There are cyberarcheologists who specialize in ancient operating systems, forgotten protocol standards, and dead programming languages. They exist because of archeonets, ancient corners of the network or long-abandoned but still operational data centers. When you live over 7 centuries and have a written history that stretches back to the dawn of your species you have to think long term when disaster-proofing a system, but stuff still falls through the cracks.

I have a few more stories, and may just put them on here since it’s pretty quiet.

no single farspeaker knows it from nose to tail”

What I was going for is this. In real life you have sysadmins, net admins, cybersecurity people, etc, that make up an IT team. They all have interdisciplinary knowledge but aren’t experts in every field, and indeed may work at cross-purposes on occasion. (How many times have I heard “It’s not the network!”) That’s not getting into the underlying hardware, and the stack that goes from hardware to firmware to OS to application. 99% of IT people nowadays probably can’t design a CPU from scratch, and if they can it’s likely not going to match an actual commercial CPU from AMD or ARM or Intel. Those are the products of thousands of man hours.

Then you have the differences in vendors (not really a problem for the Farspeakers at this point in time since they hold a monopoly on the network) but they DO have to contend with dozens of millennia of brown field infrastructure. The story takes place around 35 to 40 thousand years ago, when Earth was in the middle of the ice age, but the Farspeakers were founded around 95 thousand years ago when they invented the telegraph, soon (in relative terms) before achieving orbital flight. That’s a long time even if you scale it to account for the yinrih’s longer lifespan.

You might enjoy the book The Victorian Internet which is about the impact of the telegraph on society. The telegraph was the first time a message could be conveyed faster than a galloping horse or ship’s sail. A lot of the themes you mention are echoed therein.

In my own conworld there is a concept called the rLrsfBMr literally “realm of minds” which I translate as noosphere in English. It has different definitions depending on the religion of the person you ask, but in the Bright Way, sapience itself is regarded as a sacred gift, and the noosphere arises through the interactions between sapient minds (i.e. communication). Since sapient species are thought to be social, at least to some degree, in order for culture to develop, the noosphere eventually accretes a “body”, analogous to the brain and nervous system that upholds an individual sophont’s consciousness, which is the physical infrastructure involved in communication. A particular order within the Bright Way called the Farspeakers is in charge of building and maintaining this “body”, making them monks who are also network engineers.

More broadly, the Bright Way believes that there are other sophonts dwelling among the stars, and that they have been given a commandment to seek out these sophonts. Different corners of the Bright Way have their own ideas of what this means, but the Farspeakers believe they must bridge the respective internets of these far-flung sophonts, creating a galaxy-spanning meta internet.

A lawful neutral (as in the dispassionate laws of nature) god of wind and weather called the Storm Archon. It takes the form of an everlasting stationary tornado and speaks through thunder echoed off of the hills behind it. A party of adventurers, angry at their hometown being destroyed in a storm, does what all good little JRPG protags do and goes on a quest to kill the god. They succeed in committing deicide, but as they journey home they notice the rain stops and the air becomes stagnant. They’ve doomed their world to a slow death as the atmosphere gradually dies.

I loved this story, first read it 10 years ago now. Never thought of it as HFY mostly due to lack of aliens, but it’s got that post-war optimism going on which I sometimes envy as a bitter misanthropic millennial.

Yes. This is part of a worldbuilding and conlanging project. Most of the lore is on this thread on the CBB forum. I have other stories, but this one was the most relevant to this community. A more or less comprehensive grammar of Commonthroat can be found here. Incidentally, Sunshine is not actually a native Commonthroat speaker, having grown up speaking Hearthsider and learning Commonthroat from consuming popular media from the Allied Worlds.

I am a very casual 40K enjoyer who mostly binges wiki articles and lore videos and plays the occasional licensed video game, so take this for what it is. 40K is definitely not HFY, but the imperium views itself as such in-universe.

Cheap real estate?!

It’ll just get escaped by quotes.

EDIT: it might be a better idea to use non-ascii characters.

Thanks :D One of these days I want to draw the mech he’s piloting, but I’ve been doing all these with a mouse and I suck at perspective.

Are there other mechs for sale?

What is a fish hook mass? A giant tangled wad of fish hooks?

I know what it does, but “replacement” implies the original is no longer there.

I can purchase (a/the) mechagodzilla on the open market?

What prompts the market for replacement pineal glands?

So water is rare enough to serve as currency?

Does it require an internet connection or can it operate locally? Does it need an app/account?

I’m in the US.

I haven’t differentiated the various regions of Focus in terms of diet, but I have defined a few things about yinrih cuisine and a few foods or snacks.

The yinrih gustatory system is less senative then that of a human. Cooking emphasizes texture and temperature, overall mouth feel, rather than taste. They CAN taste, and dishes do incorporate flavors, but it’s far less sophisticated compared to human gastronomy.

The most common livestock bred for meat is the wormcow. Male wormcows grow what are called trophic limbs while the female gestates the calf. The calf eats these trophic limbs while it grows before assuming a herbivorous diet as an adult. This process is not harmful or even painful to the father, and he can regrow the limbs the next time a calf is expected. These limbs are harvested without killing the animal. The meat is naturally spicy as it contains large amounts of capsaicin (or analogous compounds) to deter insects from eating the wormcow’s technically dead legs. Humans compare the meat to beef, though it keeps better, not acquiring that rancid flavor so quickly.

Most yinrih dishes, including wormcow, are served in bowls in a state somewhere between salad and stew, always prepared such that utensils are not needed, with the food already cut into bite sized chunks. Cultures very on whether the bowl is brought up to the mouth or whether the diner lowers his head to meet the bowl on the table, but yinrih eat, as the shape of their heads suggest, like dogs, directly from the bowl.

Snacks, or “tail food”, are meant to be eaten casually while standing. Since all four paws are occupied in bearing the diner’s weight, he must use his tail to grasp the food and bring it to his mouth. These foods include the same sort of processed empty calorie laden junk food familiar to humans, often salty or sweet in flavor, crunchy or gummy or creamy in texture.

There is a cream cultivated from certain plants that fills a role similar to butter. The flavor is too subtle for yinrih but they do enjoy using it as a binder or a base to add other flavors to. The Commonthroat word for this cream (which I don’t have to hand) is the “butter” used in the profane expression “cloaca butter” meaning nonsense or BS.

Spacers have a very different way of eating since they are in microgravity and can use all their paws to grasp now that they don’t have to hold their weight. I haven’t detailed much about how they eat other than that there’s a hydroponically grown meat substitute called “leasemeat” (the word “lease” coming from an archaic English word for “false”). It comes from a fungus and is often gussied up to approximate the texture or flavor of other meats, but it’s a poor substitute, and real meat is an expensive luxury.

On the tidally locked planet Hearthside there is a “snack” of sorts called “cooling bark” (“bark” referring to a strip of tree bark). It’s like those dissolving mouth wash strips that used to be so popular. The difference is it’s really, really, REALLY minty, like a reverse Carolina Reaper. It’s potent enough to cause pain and even fainting in humans. It’s meant to provide relief from the heat of the nightless desert rather than to freshen the breath. It effects the entire body rather than just the mouth.

Salamanders are amphibians, or do you mean the mythological salamander? If they’re amphibians, that would present some interesting logistic issues. Their skin would need to stay moist and they would need to lay their eggs in water.