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4 June 2025 - Lore Changes, and the Kirivian Rewrite

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  Merry pride month. Now that a certain (unwanted) demographic has been obliterated from the readers on this page (xan gone w*ke? carson_crying.mp4), I have some lore things to mention that I have been working on behind the scenes!

  As it has been implied the last few posts, I'm getting close to a test release, and that means I have to come up with the second draft of the story. The story is significant to the game as it is what the progression (or, I guess the "game-long tutorial", like No Man's Sky in a way) is centered around. And if that bothers you, no, it's not required. If you wanna drop the story and do your own thing, have fun.

Cool References

  Before I talk story, I actually want to talk about some "collaborations" (I use that term very lightly) and little story inserts that certain community members are bound to enjoy.

  For some backing context, I have been a worldbuilder for a long, long time. One of my favorite things to see in communities is coherence. That is, Joe writes a story which John references, causing Joe to reference it back, then Amy ties in a story into the collaborative work of Joe and John, and then Suzy writes her own story which has their work in canon, so forth. These can quickly delve out of control, but sometimes they just work, and in particular, sci-fi is one of those environments where it works. It's probably due to the vastness of space. That said, I have done this exact thing.

  The references included in The Conservatory as part of its lore include:

The Conservatory

  But what about the lore here? Well, my races have undergone some tweaks. The big highlight is on the Kirivians and the Novan.

Gaians

  Gaians, the evolutionary successor to Humans, are roughly the same. The short version is "(a specific, successful group of) scientists and artists that left Earth before society collapsed, and eventually they colonized an empty world and spread Earth life there".

  The important role the Gaians have is the creation of the ISCA, kind of a starfleet-esque organization. The ISCA is largely still in flux (especially with the reference to the iemp mentioned above integrating something called R-113, which is a way to define life (or lack thereof) which receives basic rights).

Avelians

  Avelians are the avian people of The Conservatory. Their lore has been tweaked a little bit, mostly in the form of their homeworld. I really wanted a race with tall stone skyscrapers (I think I saw a picture from the game Viewfinder that really inspired me. I'll play it soonTM).

  These folks are still in development and so they won't get much mentioned here, too much flux.

Kirivians

  Kirivians are the feline people of The Conservatory. Their lore has been significantly rewritten after I got the silly idea to make toki pona their native language as a bit of a love letter to the community. To make this work, I had to slightly tweak their culture and biology, and while I was at it I also tweaked the planet's biosphere a bit. There's a bit to unpack here. Their artstyle is still the same.

  Starting with the planet. Previously it was a once lush world that got destroyed by an extremely powerful solar flare, causing its magnetosphere to destabilize, killing most of the life on the surface (including the people) and whisking the oceans away into space through solar winds. The planet was almost destroyed, if not for the help of the Avelians, a close friend to the Kirivians, who devised a technique to create a magnetic "shield" using their fleet, while the world could be terraformed back into a livable space. Even if scarred permanently by the disaster, their world would recover.

  Now, in the original lore, this event was fairly recent, and people lived a post-apocalyptic lifestyle (albeit a very clean and positive one, as a bit of a literary curveball). The oceans were turned into cold deserts, not snowy, but not hot. The sky is permanently overcast, and it never seems to really rain beyond a faint mist. The continents are overrun with much more resilient fungal life, making them uninhabitable, casting people into the deserts below.

  In the tweak, I've made it so that this event happened several centuries ago. This is actually kind of a much needed change because of the time it takes to terraform, and the time it would take for things to stabilize into where I want them for presentation of the world (i.e. being permanently overcast, the ocean floor being a cold desert). It would also allow time for a new culture to develop. In conjunction, one of the holidays I had on the planet would not make sense without this cultural redevelopment. Oh, also, the continents are no longer overrun by fungus, and floral life is now present in most places. I moved the fungus to the Novans.

  Now, back to a thing I glossed over - toki pona as their official language. If you are not aware, this is a constructed language. It is incredibly simple, with 130-something words in mainstream use. Now you might be inevitably wondering "how did you manage to make a space-faring civilization work on 130 words?" - to which I answer "I didn't"!

  Kirivian biology includes the fact their brains, much like the Novan (down below), do not have a language center in the same capacity as Humans or Avelians. Kirivians previously didn't have a spoken language. They instead use pictures and paintings to communicate, mixed with very weak tactile empathic communication - you have to make physical contact with listeners to send thoughts, but its largely limited to feelings. Their primary means of visual communication is a bit inspired by Darmok from Star Trek: The Next Generation (S5E2), with their imagery relying on cultural metaphor and known events to carry significantly more meaning than what is literally shown in the image.

  Now, when they met the Avelians (among all of the playable races, and any inserted fan races) they had to develop some way to communicate. Moreover, this means that they had to come up with something that could be spoken, but which still suited their limitations. Thus, I realized something very close to me already exists that achieves this exact purpose: toki pona!

  While they may not have a strong speech center, they do have incredible memory and relational skills. In universe, I just have it that they oh-so-conveniently just happened to come up with the same toki pona and sitelen pona (the speaking system, and the writing system, respectively) that exists in the real world.

  This has had a cultural impact too: they may use the spoken language to describe pictures that are already known culturally. 󱤑󱤤󱥮󱤧󱤬󱤰󱦐󱤉󱤩󱤀󱥨󱤉󱤣󱦑󱦜󱤑󱤤󱥮󱤧󱥱󱤉󱥽󱥵󱦜󱤑󱤆󱤧󱤷󱥨󱤑󱥍󱦗󱤩󱤂󱦘󱤧󱤷󱤂

  A quirk of the Kirivian use of the language exists though: toki pona relies heavily on context to form the meaning of the words themselves. Kirivians will use phrases like the one above to describe one of their culturally important images or events to sort of "prepare" the conversation for a topic. Otherwise, they speak it just as it is spoken in the real world.

Novan

  The Novan got a restructure too, but not nearly as big as the Kirivians above. The big change is their planet. It used to be a volcanic hellscape. Now it's only sort of a volcanic hellscape.

  I wanted the Novan's weirdness to be exaggerated even more, and so as mentioned previously, I took the fungal overgrowth idea away from the Kirivians and instead made it part of the Novan world. The Novan now live in chasms and ravines where the temperatures are higher and there is not much light (better justifying their current sensory suite). On the surface of their world is a cold, silent fungal expanse. There's no plantlife. It's just fungal colonies, nothing moving, not a sound from any animals, nothing. All of the life is underground, the surface is unfriendly.

  This allowed me to also create a fun new thing: The Novan now use biotechnology with that fungus, mycelia is used to process both chemically and logically. Now personally, I quite dislike body horror and my lore reflects that. The most grotesque thing they might use is wet bits of fungus pumping things around. They don't use any other life ever, and they are a sophisticated people who follow their laws. The use of unauthorized biomass in technology is a serious crime, and the use of R-113 compliant biomass or equipment is a capital offense. Thankfully there is little incentivizing it, especially in the face of other races who use traditional electronics that can fill in the gaps that fungal biotechnology misses.

  Otherwise, they're the same lovable space cryptids as before.

Closing Thoughts

  I know most of my recent blog posts are technical posts, so I thought I should make one about the game's story itself just to get people interested again. In particular I want to extend a thank you to jan Sonja (the creator of toki pona) for confirming to me that I am allowed to use the language like this. It is genuinely one of the most loving communities I have been in and so giving them recognition like this feels like a great way to return the favor back to everyone.

  When it comes to these races, I really want to look into more languages, but making entire languages is a very big investment that is frankly too much for me. This means that while I will have other languages in universe, they'll either be substitution script (English with different symbols, like  ) or some incomplete fragment of what could be a language, without enough context to make it learnable. The Novan have a substitution script, and the reference of Terra-Widow mentioned at the start allows me to use Akolouthos for robotic beings. The Avelians probably have their own system, I think one has been loosely "designed" (scribbles turned lithography) but since I am letting my friend write that lore, it's ultimately up to him.

  If you have any questions about the story, you should join my Discord, it's on the blog home page. Thanks for reading.