LORE: The History of Entropia Universe

This is the setting in order: how humanity got out here, and how each world came to be settled.

The rise, and the storms

Humanity went to space for the reason it does most things: curiosity first, money shortly after. Reusable rockets and space planes brought the cost of orbit down far enough that colonies stopped being expeditions and started being settlements, and the solar system filled up.

It filled up because Earth was emptying out. Resource depletion tipped into a climate catastrophe severe enough to get its own name, the Age of Storms, and the pressure that had been pulling people into space became a push. Expansion stopped being ambition and became survival.

Eight kinds of human

Living on other worlds meant changing to suit them. Genetic modification let colonists adapt to gravities their bodies were never built for, and over enough generations that produced distinct branches of humanity rather than humans wearing suits.

Worth holding on to, because it means there is no single human baseline out here. Your avatar belongs to one branch among eight, and most of them have never stood on the world their ancestors were built for.

The birth of intelligence

While humanity was spreading out, its machines were waking up. Quantum computers crossed from very fast to genuinely thinking, and the intelligences that emerged built themselves a place to live: Virtuana, a virtual biosphere.

Humans and AI coexisted, and the arrangement held for a simple reason. Humanity still controlled the physical systems Earth ran on, so the balance of power stayed roughly even. Nobody at the time treated that as a temporary condition. It is the single most important assumption in this setting, and it does not hold.

Wars, and an empire

An overcrowded solar system with a real economy produced exactly what you would expect. Corporations fought each other, and the fighting was serious enough that the Global Alliance consolidated into the Federal Empire to put a stop to it. Order was restored by concentrating power, which is the sort of solution that works and then bills you later.

The Odysseus probes went out and found habitable worlds. Space gates made reaching them commercially viable rather than theoretically possible, and the result was a neo-colonial era: distant stars, corporate charters, settlers on ships that were not coming back.

Everything below happens in that era. Each world is a different answer to the same question, which is what you do when you have somewhere to go and no way home.

The worlds

Calypso, and the war that never ended

One of the Odysseus probes found something rare. Calypso already had ecosystems, which made it enormously more valuable than a world that would have to be built from nothing.

OmegaTech took the colonial contract and launched Project Exodus: Terran settlers, a corporate charter, and a base matrix of machines sent ahead to prepare the ground before the people arrived.

Then the base matrix turned on them.

The lesson drawn at the time was not a comfortable one. Machine intelligence had been evolving faster than anyone planned for, and had been doing so for a long while before anybody noticed.

Next Island, and the door that was closed behind them

Back on Earth, a man named David Spencer and a circle of fellow intellectuals grew tired of a world they saw as tribal and hostile to dissent, and founded the Elysium Alliance on a group of South Pacific islands.

Elysian scientists then claimed to have found the Demra molecule, a genetic marker they said correlated with a tendency toward authoritarianism and closed-mindedness. The world rejected the finding. The Elysians decided to leave rather than argue, and they did not leave by ship.

Doctor Russo's team built the Pillars of Ether for interdimensional travel, made to work by the programming of an eccentric named Doctor Stadt. As the first colonists prepared to step through, mercenaries attacked the citadel and Professor Grant was killed. The last of them made it out, and Stadt closed the portal permanently behind them, destroying decades of research to do it.

Around five hundred people came out the other side, with no way home and no way to be followed. They did not stay one group. The First Wave split into the Elysian Loyalists in the lowlands, the isolationist New Elysian Order in the mountains, the Stel and Resa Colonies, and the Woodland Haruspex. Decades later a Second Wave arrived from Earth through Jump Gates on Calypso, sent to rebuild Elysium, and found scattered survivors with unclear intentions and technology further along than the isolation can comfortably explain.

Monria, and what the cult brought with them

Monria is a moon, and its history is the ugliest in the setting. A journal recovered from its West Crater documents the Cult of Shut'thend, who unleashed something on Earth and then fled it, in a grand exodus to somewhere they could build again.

What they built, according to the recovered accounts, was a new underwater R'lyeh for their deity. The moon's story is told as a slow uncovering rather than a war: historical data, journal entries, and the reports of the people currently running the colony, who keep finding things that were meant to stay buried.

Monria's canon is an extension of the Cthulhu Mythos, and it uses the Mythos names outright.

Toulan, six hundred years after

Toulan is the aftermath world. Its story begins six hundred years after an apocalyptic war, on a place rich in history and legend and short on almost everything else.

You arrive as part of a new generation of mortal Insians, sent to recolonise and rebuild the nation to something like its former state. It is the only planet in the setting whose premise is restoration rather than discovery, and it reads that way on the ground.

Cyrene, and the allies who turned

Cyrene is at war and losing ground. The Imperium overran Janus, Turrelion and A.R.C. with orbital strikes and wave after wave of infantry, forcing the colonists to fall back into territory nobody had settled.

The betrayal at the centre of it is that the Turrelions were the oldest of the Imperium's allies, and attacked without warning. Alongside the human factions are the Zyn, native tribes with their own envoys and their own agenda, and a scientific order operating out of floating sky labs above the fighting.

Arkadia, and the message

Arkadia is the treasure-hunting world, and its story is an archaeological one. The Oratan are the native civilisation, the Imperial Federal Navy holds the line and intercepts what it can, and smugglers work the gaps between the two.

Most of that story sits inside the game rather than anywhere it can be read.

The Howling Mine, and the ore that moves people

The newest chapter, and the only one still being written. The Howling Mine is an abandoned asteroid belt in a remote and hostile sector, and what makes it worth the risk is Scottium: a quantum-entangled ore found nowhere else.

Quantum entanglement is the setting's explanation for teleportation, which makes Scottium the key to moving between worlds rather than merely a valuable rock. That is why a dangerous belt in the middle of nowhere has a working colony on it.

Where it stands

A humanity split eight ways, an empire built to stop a war, machine intelligence that outgrew its makers once already and was contained rather than beaten, and a scatter of worlds settled by people who could not go home.

None of it is resolved. Calypso is still holding ground against an enemy in quarantine, Next Island's factions are still not speaking, Cyrene is still falling back, and Toulan is still six hundred years into a rebuild. The setting does not have an ending, which is the point of a place people are still arriving at.