Welcome to Loremakers: Community Questions, a new series focused on answering your lore questions. We’ve done a deep dive through the Ask A Dev section and selected ten questions to answer about the Star Citizen universe. All questions were slightly edited for context and clarity but you can click on the topic to go directly to the question and join the conversation. Also, the Narrative team plans to do one installment of Loremakers: Community Questions every quarter with the next entry scheduled for Tuesday, July 6th, so please join the discussion and drop any other questions you might have about the universe in our Ask A Dev forum.
Alien Currencies
Question: Will alien races have their own currency or will trade with them only be done in UEC?
Answer: The Narrative team has touched upon the topic of alien currencies when developing their various languages. The Human translation for the Banu currency is Nus and the Xi'an currency Kuen. We haven't defined a Tevarin currency yet, though they probably used one prior to their integration into the UEE. As for the Vanduul, well, Humanity hasn't really had a chance to ask if their society values anything besides war.
How this manifests in gameplay is a larger question that would also involve the Design team, as they would need to build and balance the economies associated with the alien currencies. As it stands now, the current plan is to focus on UEC as the initial economy to build, but it's possible that we could expand out to include alien currencies down the road.
Anasazi Sea on Terra
Question: Anasazi. It's a great word. It sounds cool. It's also controversial. I'm an anthropologist and the name has been in my awareness for a long time. I first learned about it in undergrad and it has always served as a case example of not respecting people and their culture. Here's what the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center has to say about it.
Would you consider changing the name of the Anasazi Sea due to the historical misuse and negative cultural associations related to it?
Answer: Thanks for highlighting the issues surrounding the historical misuse of the word Anasazi. You're right, it's a cool sounding word, but since its usage is controversial, we’ve decided that using a new name would be best. After contemplating a handful of options, we will be changing the name of that sea on Terra to Animas. Our thinking behind this is that it sounds relatively similar while being used and defined in a wider variety of ways. Also, the fact that the Animas River was a water source for some Ancestral Puebloans felt fitting.
The next issue related to Ancestral Puebloans that the Narrative team needs to tackle, figuring out a way to convince the company we need to take a research trip to Chaco Canyon for the summer solstice. As an anthropologist, do you have any advice on how to convince them of this?
Gameplay Justification
Question: What is the lore reason for us being able to zoom in our eyeballs?
Answer: Wait… do your eyes not do that?
At this point, there's no defined lore reason for it. It's just stylistically replicating the notion of focusing your attention on something.
Justification for Trading Merits in Prison
Question: What's the lore justification for Merits being tradeable? It's difficult to envision a modern prison doing this, so what makes prison in Stanton different, and why?
Answer: Merits are earned through manual labor tasks in rehabilitation facilities. They can be used to reduce your sentence time and buy supplies needed for an extended trip into the maze of mines. Having them tradeable makes sense from a gameplay perspective, including as a way to promote camaraderie and help friends earn their release at the same time.
From a lore perspective, the prisons in Stanton are run by Klescher Rehabilitation Facilities. If you've been inside and experienced the conditions, you can probably surmise that the company is less interested in rehabilitating law breakers than the credits generated by their free labor. Originally, merits were tied to the person who earned them, but then Klescher discovered that at one of their centers, an enterprising prisoner had managed to hack the system so that they could swap merits with others. The administrators at the center shut down the exploit when they learned of it, but a review of the statistics from that time period showed that the black market economy had greatly increased the amount of merits accrued and by extension, the amount of work performed. Unsurprisingly, following the review it was decided to embrace the exploit and officially make merits an open economy. In public, Klescher claims that the trading of credits inspires cooperation and teamwork among their residents.
Descendants of the Messer Family
Question: With the Messer having been in power for so long, I'd assume there are many, many descendants that exist in the 'verse. Where did the remaining Messer's run to when the regime fell? Do their descendants still feel the need to hide from the public at this point? If so, how does the modern UEE treat them?
Answer: This is a really interesting topic and one ripe with Narrative potential. Here's how we've broached the topic so far in lore. First, there's the mystery around what happened to Fiona Messer. She disappeared in 2792 during the anti-Messer revolution that killed her older brother Imperator Linton Messer XI and deposed her family's regime. No one knows where she went or what happened to her, but the mystery surrounding her fate still fascinates the modern UEE, as is evident in the making of a 2947 spectrum vid Sparrow that imagined what might have happened to her after the revolution.
Second, during the 2950 Imperator Primary, where anyone can announce themselves as a candidate by submitting a vid pitching their vision for the Empire, one candidate claimed to be a direct descendant of Ivar Messer. The hosts of Spectrum Spectator found the candidate's ideas to be odious and believed the person wasn't an actual descendant of the Messers, only someone desperate enough to get facial reconstruction surgery to look like Ivar Messer. Whether the candidate was truly a Messer descendant was never conclusively proven, but either way, he didn't get enough support to make the final ten candidates. So the current political climate meant someone felt comfortable enough to campaign as a Messer but struggled to gain widespread support.
Other Messer family members outside of the direct line were either swept up and imprisoned during the anti-Messer revolution or went into hiding. A number of them probably changed their name and obscured their family connections to survive. So, there's definitely numerous Messer descendants still running around the UEE. How this plays out in lore will be a fun thing to keep exploring going forward.
Video Critique of the Lore
Question: I just watched a video critique of Star Citizen lore and I have to agree with most of what he says. For example, the technology of the UEE doesn’t seem advanced enough and there is no real explanation as to why. Also, the UEE as described would never work. Instead of a Judicial Branch which determines if the laws are fair and fairly applied, the UEE has a police force that seems to be judge, jury and executioner (or at least jailer).
Additionally, what little we’ve been told of the Vanduul doesn’t make sense. If the Vanduul are tribal or clannish in nature, they are going to have Gods, or some Higher Being that they honor, yet we have been told they do not. There needs to be actual reasons behind what they do, not just because they are "irredeemable."
It's all well and good to write the “Rule of Cool” for current events, but who is tasked with creating the history and verifying that it has real continuity?
Answer: This is a tricky question to try and answer but will give it a shot. Rather than going point by point, we wanted to have a higher level conversation about the universe and the choices made in its construction.
Obviously when creating any fictional universe, you need to make choices to build an environment that complements the story you want to tell. Since the beginning of Star Citizen, there wasn't ever really a goal to try and realistically project exactly where Humanity would be in 900 years. During the initial planning, there was a lot of discussion of what the 30th century would look like and feel like for the game that we were aiming to make. So when sitting down to look at the universe, there were stylistic choices made from the get-go that led to the most tactile gameplay. These creative choices were based on Chris' artistic taste and his vision for the game universe, so we kinda started from there and worked our way backwards, creating Time Capsules, to bridge the gap between present day and then to hit the target.
For example, Chris wanted to avoid having AI dominate the landscape. He wanted players to be in the pilot seat and in control of the action. Now, is it unlikely that AI wouldn't be piloting ships at this point in the 'real' timeline? Probably, but the game would have a very different tone and feel if all the players could simply entrust their fleet to their AI (that can pilot thousands of times better than they ever could) than having to do it themselves. That's why we littered the history with all those tragedies involving AI, so Humanity would stop pursuing it as a thing (even though they keep trying). Similarly, with advancements in AI targeting computers, it is conceivable to imagine a future (like many sci-fi authors have) where battles would probably take place across hundreds of thousands of kilometers as the combat systems would be able to instantaneously calculate trajectories over those vast distances. However, because Humanity has eschewed AI development, it allowed us to have that desired Wing Commander vibe of pitting your skills against your opponent in a tangling dogfight rather than sniping across a solar system.
Again, this isn't to say that the criticisms aren't fair. If there are facets of the universe that don’t feel satisfactorily explained, we definitely welcome requests for further clarity or explanations into why the things are the way they are. Nine hundred years is a lot of history to fill in and since the bulk of this stuff won’t affect the day-to-day life of a player in the Star Citizen universe, it does tend to take a back seat when stacked against the other tasks that we have going on, but that shouldn’t stop anyone from bringing them up to discuss.
To address a couple of the points you outlined, for clarity, the Judicial branch of the government includes a full court system under the Office of Imperial Justice. The Advocacy are simply the Imperial-level police force. You just don't get much of a view of the courts from a player perspective.
As for the Vanduul, it's not quite clear why a clan structure predisposes them to religion, but otherwise yes, that is correct, you have very little information about how the Vanduul operate, but that doesn't mean that they are lacking complexity. One of the strange hurdles that we've been dealing with is the fact that we're building this universe in tandem with the game, so, as backers, you’re getting access to the written lore sooner than you get to experience it. For that reason, we don't want to just tell you everything. We want to make sure there are things to discover in the universe when you get in there.
Start of the Second Tevarin War
Question: According to currently published lore (Battle for Centauri) the Second Tevarin war started in 2603 with a massive Tevarin fleet entering the Fora system through a "previously unknown jump point". Yet, all three of Fora's jump points were known before 2603 and the Tevarin fleet would need to have passed through another UEE system before reaching Fora. Please can you confirm if the Second Tevar War did start in Fora or if this is an error?
Answer: Good catch. The lore discrepancy happened when we reorganized the layout of the systems and jump points in the early days of the project. In its current layout, Fora would not have been the initial entry point into the UEE for the Tevarin fleet.
It looks like a slight adjustment might work. The Tevarin fleet could've first entered the UEE via Banshee and then made their way into Fora. Since Banshee has a pulsar at its center, it's sparsely populated, so it makes a lot of strategic sense for the Tevarin incursion to begin there and then move into Fora to fulfill the demands laid out in the article. So, technically, the first confrontation could still have happened in Fora but the Tevarin passed through another UEE system first and used an already known jump point.
We'll be updating the lore linked above to reflect this change. Thanks again for calling this out!
What year was Aegis Reclaimer introduced?
Question: I've gone through Galactapedia and various wikis but couldn't find anything about the ship's age or history in general, like if it was produced already during the Messer era or something that came into fruition afterwards when Aegis had to seek out alternative sources of income. Also, what generation is the one we have in game?
Answer: An official introduction date for the Aegis Reclaimer has not been publicly announced yet, but the current idea is that Aegis first introduced the Reclaimer in the second half of the 28th century. At the time, the Messer regime was on their last legs and Aegis, a brand beloved and propped up by the regime, was already looking to rework their image and expand their ship line away from military craft. We tend to keep origin dates a little looser until we do a fully detailed write up like the ones featured in our Whitley’s Guides.
Hmm… maybe a deeper dive into the Reclaimer history would be the perfect subject for a future Whitley's Guide...
Crusader's Environment
Question: What keeps the lattice work of platforms on Crusader buoyant? If we turn off our ship, will it float in the gas clouds?
Answer: The platforms in Orison are all equipped with large thrusters that fire periodically to help the city maintain its precise orbital height. Without the thrusters, Orison would be pulled down into the dangerous cloud layer below. While the lower gravity found at Orison’s elevation makes it ideal for Crusader’s shipyards (the platforms themselves have artificial gravity) exactly how this affects ships is a bigger question that involves other departments. It's too early for us to say definitively how it'll be handled but we're just as excited as you are to try it out ourselves.
Imperator Line of Succession
Question: Pretty straight forward, I'm curious how the UEE Imperator line of succession works?
Answer: Great question. That was actually something we hadn't discussed before, so some of us had a brainstorm session and came up with this:
If the current Imperator is no longer able to perform their duties, the order of succession would be:
- High-Secretary
- Senate Speaker
- Senate Witness
- Imperator Chief of Staff
Note that the successor does not become the next Imperator, but temporarily takes over the responsibilities of the office until a special election can be held the following year (or the normal election in the case of a succession event occurring in the ninth year of the Imperator’s term). The new Imperator elected will then serve until the end of the original term. No matter the length of time they serve, they are still subject to the one term limit and will not be allowed to run for imperator again. To protect the line of succession, typically if there is an event where all of them would be in attendance together, one person in the line will serve as the designated survivor and be protected offsite. If the worst case scenario happens and the entire line is unable to serve, the senate will then vote a current senator to assume the duties of the office. If the senate is unable to vote (If this ever happens, things must be going really wrong in the UEE!) the High-Command will temporarily assume the responsibilities of the government until such a time when an election can be held.