Topic: Facts about the seed story and setting:

((NOTE: This is a copy of a message from the original seed forum made by Dangermouse, the last update on it was done on may 8th))


Those informations are facts gathered and given by the developers in the forums and website. This thread is a summary and does not contain every aspect and detailed information of seed. Dont forget to think beyond the things you read here.

Hint: The game gives you alot freedom to play like you want of course. Example : You can be paranoid and believe that TAU is a sentient beeing with its own will. Be aware of metagaming however.

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The seed ship and earth
- The seed ship left earth 1000 years ago. It landed on the planet called Da Vinci 750 years ago.
- We dont exactly know which year the ship left earth. It did when the humanity was able to build such a piece of technology.
- The communication was lost en route to Da Vinci, before the colony was even started.
- There were 4 more seed ships with different destinations.
- The ships didnt carry living people, they carried DNA material of humans, plants and animals.
- Earth was not destroyed when the Seed ship left.
- First humans on davinci were born 120 years ago and no one died because of aging yet. There are now 240.000 inhabitants.
- The colonists were originally meant to live on a terraformed planet and to be in contact with earth. Until today, there was no contact established by the colonists to earth or to other possible colonies.

The planet davinci
- The atmosphere of Da Vinci, which is located in the Beta Hyi system, contains limited amounts of oxygen and no extreme amounts of immediately lethal agents.
- Humans could only survive a few minutes without further protection outside the tower.
- Da Vinci is slightly bigger than Earth with a radius of about 7000 km, and corrospondingly slighly higher gravity. The surface is about 30% water mostly trapped in a network of 'Grand Canyon'- like chasms and glaciers. There are very few bodies of open water on Da Vinci, and none near the Tower.
- The temperature of Da Vinci is quite low most of the year.
- The area around the tower is mostly comparable to slimy tundra.
- Due to terraforming, which took place for hundreds of years without colonists, a huge glacier was melt resulting in floods that threaten the tower. The weather is hostile, storms and hurricanes threaten the society.

The tower
- People live in a large tower. The tower was originally not meant to inhabit people, it was meant to be a base for terraforming.
- The rooftop of the tower was destroyed by a rock and cut off by 1km. The tower was originally 4km high and now has 3km height.
- Energy is one of the few things the colonists do not have to worry all that much about, as the tower still has a functioning fusion reactor.
- It needs to be maintained constantly or nature will destroy it.

TAU (Terraforming Assitance Utility)
- TAU is no sentient beeing. It has no emotions or a will. Colonists do not expect it to behave any differently than a very complex, buggy and big machine
- TAU is a complex piece of machinery (swarm intelligence), and an old one at that. It can't just be rebooted. It is basically a colloquialism for the tower computer network. It is a mess of upgrades, add-ons, hacks, patches, repairs and strange synergies between widely different modules.
- TAU has all relevant knowledge in its database. Informations about wars and religions are in the database in a historical context and are never presented as modern, civilised, viable ways of solving problems, since it was meant for the colony to be an ideological, peaceful society.
- TAU controls a lot of vital functions in the colony: air supply, nutrition systems, maintaining outside perimeters, making new humans, mining resources, handling the fusion reactor and more.
- TAU keeps developing errors, flaws, faults, annoyances, and the occasional dangerous shutdown. Data is lost now and then, chimbots act irrationally or strange, machinery shuts down, lights flickerand so on. One of the bigger problems is that Tau breeds colonists to fast, resulting in massive resource and space problems.
- The primary problem seems to be that some of the interpretation and reporting systems have broken down, the programs necessary for humans to be able to inspect these systems.

The society
- The inhabitants dont need to eat, drink or sleep. They use floatbeds to treat those needs.
- Floatbeds also breed colonists and dream-teach them until they are young adults . The process only takes 2 years. When people leave the floatbed for the first time, they allready have a huge knowledge in various fields.
- People dont have personal rooms/apartments. They only have personal lockers and their personal floatbeds.
- There is almost no privacy. The tower is overcrowded, people and work everywhere.
- People dont have families or childs and the ability to procreate has been put to sleep. People can have sexual interactions and romances.
- People are often in so called rings, societies for supporting eachother, sharing mindsets and goals on how to develop the community.
- The colony has a fairly flat hierarchy with democratic and anarchistic elements. The administrators are in a powerful position and rule all productions. They can be voted and devoted in short, flexible cycles via. polls by the community.
- Since there is no police, spotting and dealing with a crime is everybody's responsibility.

The spacestation
- There is a spacestation floatin in the orbit of davinci.
-There have never been humans at the space station, and with the space elevator cable ripped loose it is not likely to happen in the near future.
- The station could contain various informations and resources.
- Contact to earth could be done via the spacestation. But not in realtime , the lag would be decades long.
- It is not used for terraforming, but as counterbalance for the space elevator and as a launch pad for TAU-controlled satellites. Apart from that it is “mothballed” for later use.

Right now, those are the most common and important questions, of the society :

- Should they terraform or not?
- Make a habitat underground?
- Attempt to get off the planet?
- Alter their genetic structure to be more resistant to the alien environment?
- Scrap the air purifiers of the terraforming machinery to make room for more people in the tower?
- Keep living in a suspended state unable to eat and have children?
- Repair the spacelift and try to reach the spacestation ?

Its not possible to multitask, because there are not enough resources to do it all at the same time.

There are probably new directions people can go if they find them out.

Re: Facts about the seed story and setting:

Someone should definitely save more of the background story etc. from the website if not allready done so.. Specially now that we have no idea how long the stuff will be available there... I might do some of this today from school if I got the time.

Re: Facts about the seed story and setting:

I got a copy of the whole background story that I will be putting up for everyone to read smile