No adult talks about winning. Everyone just talks about getting through this month. Even those who make it out alive take a long time to put the gun down.
No one on this planet understands the insides of the old machinery. Yet if you repeat the words and steps the forebears memorized and passed down, the machinery gives one great shudder and runs again. Half of those steps are the real process and the other half are meaningless words, but since no one knows which is which, the whole thing has to be kept. Whoever once tried changing the order was buried beside that machine.
Partners, children and jobs are all decided by the Party and sent down on paper. People see their partner's face for the first time on the day that paper arrives. One sheet, two stamps, and hardly anything you could call wedding preparations. Anyone who refused a partner got one more paper, ordering them to a distant district. So children first learn how to keep anyone from finding out who they like.
Even the lawmakers and the hospital are the corporation. If you are hurt, the corporation fixes you and logs the cost, not in money, but in days you will owe. Die before it is paid off, and the remaining days pass straight to your children. So on the Corporate Planet, the scariest person is the one who fixes you and never mentions the price. People from this planet flip to the back page of a contract more than once before they sign.
On the Criminal Planet, the boss is the government. In each district a single gang has settled in, making the laws, collecting taxes and even holding trials. Shops that pay protection on time even get their thieves caught by the gang. The ones who come to smash up shops behind on payment are the same gang. When the boss changes, the law changes that same day, so every morning people start by checking who the boss is. So when people here meet a new face, they ask which district you're from before they ask your name.
