A place for theories about Oxygen Not Included.
You are an AI.
The player is an artificial intelligence tasked with managing this new colony. You can see further than the dupes (scanning, perhaps), initiate research into new tech, and you design and manage the base via programmed commands for the duplicants to follow.- Confirmed via the lore snippets you get every so often. Specifically, you are the AI of the Printing Pod. See that arch-like tech thing the dupes fall out of? That's you.
The scale of the game is wrong.
Duplicants are actually a few centimeters tall, and all the other quantities in the game are scaled to match. A tiny size like that would help explain the strange water physics.- Kind of confirmed? Ingame duplicants weight exactly 1KG, and some of the lore seems to point in this direction with some of the recovered Gravitas data mentioning that the "test subjects" are 42cm tall.
The duplicants are part of an experiment.
Some Mad Scientist-type organization has placed Duplicant Printers in several asteroids and is covertly monitoring them to see how they cope with the situation and what survival strategies seem to work the best.- Jossed. Lore entries explicitly stated that the asteroid is a chunk of the now-destroyed earth. There are no humans alive to be the organization
- The "Investigations" lore entries states there were earlier failed attempts at colonization which were closely-monitored experiments.
The World Ended.
There is a cracked world in the background. It matches records that suggest this is your planet. Gravitas files mention an imminent apocalypse. Therefore: the world ended, and you are all that's left; an automated colony development system that activated while buried deep within fragments of the world cast off into space.- Confirmed. Specifically, no matter what type of Asteroid you spawn on, ingame lore snippets confirm that the Asteroid is indeed a small chunk from the now-destroyed Planet Earth. One wonders what the Hatches and Pufts evolved from...
- Ingame lore snippets confirmed that the Hatches, Pufts and literally every plant and critter you see in the game were bio-engineered by Gravitas to assist in colonization effort.
Gravitas' shenanigans are what lead to the events of Shattered Planet
Earth is implied to have been destroyed by as unscrupulous MegaCorp screwing around with the fabric of spacetime. A planet riven to flinders while at the same time still habitable sounds like something a company that can turn off entropy would do.- Confirmed. Specifically, Gravitas' use of the "Temporal Bow", a device using controlled time-travel for power generation.
The Neutronium at the base of geysers is the ultra-compact form of whatever they produce.
- Jossed. Neutronium exists due to reality compensating the paradox of an object existing in two locations at the same time due to time travel shenanigans.
