Video Game / I Was a Teenage Exocolonist

I Was a Teenage Exocolonist is a Solar Punk Life Simulation Game developed by Northway Games and published by Finji. It was released on the 25th of August in 2022 on Steam, the PS4, the PS5, and the Nintendo Switch.

You start the game as a ten-year-old child, one of several born en route to Vertumna IV, a distant alien planet. As your spaceship home passes through a wormhole, an accident sends you into a coma- and awakens a strange ability to see potential futures. Your dreams are confusing, filled with skies and plants you've never seen. The worst are the nightmares, nightmares of terrible xenofauna attacking everyone you love.

You wake up on Vertumna, surrounded by humanity's first colony. What will you do with your life on this alien world? Will you fight the monsters of your visions, or find a way to live in peace with them? Will you accept your powers? And what of your fellow colonists, the future of Vertumna?

The choice is up to you.

The game has Sol spending 10 years on Vertumna exploring the planet, working in various jobs to build their stats and earn Kudos, and maintaining their friendships/relationships with their fellow colonists. Its narrative plays out like a Visual Novel, with certain choices that require a high enough stat or winning in the Deckbuilding minigame, where Sol has to arrange their memories, which are represented by cards, by color and/or number to reach the target score.

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This game includes the following tropes:

#-M

• 10,000 Years: The last of the Convergent Domain left Vertumna 20,000 years before the humans arrived.
• Act of True Love: Among Sol's peers, Dys in particular has wishes that are at odds with staying in the colony in the long term. Depending of how his plans pan out, Sol may end up actively helping Dys do something that will make him happy, but also guarantees that they will never see him again in human form afterwards. That help carries extra weight if Sol is close friends with him or his romantic partner, as they are choosing his happiness over keeping him in their life.
• After the End: The game takes place in the far future, 20 years after the Stratospheric left Earth for Vertumna because the former became uninhabitable due to many factors such as climate change, pollution, and nuclear war.
• Age-Gap Romance: Marz's "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue can mention Utopia, who is twelve years older than her, among her romantic relationships. A specific set of choices can result Sol, who is the same age as Marz, having a relationship with Utopia later in life.
• Alcoholic Parent: Besk, Dys and Tang's mother, is remembered as a depressed drunk by the latter. An event during which Marz is looking at photos from her childhood includes one of Dys and Tang at their shared fifth birthday party with their mother just out of frame, holding a drink.
• Aliens Speaking English: Well, Esperanto to be exact. Possibly justified, as the aliens are actually sentient AI, so learning any number of languages should be trivial to them.
• All Animals Are Dogs: Vriki, which are spider-octopus aliens, can be tamed and trained just like Earth dogs. Cal suggests training it with a clicker if it's your pet. Socks, Cal's own pet, responds to orders like a dog if properly trained.
• Alliterative Name: Every region of Vertumna: the Valley of Vertigo, the Subaqueous Swamp, etc.
• All There in the Script: While the non-romanceable characters only mention their ages along with their blurbs, the game's internal data reveals their birthdays:
  • Flulu: Late Pollen
  • Geranium: Early Dust
  • Eudicot: Late Dust
  • Lum: Late Wet
  • Antecedent: Late Pollen
  • Instance: Early Pollen
  • Professor Hal: Mid-Dust
  • Tonin: Mid-Wet
  • Utopia: Mid-Pollen
  • Rhett: Mid-Wet
  • Seeq: Mid-Quiet
  • Kom: Mid-Dust
  • Nougat: Late Dust
  • Tirah: Late Quiet
  • Al: Late Dust
  • Bernie: Early Wet
  • Besk: Early Quiet
• Alternative Calendar: A year on Vertumna is a little longer than a year on Earth. It's divided into 13 months across five seasons: 3 months each of Quiet, Pollen, Dust, and Wet, and 1 month of Glow.
• Ambition Is Evil: Averted. Lum's threat to the planet can only be ended by Sol if they specialize in politics, or by Marzipan - who's a junior politician herself.
• Androids Are People, Too:
  • Sol learns while doing robot repairs that Congruence is such an advanced A.I. that she's compassionate like humans and cares deeply about Professor Hal. Some of the robots that Sol repairs break out of their original programming to become their own selves, one of which becomes Sol's pet if they succeed in repairing it.
  • Symbiosis and Nocticulent are technically Organic Technology androids, but treated as full characters by the narrative.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • You can toggle Seen Dialog so that dialog choices that you already made in a previous run can be marked and skipped. It also speeds up parts of it so you can skip straight to the choices.
  • Thanks to your Past-Life Memories, you can instantly skip certain subplots once you've learned how to complete them in previous runs, such as finding the cure for Shimmer to save your dad.
  • To compensate being only found on expeditions and not gaining friendship when given gifts, Sym's heart meter increases by two full hearts (20 points) each time you have a full conversation with him on the overworld.
• Anyone Can Die: The Strato colony faces dangers on Vertumna within the first few months of landing on it, and kids and adults alike, including your parents and close friends, as stated in the Content Warnings, aren't safe from its perils. However, your ability to recall your past lives allows you to save them in future playthroughs.
• Asteroids Monster: Sugarbugs are small, marshmallow-like aliens that reproduce when cut into several pieces.
• Award-Bait Song: "The Child You Were" is the game's ending song, which is a rock ballad about the loss of childhood innocence and learning self-love despite the loneliness that's part of growing up.
• Babies Ever After: You and your Love Interest can start a family in one of the game's many endings, and so does your pet if you have one. Cal and Tammy also have many more children after Echinacea if they formalize their union and settle down.
• Babies Make Everything Better:
  • The consequences of a typical deconstruction are depicted several years after the fact. According to a conversation with Instance, Dys and Tang are the result of their mother believing that having children would make her feel less lonely. Their mother was dead via suicide by the time they were old enough to start going to school. In the present day, both the twins and the friend of their mother, who's keeping an eye on them, wonder if their mother ever truly cared about them.
  • This is played straight with some romance options who won't have any children on their own, but are willing to co-parent with Sol, as the children will always bring out the best in them. Ironically, one of the romance options to whom this applies is Dys himself.
  • Once the colony's supplies become sufficient thanks to the Heliopause's arrival, having many children with as many partners as possible is highly encouraged, not just to populate the planet, but also to increase genetic diversity. This along with the promotion of communal childrearing becomes a symbol of hope for the future of Vertumna.
• Back in the Saddle: Some choices can result in Utopia's late-game second-in-command being Tonin, who has come out of retirement.
• Bee Afraid: The squeedgers are bee-like aliens that attack you if provoked, but since they have a rudimentary danger system, they're easy to sneak past to harvest their honey from the queen. When female squeedgers mature into queens, they metamorphose into immobile hives to nourish their larvae with the honey they secrete from their deep, tunnel-like pores, and they also protect them with an acid mist.
• Bequeathed Power: In Nomi's holonovel, Ghislar, in his dying breath, transfers his powers to the protagonist so she can fight his daughter Mjolna to stop the intergalactic war.
• Bestiality Is Depraved: After fighting with Cal during your 18th birthday party, the Helio youth make some parting shots about his "alleged romantic interactions with the floatcows" before leaving.
• Big First Choice: The player is faced with one after unlocking the possibility to recalibrate the Stratospheric's shields at the beginning of the playthrough. To have the option at all, specific choices must be made for two out of the four sources of starting stats, forcing you to choose Reasoning and Engineering over alternatives. There are also three different shield settings to choose from: one leaves things as they are, one prevents the famine in the fifth year and one sacrifices the Stratospheric to end the time loop via destroying the wormhole, which leads to a glimpse of what would have happened if Sol had been born on Earth.
• Bilingual Bonus: One of the few non-English names mentioned is that of the deceased former captain of the Heliopause, Morikawa. "Mori" and "kawa" are the Japanese words for "forest" and "river" respectively. This makes it an appropriate name for someone to have in an environmentalism-heavy game.
• Binary Suns: Vertumna has two suns: the customary hot, yellow sun, and a (relatively) cooler blue sun.
• Binomium ridiculus:
  • You can help Tang with cataloguing the Vertumnan flora by making up scientific names for them such as Wonkius shrubbius and Purpleus grassium.
  • One possible conversation with Tang has her offer to name a species she has recently discovered after Sol. If the player has Sol suggest that Tang name the species after herself, Tang says she can't do that... because she already did it for six other species.
  • If Sol becomes a botanist, which results in them discovering thousands of new species over their lifetime, they will name them all after their friends if loyal and deliberately give them silly names if rebellious.
• Bio-Augmentation:
  • Each child receives one augmentation, ranging from incredible eyesight to perpetually flexible brain neurons to just being really, really calm. They see their first signs of it at six.
  • Maxing out your Biology skill gives you access to the Engineering building's genetech lab, where you can acquire an augment anytime if you chose not to have one at the start.
• Bioluminescence Is Cool: The whole appeal of Glow season. Vertumna's suns never rise above the colony's horizon, and the planet draws close to the wormhole the entire system orbits. The UV rays shining off the wormhole's event horizon make the fungal flora of Vertumna fluoresce in a splendid array of ghostly colors, providing the majority of natural light for an entire month.
• Bittersweet Ending: Most of the standard endings are this, filled with mundane tragedy and uncertainty about humanity's future on Vertumna. Even some of the "bad" endings are not entirely bleak - "Tangent's Cure" does feature a complete ecological collapse, but the humans do have a genuine chance to ever-so-slowly terraform the planet into a new Earth.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: Much of the life on Vertumna is hard to classify between plant, animal or mineral. It includes things like animals that photosynthesize, lifeforms that appear to be plants until they start to walk around and small metallic orbs that feature antennae and feed on electricity.
• Bizarre Seasons: Seasons on Vertumna include Pollen, when the air is full of it and everything is tinged slightly pink, and Glow, when the sky is completely dark and the only natural illumination is giant glowing mushrooms. Some colonists find the latter so creepy that they stay inside until the season's over.
• Boldly Coming: In Nomi's holonovel, you can accept Mjolna's offer to let you rule her alien kingdom side-by-side with her as her queen, which is her race's equivalent of marriage. Nomi admits that they added that scene for Rex so he could get a chance to "boink his alien-self".
• Bookends: The game typically begins and ends with Sol getting trapped in the shed fire and a grown-up Anemone rescuing them from the doglike alien. In the end, they realize that the vision they had at the beginning came true, but this time, they've developed the skills to fight it.
• Borrowed Biometric Bypass: In the Array plot, Vace decapitates Noctilucent's head and uses it to unlock the door to the Convergent Domain, where the Array is housed.
• Both Sides Have a Point:
  • The game takes this view of the Strato-Helio divide. Strato needs Helio for their food rations (in the first playthrough, at least), more effective weapons, and trained soldiers. Helio needs Strato for their past experience living on Vertumna, their more ethical and less toxic cultural mindset, their larger archive of cultural works, their more powerful AI, the greater acceptance and fulfillment they give the children of Helio unsuited for combat, and Sol's ability to make peace with the Gardeners. This is why all transitions of power between the two are Velvet Revolutions at worst.
  • The conflict between pacifists and fighters in the colony. Cal doesn't believe in violence, and a peaceful solution is possible, but in the meantime, the colony is under attack by an alien threat and humans aren't wrong to defend their new home.
• Broken Bridge: All the random events outside the colony block your way, and you must interact with them in order to proceed, but mastering your Perception skill lets you bypass them.
• Buffy Speak: In one Shovelling Dirt event, Cal explains the need for special fertilizer on Vertumna this way.
  "The wet ground makes the roots of Earth plants rot easier, so we need a ton of mushtree mulch, or this kind of puffy lava rock kinda thing?"
• But Thou Must!:
  • If Marz organizes a Toilet Paper Prank in the classroom, you can try to stop your friends from joining her instead of joining in yourself, but while you receive points for Loyalty, Marz will threaten you into joining them, anyway.
  • In Marz's four-heart event, she notices how "hideous" you look and offers to give you a makeover. You can tell her that you're "not [her] doll", but she'll insist that she's doing you a favor, anyway, so you don't have much choice but to go along with her.
  • It's impossible to skip any of Sol's late teens birthday parties. If Sol picks the option to not go, it only causes Marz to put a little extra effort into making them join. In the case of the seventeenth birthday party, trying to not go at all only results in Sol showing up so late they arrive just in time to witness Lum's interruption.
  • In Nomi's holonovel, you can't refuse to stop the alien invasion because doing so leads to your early death.
  • You can't turn down Tang's request to find her hopeye eggs at the Valley of Vertigo because she never "said" that you were her "errand-runner", angering her but giving you the Fetch Quest anyway.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": The game takes place in the far future where humans left Earth to colonize an alien planet, Vertumna. To distance themselves from their Earth origins, the Strato and Helio colonies give different names for Earth technology such as "hearspeaks" for earphones, "virtspace helmets" for VR helmets, and "vintage focus devices" for fidget spinners.
• The Caper: In the backstory. The Vertumna Group purchased, borrowed, salvaged, or outright stole a huge trove of highly advanced technology, including gene editors and a strong AI, as well as a starship, and fled the Sol system without official permission. Eudicot, Flulu and Instance were all directly, personally involved and are wanted by Earth's government.
• Capitalism Is Bad: One of the classes the players attend will talk about Earth's history with an emphasis on the destructiveness of capitalism. Your colony seems to actively discourage practices that they feel would reintroduce Earth's troubles, such as discouraging the hoarding of merits to avoid inequality among the community. However, at one point, Sol can argue in favor of capitalism without being called out by the narrative, and even say that capitalism looks bad because the Stratospheric colonists wrote the lessons.
• Card Cycling: The Crystal Clusters collectible lets you redraw your hand during card challenges.
• Cassandra Truth:
  • Sol tries to tell people about their visions, but (because not all of them come true) is dismissed as a liar. Eventually, Sol mostly stops talking about them, for reasons decided by the player. If the player insists on continuing to talk about them, they start being considered delusional, and they get Delusion cards, which have negative values.
  • Sol themself turns out to not be completely immune to this in one instance. They dismiss Dys telling them that he saw Sym recently, while Sol is mourning after witnessing Sym's death, as Dys responding to the information with denial. If Sol ever leaves the colony again after their mourning period is over, it turns out that Sym has a Body Backup Drive, meaning Dys had truly seen Sym more recently than Sol had.
  • In Nomi's holonovel, you can report to the police about the alien invasion, but they don't believe you, and they imprison you as you helplessly watch the aliens destroy earth.
• Cast from Hit Points: Since the Stress meter acts like an HP meter, although it increases when you get stressed, it fits this trope in spirit.
  • The Stressful Event memory is a powerful card, which is worth 8 points, but it gives you 10 Stress.
  • If you can't reach the goal in a card challenge, you can push through with the task in exchange for gaining Stress, which increases by 5 for every point you lack for the target. You can't do this if the cost would make you exceed the maximum (100).
• Cast from Money: The card obtained from getting into the early stages of friendship with Marz, who can be befriended via doing commerce-related jobs, costs a single Kudos to use. It can be upgraded twice so that you earn Kudos when you play it instead.
• Chameleon Camouflage: One Vertumnan species is an almost invisible, many-armed animal that wraps itself around trees.
• Changeling Tale: A setting-appropriate version of the trope gets discussed a couple of times:
  • Dys runs into the notion of human babies getting replaced by beings of another species and comes to wonder if it could have happened to himself and his twin sister, Tang. Both of them are knowledge-craving introverts who have trouble connecting with their peers and also see a lot of appeal in the idea of discarding their human body to come an AI.
  • During their childhood, Nomi-Nomi thought that themself and Rex, who are the My Species Doth Protest Too Much members of the Heliopause, were changelings. Their active imagination went as far as getting Teleportation technology involved in their theory.
• Chekhov's Gun: The Secret Funtimes Club might seem like a silly little game Sol and their Strato peers make as kids, but it plays a pivotal role in overthrowing Governor Lum since it becomes Sol's political party, being renamed the SFC for formality.
• Chicken Joke: Congruence tells one in one of her classes, but the answer is completely in binary. When converted to text, the answer is, "To get a byte to eat!"
• Childhood Friend Romance:
  • You can romance one of your childhood friends as you grow up together.
  • Cal and Tammy have known each other since they were toddlers, and if you save Tammy, they start dating around their respective 17th birthdays. In fact, when Cal was four, he promised to Tammy that they'd get married when they're older.
• Childhood Marriage Promise: When Cal was four, he promised Tammy that they'd get married when they were old enough.
• Cluster F-Bomb: Sol's narration shouts a string of expletives as they let Vace test the stungloves on them.
  Holy - shit-snacking - arsehole-shitting - mother-of-GODDAMN-pearl, it hurts WAY more than you'd expect!
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Among the workplaces, the Garrison is red, the Expeditions Outpost is orange, the Living Quarters are yellow, Geoponics is green, Command is blue, while Engineering is purple. The associated colonists working there are color-coded accordingly: Anemone and Vace at the Garrison, Dys at Expeditions, Tammy at the Living Quarters, Cal at Geoponics, Marz and Rex at Command, and Tang and Nomi at Engineering.
• Color-Coded Speech: Vace speaks in red text, Anemone and Dys in orange, Tammy in yellow, Cal in green, Rex in teal, Marz in blue, Tang and Nomi in purple, and the other colonists in plain bold.
• Color Motif:
  • Blue cards relate to academic knowledge, and they can be earned by things like answering a question correctly in school or befriending Tangent.
  • Yellow cards relate to social knowledge, like deducing what someone is worried about or saving Tammy.
  • Red cards relate to physical prowess, like winning a game of sportsball or chasing a Mysterious Watcher.
  • Wild cards are a pinkish-purple rainbow; they're tied to a number of things, including wild leaps of logic and enthusiasm or your visions.
• Comical Nap Drool: Nomi drools in their sleep in their nine-heart event after zonking out while working on their holonovel.
• Company Cross References: Some cards have references to other games published by Finji:
  • The Coloring the World card features Chicory's Brush.
  • The Organizing the Storage Room card features Wilmot, and the depot clerk event that rewards it to you references the box-sorting game.
    At least it's all in your holopalm and you have liftbots to help physically move the boxes. You can organize it all by moving icons around your screen, just like a holopalm game!
• Content Warnings: The game features an extensive list of the mature or potentially distressing content it contains accessible from the main or in-game menus. The entry on "Character Death" even includes a full-spoilers enumeration of who dies and whether or not it can be prevented.
• Continuity Nod: During an event working as a delivery person, it's possible for Sol to discover that Chief Administrator Seeq sculpts as a hobby, via an example of Seeq's output that promptly becomes the quirkiest thing about them. During an event from the Governor's assistant job, Seeq asks Sol if they can trust them for a prospective task. One of Sol's possible responses is to ask Seeq if the task is "about [Seeq's] weird sculptures," (it turns out to not be the case) due to Seeq having last displayed similar behavior during the incident upon which Sol discovered their hobby.
• Cool Starship: The Stratospheric, a Colony Ship that survived twenty years of space travel. After landing, the colonists chose to name their settlement after it, and its remnants were repurposed into their first buildings. One character wishes she'd never left the Stratospheric, seeing it as more comfortable than the wild climate of Vertumna.
• Critical Status Buff: The card associated with befriending Rex gets a bonus to its value if stress is over 50.
• Crotch-Glance Sex Check: Implied when you get a pet unisaur. Unlike the other xenos, which are gender indeterminate, you're able to get the unisaur to stand still long enough for you to confirm that it's female.
• Cruel to Be Kind: Because of the way floatcow biology works, there are two ways to help a upended one: you can milk it, if your skill in Animals is sufficient enough, or you can cut its urine sac open with a knife, letting the overload of fluid gush out. This hurts the floatcow, but an easier skill test confirms that it's the only way you have to get it moving again.
• Cult: The Vertumna Group is called one by their enemies on Earth, but it lacks the abuse, religious culture, and rigid hierarchy often associated with the trope. Mostly they're just a self-sufficient commune that didn't like Earth's norms.
• Cult Colony: While not religious per se, the Strato Colony were originally a commune whose values are extremely different from Earth's, and they fled to Vertumna to escape persecution and be allowed to practice their way of life.
• Cynicism Catalyst: The death of Anemone's beloved brother Kom causes her to go from a plucky and cheerful girl to a bitter and angry young woman who joins the military dead-set on revenge. She also comes to scorn her once-beloved sportsball as a children's activity, devoting all her time to becoming a soldier.
• Dangerously Garish Environment: Despite Vertumna's brightly colored and gorgeous sceneries, there are damn good reasons children are banned from going beyond the colony's walls, most notably the manticore.
• Dartboard of Hate: After an especially bad interaction with Marz, Dys can be found playing a holopalm game he made himself that consists of throwing virtual weapons at a picture of Marz. Having Sol try the game themself reveals that the game has a feature allowing the player to use a photo of their choice.
• Dating Sim: A small part of the gameplay. It's possible to date many characters, but some have love interests other than Sol that they will prioritize (unless given good reason not to). Others have hardlocked requirements for what they want out of a relationship (polygamy, children, etc...), or personal issues that prevent a long-term relationship regardless of what the player does.
• Deathly Dies Irae: The version of the game's theme that plays on the title screen has the first four notes of Dies Irae. It sets the melancholic and suspenseful feeling of leaving Earth for Vertumna and not knowing what dangers lie in the alien planet.
• Deck Clogger:
  • Delusion cards are the only cards worth negative points, and while they can be used strategically to gain straight or flush bonuses since they're Literal Wild Cards, they deduct from your total score during card challenges. Accumulating too many also has a negative consequence on the narrative, since this means that Sol is being considered "delusional" by the others for telling them about their visions. As a result, Instance forces Sol to take medication for their "psychosis", wiping all their Past-Life Memories, and thus the choices that can only be made after the first run.
  • As you gain higher-valued cards later on, your early game cards eventually become junk, making it hard or impossible to get the target score if you're unlucky to draw them. Since your Empathy must be at least 33 in order to delete them anytime for 50 Kudos each, and relaxing makes you choose only between two random cards to delete^note three if your Empathy is at least 66, you must think carefully about the choices that give you cards.
• Deep-Immersion Gaming: Nomi's CG during their five-heart event has them cosplaying as their Legends of Avamar archer inside the game.
• Denied Food as Punishment: While babysitting, Sol can threaten Nougat that there would be no dessert for her if she continues misbehaving. Their scary face convinces her just once.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • The Shimmer is a respiratory disease to which some individuals are more vulnerable than others, being eventually fatal in one case if it isn't cured in time. Before the cure is found, the best protection against it is a respirator that many people just plain don't use because of reduced comfort. Those aspects of it make it evocative of COVID-19.
  • One of the essential materials of holopalms can't be nanoprinted and only so many spares were brought on the ship. Because of this, the colonists will need to start mining to keep holopalms in their lives, even if they are against mining on paper. Holopalms are the setting's equivalent of smartphones and other personal electronic devices that are frequently used by otherwise very environmental-minded people out of necessity despite being very environmentally damaging by several aspects.
• Developer's Foresight: It's possible for Sol to become a regular at a given workplace, focus on other things to the point of not going there at all for a significant amount of time, then return. Upon the latter event, the place's supervisor and the peer who works there the most will make remarks about Sol coming to work with them for the first time in quite a while.
• Diegetic Soundtrack Usage: One of Dys' friendship events has him share a song he's listening with Sol. When this happens, the song turns out to be "The Child You Were," which is the game's ending song, via Background Music Override.
• Dies Wide Open: Kombucha's eyes are wide open upon dying to the Faceless.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Some cards reduce the value of other cards, but if you can use them strategically, you can earn bonus points from pairs and straights.
• A Dog Named "Dog": One of the possible names the game suggests for the vriki you can tame is their species name.
• Don't Explain the Joke: If Tammy asks you what your favorite dessert is, you can reply, "Desert? I prefer the Sahara myself." However, she won't get the joke, and you have to explain it to her, which makes it less funny and causes her to lose confidence.
• Door to Before: Boss events, which are typically in remote areas of the exploration maps, turn into stations from which it's possible to get transported back the colony once completed.
• Do Well, But Not Perfect: Sometimes, failing the card challenge is necessary to get certain outcomes, even if it's counterproductive at first, such as events where you have to be saved by a "mysterious stranger" three times in order to meet Sym.
• Draw Extra Cards: Some cards and perks let you draw extra cards each round, giving you more options in the card challenges. The Memory Backpack is an equippable item that has this function.
• Dream Emergency Exit: If you've already experienced the strange hopeye dream on your 19th birthday, you can skip it by instantly waking yourself up, although you'll still get insomnia, reducing your mental skill gains by 1 for 3 months.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • Tang and Dys's mother Besk couldn't handle raising them from birth and resorted to drinking and neglecting them and eventually taking her own life.
  • In the "Tangent's Cure" ending, Instance kills herself after seeing the horrific mass extinction of Vertumnan wildlife by the virus she and Tang were forced to make by Lum.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Figuring out how to keep the colony safe and secure, much less prosperous, is a process of solving one or two problems at a time until Sol accrues enough experiences across all their lifetimes to single-handedly resolve every major issue in one triumphant lifetime.
• Easy Level Trick: By default, Sol can only give a gift to one of their peers once per three-month season, while giving a gift on the right month is necessary to formally discover the birth months of most peers. However, the Friends interface will display the ages of everyone in the colony, peers included, from the beginning of the game. If the player keeps close enough attention to someone's age, it eventually goes up, on a different month of the year depending on the person, which is their proper birth month.
• Easy Sex Change: Downplayed. On the one hand, befriending Tangent implies that the setting's gene therapy based process still takes a significant amount of time and spells out that her puberty is milder than that of someone born with a female body. On the other hand, the mere fact that the physical part of the process has been wrapped up by the time she's nine years old indicates that gender affirming care significantly progressed compared to the present day.
• Eat Dirt, Cheap: Dillypillars use their diamond teeth to eat crystals found in the Prosaic Plains, so Cal asks Sol to find some along with some native plants to feed his pet, Socks.
• Eating the Eye Candy: Marz spends one shift as depot clerk ogling at other people's butts, and Sol can join her, tell her to cut it out, or even compliment her butt. If Sol joins in on the ogling, they also can't help but notice Seeq "sashaying" away, their hips "swinging like a pendulum".
• Edible Theme Naming: Some of the colonists are named after food, such as Marzipan, Nougat, and Tiramisu (aka Tirah).
• Effortless Achievement: There are achievements for reaching mandatory plot beats such as surviving your first year on Vertumna and seeing the Heliopause crash-land on the planet.
• Either "World Domination", or Something About Bananas: When you help your dad with the animals for the third time, he runs a test to try translating what the trippets are saying. He says that they're either saying "kill all humans" or "linguini sportsball".
• Eldritch Abomination: While the xenofauna of Vertumna are already alien in nature, the Faceless that attacks the colony at the end of Year 5 is a giant, incomprehensible being with cloven hooves that unzips its faceless body to reveal numerous tentacles, some with eyes on them, and hundreds of teeth running across its "jawline".
• Eldritch Location: Even by the standards of alien planets, Vertumna is weird. Rocks that empathically project feelings onto you and heat-hazes through which you can see alternate versions of yourself are par for the course, to say nothing of the magic-granting wormhole hanging above it. Some of its weirdness is explained by alien technology, but most of it is just Vertumna's natural state.
• Enemy Mine: In the second OVA of Turbogirl Hyperjet Transform, the Turbogirls team up with their enemies, the aliens, in order to defeat their common enemy, the Medusa Demons. Nomi-Nomi draws a comic inspired by this, where the xenofauna are fully sapient and help the humans instead of attacking them, believing that not all aliens are bad.
• Equivalent Exchange: To reach Vertumna, a ship must lose whatever it needs the most. The Strato lost the microbial soil and hydroponics its people needed to grow food, the Helio lost the leadership necessary to keep them from devolving into a tyrannical militia, and so on. Future versions of Sol are able to avoid paying Strato's price, but only because it was already paid in a previous timeline they learned from.
• Everybody Must Get Stoned: When clearing the pixie beans for human consumption, Congruence forgets to check for their effects on people undergoing puberty. Since the pixie beans get debuted as a food source right when Sol and their peers are in the early stages of puberty, they come out of their first time eating them in an unusually good mood. If Sol both eats the beans and discovers their drug-like effects themself during a shift in the xenobotany lab, it's a small miracle they get to the end of the experiment.
• Evolving Title Screen: Getting the final friendship/romance event with any character with Relationship Values will add them to the title screen. Sol can be added by destroying the wormhole-induced time loop, then deciding to bring it back.
• Exact Words: When Tammy gets pregnant, Sol can ask her whose baby it is, but since they didn't ask who the father is, she simply replies that it's hers.
• Expressive Health Bar: The Stress meter acts like an HP meter, which goes up each time you work or get sick or injured, with a maximum of 100. Sol's expression changes along with it, and they get exhausted when they reach maximum stress, leaving them unable to do anything but relax.
• Extinct in the Future: In Humanities, Congruence mentions that by the time the Stratospheric left Earth, the latter was past the point where both bees and everything they were pollinating had gone extinct.
• Extra Eyes: Several alien species you encounter on Vertumna have multiple eyes:
  • The Eyebeasts that attack the colony at the end of the first year have eyes all over their bodies, and no one could tell which end is which.
  • The Hopeyes are one-legged kangaroo rat-like aliens with two pairs of eyes, one of which is extra large and sits where their ears would be if they were Earth rodents.
• Fake Difficulty: The game doesn't allow Sol to give each of their peers a gift more than once a season unless they max out their Creativity skill to reduce the cooldown to every month instead. Since birth months are mainly discovered via giving the right person a gift on the right month, it's possible to lock oneself out of the discovery for an entire year simply by giving them a gift on the month right before their birthday. Everyone but the twins having different birth months from each other won't necessarily cross the player's mind on its own, making it hard to figure out that only giving gifts to the children with unknown birthdays on months that aren't already "taken" is a viable strategy.
• The Famine: Because the Stratospheric lost its supplies for sustainable farming on the way to Vertumna, a famine strikes during Year 5. During this, your mother works extra hard in the Geoponics Station to provide enough food for the colony, your physical skill gains are reduced by 1, while cake cannot be sold at the Supply Depot. You can help Flulu on the farm, work at the kitchens, or forage at the Valley of Vertigo to try ending the famine early, or you can avoid it altogether by making certain choices in previous playthroughs.
• Fantastic Ableism: "Genetic purity" (i.e, not having a mutation) is so far out of fashion that people pity children born with it and expect them to fail every single thing they do. Having this background gives Sol extra money at the start of the game and each time they work because bigots feel the need to reward them for anything they do right.
  Sol's blurb: You're [age], and doing just fine without any genetic enhancements, thank you very much.
• Fantastic Flora: Mushtrees produce incredibly light wood that can be lifted by hand, grow much faster if stimulated by a mild electrical current, and absorb water like a sponge, becoming bloated and mushy during Wet season.
• Fetch Quest:
  • The delivery job is unlocked via delivering sweets prepared by Tammy to Marz, who doesn't want to get them herself.
  • Colleagues from inside-colony jobs will sometimes ask Sol to look for something while out exploring and bring it back to them if they find it.
• Fictional Currency: The colony provides all necessities and many communal luxuries, but anything unique or personal must be bought with "Kudos". This later becomes an issue when Marz attempts to recreate capitalism using Kudos as an actual means of exchange instead of a reward mechanism.
• Fictional Sport: Sportsball, a game that appears to be similar to volleyball.
• Find the Cure!: The Shimmer Cure plot revolves around Sol exploring the Valley of Vertigo to help Tang and Instance find the cure for the disease to save those who got infected such as Geranium.
• Finger-Tenting: Marz deviously puts her fingers together like this in the card "When a Plan Comes Together".
• First Period Panic: Sol gets their first period when they're 13 if the player selects the corresponding puberty option for them. They can discreetly ask their mom for help, and she assures them that it's alright because it's just a sign that they're growing up, and the narration states that they can get hormone blockers if it's bothering them too much.
• Flipping the Bird: In one event where Sol beats Vace in a sparring match, the latter gives them the finger if they rub in their victory on him.
• Floral Theme Naming: Some colonists are named after plants or plant taxons such as Geranium, Eudicot^note a clade of flowering plants that sprout two leaves upon germination, and Echinacea^note a genus of flowers in the daisy family, more commonly known as coneflowers.
• Forced Perspective: The "dog" in the intro cutscene only looks like a dog because of the angle Sol is looking at it from, probably coupled with the concussion they're suffering. It is NOT a dog.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Sol notices that Geranium and Flulu are working extremely long hours and seem to be worried about something at various points of the first playthrough's first three years. On the fourth year, it turns out that the Stratospheric lost the supplies necessary to grow Earth plants during the wormhole transit. On the fifth, it turns out that the fourth year's Glow attack damaging the fields got the colony months away from running out of food unless extra work is put into finding local sources of food.
  • As the kitchen helper job becomes available just a little more than a year before the famine begins, a few of the job's generic events hint at the fact it's coming, such as the unexplained delivery of a bunch of sawdust and Antecedent being very careful about the quantities of food used.
  • The fact that the Shimmer is a Pollen-only disease is a hint towards the fact that it's vulnerable to a factor present during Dust, the season that immediately follows.
  • If Sol is able to repair the broken communication device that Dys steals from Command, they are able to pick up bits of a communication that is clearly from Command. The question of who that communication would be for with no other human settlements around comes up. One of the things revealed after the Heliopause lands regardless of playthrough is that Eudicot has been communicating with the ship all along.
  • The Dartboard of Hate holopalm game Dys makes at some point includes a bomb as one of the virtual weapons. If left to his own devices, he eventually plants a real bomb on the colony's walls before disappearing. The fact that the game's target is a picture of Marz, who grows to want to become part of the colony's leadership, makes the game even more prophetic.
  • While relaxing on the walls, Dys can be seen drawing a person who looks nothing like anyone in the colony and says that he's "not good at drawing him yet" if complimented on the drawing. Depending on whether Sol has encountered Sym under the guise of the "Mysterious Stranger" or not, it can foreshadow Sym's very existence or the fact that Dys has also encountered him at a point where Sol has every right to assume he was some sort of hallucination. If the event isn't triggered until after Sol has formally met Sym, they recognize him in the illustration.
  • A conversation with Tang reveals the colony to be at a high risk of getting a high rate of hereditary heart disease in a few generations. She also notes her own heart rate accelerating past an acceptable threshold if she's given the more potent version of blep tea that Sol can make while working in the xenobotany lab. Take a guess as to Tang's cause of death.
  • If Sol speaks to Dys while in a state of mourning because of Sym's apparent death, Dys refuses to believe them about it on the basis that he allegedly saw Sym very recently, even if it's been more than a month since the event. Sol dismisses it as Dys being in denial, but its turns out that Sym actually is still alive via Body Backup Drive and Dys simply continued to see him during work for the entire three months for which the mourning state kept Sol from going on expeditions.
• Gaia's Vengeance: The colony-breaching attack during Glow is made by multiple xenofauna- not only predators, but species that naturalists could've sworn were docile. Earlier, Sol may notice a tree being cut down and the other trees around it trembling in response. The Gardener Array is a planet-wide, partially fungus-based network of A.I.s responsible for the restoration of Vertumna's biosphere after its original inhabitants fled the ecological collapse of their civilization. As a whole, the Array thinks very poorly of "invasive species" like humanity (and their creators) and they invoke natural disasters and animal attacks against the colony in an attempt to purge what they see as a dangerous infection.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • After the 9th Vertumnalia Festival, you and your friends start noticing that you haven't been seeing Dys and are worrying about him. However, you can still talk to him in the overworld and bond with him since he doesn't actually disappear until that year's Glow Season unless you can convince him not to when you spot him setting up the bomb near the colony walls. On a similar note, at least one random job event mentioning Dys visiting can still pop up after he leaves for sure, or even after he has become a Gardener.
  • The birthdays (technically birth months) of Sol's peers are formally discovered via giving them a gift on the right month, though they can also learn Marz's birthday in one conversation with her about Valentine's Day. This needs to be done separately for a pair of characters known to be twins.
  • You can still comfort Nomi-Nomi over not knowing what their Bio-Augmentation is or whether or not they have one by saying that you don't have one either... even if you gave yourself one later at the genetech lab.
  • You always start with 50 Stress upon landing on Vertumna, even if you unlocked the option to recalibrate the Stratospheric's shields, wherein you don't gain Stress in that sequence of events.
• Game Within a Game: In Nomi's ten-heart event, they write an interactive holonovel about you as a high school girl destined to save the world from an alien invasion and let you playtest it. Like the main game, it has multiple branching paths that you can explore.
• "Getting My Own Room" Plot: One time during construction, Rex is excited to finally get his own room after being stuck living in the family barracks and then the juvenile barracks aboard the Heliopause.
• Gift-Giving Gaffe: There are some gifts that your friends don't like, deducting points from their heart meters, but you can avoid giving them the wrong gifts the next time around because they're recorded in their profiles.
• Golden Ending: The "Peace on Vertumna" ending requires the player to overthrow Lum's fascist government (resulting in either them or Marzipan becoming the colony's governor), go on enough expeditions to meet and befriend Symbiosis, discover the history of the Convergent Domain, and establish a permanent, mutually beneficial peace between the humans and the Gardeners. Getting this ending will also have a positive influence on Sol and their friend's futures (for example, since Vertumna no longer needs a standing army, Anemone returns to her childhood dream of becoming a Sportsball coach) and will result in the Sol's parents dying happily, with their lifelong dreams fulfilled.
• Good Behavior Points: Kudos, the setting's currency, work like the Weird Currency variant, as they are entirely meant to reward others rather than oneself. One can receive them for any act that's appreciated by someone else, while taking them away is a possible means of punishing a disobedient child or work that was too sloppily done. They can also be earned from doing a needed job or doing well in school for an entire month.
• Good Parents: Geranium, Flulu, Tonin, Tirah, and Antecedent are loving, supportive parents to both their biological offspring as well as the other colony kids. Tammy and Cal become this to Tammy's child Echinacea if Tammy survives.
• Gratuitous Foreign Language: One time while babysitting, Tammy says that she needs to put all the keiki (Hawaiian for "child") to bed.
• Gratuitous French: If Marz greets you on your 16th birthday, she says that she doesn't care about her bedhead because it's "tres chic".
• Groundhog Peggy Sue: Tammy and Hal's lives can only be saved on a playthrough other than the first, because of Sol's ability.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • Sym is one of the 10 romanceable characters in the game, but you need to go on enough expeditions to encounter him. He's barely hinted at in a few random events outside the colony, and it's possible to miss him in an entire playthrough, but befriending him is required for the Golden Ending.
  • The card and image for the avoidable Shimmer-induced death are surprisingly easy to miss for the nature of the event they are tied to. It's easy to assume that all one needs to do to get them is let the person die, which is a given in any playthough in which Sol doesn't know how to cure the condition. In reality, the last choice made before the character's death matters and only one choice out of the three offered will unlock the card and the image. The reason that choice is the right one is quite subtle: it gets Sol to Geranium's deathbed sooner.
  • There is a way to avoid having the famine altogether, but it requires having fulfilled three different conditions in previous playthroughs. The only somewhat logical element about them is that two can be fulfilled by focusing on Engineering. One unlocks upon Sol becoming Second Engineer. One requires to complete a robot repair event while having enough Organization (otherwise not needed for the job) and Hal dead. One is an Expeditions event that requires to check the same location no less than three times on different trips. The latter's only clear use at the time is nudging Sol towards one of the special endings.
  • The opportunity to prevent a death that happens outside the colony on the second year without sneaking out doesn't show up from the second playthrough onwards on its own. The prompt to speak to the peer who can help prevent the death will only appear during the right month's overworld phase if a specific stat is high enough, but the stat isn't one naturally raised via working alongside the peer. It can take several playthroughs to even know that the prompt can show up merely from consistently not raising the stat enough during the first couple years.
• Harmony Vs Discipline: The sides are represented by two acrimonious siblings. Tangent (Discipline) is a scientist whose belief in human supremacy may lead her to exterminate the xenofauna of Vertumna. Dys (Harmony), her brother, is an explorer who resents humanity and everything artificial. The narrative takes the view that Both Sides Have a Point, and defines its Golden Ending as "a way to save both [the] colony and the planet".
• Healthy Green, Harmful Red: Sol's Stress meter is green on one end for zero Stress, red on the other for maximum Stress, and yellow in between.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: Social skills are as important as physical or mental abilities. In particular, one of the most generally-useful mutations is...a calm temperament, which reduces the stress you suffer, allowing you to get more stuff done with fewer months of downtime.
• Herbivores Are Friendly: Cal believes that the plant-eating xenofauna are the "good guys", which is why he decides to keep his pet dillypillar Socks. But as Sol finds out in their expeditions, not all herbivores on Vertumna are docile, as some such as bushbubs become aggressive when provoked.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Symbiosis falls off a cliff while trying to protect Sol from the manticores. Sol tries rescuing him, but he slips off beyond their reach and falls to his death. He gets better, however, thanks to his vat creating a backup copy of himself from moments before the attack that led his death.
• Hippie Name: The Strato colonists' penchant for distinctive names (Geranium, Melatonin, Antecedent, etc) is an early hint that they're nonconformists who left Earth in the hope of creating a more flexible society. Very rarely do the colonists use anyone's full name.
• Honorary Uncle: Since the grown-ups take care of each other's kids, they call their friends' parents "uncle" or "auntie".
• Horde of Alien Locusts: The Maskwings are alien locusts bigger than Sol's fist that can devour their weight in leafy plant matter, fabric, wood, hair, or even skin in just an hour. When frightened, they flip their wings forward to make themselves look like manticores, and millions of them swarm in hot places such as the Western Wresting Ridge during the Dust Season.
• Hostile Terraforming: Governor Lum can force Instance and Tangent to release an engineered plague on Vertumna that kills everything larger than a small insect. The planet's biosphere crashes hard and the colony shelters in a bunker for years, but at the end of it all, the soil is fertilized by all the death and the Gardeners are crippled if not outright destroyed, so the colony can begin using their Earth seed stores to reclaim the wasteland in the Earth's image.
• How Dad Met Mom: After the Heliopause arrives, Sol can sit with their dad to listen to the story of how he met their mom. Geranium, who worked part-time at the Earth colony's clinic, thought that he was "too cool" for Flulu and that she and Rhett would get together since both of them are tough fighters, but he fell in love with her when he took care of her after she got injured in an attack. They then applied to work at the Stratospheric together, though Flulu only wanted to "get off [Earth] before anything", but she didn't realize her love for Geranium until they were in space.
• Humanity on Trial: A prominent theme in the game, but also a literal possibility, if Sol and their friends can convince the alien Hanging Judge to give them a shot at coexistence.
• Human Resources: The colony routinely recycles dead bodies into soil. Dys, who grows to care significantly more about the local wildlife than the colony and is Not Afraid to Die, prefers the idea of dying far away from the colony and never getting found to having his remains getting used to grow food for the colony.
• Humans Are Warriors: A big part of the story is the effect humanity has on nature, for better or for worse. The first time xenofauna attack Strato, an Empathy check against one of them will reveal it is afraid of you, a mere ten-year-old child. And with good reason, because the Combat check to kill it is not hard. In one of the darker routes through the story, Strato concocts an extinction plague less than a decade after landing on the planet.
• I Drank WHAT?!: One event at the Prosaic Plains has Sol coming across a pond with seemingly clean, potable water. Unless they have enough knowledge in Animals to analyze it first, they only realize after drinking it that balneals pee into the pond to mark their territory.
• Imagine the Audience Naked: Sol tries imagining the audience in their underwear if they struggle with performing a dramatic reading for the Vertumnalia Talent Show, but they stammer and stumble over their words and fail.
• Improvised Weapon:
  • If Sol goes to Geoponics during the first Glow attack, they grab a shovel to use as a weapon.
  • The illustration depicting Anemone and Kombucha facing the Faceless after its attack on the colony has been going on for a while shows Anemone holding a rake.
• Insistent Terminology:
  • Sometimes, you can see Tangent taking a nap, and when you wake her up, she'll insist that she wasn't sleeping and that "it is crucial to rest the eyes, to maintain adequate moisture levels."
  • If you tell your parents that you want to become a farmer like them, they'll say that they prefer to be called "agriculturists" or "cultivators".
• Insult Backfire: In the scene that establishes the kind of relationship Sol and Tammy had growing up, you can choose to be her childhood bully, which allows you to call her a Fennec-face. Not knowing what they are, Tammy asks if they are cute, which Sol admits. In turn, she decides to take it as a compliment rather than the tease it was intended to be.
• Interface Spoiler:
  • Right from the start of the game, there is a meter tracking how much Sol rebels against the colony. A meter which would not be there unless rebellion was important to the story at some point.
  • Players who regularly check the gallery during their first playthrough are bound to get spoiled:
    • The backgrounds associated with the Helio colony appear there as soon as Sol gets a random Flash Forward that uses them and are given labels that include the colony's name.
    • Most of the still-locked "Cheevos" (achievements) have names that are roundabout enough to only make sense once the player has run into the event to which they relate. Maxing out friendship with one of the romance options will unlock an achievement named after them. Not only is one of the romance options Permanently Missable Content for players who neglect exploration, another dies way too early into the first playthrough for their friendship to get anywhere near maxed out.
• Iris Out: A heart-shaped one is sometimes used as a Fade to Black during sex scenes.
• It's Up to You: Sol's actions will make the difference between the colony surviving and being wiped out, and they're the only one who can save many lives. Some of that is because of their visions giving them information from other lives, but not all; sometimes they're just able to pull off something that the colony's adults can't manage because they're the protagonist. One example of the latter is that both the Engineering storyline and researching xenobotany have events that can't progress without materials found outside the colony, but Sol has to take shifts with the surveyors to obtain them on their own rather than simply ask the people heading out anyway to do so. Once the materials are obtained, they won't be properly exploited unless Sol at least participates in researching them.
• I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: If Sol tells Cal to back off from Tammy, Cal cries but begrudgingly lets them go with her, on the condition that Sol takes good care of her.
• Kids Shouldn't Watch Horror Films: In Tammy's three-heart event, she cries because she got nightmares after watching the 2085 remake of Mothra vs. Godzilla at the lounge. If her father dies, she also laments that he made her feel safe from the "monsters" and that she misses him.
• Killer Rabbit: Some of the xenofauna of Vertumna look cute, but they're still vicious creatures:
  • Manticores are pink goopy-looking creatures, but their spikes and height make it abundantly clear that they're not on your side.
  • Hopeyes are cute little rabbit-kangaroo-mouse hybrids...and when their nests are threatened, can swarm to kill anyone who threatens them.
  • Vriki are small, adorable spider-like creatures with mushrooms growing on their heads and many tentacles, but while the babies mostly don't eat anything bigger than fruit and insects, they come in swarms and can devour you if you disturb them.
    Screw spiders, even cute ones.
• Ladies and Germs: During the party for his bar's opening, Rex addresses the crowd as "Ladies, gentlemen, and those who defy classification," with the latter being said while winking in his non-binary Best Friend's direction.
• Last Disc Magic: The cards for becoming a Council member's second-in-command have a value of 10, which is nearly the maximum base value a single card can have, but are obtainable only on what would've been the 10th Vertumnalia Festival, 95% into the game.
• Last-Second Word Swap:
  • The first time you tell your mom what you've learned for the day, she'll compliment you for "getting your sh— I mean head together."
  • One of the many hints that Sol's attempt at Instant Sedation could have killed its target if not for the setting's advanced medical technology is Flulu responding to their explanation by saying Sol could have "ki— badly hurt" the target.
• Let Them Die Happy: One of the characters who can potentially die early in the game is a parent. Sol can potentially be at the location of their death because of an act of disobedience and get mistaken for their child by them, while it's impossible for the actual child to be reunited with the parent before the death occurs. It's possible for Sol to pretend to be the dying person's child during their last moments.
• Level-Up at Intimacy 5: Friendship Moments often reward Sol with powerful cards, and successfully dating someone also gives them the Smitten status, which increases all Social Skill gains by 1 for three months. Additionally, going out on dates reduces Sol's stress.
• Limited Wardrobe: Everyone only ever wears one outfit, with those of Sol and their peers only changing as they get portraits that look older. While the colony's emphasis on saving resources means that some people may genuinely have only one daytime outfit, some, such as Marz, are implied or stated to have more than that by the narrative. Marz herself has a generic line on the tail end of her early teens in which she's thinking of renewing her wardrobe because she feels like she's been wearing the same clothes for several years.
• Literally Falling in Love: While trying to fend off the manticores, Sym accidentally trips and falls on top of Sol. Sym calls them "[his] hero" for "saving" him for the moment and looks lovingly at their lips, and Sol can either kiss him in return or shove him away.
• Literally Shattered Lives: This is how you kill the alien dog during the 10th Glow attack if your highest skill is a mental one. You set up a freeze trap for the dog that crystallizes it, and Anemone kicks it to shatter it to pieces.
• Little Bit Beastly: Some characters have augments that give them animal body parts, such as Rex having dog ears, Utopia having tiger paws for feet, and Nougat having a tail.
• Living Is More than Surviving: Marz and Nomi are bored with just trying to survive on Vertumna and believe that there should be entertainment facilities, so that colonists who aspire to have creative jobs can make their life worth living on the planet.
• Losing Horns: One photonophor event has you going around playing a wakka wakka noise on it whenever someone trips.
• Love Doodles: If Sol's friendship with Nomi is high enough, the former can catch the latter drawing in secret, which they hide from them in sheer embarrassment. Nomi later posts it online, which is a drawing of their Legends of Avamar character embracing their partner as they ride a unisaur together, with hearts surrounding them both.
• Magical Girl: In Nomi's holonovel, the protagonist transforms into one as she harnesses her new powers bestowed on her by Ghislar. She grows taller and stronger, her school uniform becomes skimpier, and she grows a pair of small white wings, cat ears, and a tail.
• Magikarp Power: Your starter cards based on your babyhood memories and your Bio-Augmentation start out being worth 0 points^note except for the Super-Strength card, which has a flat score of 5, but they can be upgraded into more powerful cards at the Garrison Gym, which is unlocked by the 2nd Toughness perk.
• Making Love in All the Wrong Places:
  • One of the nighttime guard duty events has Sol catch Anemone and Vace sneaking out to have sex in the commons when Anemone was supposed to be on-duty. Sol can be aroused, disgusted, or — if they had feelings for any of the characters involved — heartbroken.
  • If Sol's relationship with Tang is high enough, they can offer to have sex with her on the roof of the Engineering building, even while it's cold out during Quiet Season.
• Man-Eating Plant: One Boss Event in the Colony Outskirts has Sol finding a seemingly safe flower to take back to the colony. Unless Sol has enough skill in Animals to know how dangerous it actually is, the flower reveals itself to be a carnivorous plant that tries eating them should they try plucking it out of the ground. Thankfully, a "mysterious stranger" rescues them at the last moment.
• Mayfly–December Romance: Any relationship between a human and Symbiosis is bound to become this, as the latter is an immortal alien AI.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Every character in the game has an astonishingly apropos name. Some of them go by nicknames that play on other aspects of their personality.
    • Aspartame is named after an artificial sweetener that is much sweeter than normal sucrose, fitting for a kind and caring lady.
    • Dysthymia is named after a form of chronic depression and is the most clear and open case of a depression sufferer among the cast. Dys muses on what an odd thing that is to name a child after, and consequently fears that he was a contributing factor to his mother's suicide.
    • Anemone is named not just after a sea creature, but also a brightly-colored flower, which is sometimes called the "windflower" because its dead petals fly everywhere, appropriate for a spirited young girl who loves playing sportsball.
    • "Basorexia" means "a compulsive desire to kiss". Rex is all about physical affection, is a flirt towards Sol, and enjoys big hugs from them. His nickname is also a Stock Animal Name for dogs and his Bio-Augmentation makes him a Little Bit Beastly dog.
    • Mothers are traditionally considered as the "light" of the family, who enlighten their child with their knowledge of the world, hence Sol's mom is named Fluorescent. Fluorescence is also the scientific name of the "glow in the dark" property of some novelty items and she shows her best side during darker times.
    • An antecedent is something that goes before another item in a series. Auntie Seedent's duties largely include raising the next generation of colonists.
    • "Congruence" means "agreement or harmony; compatibility", and in mathematics, congruent lines are equal in length, fitting for an A.I. who keeps the ship running in order.
    • Marz's dads, who are construction workers, are named Aluminum and Burnish. The former's name is a common construction metal while latter's name means "to polish metal by rubbing".
    • Marzipan is an ingredient that can be used to make elegant-looking sweets. Marz is a homophone to "Mars", both a Roman god of war and a planet that is a popular location for fictional exocolonies.
    • Utopia means "paradise", and her job is to scout for the best places in Vertumna to expand the colony.
    • Tiramisus are among the desserts that are often made to be shared among several people, quite fitting for a mother in a four-person polycule.
    • The commander of the Heliopause goes by "Lum", associated with light. His full name, Baculum, is significantly less flattering, much like the disconnect between his public persona and actual personality. Since "baculum" means "penis bone", and he turns out to be a corrupt governor underneath his charisma, his full name means that he's a dick.
    • Symbiosis means "a mutually beneficial relationship between two different species", and his purpose is to find peace between the humans and the Gardeners by befriending Sol.
  • Lum says in his speech for the 8th Vertumnalia Festival that Vertumna is named after Vertumnus, the Roman god of cultivation, which is why he plans to clear its land for farming.
• Medicate the Medium: If Sol makes a regular habit of discussing their dreams around the colony and insisting on their predictive power, they will eventually be committed to care for a psychotic disorder by Instance. They will be forced to take medication that wipes all their Past-Life Memories, thus deleting all choices that are only available after the first playthrough.
• Memorial Statue: One is built in memory of Sol if they become a military hero. They die in a Glow attack in their early 30s, and the whole colony mourns them as their body is returned to soil.
• Mercy Kill:
  • One event while exploring the Colony Outskirts during Glow Season has you encountering a manticore that's dying from being trapped in a sawmill for several days. You can try putting it out of its misery, but your psychic connection with the wormhole weakens your resolve to do it until you're put in a trance. By the time you snap out of it, the manticore has mysteriously disappeared.
  • The final event of Dys' friendship/romance arc involves a hopeye getting mangled by one of the colony's anti-pest traps. One of the choices made during the discussion in who between Sol and Dys ends its suffering.
• Mini-Game: Stat checks take the form of a card-sorting minigame. The rules are a little like Uno; you're dealt some cards from your deck, and you can get bonus points by placing similar cards next to each other and/or forming an upward count with their numbers. The harder the challenge, the more points will be required to clear it. Sidequests reward the player with higher-value cards.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: Many xenofauna look like combinations of various Earth animals.
  • The unisaur looks sort of like an antelope, except it has small forearms like a tyrannosaur, a single curved horn, and a long brushlike tail.
  • The hopeye is a giant kangaroo mouse with purple fur, several eyes and the behaviour of a rabbit (living in groups, thumping its feet to warn of danger).
  • Vriki are pink spider-octopus aliens that tend to latch onto people's legs.
  • Dillypillars are tiny caterpillar-like bugs that grow into long, slender dragons the size of the colony walls.
  • Manticores are lion-mantis creatures that are extremely aggressive towards other xenos and humans alike.
  • Floatcows are bovine aliens with long grasshopper legs that they use to leap high into the air.
• Modular Epilogue: The game typically ends on your 20th birthday, and the epilogue explains how your and your friends' lives turn out in adulthood. The job you get depends on the activity you did the most and your highest associated stat, while your friends' fates are based on your choices in certain paths and whether or not you're dating them. You then generally live to a ripe, old age, and in your Dying Dream, your ancient self offers to take you back in time to start a new life and see how different it would turn out.
• Mole Monster: Dustmoles are molelike aliens that breed rapidly and destroy fields to build their underground nests. One guard duty event has you and Vace acting as pest control for them, but Cal protests that the dustmoles should just be sent away because he believes they're harmless creatures.
• Money Spider: Successful stat tests can reward Sol with kudos, even when there's nobody around and the situation is one completely unrelated to money.
• Monster Compendium: The bestiary of Vertumnan fauna, which provides a brief summary of the alien creatures you encounter on the planet, can be viewed at any time at the expedition outpost.
• Morton's Fork: The third time you explore the Convergent Domain, you can pick up a radioactive plant along the way. Regardless if you collect its Value-8 card or not, you get sick from the radiation, adding more stress, and you need to survive a series of stress-inducing events in order to make it to the final room.
• Multiple Endings: There are 29 possible endings, all of which can be collected in the gallery. Most of them depend on the job you get at the end of the game, but there are special endings depending on the choices you make in the main story.
  • The "Standard" Ending: This is the ending that allows for all jobs and gives a "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue for every single peer with whom Sol has become close enough friends or romantic partners. Vertumnan xenofauna will always attack your colony every Glow Season, but despite the uncertainty of humanity's survival, you and your friends continue to fight for the colony in the years to come.
  • The "Ran Away" Ending: Sol and Dys believe that the colony is seriously harming the planet and they can't do anything about it, so Sol helps him set off the bomb near its walls and then runs away with him, never to return. Dys and Sol become Gardeners and Sol eventually forgets that they were ever human.
  • The "Joined The Gardeners" Ending: Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Sol reunites with Dys after his departure from the colony and assists with the last steps necessary to get him assimilated into the Gardener Array. The offer to join gets extended to Sol, who accepts. After getting sidetracked by a reintroduction project for a few decades, Sol checks on the colony to find it changed into a sparsely populated People Zoo due to the Gardeners having the knowledge necessary to keep humans from fighting back.
  • The "Tangent's Cure" Ending: A bioweapon meant to kill only the Vertumnan wildlife is released on the tenth year's Late Wet. Cal gets killed in response to his violent reaction during the announcement. Instance, who was the one initially threatened into making it, takes her own life a few months into the ten years for which the colonists have to stay inside the Helio while the bioweapon does its thing. When the colonists emerge, Vertumna has been terraformed.
  • The "Transcended Time" Ending: The ending in which the cause of Sol's Past-Life Memories is triggered by their consciousness becoming the version of themself that inhabits the wormhole and is connected to all their other possible selves, leaving their still-teenage physical body in a lifelong coma from the perspective of the other colonists.
  • The "Strato Destroyed" Ending: The result of Press Start to Game Over. Sol pulls down the Stratospheric's shields while it's going through the wormhole, dooming themself and everyone onboard. The wormhole is also destroyed in the process. Upon dying, Sol doesn't meet their ancient self.
  • The "Life On Earth" Ending: A glimpse of a timeline in which Sol is born on Earth due to the wormhole not existing and dies young defending the Vertumna compound against desperate refugees.
  • The "Disabled the Array" Ending: Sol injects the payload into the Array, disabling its control over the Gardeners and its eco-defense system designed to eradicate humans. The yearly Glow attacks cease, the Shimmer pollen clouds are much reduced, and the crops at Geoponics thrive heartily. However, Sym's abilities as an AI construct are removed, so he can no longer shapeshift or connect his consciousness with the other Gardeners. His scars also no longer heal, and he eventually dies of old age after losing his immortality. Sol and Vace are then hailed as heroes, and Vace humbles himself after his near-death experience during the mission made him realize how difficult being a true hero is, and becomes good friends with Sol.
  • The "Peace on Vertumna" Ending: While this doesn't have a unique image like the other special endings, it still counts towards the ending achievements and enhances the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue in the best possible way. Sol successfully makes peace with the Gardeners by agreeing to their contract that the alien race will take care of the humans and provide them with their needs, on the condition that the humans limit their population and consumption of Vertumna's resources. The two races make a few compromises so that they can live together in harmony, and while a few dissenters leave the colony to break free of Gardener influence (and are "pruned" as punishment), the two races thrive together, and eventually, a second coastal colony is founded as a reward for the humans' efforts in preserving Vertumna.
• Mundane Luxury:
  • After landing, Geranium is delighted to experience changing seasons again.
  • A young Cal enjoys simply being able to play in mud after having grown up in a ship that recycled its water.
  • After the Heliopause lands, Marz is thrilled to be able to talk to people who haven't been part of her life since the day she was born.
  • Nomi-Nomi enjoys simply being outside.
• Mundane Made Awesome: If Sol is nonbinary when first meeting Nomi-Nomi, it's possible for the two to exchange the "secret nonbinary high-five"... Which is described as "like a regular high-five, pretty much".
• Mushroom Samba: Blep tea, brewed from a native grass, is mildly hallucinogenic. If Sol is a biologist, they can experiment with making a more potent form of the beverage, which will send either Tangent, Cal, or Sol completely to space. They decide that the experiment and results were educational and fun but probably not something that should be widely reproduced.
• Music Soothes the Savage Beast: This trope is said verbatim if Sol successfully sings the ancient vriki to sleep at the Valley of Vertigo.

N-Z

• New Game Plus: Starting over a new life carries over any information you've learned about your friends in your past life, but you have to encounter them again to unlock them on your friend list. The prologue gets an additional memory of a chosen favorite gift received on your fourth birthday, which serves as your starting gear besides the Sun Medallion, and of your dad regularly reading you a story of your choice, which gives you a bonus card. There's also a bonus scene with your childhood friend after picking them, which further builds on your stats depending on your choices.
• No Biochemical Barriers: One possible blurb of text from working in the xenobotany lab mentions that the adults born on Earth anticipated the possibility of life on Vertumna being more exotic to them than it turned out to be. In practice:
  • The trope is played straight with Vertumna's atmosphere, which is perfectly breathable for humans.
  • On the disease side, the Shimmer affects humans despite having evolved to affect the local wildlife.
  • Things are a little more realistic when it comes to using the local wildlife as a food source, as Congruence needs to run tests to account for both short-term and long-term dangers. The colony also runs into its first Alien Catnip species a few years in.
• Nocturnal Emission: Sol gets this when they're 13 if the player selects the corresponding puberty option for them. They vaguely recall having an "exciting" dream the other night when they stained the bed, and if they do their laundry, their dad comes in to tell them that it's okay to "feel a little wet behind the ears".
• Non-Heteronormative Society: While the situation on Earth is unclear beyond bigotry being mentioned among its rampant problems, sexual and gender diversity exists in the colony without being treated as anything remarkable:
  • When it comes to Sol, pronouns, gender presentation and biological sex are completely separate choices, with non-binary options for all three (there is a No Biological Sex option). All their peers are available for romance regardless of the choices made.
  • Tang first appears at age 9, having already undergone her physical transition via gene therapy. There is also a known non-binary adult in the colony, Seeq.
  • Marz is raised by a pair of gay fathers, while Cal has four parents due to his mother being part of a polyamorous relationship. According to Geranium's story about how he met Flulu, the ship deliberately left Earth with a diversity of marital arrangements onboard, including couples unable to produce children and smaller polyamorous groups.
  • Nomi-Nomi grew up as the only non-binary person on the Heliopause, but they mention that people just got used to it over the years if asked about their gender during the first proper conversation with them. The issues they mention running into while growing up all seem to have been caused by having a personality at odds with that of the rest of the ship rather than their gender.
• No-Paper Future: Averted. Despite the Strato crew being bio-augmented with holographic palms, Eudicot and Seeq miss the feel of paper and still use it after landing on Vertumna. They plan to cut down the local trees to make paper out of them. Congruence also teaches her students pen-and-paper handwriting in Humanities class to teach them low-tech solutions in case their technology breaks down. Nomi-Nomi is also found drawing on paper during one of their events. Children also don't get holopalms until they're eight, so any drawing the youngest ones do is on paper.
• Not Blood Siblings: This gets briefly discussed if Sol suggests that Tammy's surrogate mother could have been Cal's mother Tirah. Since Cal and Tammy are a Puppy Love pair who become the first people to conceive a child in the colony if Tammy doesn't die as a child, Tammy is quite quick to point out the reasons why her surrogate mother can't be Tirah. This implies that the idea of having been carried by the same woman as Cal makes her uneasy, even if they are otherwise not genetically related at all.
• Notice This: Collectible items glow the same way as random event spots outside the colony, but your Perception skill must be at least 33 in order to unlock this perk. Before this, even the collectible getting a white outline requires being right next to it, just like overworld sprites and the entrances of buildings. However, a first-time player can easily mistake a collectible for a background element and thus not go out of their way to approach it.
• Odd Friendship:
  • Tammy, the sweeter-than-sugar Nice Girl who wants to be a prolific mother and baker, and Marz, the arrogant Alpha Bitch who wants to run the colony someday, are actually pretty good friends. Marz is also somehow good friends with Tangent, who's a walking case of Acting Your Intellectual Age. The latter can be explained by both Marz and Tang considering themselves more mature than the rest of their peers.
  • Dys and Nomi-Nomi, whose baseline moods couldn't be on more opposite ends of the spectrum if they tried, get along surprisingly well. They do have things in common, such as being misfits with creative minds who picked up a few engineering skills simply because they need them to turn their ideas into proper media.
• Odd Name, Normal Nickname: Everyone, save for the protagonist if the player invokes Aerith and Bob when they name them, has a name that isn't normally used as a "conventional" name. However, some of them go by nicknames that sound like "traditional" names such as "Cal" for Recalcitrance, "Anne" for Antecedent, and "Tammy" for Aspartame.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome:
  • The Stratospheric's crash-landing on Vertumna and the two weeks of struggle that followed it are not shown, because Sol was rendered comatose during the first few minutes.
  • Some of the fights that Sol gets to join during Glow attacks if they have enough Bravery come with the implication that some non-combatants are managing to hold their own off-screen in timelines in which Sol can't join those very same fights.
• Oh, My Gods!: Flulu swears by the stars, and Tangent by Newton's apple. Apparently, the latter is more rude.
• Only Shop in Town: Starting from the second Vertumnalia Festival, the Strato crew opens the Supply Depot, the first and only shop of the colony. You can spend your Kudos there for special cards, and gaining certain perks by increasing certain skills unlocks new items in stock.
• Organic Technology: A lot of the technology left behind by Vertumna's long-gone native sentient species is hard to tell apart from the wildlife. Even the parts that are recognizable as technology are implied to technically qualify, as it explains how they are still functional 20,000 years after being built.
• Our Wormholes Are Different: The wormhole leading to Vertumna is what gives Sol their precognition. At some point in their timeline, they merged with a psychedelic/psychic Vertumnan megafauna at the perihelion of the planet's orbit around the wormhole, shredding their consciousness across every single possible moment of any theoretical incarnation of their own life. It is possible to use the precognitive abilities this manifests as from any individual Sol's POV to sacrifice the Stratospheric to collapse the wormhole, "ending" the time loop.^note You can let yourself back into the loop by asking yourself nicely.
• Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: Downplayed. Religion is never criticized because it's never mentioned at all- the setting is entirely secular. There's no chapels on the spaceship, for example, and funerals focus on the deceased person's importance to their planet and community rather than any kind of religious viewpoint. It's closer to Author Appeal than an Author Tract.
• Overly Long Name: The author of Life Beyond the Einstein-Rosen Ridge, which inspired the formation of the Vertumna Group and the colonization of the alien planet, is named Planktonic Ascendance Wang-Botha-Schmidt.
• Palette Swap: The career endcards display the trope on two levels:
  • Each individual endcard adapts to Sol's gender presentation, but only via changing their hairstyle.
  • Several pairs and trios of endcards are clearly using identical or nearly identical poses for Sol, while changing some combination of Sol's clothing and what they are holding. The background is always more heavily modified by comparison. For example, both the botanist and lawyer ending show Sol sitting at a desk from the same angle with their left arm raised, but the botanist is holding a plant, while the lawyer is touching a larger holoscreen.
• Permanently Missable Content:
  • Babysitting is only available if you save Tammy, but you can only take the job in the first five years because the creche gets permanently destroyed in the Faceless attack at the end of Year 5. Even if it gets rebuilt, the job will never be available again.
  • It's possible to go through an entire playthrough without even meeting Sym, one of the potential friends and love interests, simply by having Sol never leave the colony.
• Pink Girl, Blue Boy: Conversed by Tammy when she's pregnant with Echinacea. She remembers when babies used to be swaddled in pink blankets for girls and blue ones for boys, but she thinks it's ridiculous.
• Planimal: Many of Vertumna's creatures. For example, the bushbub is a giant tortoise whose 'shell' is a bush that helps them camouflage. Bushbub berries are edible, but harvesting them is not easy.
• Please Put Some Clothes On:
  • You can tell Rex to put a shirt on the first time you see him shirtless, but he'll complain that he took it off because it's hot outside. He'll also consider going pantsless.
  • During his nine-heart event, Cal steps in front of a humidity sprinkler with his shirt tied to his waist to let the water spray on him, trying to impress you with his muscles, but you can tell him to put his shirt back on because he's "blinding" you.
• Polyamory:
  • Cal has four parents in all: his mother Tirah and her three partners (at least two of which are her boyfriends, Ceph and Perk), and they all work together to take care of him.
  • You can enter a polyamorous relationship with Marz and Rex since Marz doesn't mind sharing you with Rex. You can also have one with Dys and Symbiosis on certain routes.
• Poor Communication Kills: Dys and Tangent's sibling relationship completely disintegrates due to this. She thinks he doesn't accept her gender transition, he thinks she hates and patronizes him for not being intelligent. In reality, Dys has no problem with Tangent being transgender and Tangent is genuinely concerned for her brother's safety and well-being, but their mutual inability to express their feelings all but completely severs the twins' bond.
• Pop Quiz: Rhett quizzes you on the Vertumnan xenofauna at one point during guard duty. He won't punish you for getting it wrong, but you'll earn Kudos if you get it right.
• Population Control: In order to control the colony's population, having a child requires permission from the Council, and there haven't been any babies born since the Stratospheric landed on Vertumna, with the last one born shortly before the ship passed through the wormhole. If Tammy is saved, she eventually gets pregnant at 19 and gives birth to Echinacea, the first child born on Vertumna.
• Precision F-Strike: Geranium, who, according to Sol, rarely swears, says "shit" upon learning that the pixie bean feast he cooked up for the 4th Vertumnalia Festival made the young teens crash after a burst of hyperactivity.
• Produce Pelting: In the first xeno wrangling competition, Cal complains about animal cruelty and throws watatoes at the rodeo participants.
• Psycho Pink: The game takes place on Vertumna, an alien planet where the predominant colours are pink and purple. Possibly because it's the garden planet of an alien race, who are very hostile to humanity. Native fauna includes the manticore, a predator which stands as tall as a horse and consists almost entirely of pink spikes. Plasrifle blasts barely leave a mark on it.
• Pull a Rabbit out of My Hat: For the 4th Vertumnalia Festival, Dys attempts this magic trick by pulling a hopeye out of his hat, but as soon as he removes his hat, the hopeye falls out and bounces away, embarrassing him onstage.
• Pun:
  • Cal cracks one the first time you tend to the animals with him, which he got from your dad:
    "I herd you're gonna help out with the animals! Get it? Herd?"
  • One of Sol's blurbs for having extra fingers states that they come in handy.
  • One joke that Sol can tell Rex, a Little Bit Beastly dogboy, to cheer him up is "Why the hangdog expression?"
  • One of Rex's generic lines has him making Construction Catcalls at the other workers, but since he's a dogboy, he has this to say.
    "Back on Earth, they used to call this cat-calling. My way's better, I think!"
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: If Sol agrees to work together with Vace to go hunting in the Subaqueous Swamps, Rhett claps them both on the shoulders and says, "Good. Teamwork is the key word here. Team. Work."
• Puppy Love: The other kids know that Cal and Tammy are going to end up together, and tease them about it. Sol can even join in on the friendly teasing.
• Purely Aesthetic Gender: Sol's gender, pronouns, and presentation can not only be chosen, but changed instantaneously whenever the player wants. This is somewhat justified, as the setting has very advanced gender-changing procedures and progressive norms.
• Queer Establishing Moment:
  • For Tangent, this moment can come as early as considering her as a childhood friend and reading the mention of her having undergone genome treatment to make her body conform to her gender. If that part gets skipped due to only considering other children, a piece of her random dialog during her late childhood has her comment that her puberty seems to be going a little differently from that of people who were born with a female set of hormones.
  • As Seeq is non-binary, the player knows as soon as the first time their pronouns appear in dialog.
  • If Sol asks Nomi-Nomi about their gender when they first meet them, the latter will say that they're just glad that the Strato colony has "not-boy, not-girl people" like Seeq, revealing that they're nonbinary like them. If they and Rex are mistaken for having started dating, they mention not liking anyone "that way" and instead regarding Rex like a brother, establishing their asexuality. They also have a piece of random dialog that establishes this, via mentioning being grossed out at the idea of "getting involved" with someone else. If Sol pursues them as a love interest and tells them that they don't like "doing it" either, Nomi-Nomi clarifies that they're actually demisexual, only considering having sex someday if they "really like" the other person first.
  • One Babysitting event has Sol and Tammy discuss who could have been the latter's surrogate mother. The people Sol can suggest are Anne (Anemone's mother), Tirah (Cal's mother), their own mother (Flulu) and "Marz's dad". Choosing the last option confirms that it's given completely seriously and implies Burnish is known to be the one who carried Marz.
  • While working in Medbay, it's possible to witness an exchange between Tangent and Utopia during which Tangent makes a comment about both of them having experienced having a body that doesn't match the woman they are inside.
• Railroading:
  • Even if Sol maxes out their Relationship Values with Anemone, she always hooks up with Vace on Sol's 17th birthday no matter how much she appears to reciprocate Sol's feelings beforehand. Unless Sol specs their stats right and/or finds definitive proof that Vace is a scumbag, Anemone will angrily reject Sol if they confess to her, saying it's too late and that she's happy with Vace despite him being abusive towards her.
  • When Lum orders everyone in the Council to take on an official second-in-command, Cal will be made Second Cultivator over Geranium, who is already considered the unofficial Second Cultivator. The latter fact gets pointed out by Cal himself. This is the result of the fact that it's entirely possible for Geranium to be either dead or Chief Cultivator by that point and makes one less alternative late-game scenario to account for.
  • A couple of characters whose lives can be saved by Sol's actions will step down from their respective positions soon after and hand the positions over to the characters who take over if they die. This results in the replacements being around for the same events regardless of playthrough.
  • The famine ends soon after it claims its potential victim and the avoidable Shimmer-induced death is an alternate key to the cure, resulting in both plotlines eventually losing relevance even if they don't get solved in a given playthrough.
  • Each official Council second-of-command position from the last year has three people who can potentially get voted into it: a Helio, the Strato peer who works under the Council member and Sol themself. Close friend, romantic partner and some job endings mention the Strato peer eventually taking over a specific Council seat even if the Helio or Sol won that playthrough's vote for it. It's especially noticeable because putting in enough work in a location to get Sol voted second-in-command is a surefire way to reach a high friendship level with the peer that works there, if not start a romance with them.
• Raised by the Community: All adults taking part in raising the children is the norm in the Strato colony. Blood ties only matter in terms of sharing family bedrooms and being the prime decision-maker when it comes to the child's life. Several situations show the subtleties of the system:
  • Tang and Dys, who are orphaned twins, still have an adult in the colony who is considered their prime caretaker.
  • Upon finding out that children in older times had to do Egg Sitting as a deterrent to reproducing too early, Sol doesn't understand the deterrent aspect due to taking for granted the idea that a child's biological parents wouldn't be the only ones caring for them.
  • The colony is noted to have some children who live in the daycare full-time. A random blurb from babysitting mentions that they consist of orphans, children whose parents decided to take the communal child-rearing further than others and Anne's own three youngest sons, who are triplets.
  • When Tammy has her baby, she insists on taking care of her all by herself, believing that she can fully apply the skills she learned from babysitting and that it's her full responsibility as a mother to tend to her. Despite clearly looking ragged from giving birth, she refuses to let the other grownups or even her partner tend to her baby in the creche, unless Sol offers to babysit for her. That's when she realizes that it's good to have extra hands in raising a child.
• Relationship Values: You can track your relationships with the romanceable characters in your friend list. You can improve your relationships with them by giving them gifts and bonding with them until you max out their meters at 10 hearts. As you bond with them, you unlock more details on their profiles, including sliders that tell you more precisely about their personalities.
• Reset Button: Sol appears in their own Dying Dream as an incredibly elderly version of themself, who offers the chance to experience another possible lifetime and some hints as to what major events (usually character deaths) might turn out differently. Even if the player has prevented every possible death, forged a lasting peace between humans and nature, or destroyed the cycle entirely, the ancient Sol simply remarks that there is more to be done and offers their hand to begin again.
• Ret-Gone: Exposing the Stratospheric to the wormhole un-shielded detonates the ship's reactor and the ensuing blast collapses the wormhole, retroactively unmaking the entire plot, leading to a timeline where there is no escape from a dying Earth. The Vertumna Group makes a go at establishing a compound on Earth, but they are eventually overrun by desperate refugees. Restarting at this point leads to an endless loop of the "Life on Earth" ending until the player asks the ancient Sol to undo their actions.
• Revealing Cover-Up: One of the events involving Cal's secret pet Socks has Sol find Cal while he's trying to prevent an on-duty Vace from entering the barn in which he's keeping Socks. Vace points out that he could have very well ignored the barn, but Cal going out of his way to make sure he doesn't enter it has made him want to do just that.
• Right Place, Right Time, Wrong Reason: The most obvious means to save Melatonin and the only way to save Professor Hal both require Sol to be in a dangerous setting a child their age is not supposed to be. If Sol manages to save them, both take the initiative of twisting the truth to keep Sol out of trouble with the other adults as part of their "thanks for saving my life" reward.
• Robot Buddy: You can get a pet vacubot by continually doing robot repairs, which increases all mental skills by 20 and adds 4 points to the card on the rightmost slot in card challenges. It becomes your assistant in its epilogue.
• Romance Sidequest: The options for flirting with the dateable characters are clearly marked so you can skip them, and you can still earn them on the title screen by maxing out their heart meters regardless.
• R-Rated Opening: The Teaser is a Flash Forward from a young adult Sol's point of view in which they are getting rescued from a burning building and the first non-human creature they run into tries to eat them and their rescuer. Just in case the mere presence of Content Warnings in the main menu and the unskippable first line of the session, which mentions mature themes, fail to convey that the game's plot is by no means a walk in the park.
• Rube Goldberg Device: You can help Rex build one the second time you help him build something. He creates a system of pulleys and ramps to bring some cookies straight to his hammock from a distance.
• Sadistic Choice:
  • Cal and Tammy need to be separated for Sol to become long-term partners with either of them. They are both loving and harmonious as a couple, unlike the other pair that needs to be broken up for Sol to have a chance with either half. As it happens, players aiming to make Cal Sol's husband technically have a second option that those aiming to make Tammy their wife don't: letting Tammy die a few months after the beginning of the game, which has ethical issues of its own, but also can't be avoided during the very first playthrough and takes a single choice to repeat on subsequent ones.
  • If the famine happens and Sol doesn't manage to end it, they will have at least one opportunity to obtain extra food with the full knowledge that it's being taken away from someone else who needs it. However, stealing food deducts from your food supply since Sol still feels bad for it, but at least you'll get a card for it.
• Same-Sex Triplets: Anemone's three younger brothers are triplets.
• Scavenger World: The colony is gradually degrading into a manual society. This is because they brought tech with them from the ship, but it will be a long time before they know Vertumna's resources well enough to get that technology repaired or make new stuff.
• Scenery Porn: Vertumna is a lovingly detailed world of pastel shades, lush foliage and adorable (if dangerous) animals. The settled parts of it are no less beautiful, being filled with cushions, colorful banners, and natural light.
• Schrödinger's Gun: Quite a few elements of the plot are clearly adapting to player choices:
  • Jobs, classes and relaxing activities are done in one-month blocks, but each of Sol's peers can be part of events exclusive to several different activities, resulting in what they are doing during some months adapting to whatever Sol is doing. For example, all three classes have events involving Tangent, but seeing any event involving her implies that she just happens to be taking a specific class at the same time as Sol, regardless of when Sol is taking the class. Another example is biology classes, which Cal will sometimes happen to be taking at the same time as both Sol and Tangent rather than working in Geoponics, his usual workplace.
  • Some events simply don't happen if Sol doesn't find out about them. The artificial plague meant to kill all local wildlife will never come up if Sol doesn't befriend Tangent and the fleet from Earth will be a non-entity unless Sol works as the governor's assistant often enough to eventually walk in on Lum during a specific conversation.
• Schrödinger's Question:
  • Sol's name and Bio-Augmentation (or lack thereof) are decided via player input and become what was there all along.
  • An early event involving Tammy has the player choose what her relationship with Sol was growing up between a playmate, a study partner and someone to whom they were mean. Their answer impacts what Sol is offered to do with her.
  • Some of Sol's birthdays have the player pick Sol's favorite gift among several, with said gift becoming the only one that is converted into a card.
  • Sol's biological sex isn't established until right before they start puberty, via asking the player what aspect of a past sex ed lecture was relevant to them, four years into the game.
• Scientific and Technological Theme Naming: A recurring source of names alongside Floral Theme Naming and Edible Theme Naming. We have Tangent, Fluorescent, Instance, Congruence, Halitosis and Symbiosis.
• Science Fair: You can compete against Tangent and Tammy if you save her in one during the Vertumnalia Festival if you have enough Reasoning. One year, you can beat Tang with a twist on the baking soda volcano experiment.
• Script Breaking: The game sometimes has issues keeping track of what Sol is supposed to know between Dys' friendship plotline, Sym's friendship plotline and the overall Gardener plotline, and sometimes gets even more confused when the options to use the Past-Life Memories to streamline things kick in. This can result in the following occurrences:
  • Seeing Sym casually mention Sol and Dys in the same breath during dialog available while choosing to talk to him right after his "first proper contact" event, then have Sol return to the colony to have a conversation with Dys that is written as if Sol has no idea Dys and Sym already know each other prior to it.
  • Sol remembering the whole thing about Gardeners being organic constructs whose closest thing to sleep is updating their Body Backup Drive in a vat in the events relating to the overall Gardener plot, but being genuinely confused by any allusion to Sym's vat during the latter's friendship events. This one easily happens due to both plotlines progressing via talking with Sym while prompted to do so on an exploration map.
• Secret Pet Plot: Cal secretly takes in a dillypillar, whom he names "Socks" during his childhood. If they regularly work in geoponics, Sol can potentially tell the adults as soon as they find out or get involved in the animal's care. Socks eventually grows out of being able to eat the food Cal provides her with and leaves on her own, unless Sol finds food she can eat while exploring. In the latter case, Gigantic Adults, Tiny Babies kicks in during Sol's early teen years and Socks gets harder and harder to hide, until Cal has no choice but to release her during a late teens event.
• Sentimental Homemade Toy: If Sol searches through their belongings after the Faceless attack in Year 5, they retrieve only the first handmade doll Tammy gave to them.
• Settling the Frontier: As one may guess from the presence of the word "exocolonist" in the game's title. The game adresses the fact that any planet that would be a good place to build a settlement would have pre-existing wildlife that will inevitably get disrupted by the colony's very presence and respond in kind.
• Sexy Discretion Shot: There are some events where you can have sex with your love interest. There's a bit of foreplay, and then the screen fades to black as the narration then shifts to the aftermath.
• She Is All Grown Up: During the Vertumnan Youth Ball on their 17th birthday, Sol is surprised by how much their friends have blossomed from awkward teens to attractive adults that they could "hardly recognize some of them."
• Shout-Out:
  • The old Earth teen magazine that Marz reads during her five-heart event contains a passage that references The Wizard of Oz:
    Don't be afraid to use green concealer! You may look like the Wicked Witch at first, but don't click your heels and go home! Stick with it and you'll be on that yellow brick road to clear, beautiful skin.
  • Two of the suggested names for the hopeye you can hatch from its egg are Hoptimus Prime and Hop Solo.
  • Similarly, options for the unisaur you can tame include Clever Girl and Twilight Sparkle.
  • The caption for the unlockable image of a manticore attacking Tonin is "Attack on Tonin."
  • One of Nomi-Nomi's events involves talking to them some time after they have discovered a series exclusive to the Stratospheric's archive that they really like only got its finale after the ship left Earth. One of Sol's possible answers to this is "Sounds rough, buddy", which reads suspiciously close Zuko's famous "That's rough, buddy" line from Avatar: The Last Airbender.
  • If Sol tries to hide and observe after Rhett tells them to return to the creche during the second Glow attack, they bump into Kom, who reiterates Rhett's advice all while sarcastically calling them "Naruto."
  • Anemone has two reasons to not like "Annie" as a nickname for herself. One is that her mother, Antecedent, already goes by "Anne." The other is the potential association with a well-known fictional Annie who shares her hair color.
  • A card that can be obtained via making the choice to add spice to something is called "The spice must flow."
  • When Flulu asks the protagonist what they want to be when they grow up, they can say that they want to be a monster hunter. Flulu's response?
    "You've been playing too many hologames, <name>. Hunting monsters? I hope it doesn't come to that here."
  • If Sol falls for Marz's trick into getting them to yell at customers to earn more tips for her, Marz laughs and gives them the tips anyway, saying that she didn't mean to "turn [them] into the Hulk or anything."
  • Another Hulk reference is made when Sol insists on delivering the soil to Geoponics by themself by telling Cal, "Sol Smash!!!"
  • If Sol gets a lecture from Flulu for skipping school a second time, the lecture includes the phrase "We live in a society."
  • Professor Hal's nickname is also the name of the spaceship AI from a well-known sci-fi movie. He's even an AI programmer himself!
  • If Sol is close enough to Dys to figure out where he might have gone after leaving the ninth Vertumnalia Festival, they will find him in the middle of trying to convince Sym of how dangerous humans are for the planet with a couple of hypotheticals that consist of all the planet's trees getting cut down and its rivers getting poisoned. This alludes to the best-known version of a famous quote: "When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only then will we realize that one cannot eat money."
  • When Tang explains to Sol her plans for a Super Breeding Program in order to prevent hereditary diseases from being passed down, they can tell her, "Cool motive, still eugenics."
  • The Creativity skill check for your first time working at the bar says, "Take chances and make mistakes!"
  • The scene where you name the stray vacubot gives you four sections worth of pop-culture name suggestions before you can finally choose to give it your own. Some of these suggestions are R.O.B, R2-D2, C3PO, Asimov, Optimus Prime, Bender, and WALL•E.
  • The board game that you can play with Marz and Rex is all but stated to be Monopoly since it involves trying to bankrupt the other players by charging them rent for your properties.
  • One generic defense training session has you playing a virtspace game where you slice fruits and vegetables thrown at you with your hands.
  • When Rex checks in on Nomi's progress on the latter's interactive holonovel, he says, "How's the game going, Nomestar Runner?"
  • If you team up with Nomi to investigate half the lake's circumference to study its water, they go, "Team Clockwise is blasting off again!"
• Slipping a Mickey: One of the characters who potentially dies can be saved by putting sleeping pills in their blep tea. Doing that promptly reveals that too many pills were used and gets them rushed to medbay, but it keeps them away from the circumstances of their death.
• Social Media Before Reason: In Nomi's holonovel, you can record the alien invasion for your holovlog, only to be disintegrated by the aliens while doing so.
• Soundtrack Cover Character Jam: The game's OST has Sol playing the photophonor^note a flutelike instrument that produces light patterns when played on the cover.
• The Spartan Way: Soldiers of the Heliopause are trained from the ground up by being made to beat up anyone they consider weak. New recruits are also hazed by stronger members as part of their initiation rites.
• Spin the Bottle: While high on pixie beans, which have an intoxicating effect, the community's teens can decide to play spin the bottle, though Sol can suggest playing Seven Minutes in Heaven instead.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: Sol and Sym, as the former is human, and the latter is a Gardener: one of the AI caretakers of the planet, most of whom are trying to get rid of the new invasive species. On one occassion the game even explicitly refers to your relationship as such.
• Static Role, Exchangeable Character: On account of various avoidable deaths, there are a few events that can potentially have two different characters fill the same role:
  • During a late-game Vertumnalia Festival, either of Sol's parents can make a vocal comment about Lum's leadership being the kind of thing they left Earth to get away from.
  • If Sol finds a squeedger queen still young enough to be moved while exploring and manages to bring her to the colony so she will anchor in Geoponics instead, both Geranium and Cal can be the one to welcome her while calling her "Your majesty."
  • If Eudicot dies, the character doesn't get replaced for another couple of months, so Seeq fills in for the job in the meantime and is the one to formally hand the position over to the permanent replacement. If Eudicot survives, there is no need for Seeq to fill in and the position is handed over in person.
  • If Professor Hal dies, most job events in which he would have been present if still alive replace him with Congruence all while keeping the dialog practically the same.
  • If either of the two first puberty options are chosen, Sol can ask one of their parents for help or have one of their parents figure out what's up if they handle the resulting mess on their own. Which parent this happens with depends on the option chosen, as it will be the parent who went through the same type of puberty.
• Status Buff: Certain story choices and events positively affect how much you gain certain skills for several months:
  • Clear Mind: At zero stress, you feel completely relaxed, giving you a 10% chance to get a bonus point in skill gains.
  • Smitten: Dating someone increases all social skill gains by 1 for three months.
  • Enlightened: Mastering a skill increases all mental skill gains by 1 for three months.
  • Heroic: Joining the fight during Glow attacks makes you feel pumped, increasing all physical skill gains by 1 for three months.
  • Popular: Winning a Vertumnalia contest doubles your Kudos earnings for three months.
• Status Effects: Certain story choices and events negatively affect how much you gain certain skills for several months:
  • Stressed Out: At maximum stress, you can't work or explore outside the colony, and you can only spend the month off relaxing to fully de-stress.
  • Feud: Getting into a major fight with someone reduces all social skill gains by 1 for three months.
  • Insomnia: You lose sleep after having a particularly bad dream on your 19th birthday, reducing all mental skill gains by 1 for three months.
  • Injured: Getting hurt in battle reduces all physical skill gains by 1 for six months and prevents you from exploring, but your injuries can be healed by relaxing.
  • Starving: When the famine hits the colony, you end up hungry, reducing all physical skill gains by 1 until the colony gets enough food.
  • In Mourning: The death of a loved one such as Tammy and your parents reduces all skill gains by 1 for three months. You also can't give gifts to your friends, go exploring, or activate events while working.
  • Hormones: Once you hit puberty, your raging hormones triple all Rebellion gains for nine months.
  • Grounded: If you get caught disobeying the grownups, you're banned from exploring and all Loyalty gains are doubled for three months.
• Stink Snub: Marz often expresses her disdain towards Dys by complaining that he stinks. The player can choose to have Sol join in, with one such occasion unlocking a card called "being a bully." There is an implied kernel of truth to this, as Dys spends his days sneaking out of the colony via a drainpipe, while Marz refuses to go out in bad weather out of fear for the state of her clothes.
• Story Difficulty Setting: The card challenges can be turned off to focus more on the story, and the success of each activity is instead determined by a coin flip based on your age and skills.
• Sudden Soundtrack Stop: On your 17th birthday, you can attend Marz's surprise party and dance with your peers, but the happy music suddenly stops when Lum and Rhett step in for an important announcement.
• Super Breeding Program: When Sol's generation gets close to later teens, Tang starts crunching the numbers for the colony's prospective genetic diversity. She notices that while the presence of the Heliopause crew means that overall diversity will be even less of a problem than anticipated, the future population has a very high chance of ending up with a high rate of hereditary heart disease if people are left to their own devices. This can be avoided with careful planning over several generations, resulting in a brief exchange over the ethics of such a plan. The trope is outright deconstructed when Tang refuses to contribute her own genetic material to the next generation and people bemoan the fact that her intellect won't be transmitted, while the choice has to do with her not wanting to perpetuate her family's established history of mental illness. If her relationship with Dys is rekindled, she gets motivated to develop augments that make up of genetic predisposition to mental health issues and happily contributes her genes to the next generation.
• Super-Deformed: Some menacing xenofauna such as manticores and the Faceless have chibi overworld sprites of themselves.
• Surprise Party: Your friends organize one for you for your 18th birthday, with Marz as the host. You play along with the surprise because you're tired from the siege last Glow Season, but the Helio youth crash the party because they think they can sit "wherever [they] want" at the lounge, to Cal's frustration. In subsequent runs, you see the surprise party coming thanks to your Past-Life Memories, but you can still attend by pretending to be surprised.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: The game usually lets Sol get away with anything that saves someone who would have died if they had done nothing. An attempt at using Instant Sedation to keep a character from going on the outing on which they can get killed almost kills them in itself. On top of this, as Sol has to visit the person's quarters to put the sleeping pills in their drink, everyone figures out that Sol is the one who did it and several authority figures now want to know why they apparently randomly poisoned someone.
• Sympathetic P.O.V.: Sol was raised in the Stratospheric commune and sharing their values, so the game initially presents ideals such as vegetarianism, communal childrearing, and anti-capitalism as simple truth. However, the game also shows that these ideals appear to be natural because that's how Sol was raised, and they have the opportunity to question and oppose many of them in favor of other systems.
• Talent Contest: You can compete against Marz, Dys, and Rex in one during the Vertumnalia Festival with enough Creativity, and you can choose between up to three different talent acts to try winning in it.
• The Talk:
  • Marz mentions that her dads taught her about reproduction when she was growing up, but were invoked "squicked out" when she asked them how to get someone to "actually have sex" with her.
  • One time while helping their dad out with the animals, Sol sees him untangling two bristleslugs from "wrestling" each other. He refuses to go into the details on what they were doing, but 10 minutes later, they entangle themselves again.
    Geranium: The heart wants what it wants, I guess.
• That Came Out Wrong: When Nomi-Nomi, who is sex-repulsed, explains to Sol the various ideas they have for their mural, they gush like this about making it a pirate ship.
  "Nomination, ruler of the high seas! Scourge of the seven winds! Plunderer of booty! (Beat) Um... maybe strike that last part."
• Theme Twin Naming: In a case of theme triplet naming, Anemone's triplet younger brothers are named Cirrus, Cumulus and Nimbus, which are all cloud types.
• There Are No Therapists: The Stratospheric only had one therapist, the mother of Dys and Tang who died before the events of the game. However, if Sol helps Rex build his bar, they can take up a job as a bartender, helping people through their issues as best they can without any specialized training. Should Dys and Tang be reconciled, Tang becomes a fierce advocate of mental health, albeit mostly through genetic alterations rather than therapy.
• This Is Reality: If Flulu sits down to talk with Sol about their rebellious attitude, she emphasizes that surviving Vertumna "isn't some holovid high school drama", but a matter of life or death.
• Timey-Wimey Ball: In general, the only thing that travels through time is memories of the future. However, this isn't a hard rule; sometimes you can do something that physically affects the past, since when you destroy the wormhole, that causes it to be retroactively destroyed, preventing the story from happening. Also, the transcendent Sol is able to move around through time, though they usually only appear at the end of Sol's life.
• Timmy in a Well: Referenced in one joke that Sol can tell Rex, a Little Bit Beastly dogboy, to cheer him up.
  "What is it? Did Nomi fall down the well?"
• Toast of Tardiness: Nomi-Nomi writes a holonovel in which the plot is kickstarted while the character standing in for the reader is running to school with a piece of toast in their mouth. Presumably, they were inspired by the time they crashed into you with a toast with in their mouth in their four-heart event.
• Toilet Humor:
  • Tangent's presentation for the science fair at the first Vertumnalia Festival involves using the hydroconversion machine for other benefits besides making urine drinkable. Despite her saying the word "pee" many times, Sol finds Tang's presentation boring.
  • During the 4th Vertumnalia Festival, Geranium serves pixie beans, the first domesticated Vertumnan crop, which glows in the dark. Flulu jokes that the community will have to thank him for the "light show in [their] toilets tonight."
  • One time during work at the Supply Depot, Tangent feels embarrassed when she asks Sol to get her "fart pills" for her upset stomach. Marz then teases her that she got a bad case of "Bluegut", when she farts blue dust and stains her pants with it, and she makes her check her own butt, to her dismay.
  • If the event during which Seeq makes Sol deliver a paper report to the rest of the Council happens after Utopia has become Chief Surveyor, Utopia's reaction to getting a paper report includes wondering if Eudicot plans to reintroduce toilet paper next.
  • When talking with Cal about animal facts, Sol remembers the time when Tang brought a skunkbug to Biology class. It released a stench so horrible, everyone thought she farted, and Professor Hal had to clear the whole room, and it took weeks to clean up the beanbags. Cal, however, remembers that it was Sol who brought the bug to class instead.
• Too Desperate to Be Picky: Some of the jobs Sol can take are explicitly offered by people so desperate for extra hands that they will take any applicant who isn't horribly underqualified. The job for tutoring the younger children can be allegedly taken on by "anyone who isn't a complete idiot."
• Trailers Always Spoil: The game's launch trailer spoils some major plot points by showing CGs of Tammy being saved from her early death and Anemone and Kom fighting the Faceless.
• Uncoffee: Blep tea, which gets its name from how bitter it is, but is still quite popular as a stimulant. It also has an Alien Catnip side to it, as an event in which a more potent variant is researched has Sol hesitate between giving it to someone who prefers the stimulant aspect and someone who prefers the drug-like aspect.
• Urine Trouble: While exploring the Western Wresting Ridge, you may feel a light shower even if the place is normally arid. If you look up, you'll realize that it's coming from migrating floatcows that are urinating to keep themselves afloat.
• Used Future: A cozier example than most. The Strato colony was a personal project by people who didn't fit in on Earth, so their ship is low-tech, relatively small, and communal ^note families share a bedroom, and all living spaces are public. Think "visible bolts and worn cream paint" rather than "smooth white plastic". Apparently they stole a much more advanced A.I for the project.
• Veganopia: That was the original ideal of the Stratospheric's people — they use soy and other plant-based proteins in food to avoid the ecological burden of raising domesticated animals on the ship. However, when they actually arrive on their new home, most of their food reserves and the soil needed to grow more are destroyed (unless Sol takes a very specific route), and as a result, hunting and ranching become part of their lifestyle even before the Heliopause arrives.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: There are choices that let you be mean to your friends, but notably, you can bully Tammy into losing her confidence. This is the only other way to separate her from Cal after saving her, besides bonding with him well enough to tell him to back off from her.
• Video Game Delegation Penalty: The Targeting Autohelm autoplays your best hand during card challenges, but deducts 2 points from all card values.
• Villain Has a Point:
  • Even though humans are sapient and can be reasoned with, the Gardeners are absolutely correct about the damage they will do to the environment given the chance.
  • Although it's told from the perspective of the descendants of the Vertumna Group on Earth, the history of the movement includes a line about others fearing that they were a cult breeding supersoldiers using genetech. That wasn't the group's intention, but they were a cult and they do use their genetech to create "superior" children.
• Walking Spoiler: Between the mid-game arrival of second ship and the nature of what was left behind by Vertumna's long-gone sentient species, there are several characters who reveal some of the plot twists by their mere existence.
• Weird Weather: "Sparksnow" on Vertumna is like the Earth kind of snow, except that it's blue, not cold, and mildly acidic. Good for sculpting, though.
• We Used to Be Friends: The children of the Stratospheric weren't always nice to each other, but they were raised together, in an environment where no other peers existed. Yet they would develop such drastically different political views that this closeness couldn't last. Cal and Anemone, in particular, get along well as kids, but after Anemone joins the military in her teens, she and Cal separate because of their differing views, with Cal believing in pacifism and Anemone believing in fighting to protect the colony.
• Whale Egg: Hopeyes lay eggs despite being the Fantastic Fauna Counterpart to various rodents. However, Vertumnan wildlife has quite porous lines between plant, fungus, animal and mineral, so a being analogous to a mammal laying eggs is nowhere near the strangest thing the planet is harboring.
• Wham Episode: The fifth year's Glow and the sixth year's Quiet. The Glow attack destroys all but one of the Strato buildings and the casualties include one of Anemone's brothers regardless of run and Eudicot unless the player actively prevents it. While the colony is still being rebuilt, a second spaceship from Earth crashes on Vertumna. Said spaceship contains a bunch of soldiers whose pre-crash purpose was clearly to arrest the Strato residents. Once things have settled down, the colony has a new governor in the form of the second ship's captain, all functions have shifted locations and there are three extra people close to Sol's age who can be interacted with.
• What Does She See in Him?: One time during guard duty, Vace impresses Anemone by arrogantly firing some shots during target practice. You can tell Anemone, "What do you see in this dingus?" but Vace will shoot an acidic glance at you while Anemone will grab him by the arm and tell him not to worry about you, which deducts 2 points from their respective heart meters.
• What's a Henway?: If Sol tries asking Nomi what their secret drawing is, they tell them it's "nunaya" — "nunaya business!"
• What the Hell, Player?: Sol's ancient self gets disappointed in you if you get one of the bad endings, painfully reminded of their power to be cruel enough to go out of their way to get it.
• Who Names Their Kid "Dude"?:
  • Dys remarks how odd it is to be named "Dysthymia", another term for persistent depressive disorder, because it reminds him of his mother's neglect and eventual suicide.
  • Inverted in a conversation with Anemone during lookout duty. As Sol grows bored spotting every random thing past the walls, Anemone suggests naming one of the rocks "Steve". Cue Sol's bewilderment, even if the player gave them a "common" name instead, since all the other colonists have esoteric Hippie Names.
    Sol's narration: Steve? Where did she get that weird name from, a holovid?
• Who's on First?:
  • The Secret Pet Plot involving Cal starts with both he and Sol being in the barn in which he's keeping the pet when it hatches. Cal always names the pet "Socks." If it's at least Sol's second time living through the event, they can respond to finding Cal looking at an unseen item he's keeping inside a crate by asking if it's Socks. Since Socks isn't hatched quite yet at that point and it's always the first time from Cal's point of view, a bemused Cal asks why he would be keeping his socks in a barn.
  • Al's full name is Aluminum. He works in construction, for which one of the desirable materials is his namesake. Al has an obvious joke he likes to make if someone nearby is talking about the limited availability of the material on Vertumna.
• Wizard Needs Food Badly: You need to keep the colony's food supply well-stocked or else you'll end up starving, which decreases all physical skill increases by 1, and cake will also no longer be in stock at the Supply Depot.
• X-Ray Sparks: The Vertumnan wildlife have skeletons that light up from within when they're zapped by the security officers with their lightning gloves.
• You Can't Fight Fate: Whilst many tragedies can be avoided, Sol notes that in all their lives they've never prevented the destruction of the Strato and Kom's death in the Faceless attack at the end of year 5.
• You're Not My Father: Vace tells Utopia off for warning him not make any "stupid" risks at the Swamps, telling her that she's "not [his] aunt" and that he can fight the xenos there on his own.

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Wake up again.