WMG / Starbound

Florans don't natively have a concept of names

Instead, they identify each other via plant-like means - the scent of pollen they give off, the color and pattern of their leaves and petals, ect. That's why they call themselves "floran" in their Third-Person Person speech, and why they see floran statue as poor likenesses of themselves: apart from their pride, the statue is also one flat color and doesn't smell of anything, so they can't tell who it's intended to be and project. That said, they have started to grasp the concept from other races, if only so those that aren't xenophobes can identify themselves and other to non-florans.

• The last bit about learning the concept would be an in-universe excuse for being able to name your playable Floran. It's just that they use "Floran" when inspecting things as a self-identification noun.
• Possibly Jossed by Florians shouting a name when one gets killed.

The Hylotl are actually vicious warlords that have been pacified via a drug

The water surrounding Hylotl Cities, and the air inside the air filled parts, are all medicated. A solution of calming and pacifying liquid is either mixed into the water, or vaporized into the breathing air. This would essentially make any citizen reduced to a state of pacifism. People who were born and raised in this environment would not understand, much less feel any aggression, and would have no need for combat. Give a few generations, and the majority of the species is not only pacified, but their culture has experienced a massive shift in morality and behavior. Weaponry is now for looks, combat is an art form and not used for practicality. The City Guards likely are given a modified solution that inducts one into passive nature, but would allow them to suddenly switch into a fully aggressive, combat ready state.

• The Hylotl does not have much trouble digesting food and things that a carnivore or omnivore would be able to digest. The Player is able to keep down an alien meat steak, which shows they at some point evolved to be omnivores. They have the potential to eat life forms from alien worlds, and nearly anything that has meat. Early on in their history, it is quite likely that The Hylotl nearly drove large groups of Marine Life to extinction, if not having driven them to extinction by the time the solution was created and deemed needed. The Vegetarianism can be explained as the species choosing to subsist on vegetation, and adapting to a new lifestyle, instead of having to hunt and kill, or to slaughter for sustenance.
• The Player Character Hylotl, a trained monk, is raised in these ways of pacifism, but likely learned survival and combat as an art form. The second they get off world, they are no longer medicated with the solution. A species with a violent nature, and aggression as natural, would experience a massive shock, which would explain the Player killing wild animals for sport, or exterminating an entire village. However, due to being trained, and selected as a missionary for their peaceful ways, the Player will exhibit restraint, and may even manage pure vegetarianism, and pacifism in comparison to other beings exploring space.
• Was just reading this, but holy fishcakes this actually is feasible! I know it sounds insane, but look through the Hylotl Armors. Just look at them. Why would a race of pacifists even have battle ready armor? They have what seems to be stealth and infantry style armor, along with ones that their ancestors would wear while riding gigantic fish into battle. Even if they had a violent past, that doesn't truly contradict with this. There is armor for deep sea exploration, and for tending to the hatcheries, sure, but the fact still remains a majority of the armor for the species, is violent in nature. There are parts that are still for art, but the armor looks as if it is blood thirsty. Note, this troper originally wrote this bit before writing the above/rest of the WMG Theory. He merely wants you to know he read the one line description of the WMG, and then suddenly realized it fits.
  • No wonder everyone's racist towards the hyloltl.

The Races that made the Glitch are...

• Human: Just given the fact that they in a Medieval are like Earth at the Medieval time.
• Apex: They are the most technologically advanced race.
• Hylotl: Their half-way in-between Humans and Apex in terms of technology, and are a Proud Scholar Race that enjoy studying things.
• The same race that give Avian the technology.
• Engi: They conducted these experiments by building separate robots and monitoring how their civilizations evolved.
• Whoever or whatever is placing pixel capsules everywhere.
• The pixels are probably Dust with a different name.

The Avian god is actually the leader of the Apex.

Think about an advanced race gave the Avians star ship tech, which they misinterpreted as a god.This seems to this troper that it would be something Big Ape would plan. Why rule one race when you can rule two and be thought of as a god?

• Jossed. The kluex was one of the early avians.

The Big Ape will be one of the bosses.

If not the tier 10 Boss.

• Or the tier 9 boss, with the Eldritch Abomination that invaded Earth as the Tier 10 Boss.
• Confirmed, as the Tier 5 (third-to-last) storyline boss. He's actually now a sentient AI, and the boss is the projectors that sustain him

The simulations that resulted in The Glitch were conducted by the Engi.

The Glitch can suffocate in airless spaces and so can the Engi. They conducted these experiments by building separate robots and monitoring how their civilizations evolved.

The tentacle monsters are to some extent giant plants

Large tentacle trees drop regular wood when felled on tentacle planets. We know the relatively plant-habitable Earth was tentacle'd. Tentacle juice is just water with the pigment full of baby tentacle monsters.

Theories as to who is leaving all these helpful if unusual 3D printer pixel capsules and effect capsules and lost treasure and seemingly random dungeons around

Deprecated, as in 1.0 it is blatantly revealed that the Terrene Protectorate orbital-bombards planets with status pods, capsules, and pod chests to aid in future colonization.

• Dreadwing? He's clearly not against wildly expensive expenditures for no clear reason. Maybe that's why he's searching distress beacons with UFOs, in search of his lost pixel treasures?
• The companies making these 3D printers. As some form of advertising campaign that got out of hand and was never heard from again.
• A bunch of banking ships. That exploded. Scattering cargo everywhere.
• Whoever is behind the Glitch.
• Everyone.
• The pixels lost on death not used to clone back up you being unneeded ejected into space instead of back into your bank?
• The tentacle monsters. Somehow.
• All the monsters. They're monster nests. Pixels are used by the more robotic monsters to clone manufacture more monsters.
• Lots and lots of pirates' buried treasure.
• No-one and nothing. They form naturally, like ores.
• The cultists of various kinds scattered throughout the galaxy.
• The USCM.
• Kluex.
• Big Ape.
• The developers' in-universe avatars.
• All the pixels from character wipes and permadeaths.
• Several traders who died and whose last acts were stuffing equipment in a box.
• Those people who were caught camping and died outside their campsites, explaining the tents lying around randomly as well.
• Whoever is building the strange giant laboratory-like dungeon structures with the Matter Block item makers and the enslaved robots.
• The Agaran mushroom people who are hinted to be The Virus or at least horrific things.
• The player's missions in the racial backstory.
• Princess Celestia
• Yuyuko Saigyouji
• The Glitch themselves, who die somehow if they are not present on the world in question.
• Any of the other races.
• Nothing and no-one. They're plants.
• You!
• The specific tentacle monsters human players flush out the airlock of their ships in their racial backstory.
• The modinfo files.
• The intro mission shows the capsules at the Protectorate academy, so...i guess most of this is jossed? It's the Protectors/Ruin's destruction of Earth that spread them around.

The Novakids trolled the Avians in the distant past for the lulz.

This rapidly got extremely out of hand. Kluex took over when the Novakids got bored, and there was a mutual lack of understanding. Things continued from there. This explains why the Sunborn sound a lot like less derpy novakids in certain portrayals.

Nobody knows the Big Bad.

The Big Bad is hiding behind the scenes manipulating people to get its will done, forming a band of sorts, but one so well controlled that its own members don't entirely realize it.

There was a Sburb session somewhere.

This is why Perfectly Generic Objects appear as Perfectly Generic Items. What impact this may have, if any, is unclear beyond Perfect Armor.

"[Redacted]" from "Minutes of a Meeting" is...

• The Big Bad.
• An evil novakid with an attention span.
• A human criminal.
• A hylotl warlord.
• An evil glitch Outcast knight.
• The creature that ate Earth.

There will be Tier 7 Armor.

• And it can only be made with the help of Ancient technology.

The Novakids have No Clue where they came from

• In later updates, their entire story is trying to find out their people's origins

Agarans were the eighth race, whose sigil on the ancient gate was removed.

It's pretty clear that other races seem to fear the Agarans, and for a good reason. However, there is another reason for this fear: only one or two races are completely immune to the Agarans mating. Think of it. Agarans are mushroom people. Mushrooms release spores, and parasitic mushrooms exist. Agarans are an entire society of parasitic mushrooms, which could easily take over any being other than Novakids (on account of the Novakids being roughly humanshape gas people, implied to be fairly high in temperature and thus able to sterilize, or incinerate, spores) or the Glitch, who are machines who cannot be taken over, but can probably be halted by clogging their inner mechanisms with mushroom growth.

As such, the Agarans could not be allowed to the Outpost, intended as a safe haven to all, due to their potentially uncontrollable spores. So to protect the outpost, someone removed their sigil from the Gate, forever banning them from entry.

The next major update will expand on the Novakids, maybe even have a chain of quests about them.

Considering that the final story quest reveals that they're fragments of the Cultivator and the general lack of settlements and lore for Novakids, I would be surprised if it didn't do anything with them.

A future major update will explain some loose ends and tie them up.

After all, Asra Nox is still alive. Wouldn't be surprised if she brought a fragment of The Ruin with her and intends to make a new, artificial Ruin to replace this one.

Attention-deficit musings on the Glitch.

A few assorted theories/headcanons on their exact nature as Mechanical Lifeforms. Further overthinking by other tropers is highly welcome:

• They really do *need* food, as in they don't eat just for simulation accuracy. They have a bio-electric engine to supplement batteries/charging stations; and/or the stomach analogue is full of nanomachines that extract trace minerals to repair minor damage and erosion. Either way, it explains why the Glitch PC doesn't just pay a mechanic to turn that part off and why food healing works. Presumably, Glitch prefer or are restricted to robo-chickens and automatoes. Of course those would be much more efficient for self-repair, they're made of metal and circuits without any organic trash to sort through.
  • This one has a very simple solution: The Glitch run on fuel cells, which require a fuel source and an oxidiser source; they are presumably extremely advanced fuel cells, capable of using many kinds of organic material (starch, fat, et cetera), but they still need some source of organic material. IE, they do not have a bio-electric engine "to supplement [their] batteries", they have a bio-electric engine that is their batteries. — Pedantic Speaker
  • In fact, for something you self-admittedly spent roughly thirty seconds thinking about, you are probably largely right: There are nanomachines that can turn food into fuel, if by nanomachines you count enzymes and microorganisms; likewise the human body has nanomachines that can repair damage. However, regarding Gameplay Story Segregation, it is also possible that the Glitch are largely composed of plastic: Look at a circuit board, one without large components: Most of the volume of the board itself is plastic.
• Related to the first, burning meat smells horrible. Ergo, any Glitch village that eats organic compounds will also smell horrible. Thus accurately simulating the terrible smell of medieval villages.
• Glitch sexes each contain one-half the schematics needed during the construction trance. Going a little further, females contain a tiny fabrication unit to create the newborn's CPU.^note As You Know, circuitry is ideally constructed under sterile conditions.
• Breathing: Again, a practical requirement that also helps the simulation. Rather than requiring oxygen, breathing for Glitch translates to cooling. They're hyper-advanced robots that don't die immediately upon touching water, so presumably they have heat sinks and minor water-proofing. They still suffocate in space because space is colder than cold, but has nothing to actually conduct heat. Having nothing to vent heat into results in critical overheating; whatever space-magic powers the Breathing EPP can likely cool the air bubble as well. I've got nothing for "drowning," that might be just a requirement for the simulation. -woggs123
  • Again, this one has a very simple solution: The Glitch run on fuel cells rather than batteries; fuel cells need a fuel source and an oxidiser source; the Glitch use the oxygen in air as their oxidiser source, therefore they necessarily have an Oxygen Meter (they could simply store oxygen internally, but oxidiser is generally heavier and bulkier than the corresponding fuel for most organic fuels). — Pedantic Speaker
• You said it yourself. They've probably got minor water proofing, and venting off heat usually requires a vent to be opened, into which water can rush and wreck the circuitry. Thus, it's probable that Glitch "drowning" is just mounting water damage following a decision to vent heat rather than overheat and potentially explode, letting the water into the inner workings through the vents.
• Jossed as of the 1.0 updates. The Glitch do not use fuel cells as their power source but are powered by gas turbines burning fuel produced by bacterial fermentation. This explains why they need to eat and breathe.

Glitch, and maybe Florans, are technically part of their starships.

With the Glitch, it's Exactly What It Says on the Tin: The starship is part of the self-aware PC's "personal" hive mind, with the body being akin to a drone or strike craft. The PC still bothers to eat and repair itself for the same reason the player does: printing the body costs money, dying away from the ship results in loss of useful materials, and also dying probably hurts. For the Florans, maybe the mass of vines covering the ship is comparable to Creep and is connected to the Floran respawn animation. I'm not saying Florans are a psionic hive mind with no concept of death, but besides the Novakid they're probably the weirdest and alien-est of the playable races so who knows? -woggs123

Midnight planets are ancient prisons, like space Tartarus.

I'm just going off of the many sealed-off microdungeons here.

The Pixels are actually Dust.

The Avians are Hissho and the Starbound universe is an alternate version of the Endless Universe.

The Terrene Protectorate was established to enslave humans.

Settle in, this is going to be a long one... Also, going to state right off, this is based on events as seen in the game, and on the text of various in-game codex entries here.

In the early days of human space travel, the primary human force among the stars was the militaristic, corporate-run USCM. Multiple codexes support this, and also tell of how the USCM tried to take on alien powers and was quickly crushed, and how in their place was established the Terrene Protectorate, a pure good, lovey-dovey organization that wanted to foster peace and exploration and hug puppies and coo in childlike awe at double rainbows, and all that.

Except let's also note that the Terrene Protectorate is an ALIEN organization, not a HUMAN organization. In fact, the majority of the Grand Protectors... are aliens. This in spite of the fact that it's the TERRENE Protectorate, based on Earth, and as near as can be told it was THE governing body for the entire planet before The Ruin destroyed it all, or at least the only body on Earth that regularly went into space...

It's not hard at all to suspect that these various alien powers, after fighting off the initial military assaults and diplomatic treacheries of the USCM, decided that they clearly needed to do something to keep these crazy Earthlings under control, right? And we already established that they were able to best our military might as well as our schemes. They conquered everything we sent out... conquering our planet itself would have been easy

Of course, it's worth mentioning that there are Grand Protectors who were human, including Esther. Obviously the Protectorate isn't entirely an anti-human organization... they're willing to tolerate humans who "play by the rules" and all that...

...but here's where it gets interesting... according to the codexes [A United Earth] and [Humanity's Redemption], the previously divided human civilizations found unity after visiting the stars, when previously limited resources and space were now suddenly unlimited... of course, we also know this is a bald-faced lie. This isn't even a theory, it's stated in-game: the USCM was still just as bad and corrupt and divided as ever. We didn't "find unity in the stars," we found unity after the aliens beat the stupid out of us and collared us.

Then, according to [Off-Earth Human Census], only 15 million human beings were even living off the Earth... that's an extremely low number. That's less than 2% of the CURRENT human population of Earth, here in the early 21st century, much less what it would probably be in the far future of Starbound. But with this being said... how could there then be any truth to this idea of humans no longer needing to fight over limited space on Earth? Of course, we've already established that all the codexes about the Terrene Protectorate's founding are all lies... they all pretend that humans "found unity" and that the Protectorate just sort of... appeared out of a cloud of love and light, but that's not true. Still, all those people did go SOMEWHERE, right? So where did they all go, and why aren't they being counted in the Off-Earth Human Census?

Let's find our answer at the Letheia Mining Base. Let's take a look at the disgusting way that they treat their employees there - little better than expendable slaves. Let's also notice that 100% of the miners are humans. Let's then visit the Letheia Space Station, and read the [Letheia Corporation Brochure] and notice that Letheia is not a human corporation, it's a hylotl corporation.

This is where all those people went.

The Terrene Protectorate was NEVER a human organization. It was never even a benign organization meant to keep those wily humans under control. They made a show of being a pro-human organization by allowing a select few humans who were willing to play by their rules to join, or even become false figureheads... but then they went ahead and sold off the vast majority of Earth's human population as slaves to alien corporations.

In short? The Terrene Protectorate was never the "Space United Nations"... they were the Combine, and Asra Nox was a Well-Intentioned Extremist who was actually right when she said humans needed to be liberated (even if her way of doing so was profoundly stupid and ultimately killed far more humans than it saved).

• A few counterpoints:
  • It was never stated in any of the codexes that Earth was facing an overcrowding problem - it was lack of resources that caused all the wars. In the advent of easy space travel and interplanetary trade it would no longer be a problem.
  • There's nothing pointing towards Protectorate serving as Earth's government or ruling body. It's called "Terrene" because it originates from Earth, not because it rules the planet.
  • In addition, it was never stated anywhere that it was ever intended to be a human-only or even pro-human organisation; it's dedicated to keep peace and harmony between all the races in the universe. Having it be a human-only or even mostly human organisation would cause serious Unfortunate Implications.
  • Humanity Census is specifically noted to only count the humans that settled down in one place; another codex specifically notes that most humans off-Earth are nomads.
  • While Letheia Corporation is a classic ridiculousy corrupt MegaCorp, there is absolutely nothing pointing towards it actually indulging in slavery. Its human employees are all armed and apparently trained in weapon usage, there's no sign of there being or ever having been any sort of slave drivers or guards, and mission codexes note that the miners actually expected the Letheia HQ to send them help and that Letheia sent condolence letters to the families of the miners trapped in the facility in an atempt to appear as a honest employer who deply regrets the unfotunate on-site accidents - neither of which would really happen had said employees been slaves.
  • Finally, much of the pre-1.0 lore has been long retconed, including just about everything about USCM. In the current version of the game, the only codex to mention them - "USCM Annual Report" - portrays them as Small Name, Big Ego Harmless Villain that no one, other humans included, treat or ever treated seriously.
• Actually, all of the codices mentioned here are post-1.0. While the USCM has been reduced much from what they were in the beta, they are still mentioned in more codices than just "USCM Annual Report". One of the (I believe) Apex codices talks about them encountering the USCM, who tried to screw them over but instead got screwed over themselves.