The Crossing

Starquest is set three hundred years after humanity left Earth for good. It was meant to be a one-way trip to another star, and it went wrong: the fleets came out in another galaxy entirely. With no way back, humanity spread out to survive and explore its new home. This is the story so far.

Right now, in real life, we live on Earth and our spaceships are thin tin cans. Our rockets land on a pad, or on a ship at sea, or in the sea. We have satellites, thousands of them, and a lot of debris. What we don't have is anything you'd really call a spaceship. Everyone who goes up has to be an astronaut, and the reality of space travel is a long way from what we expect when we play games about it.

For this game I have a story in mind that explains how people ended up living in space. What the technology is, what makes it possible, how they got there. It's also a fun 2D pixel game, so I don't want to spend long on physics that don't help it. The story matters for what you think about while you're playing, and for the story you end up telling yourself in this universe. The trick is finding the balance. So there is a backstory, and I'd like to introduce you to it.

Earth

Earth was dying. A climate crisis had gone past the point where staying was an option, and the only way to survive was to leave. In its last decades humanity pooled what it had left into one multinational effort to build a wormhole generator. It could only be fired once.

By then we had space travel, and a lot of the effort went into ships people could live on. Big, self-sustaining ships, called arks, with smaller support ships around them. What started as one effort didn't stay that way. Countries, alliances, corporations and foundations each built their own fleet, and by the end there were four of them, each with an ark at its heart. Around the arks flew whatever else the fleets could scrape together: freighters, escorts, survey craft, mining ships, anything that would fly. They loaded as much as they could carry and as many people as they could take, which was never going to be everyone, and prepared for the crossing.

The wrong sky

On the day of what's officially called the Exodus, and what everyone else calls the crossing, the generator fired and the four fleets went through together. The wormhole was supposed to open onto another star system in the Milky Way, one where surveys had found the best chance of a habitable planet. It didn't work out that way. It closed behind them, every navigation system on every ship lost its bearings, and the sky was wrong.

The ships' computers tried to fix a position and couldn't. They ran the sky against every star catalogue on board and failed to place a single field. Then they stopped looking for stars and matched the biggest thing in the sky instead: a spiral galaxy, edge-on, with two small companions beside it. It was the Milky Way, seen from outside. Fixed against that and the other galaxies nearby, the answer came back the same on every ship in the fleet. Andromeda, two and a half million light years from home. The astronomers checked it by hand and got the same result.

Earth is still up there. Its light is two and a half million years old, from before there were any people on it. No word has come from Earth since, and none can. The survivors reset the calendar. Year zero is the year of the crossing, and everything since is counted in AE, After Exodus.

Three centuries

The system the wormhole opened into was later named Sora. The arks parked in orbit around the second planet, and for a while that was all of humanity in one place.

It didn't last. Four fleets meant four ways of doing things, and the arguments everyone had put aside for the crossing came back once nobody was going to die tomorrow. Three of the arks left Sora. Each group found its own corner of the new galaxy, and three hundred years on, none of them would be recognised by the people who founded them.

The fleets had come looking for a world, and for the most part they didn't find one. Andromeda has rock, ice, gas and fire, and almost nothing you can stand on without a suit. So people here live in space. The arks became the first stations, and stations became the norm: habitats, orbital yards, mining bases, refineries, and the ships that move between them. Planets get worked rather than lived on. Climbing in and out of a gravity well is expensive, so the rock everyone actually mines is asteroids and moons.

It's 312 AE now. That's long enough to have settled down, built things, fallen out, traded and fought. It's not long enough to have explored more than a sliver of the galaxy. The frontier is close, and it's mostly empty.

The four fleets

The Federation grew out of a Western alliance of nations that pooled their fleets, shipyards and governments into one ark, Endurance. It never left Sora. Endurance is the core of Capitol Station today, and its hull number is still painted on the oldest ring. The Federation thinks of itself as humanity's protector and has the navy to back that up. Protecting people and controlling them can look similar from the inside. It holds more space than anyone else, around what most people think of as the centre of humanity in Andromeda, with a navy to police it and a proper government to run it.

Carbon are the miners, engineers and construction crews who built humanity's escape in the first place. Their ark, Bessemer, was never meant to be one. It was a construction yard, converted in the last year before the crossing, and when their sponsors couldn't support them any more they kept it flying on skill and on each other. Bessemer went north and became the heart of Brunel Station. Carbon space is a long, narrow chain of mineral-heavy systems. Carbon hasn't forgotten being treated as expendable, and doesn't plan to.

Meridian started as a consortium of technology companies that paid for its own ark, Superior, the most advanced ship ever built on Earth and still the best yard in Andromeda. It's the core of Meridian HQ today, in orbit at Meridia. Meridian is polished and rich and genuinely inventive. Whether you get a share of that depends on what you own and what your contract says.

The Conclave came from wealthy religious foundations that built their ark, Providence, as a cathedral first and a ship second. In the years after the crossing their survey ships found the one thing nobody else ever has: a garden world. Green, breathable, the lot. They named it Eden, took it as proof that the crossing was blessed, and settled it. It's still the only inhabited planet anyone knows of, and Conclave space is a small, tight cluster of stars with Eden in the middle. Faith holds it together. Whether the Conclave is there to serve humanity or to run it depends on which of its leaders you ask.

Where you come in

You're nobody special. A pilot with a small ship and a licence to mine, starting out in Sora, in Federation space. The belt you cut ore from is about as close to land as most people get.

A note on all this: it will drift. I went back and forth on whether anyone should get a habitable planet at all, and half the place names changed while I was writing this post. What's above is the version I'm building to. I'll write about each faction properly as their ships take shape, and about how the galaxy gets drawn when I get to drawing it.