How I do Worldbuilding

No one asked, but I wanted to rant about this anyway. Here are my thoughts on writing lore and the process i follow to create the THF universe. Who knows, maybe there's someone out there who would be interested or wants to learn from me for some reason...

My lore is pretty much entirely driven by passion and fun. As such, I don't expect others to like it, or read it for the most part as just creating the article is the fun to be had... as well as editing it later, of course.

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Factions

Now I wanted to leave myself a lot of room in the future to ad new factions should I ever want to do that. While making the Fortrais Galaxy Cluster map I also wanted to allow enough free space to allow all factions routes to interact with or attack each other while keeping significant locations such as the Fracture, Arcturus and ZQ-43D fairly open for other factions to visit. However, I ran out of colours so if I want to add new factions I might need to just use darker colours or just various shades. There are, of course, a huge number of small minor factions, and 'clone factions' from other timelines (e.g. Hyperion Federation and Hyperion Empire). There are also the Void variants of these factions too, and the void has its own unique factions as well. As all '8' major factions have their own mirror universe and void versions, this totals to 32 factions. This is before taking into account the many factions on planets like Mauray, the existence of the Arcturus galaxy, the Nixoran Federation, Iraran Harkas, Iganans and many, many more. It is very clear that there are an immense number of factions and their goals and cultures can vary massively, especially on the huge sale that the Fortrais Galaxy Cluster is written on. I havent even named or made articles for many of these void and mirror universe minor factions...

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Technology

I chose a middleground between hard and soft sci fi as I have an interest in physics but don't want to restrict myself a lot. I may want to add some very strange things later in the future, some examples include the magnetic monopolar nature of suons, Data Fae, the massive Leviathan Troznux and Hybrid Starships. Who knows what ideas I could have in the future so I want to leave these options open. One thing I am proud to say is that my world is one of the few non-hard sci fi lores that deal with the problem of spaceship heat (explained through QEN machines).

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Alien Life

So obviously I chose to have a lot of alien species. Although many of them are mechanical (e.g. Sentient Robot, Freelancer Starship, Caretaker), most of them are organic. (Oh and I plan on making an entirely crystalline species at one point but idk how that would work). However, evolution has its limitations that I didn't really want to be limited to. We don't have any Earth organism which can reach space just using materials and energy available in their body and we don't (not that im aware of anyway) have anything that fires dangerous projectiles that can kill. However, because the laws of physics are constant regardless of the nature of whatever machine we are talking about (regardless of if it is mechanical, organic, pure energy or entirely crystal), I see no reason that some abilities are locked to machines, for example. If a machine can do it, why cant an organism?
Example: shield generators. Even if evolution doesn't favour these to the point of nonexistance, why would it be impossible for a 'purposed organism', or some creature that was created by precursor factions or AIs or whatever have you, to also grow a biological shield generator? This is essentially the premise of UAC bioships, the Phelke, suons and much, much more. The inverse also applies; if an organism can do it, why can't a machine? The latter attitude allows stuff like sentient robots to exist.

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Mystery

I like to keep various parts of my world mysterious. Such as precursor factions. However, as my World Anvil has to contain all of my lore, anyone reading those articles will immediately lose all mystery involved (L). If I tell those to others, though, such as online friends that do roleplay with me, I can decide to selectively disclose what I want. Unless they also look at this wiki, i guess...

Its also a bit of a complex topic, as I don't want to intentionally leave parts of my world out and leave readers (or myself for that matter) guessing. I don't have infinite 'lore energy' however, so there is not much choice... Still, this leaves plenty of areas to expand the wordcount. I have answered questions many times that I thought I might never answer in the future only to find the coolest explanations i could ever hope for. When I made up the Troznux, i never thought I would dive so deeply into how they originated. I originally was picturing some AI faction seeding them as a weapon or something, but then the Harkas species came along. I still remember that overhaul. It was epic. Another thing is that I never thought i would explain the starsong, but that would later come up in the Archo - Forms. I even went deep enough into that to completely overhaul my lore once again and set up the Cluster Stellar Conundrum, where the galaxy star counts are 10 000x higher than real galaxies.