The Planet

Lore & Background

The Planet presents itself as a place of quiet abundance. Rolling green fields give way to ochre deserts and grey stone plateaus; rivers thread between patches of dense forest where the biters nest. There are no ruins, no roads, no signs of any previous industrial or even agricultural presence. The world feels geologically young or simply untouched—its resources sit in open deposits, its oil pools in shallow lakes, its coal seams exposed at the surface. It is a planet waiting, in a very literal sense, for someone to put it to work. The biters are the planet's only organized life. They cluster in colonies radiating outward from a central Biter Nest, a pulsing, organic structure that grows and expands over time, pushing its territory closer to any human settlement. Their society is simple and absolute: defend the perimeter, swarm the intruder, and expand. They do not negotiate, do not trade, do not build. They are the Planet's immune response, and they are relentless. The thematic weight of the Planet lies in its silence. There is no voice telling the player why they should build, why the biters must be pushed back, or what the rocket is for beyond escape. The world simply *is*—a resource map and a threat map overlaid on one another—and the player's industry is the only story the Planet will ever have. Progress here is not triumph; it is survival, measured in kilowatts and conveyor-belt kilometres, and the ecology you trample never asks your permission.

In Their Own Story

The dust had barely settled from the crash when the first biter turned its small, black head toward the smoking wreckage. It stood at the edge of the grass, one of hundreds, watching. Not attacking. Watching. The refugee pulled a rusted iron plate from the hull, set it on the dirt, and began to build. By the third day there was a furnace. By the second week, a belt. By the first month, the biter line had advanced forty tiles, and the refugee had advanced a factory. The Planet did not care about either. It simply held its breath, its oil seeping into the soil, its coal waiting in the dark, its forests closing in one slow ring at a time. The refugee kept building. The biters kept coming. And somewhere far above the cloud line, a rocket that did not yet exist was already a promise the Planet intended to keep—by making the refugee earn every single rivet.

Reader's Guide

Field Notes — Recovered from a space refugee's crash-site, Planet [unrecorded]

The ship is gone. What remains is a handful of tools, a bag of iron plates, and the unshakable certainty that this world was never meant for me. And yet I am here, and the ground is hard, and the fuel is finite, and the only way out is up. Before me, the Planet had no industry. No one had ever drilled its oil or smelted its iron. The biters owned every forest and every riverbank in a slow, patient, hive-mind patience that I can only describe as geological. They do not think in plans. They think in *pressure*. A colony is a living wall, and when you push a pipe into their dirt, the wall pushes back. There is no treaty. There is only the distance between your factory and their nest, and that distance shrinks every night. I have built a furnace. I have built a belt. I have built a wall of turrets that I do not fully understand why I need. The Planet does not reward me. It does not punish me. It simply *contains* me, the way a stone contains a grain of sand. My purpose is not to conquer this place. My purpose is to leave it. And the biters, in their wordless, chitinous way, seem to understand that I will not be leaving quietly. The rocket is still a schematic in my head. The Planet is still a map of resources and teeth. And I am still the only person here, building in the silence, one belt at a time, toward a sky I have not seen in three years.

Did You Know?

• The Planet is never given a formal proper name in the base game; it is simply referred to as 'the planet' throughout the player's experience.
• The Biter Nest grows and expands over time, gradually pushing biter territory closer to the player's base even without any player action.
• The player's stated role is that of a 'space refugee'—someone who crash-landed with limited supplies and must build a rocket to escape.
• The planet's resources are distributed across distinct biomes (grassland, desert, rocky, water), each with its own characteristic ore and terrain layout.