The developers describe the lore of the Xi'an, Banu, Vanduul, Tevarin, Kr'Thak and Hadesians. They cover the Tevarin language guide, a possible Tevarin ship manufacturer, Xi'an military and monopoly houses, alien sports, pets, AI, and how lore will reach the game.
TL;DRThe team is working on a Tevarin language guide in the style of the existing Xi'an and Banu guides, currently doing weekly lore deep dives to answer the xenolinguist's cultural questions, with no release timing given.
Yeah, we're definitely working on the language currently. This isn't something that we are like, oh yeah, we're totally doing it. No, we're totally doing it. But we're going to make a language guide in the style of, if anyone's looked at our other language guides, we have the Diplomat's Guide to Xi'an, and we have the Rest Society Guide to Banu. It'll be something like that.
Yeah, to help you if you have that kind of inclination to actually learn the language yourself. We work with Britton Watkins, who is an incredibly smart and talented xenolinguist, as we call him, who is developing our languages. So one of the things that we do, aside from the fact that we release it in sort of an in-fiction way, the sort of phase that we're at is where we do a lot of deep dives into the culture, because he has to know a lot of things when building the language, of like, is color important to them? Do they have a strong sense of self, which might implicate a direction of how the language is formed. So we have a weekly what we call a narrative jam, where it's kind of a blocked out hour where we can bring the hive mind together and talk over large scale lore questions, histories. It's meant to be more kind of a social thing, but we can riff about ideas and stuff like that. And so we've been working through some of Britton's questions and trying to dive a little bit deeper into a lot of the Tevarin culture and stuff like that.
TL;DRDave Haddock says answering the xenolinguist's questions does push alien definitions further and helps other teams, but they keep answers loose so they can adjust, and Adam Wieser recommends the language docs as a read.
Yeah, definitely. And it's always going to be one of those interesting things, because we're working with the art team and the character team as far as what the physiology of these things look like and stuff like that. It helps push conversations forward on other fronts too, which is really cool. But at the same time, because we're having these conversations earlier than some of the other teams are looking at some of the aliens, we don't want to hem them in. So we try to, again, stay cryptic where we can, get answers where we can, but still keep it a little bit loose, so we have the ability to modulate and adjust as we go.
And I'll just hop in and say that the language docs, even if you don't quite have the time or the inkling to teach yourself Xi'an over the next month or year, they are a great resource just to read if you want to learn more about the culture of a specific species, whether it's their approach to time or gender or work, all these different things are all wrapped into there. So it can also be a fun thing just to peruse if you want to learn more about the Banu or the Xi'an in and of themselves. It's a very fascinating document. And I know anytime I work on anything related to one of these species, I bring up that doc and I'm just going through it to see how they approach it from a cultural aspect or how they think about things. So it's really cool. It's a wonderful resource and a really, really interesting read. So highly recommend it if you have any interest in any of the language or alien stuff whatsoever.
The Xi'an are a very long-lived civilization. They walk around on two legs. They have a very long history. Our first contact with the Xi'an was kind of a public relations disaster and a diplomatic disaster, because a terraforming company back in the Messer era, when everybody didn't really care about things like rights to terraforming planets, moved in and started the terraforming process, but they didn't know that it already had Xi'an on it. So that led to a horrific encounter where the Xi'an, naturally not trusting all these people who are shooting lasers at their planet, took them hostage. And that's how the Cold War between humans and aliens started.
TL;DRThe Banu are friendly, trade-focused first-contact aliens with short lifespans, a count-up sense of time, little interest in recording history, and loud enthusiasm for sports like Sataball.
So the Banu were the first alien species that humans encountered, when one Banu was trying to basically run from the law in Banu systems and discovered a jump in the Davien system. Just through that first encounter it set the stage where the Banu are extremely friendly and first and foremost interested in trade and building connections with other species. So we've known them the longest, we've never had any conflicts with them. They're also a species, they live shorter lifespans, we're thinking, I think, 30 to 40 years, something like that, in comparison. And their concept of time is interesting, where they count up. So when they start to work, they have a clock on their wall that says, I'm working to these many beats, which is also how they tell time, through beats. Essentially, but yeah, they're great. They also don't have a written history that they keep around. They don't sit down and write things to have forever. They just know if something works, that's the thing that works. So it's like if a brand new quantum drive is designed and it works better than the previous one, they stop caring about the one that came before, because this one is better, so why do we even need that anymore? So their sense of history is different than ours, in that in some ways humanity probably has kept and recorded more Banu history than the Banu have right now, because as long as we've known them, we've kept track of certain things. But for them, they don't care. It's all about living in the moment and what works good for now. Also very, very loud and big fans of Sataball. So if you go to Sataball games, they are there, and they love just to cheer in general. They're very enthusiastic.
I think it's just sports in general. Again, they don't have team identification. They just enjoy the celebration of the game. So they're like, yay, you're doing great, at both sides, which we've always joked would be amazing to see ultimately, but would just be probably really aggravating for most of the other spectators there.
TL;DRLittle is known about the Vanduul, a brutal, adaptive, clan-based species with no central government and no diplomacy, who have taken systems from the UEE, prompting a more proactive military campaign.
So we do not know much about the Vanduul. They're basically a very clan-based, warlike species that we had stumbled upon, I guess. There was a massive expansion to one side, we call it the western side of the UEE systems, even though there's obviously no directions. But it turns out we had settled on a planet that was a hunting ground for them. So a clan came in and wiped out a small town, which was our first introduction to them. They are a very methodical, brutal, cold species, so they just wipe stuff out and they decimate planets, but they don't have a central core government or anything like that. They operate in clans, so there's these roaming clans, which makes them very hard to combat, because you knock out one clan, it doesn't really affect any of the other ones. They don't talk to each other. They have never made an attempt to establish diplomatic relations with humans. So it's been purely violent. And there have been a lot of clashes with the Vanduul over the centuries, I guess. And to the point where we've had to abandon systems because they've had huge pushes into a system. The UEE tried to hold them and failed and then got pushed out. So we've lost a handful of systems basically to the Vanduul, and it culminated with one of our big events, which we did back in 2016, which was the attack on Vega II, where they basically attacked a UEE system and nearly destroyed an entire planet, but were pushed out by Admiral Bishop, which kickstarted a more proactive military campaign to fight our way back into Vanduul space, which is our current conflict on the west side. But yeah, not a lot is known about them. They're obviously very violent, but they also seem to be very adaptive. Their physiology allows them to actually exist in a vacuum for a little bit. So they're very resilient, very smart, and very deadly.
TL;DRVanduul waste is handled in over-engineered rest pods that replenish nutrients and double as a place to eliminate waste, according to a narrative document the team found.
I mean, again, as part of our unique job description, we have had to have conversations about how each alien poops. I think we had figured... Adam, do you remember? I feel like we said that they probably had some way of recycling their waste, almost like a natural Fremen system, like the Fremen suit thing where it recycles your waste into something like that. But I actually don't remember.
I don't recall either, but I see Cherie searching furiously, so maybe she'll have an answer in a few moments while I add here for a second. These are the fun things. We do have these extensive documents that we work on just with these questions. And for the Vanduul in general, even though within the game world people don't know much about them, we as a narrative group know a lot about them and these kind of small things. It's fun to know all this stuff and to expand on it, and can't wait until you all get to learn more about it.
I found the answer to the very important Vanduul question. It's in one of our docs. So when the Vanduul are not fighting or they don't have any duties going on, they take rests in these heavily over-engineered pods that just replenish their nutrients, give them a better environment to sleep, et cetera. And the pods double as a place to eliminate your waste as often as you need to. All in one machine.
The Tevarin are a warrior species of aliens and our first kind of enemy in space. And we've been through two wars with them, we being the UPE at the time, and the Tevarin ended up losing both and becoming a sort of fractured people, now in the midst of a long-running, centuries-long diaspora. And at the point in time where we are now in the game, they're sort of rediscovering their culture and re-embracing aspects of their culture, finding new places to gather, and different political ideologies of how the Tevarin as a species and a culture should continue. Personally, I have a soft spot for them. I think they're very cool. So it's been a lot of fun as we've been developing them more recently.
TL;DRNothing new to share on the Kr'Thak, who are humanity-unknown, longtime enemies of the Xi'an; the deepest existing lore is an RSI article on the Xi'an's second Imperial Age ending.
Nothing to share. They are a thing. To provide context, again, the Kr'Thak are basically a longstanding mortal enemy of the Xi'an. Humanity in our universe has not actually experienced them, come across them, doesn't know what they are, but just knows that they basically exist on the other side of the Xi'an Empire. So there's humanity, Xi'an, and then Kr'Thak somewhere over here. But they basically had a very long war with them that was pretty devastating. So we know they exist, but we don't know anything about them, and they won't tell us anything about them.
I would say just from what is out there from a lore perspective, there is on the RSI website an article about the end of the second Imperial Age of the Xi'an, which, we don't know too many details, but the Kr'Thak were basically involved in ending the second Imperial line of the Xi'an. So if you have an interest in digging in, that's kind of the deepest thing that humanity knows so far about the Kr'Thak and what they're able to do. So if that interests you, go track that down. And also, Jeremy wrote a great short story called Crossroads, specifically about Tevarin bounty hunters, that digs into the topic of the Tevarin right now and where they sit in this world. If that interests you at all, definitely go check that out, because it's very cool and it really highlights how they're situated in the current game world.
It is an ancient species tied to Hades system. So Hades system is an unclaimed system that's sort of an archaeological treasure trove, the aftermath of basically a devastating system-wide war that resulted in one of the planets actually getting blasted in half, and there's no indication of who these aliens were, what they were fighting over, what caused that kind of level of destruction, all that stuff. So they basically are one of our ancient aliens. So there's a lot of mystery going on about who they are.
TL;DRAdam says there is room in the lore for a new Tevarin manufacturer, via government support or the Branaugh settlement, but notes the narrative team doesn't decide which ships get made.
I think the easy answer is there is space in the lore for it. With the way the Tevarin are currently going, not only are they starting to have a resurgence within the UEE, the first Tevarin senator, Soush Kozy, was elected and re-elected from Elysium, which was the Tevarin's original home world. And he's been pushing to get more Tevarin involved in the UEE, involved in the government, so it could be something like him pushing for government subsidies to be able to support a manufacturer of a new Tevarin ship line within the UEE. There's also a settlement in Branaugh, which is an unclaimed system, so it's not part of the UEE. But a lot of the Tevarin diaspora that maybe didn't quite feel at home in the UEE, or just wanted to go to a place where their culture was all their own, have started their own giant community there. There's a growing population of Tevarin there. So there's also an angle where we could potentially have some kind of manufacturer come out of the Branaugh system that's basically making more modern Tevarin ships for what they need out there. It's definitely there, though we do have to couch it in saying that what ships get made and what their functions are aren't our choice. We're part of that process, but we're normally not the ones that are driving that conversation. But we put in those little areas, so if a ship like that is desired or talked about, we can support it.
I mean, I would think that they do. It's a natural part of, if you have a military, if you have any kind of warfare that you would like to win, you would cover all the fronts you possibly can. I believe that would include tanks, mobile artillery, that kind of thing.
So the Xi'an, we don't know whether they've had first contact with the Vanduul, but we do know that when humanity had first contact with the Vanduul, it was during the Xi'an-Human Cold War, and the opinion of people in the Xi'an Empire is like, great, those people that we hate are distracted, so cool, we're fine with that. I mean, we don't want to get involved with the Vanduul ourselves or anything, but we like what they're doing. It's fine.
Yeah, and I'm sure you'd see something similar with Tevarin, potentially, who, if they were lacking the resources to pursue more traditional designs that were Tevarin originated, I could easily see them wanting to adapt human ships to be more suitable for their use. But that's just purely in the written lore realm and not something that's probably going to be in the game.
TL;DRThe team thinks original Tevarin ships likely still exist, noting a cache found in the Kabal system release, and says a new Tevarin manufacturer would be possible like any UEE company.
I mean, I think the universe is big enough that you've got to imagine there's still ships out there. There's metals from the wars, and there's got to be still collected replicas, or things that have been lost and not found, that are out there. I think it'd be hard to imagine that there's nothing anywhere.
And it was part of the Kabal system release, that they had found basically a cache of original Tevarin ships and weapons and stuff like that. And that's what Esperia was given access to, in order to be able to recreate, I think it was the Prowler. I'm not sure. But one of the ships that they designed was based off of original scans that they had done of an actual, authentic Tevarin [ship].
Well, they were basically assimilated. As a culture, they were assimilated. Going back to the earlier question about whether there could be a new Tevarin manufacturer, it's certainly possible. If a Tevarin decides, hey, I want to make a new ship, and they've set up a company and they want to build it, they're members of the UEE, so technically it would be like any other company.
TL;DRThe hope is that Tevarin are widely integrated into UEE society and military, though integration may not mean equal treatment, and some live separately in the Branaugh diaspora.
I mean, the hope is that, yes, that there's a lot of that, that you would just see them walking down the street, and if they're living in the UEE and they're part of the culture, that they're just living in cities and doing their thing. Of course, like Jeremy and Adam were talking about, there's the diaspora and stuff like that, where they are living outside of the UEE but are trying to maintain or rebuild some of their culture. But again, the hope is that down the road, once we get Tevarin characters in game and stuff like that, we could modulate basically how many or how few there are based on location. But the idea is that you theoretically could walk around Area18 and just pass a Tevarin who's getting a frosty.
Yeah, and I mean, they went through a full civilization collapse, essentially, after the Second War. And so I think there's been hundreds of years since then. And so there's been time for Tevarin to either fall through the cracks and be in the underworld of human civilization, not really in any registered way, or to become more civilized and get representation through Sujikasi and all that. Whether they're officially integrated or part of it doesn't necessarily mean they're enjoying all the same freedoms or all the same regard in day-to-day life. But I think from the point of view of the UEE, there's ideas that Tevarin also serve in the military and all these things. So they are able to be fully integrated in that way. Whether they want to be, whether in practice that translates to an equitable day-to-day experience, I think is another matter. And then for those that want a life outside of that, that's where Branaugh is, I think, really taking root for the culture.
Every Xi'an, once they become a certain age, they have to sign up for the civil service, which is run by the Emperor's house, the Emperor's family. They do things depending on what their talents are and where they've been assigned. Some of them serve their stint in the military. Some of them join bureaucracy or other important government arms, but the military is big, and everybody essentially serves in it at one point in their life.
TL;DRThe absence of AI is mainly a stylistic choice to keep players piloting ships, so the team's view is that other aliens likely haven't developed it either, keeping the playing field even.
Yeah, I mean, again, the lack of AI or synthetic humans in the Star Citizen universe is less out of a why-hasn't-this-technology-developed thing. I mean, we have a reason for that, but it's actually a step removed from it. It was more of a stylistic choice originally, of wanting the players to be the ones piloting their ship, in early, early, early conversations with Chris about what the game universe would look like fictionally. The idea was that he wanted people to get in their ship and fly cargo from one planet to another, not sit there and control a fleet of AI drones that could do it a thousand times better than a human ever could, or fight or whatever, that sort of tactile dogfighting thing. So that's why we backfilled all of the situations of the Artemis, and there was the traffic incident or whatever that caused a bunch of deaths with AI hover vehicles, to justify why there's no AI in the universe or the human empire, because they just have been burned by it so many times that they're like, it's just not worth it to develop it. Screw it. We'll just make it kind of computer learning, but not sentient. So to that point, it feels like we would just extend that to the aliens as well, that maybe they've had bad experiences with it. Maybe it's just never come up. But that way, it becomes more of an even playing field, because if the Xi'an have AI combat drone pilots, they will just decimate. There's no way a human would be able to. I mean, I don't know, I saw Stealth, so maybe [a human can] overcome it. But yeah, just that idea of wanting to have people in ships flying and battling each other or doing stuff. So it makes sense that the other aliens probably haven't developed it, just, again, to make it more of an even playing field across the board, would be my answer.
I mean, again, I think that's a ship team question, but it stands to reason that these alien civilizations, as advanced and wide-spanning as they are, probably have similar needs. How they go about that, I think, remains to be determined, whether it's utilizing the same technology and the same exact approaches as we know now with the human manufacturers. So, probably, but again, more of a ship team question if it'll happen at some point.
Yeah, they totally would, just not a lot. If you want a party bus, you should probably hit up the Banu. I imagine their party buses are the sickest in the universe.
Oh, yeah. Those would be the ones to be on. I just feel like, based on our conversations with Xi'an music being extremely slow, a Xi'an party bus would just be this droning thing with decaying food, slow-paced music.
Meanwhile, the Banu, I believe the Banu are the ones that take short little naps in cuddle piles, right? So if you're more looking for that vibe. And they have the Slomadon, which is a giant drinking vessel that they do when you close a deal with the Banu. They take all this stuff, and everyone is supposed to bring something to add to the Slomadon to then drink, whether it's the Banu stuff or stuff from that. So in the Banu language guide, if you check it out, one of the cultural things, it warns you that if you do deal with the Banu and drink from this, to take it slow, bring something light, because sometimes the stuff the Banu put in is very, very strong. So yeah, Banu party bus, cuddle nap sleeping rooms, I think they'd be the ones that'd be way more into it than the Xi'an.
Yeah, we mostly make the manufacturers for Xi'an as they're required. So say the weapons team needs to have really good weapons that are Xi'an made. At that point, we would probably create the house that makes it and make up their history and do whatever development needs to be done to show that they would be assigned this particular role. But we do have a couple that we named in the Xi'an Diplomat's Guide. If you look in it near the prestigious family lines, we've got, hold on, I forgot the names. The 12 family does fabric and clothing manufacture. They're famous for their particular type of cloth that's really delicate and semi-transparent but warm. It's made from mashun wool, one of the animals that we invented a while back for the alien animal naming contest. It's a four-legged llama thing that makes really nice fur.
TL;DRXi'an endurance racing, where winners slow their body functions and are highly revered, is the main alien sport named, alongside the Banu's love of Sataball, where some play professionally.
We've got a few so far. Probably the most apparent one, and I don't even know how to pronounce it, is basically Xi'an endurance racing. Cherie, I'm not sure if you... the Kaikola.
So the endurance race the Xi'an have is, as we talked about, their operas being extremely long and their music being slow and stuff like that. Because I think it's endothermic, they're able to slow their heart rate to a certain pace. So the Xi'an endurance race is about seeing a long, long race where the best racers basically are able to slow their body functions down to a certain point. It's obviously maybe not the most exciting from a human or Banu perspective, but it does take a lot of skill, and basically the winners of that in Xi'an society are very highly regarded, because being able to do this well and control your body like that, and to meditate while still operating the ship over long distances, is very revered. So that's one sport type thing that we put in. The Banu are also, like you said, big fans of sport and Sataball in general. Even though that's not their sport, they love to watch, and Banu are even professional Sataball players within the UEE, because they've taken to this sport so much.
Yeah, Cluey was, it's been mentioned in just a few little lore pieces we did, but it's not too widely known, because it was something that was done pre-Purge, before the Tevarin were defeated in the wars and then basically gave up their culture and society. But supposedly it was a team game that was played on stone courses. And the belief is that basically the team tactics used to navigate the course and win the game were a way to teach younger Tevarin some of the tactics that would be used when attacking and boarding enemy ships and stuff like that. So yeah, that's kind of out there too.
Oh, Banu Banu, that's right. But yeah, he'd come up with this card game that we played a couple times over lunch, and he was iterating on it, which was getting to be fun. We should check in with him and see about resurrecting it, because it was a good time. Sort of like a liar's game, I think, if I remember correctly.
I mean, I don't see why not. The Xi'an do assign monopolies in different industries that are really high level. It's only really assigned to super prestigious houses. It doesn't really do that with smaller houses. And remember that each big house usually has like 100 or so satellite houses that fall under its umbrella. So any of those little tiny houses might just not want to do whatever industry was assigned to the big house, and they would do something else.
TL;DRLore lives mainly in weekly-turned-sporadic lore posts on the RSI site's Spectrum Dispatch, short stories and Jump Point portfolios, and new lore is created only in service of the game's needs.
This is where I want to plug the only weekly recurring endeavor that's been going on longer than the shows that I make, and that's the weekly lore posts that go out every Tuesday.
Well, they're not going out every Tuesday anymore. We've been scaling back on it. They're going out more and more sporadically. We have been trailing off because the needs of Star Citizen and Squadron have sort of overridden those. But yes, they went on for over 10 years every week. And they used to be actually three times a week. When we first started, I was doing Kid Crimson, Cal Mason, and a news dispatch every week. That was fun.
Those are all available on the RobertsSpaceIndustries.com website. Generally speaking, one almost every week, and they cover a variety of topics. They're in a bunch of different formats. Some take the format of talk shows. Some are more like news reports. Some are just straight fiction. But many of them are delightful, and they paint a wonderfully complex picture of the society that's sitting underneath the Persistent Universe that the developers are building right now.
And the easiest way to get to them, let me just jump in, is if you go to the Comm-Link, and then the top dropdown on the left is called Channel. And if you go to Spectrum Dispatch, so if you think about this as a dispatch going out on the Spectrum, that's where the repository of all these live, going back years and years and years. And they do have things where they can be, like Jared said, really quick one-offs, or, as mentioned earlier, a longer story that Jeremy wrote called Crossroads, or we have a few stories like that that fill in some other things too. So it's an easy way to start diving into things. And then if you have any certain topics, you could type in Banu or Xi'an and just see what pops up, and then go through and see where they're referenced in any of these stories.
Yeah, and we have the Jump Points as well, which always have interesting narrative elements tied into the portfolios about the companies. I think older portfolios do get posted to Spectrum, but if you want to keep up kind of live, there's always interesting things to read there. I think the development of new lore, it's something that I faced over this last first year here: everyone's always really interested in creating and coming up with more. We're definitely doing it in service of a broader vision for the game, and when there are development needs that lore can answer questions to, to inform choices along the way. I think if we go too far and just make up lore for anything and everything without any connection to the rest of the game, then we start constraining what's possible with that vision, when ultimately we're trying to be in service to the players and to the game and to creating a cohesive vision for what Star Citizen can be, and can be understood by both the players and the developers. Because we've all read the deep 100-page-plus documents that we have for all the various little parts, niche parts of the game. I think we don't really expect that of anyone else, but that information is there for people who are passionate and interested about it.
Yeah, I mean, again, the idea is that this stuff isn't meant to exist as, I need to do a deep dive on a website. We want to be introducing this stuff as storylines in the game, as part of the environments, things that you can find, missions, characters, all that stuff. So yeah, the hope is that it's going to start trickling its way into the game as the aliens start to become an actual presence in the game, that you'll be able to learn about this stuff in a few ways.
TL;DRExisting creatures like the Yao Yao, flat cats and flow pets could support missions such as lost-pet recovery, poaching of protected space whales, or flow pet extermination, offered as spitballed ideas.
I mean, we have come up with at least one pet. Harking back to the animal naming contest, we had the Yao Yao. It's a little cat-otter type thing that was domesticated by the Xi'an a long time ago as a method of pest control. But they have modern tech now and they don't really need it for pest control anymore. So it's just this adorable little creature that sits in their house and watches everybody. They go, oh my God, it's so cute. So we at least have one of those. Oh, the flat cat, of course. Flat cats are pets, although they're a little hard to get, because they're sourced from a planet that's protected by the Fair Chance Act. So you're not going to see those around. And of course, we remember the fish. We got fish. And the turtles, Leyland's tortoise. You remember that? That was really fun. I'd count that as a pet. But yeah, for stories in the game or missions, just off the top of my head, we could do a lost pet mission to find any one of these little creatures. Make their owners very happy when you give them back, or conversely, maybe keep it to yourself, run away with the adorable pet. But that's just an idea. I'm just spitballing.
I mean, I think also the question of alien creatures for me always makes me think of the space whales, right? Like the big space whales in Orison. [Not] human pets necessarily. But I've always been interested in, what's the poaching narrative around that, right? They're protected. I could easily see the kind of combat missions that we have already featuring that sort of narrative approach.
Oh, wait, sorry. I almost forgot about flow pets, which were a huge pet craze, some kind of freshwater sea slug. But they're considered invasive now because of how quickly they enter sewers in whatever settlement they're on, breed, and take over the whole thing. So another fun thing you could probably do in game is go on a flow pet extermination mission. I want to see that.
TL;DRDesigners aren't rigidly locked to existing lore; systems are being modified as planets become explorable, with retconning minimized, though some changes like more breathable Pyro atmospheres are being pushed.
No, they're absolutely rigid bound. Have to adhere to every word that we write. Narrative is king. Yes. No, no, no. I mean, again, the important thing to bear in mind, particularly with the systems and the star map stuff, a lot of these systems were conceived of a while ago. A lot of the systems were even built when we didn't know that we could actually do a planetary landing. The original idea was that you had landing zones and stuff like that; there could be little action bubbles that you could land at, but the idea was that space was the playground, and the planets had designated landing zones that you could land at. Now that the technology has allowed us to realize the entire planet at an incredible level of fidelity, we've been changing our approach to stuff, because now we want to have gameplay that keeps players on planets and lets them explore and do all sorts of really cool stuff. When we were coming up with a lot of these systems originally, it was based off of that idea that we're not going to be able to explore these planets, so keep it very simple, or single-biome type places. And now that we're able to expand it, it's much more fun and satisfying for people to be able to explore these things. So we're modifying it as we go. I mean, we're doing what we can to try to minimize the retconning, so it's not like this was a hellscape nightmare world of acid and now it's like unicorn central, which requires a complete rewriting of your understanding of what that planet was. So we're doing what we can to try to minimize it, but there is definitely going to be that. And again, as we've been looking at Pyro, there's been a push to shift some of the atmospheric compositions to make them slightly more breathable, maybe not toxic, that type of stuff, because it's more conducive to creating a better gameplay experience. We've historically always tried to be very cryptic where possible about stuff, like specific but cryptic, just to give the other designers and environment teams and artists and gameplay people the opportunity to build the game and feel like they can make the most fun experience, and then we can help support that.