Starbound Theory Thread [Spoilers]

I have another question to add to the pile - Why did the Deadbeats (a fairly widespread species, since their cities' ruins can be found in all scorched planets) not get an Artifact ?
Were they either not advanced enough (which implies they'd be younger as a species than the florans) or already on their downfall when the Ancients decided to award the Artifacts ?

Seeing how their advancement before their civilisation collapsed seems similar to 21th century Earth, it's fair to assume that they are significantly younger than humanity, yet older than the Florans. We can deduce that they either discovered space travel early on, or remained in a state of stylistic stagnation.
Maybe they just discovered space travel too late to be eligible as a Chosen Race™, then broke into intestine wars, without making significant contact with the other sentient space faring races ? That's my take on it anyway
(though that would mean that the Avians are in a very, very serious technological stagnation, as they'd have discovered space travel before the deadbeat yet their tech is less advanced in a number of ways, with ancient temples being the most advanced of their constructions)

 

Deadbeats do strike me as a younger civilization. While they probably existed for a long while now, there's a chance they weren't as prominent back when the six races were chosen.

 

Deadbeats don't necessarily have to be "younger", they could also have advanced much more slowly. And why do you think the Floran are young too? They must have been around when the Ruin was first sealed and that period has even less references in ingame human culture than "old Earth".

I'd rather propose Deadbeat aren't one biological species with a (former?) unified interstellar culture, but rather the result of some other common influence. For example Core Fragments can be used to make bombs, perhaps large amounts of fallout from those slowly mutates most humanoid species into a similar form. Thus any major warzone and even the remnants of entire warlike civilisations would contribute to the "Deadbeat" population. Just an example, plenty of other options that don't require a well-established interstellar civilisation.

 

That makes me wonder. What if Deadbeats are the ancients, or even some third civilization from the same simulation involving the Glitch? There's no reason all of those simulated species had to be mechanical, after all.

 

Neither the key trader at the Outpost nor their relics really match the Deadbeats though. Maybe a highly mutated splinter faction or something but I don't see Deadbeats existing for long in any one place nor how the Ancients would degenerate into them on a larger scale yet still survive to the present day. Them being related to the Glitch is somewhat possible but I don't quite see why their designers would bother with robots if they have such advanced bioengineering tech. Way too little information on the overall timeline to make any definitive statements.

 

I mean, we know all the Glitch-line experiments except the Glitch themselves eventually destroyed themselves. As for using both biotech and robotics, trying multiple different approaches when running a simulation is generally a good idea.

But yeah, it was just a spur-of-the-moment thought.

 

I wonder what their control group was. Themselves? Was the ultimate goal to make a civilization that would make another civilization?

 

It's been a while (ikr) but I've read everything possible to read in this thread and got so interested in it that I can't just leave it without sharing that basing on Starbounder:
"The Ancients are one of the races that do not have a corresponding fossil" I guess it's not possible for that race to be the one from the cyclopian skeleton fossil...

Following all your arguments I got to the conclusion that we should rely more on the content found officially in game, like in lore, from dialogs, starbounder wiki, e.t.c and base more on it, rather than assuming that (f.e.) CF is lazy lol. But I'm trully impressed with all your theories and I wish I was born a year earlier so I could discuss them with you earlier...

 

I have a theory, (multiple theorys I'll keep this short as I can, and will try to keep in historical order.)
Okay, here we go!
Back in the days of the ancients, they were forging stars and instead they made the novakids, and tried again but made a black hole that was alive (shadow) the Regal Medallion was given to novakids, causing the forgetting of progress, and because of that they forgot what it was for and carelessly gave it to the glitch. The glitch were made by the apex as an experiment (which faild) and hylotls evolved from the ancients and after the floran hordes became the fish people we know today, and some florans left to mushroom planets to set up colonys but were effected with the spores and became agarans, the apex were humans in military who left earth during world war II in secrecy and it makes sense because human history was lost. Erchius eye or erchius horror is the result of the ruin's other eye falling out, and I agree with the Avos thing but I think they worshipped a genetically engineered avian with superpowers.

Oh, forgot deadbeats, they probably came from a branch of the secret human military but had been nuked by another faction and mutated due to radiation or like Needie said they evolved from cyclops.

Actually that's a good point Whipping Post how the ancients could have formed from the ruin's flesh and cultivator's life force, I thought the ancients looked similar to the hylotls.

 

I have a theory that humans themselves are the ancients; a relatively small faction who built machines and manipulated their own DNA, perhaps after leaving Earth prior to the days of warping. They would have stopped thinking of themselves as human after a while, being quite far removed from them, and they would have likely had members of different old world countries and members with various hobby interests like Wild West movies.

The pinnacle of their achievements would be the creation of a benevolent A.I. with access to matter manipulation, tasked with terraforming planets and guiding blossoming civilizations away from the various problems humans had during their own development. The Glitch were likely started in the Dark Ages, humanity's great backslide of technology and culture, with the thought that everything prior could be written off and that beginning them just prior to the Renaissance would be sufficient.

Different cultures from human history being seeded to intelligent but not quite yet sentient life forms would handily explain why our languages and cultures became the norms for these races.
The secret of the Cultivator being an A.I. would also explain why Asra Nox believes that the universe belongs to the humans by rights.

The Ruin could be a life form that assimilated its entire home planet and then was contacted by the Cultivator, but simply chose to use its latent ability to manipulate timespace to attack and attempt to assimilate other worlds. As this would run counter to the mission of the Cultivator, it would attempt to manipulate matter to fight back.

The Ancients, the self-altered humans who created the Cultivator, would be almost entirely destroyed and/or assimilated before the Cultivator assessed that the only way to safeguard against the Ruin was to seal it. Or perhaps an Ancient had this idea and communicated it to the Cultivator. Either way, it took an incredible amount of energy to move an entire planetoid into a pocket dimension and the Cultivator's energy source is nearly depleted. The last few ancients know they won't be able to recover their numbers after this, and so they ask the Cultivator to algorithmically determine the safest place to hide the keys.

Cultivator seeds them amongst its projects, including sending one back to the ancient homeworld along with a portable version of its own specialized tool, the matter manipulator.

 

Thanks Suit! I was in a serious hurry when I posted last.

Actually that would make a lot of sense, the Ancients would have been considered gods by the unmodified humans, and the only three explainations for shared culture with alien species: The first would be as you said, that the other species were made by the Ancients in some way. The second explaniation is that every race beings or culture has the same history and time periods, but end up in ways different from the others because the actions of the race changes how things happen later. (ex) Let's say there is a race just like us but vampires; How would that one thing change historical events and laws? And the last explanation is that the Ancients did as you said also, and was the first race and created the others, they likely made the others to have the same parts of culture and maybe since genetics can influence the choices of an individuals programed genetically a universal history that was followed differently by different races. Maybe they knew that the destruction of their civilization would happen and gave their civilization to the other races as a way of preserving their existence and then made Humans from their DNA. Maybe the 1st relic was given to the people on Earth (who didn't know how to use it for thousands of years) so that when they figured out how to use it, and all the other secrets involving where they came from, and would be the Ancients again.
The thing about the Ancients and Humans being related reminds me of the movie "The Fifth Element" (good movie) also the gods in that movie were called the ancients

It could be that Apex, Deadbeats, Ancients, and Humans are all related.

I agree with you and PyreStarite. However, they could be related to Humans or Human-like

Good point

Well said! It is possible that the Ruin is a living mass of Death.

some Glitch are cyclops and some are triclops, but if the Ancients made the Glitch then who's brain or eyeball does it belong to? Look in the "Create Character" thing and go through all the "head mod" or hair options, you'll see what I mean.

Actually, that makes a lot of sense! Screens with camera behind have only one camera!

That's something I thought about, "If the Ruin is bigger than Earth, than how come you don't see it huge in the sky as it crushed Earth?" You only see tentacles.

 

Wouldn't surprise me if it was the same incident as the Moon base (the one where we get the erchius crystals) except it's not erchius..just something that lurks beneath Earth that the Occasus probably woke up? or kind of like the Dead space thing where "it" calls the others to it or something that the Occasus used to mark Earth as a target for the Ruin...