The Kyanah have always had a bit of an odd and complicated, and slightly inhuman relationship with nature and the environment. The prevailing attitude is that it is, as with all things, a system that they have a moral imperative to optimize and control. The ideal goal is thus to have nature be made as complex yet efficiently run as possible, to have ecosystems that are orderly and managed ecosystems, where every organism is there with a deliberate purpose, that purpose being the optimization of their city-state's systems and the maximization of its resources. Does that always happen in practice? No, of course not--many systems on their world are imperfectly managed due to corruption, politics, or a lack of information or resources. No society perfectly lives up to its own ideals, after all.
In light of their geography and mentality, it kind of makes sense. They didn't simply find the vast majority of their arable land, they were forced to build it. Way less than 1% of the land on the Kyanah homeworld is naturally arable, primarily that which immediately borders the oases that are scattered across the planet. This is not to say that the rest of the planet is simply a barren desert where nothing grows, but growing plants at a density necessary to feed their livestock cannot be sustained on such soils for long in their natural state. To make matters worse, of course, the Kyanah are obligate carnivores, and there are no Spermatophyte plants to speak of. No analogs to grasses like wheat and corn, no fruits, no flowering plants of any kind. So beyond these tiny patches, they made the arable land, pushing further and further out from their oases and wielding progressively more advanced methods of engineering and agronomy to force the land to bear spores at the highest concentration possible.
To begin farming new lands, they have always had to bring in elaborate irrigation canals and water works, treat the soil--whether that be with natural mixtures created by folk agronomists in ages past, or high-tech chemical and nanotechnological fertilizing agents devised by scholars of the second rank in modern labs--and then use a series of crops to bootstrap prime agricultural land in stages. Quite an involved process to be sure, many ancient city alphas and modern city centers can call expanding the agricultural frontier outward by a few kilometers a great accomplishment of their reign or administration, so long as the considerable investment pays off and the land remains arable long-term.
But this has had profound affects on the Kyanah outlook on nature in general. Overall, society has little reverence for the swathes of "useless land" between city-states that do not and cannot provide for them in any meaningful way. They know their own history all to well; they know that the natural bounty of their planet is meager compared to the artificial bounty. 2% of the plant biomass on Earth is cultivated by humans; the Kyanah are cultivating nearly 30% on their world. The geography of their world, together with their highly graph theoretic brains and low Dunbar's number, has shaped their morality, creating a mindset that cares about systems rather than living things--though living things are certainly a part of many systems--which has in turn circled back to shape their view of nature itself.
This is not to say that they all hate nature and like destroying the environment for shits and giggles, but a lot of them see raw, untouched nature as flawed, imperfect, resource-poor, and generally in need of improvement. Many Kyanah--the general public and scientists alike--genuinely believe that their ascension has been a great boon for the environment in every way that matters. They are, of course, well aware that carbon emissions, pollution, and habitat destruction wrought by their claiming of the oases and great industrialization have a potentially dangerous effect on the systems that they themselves have constructed. For this, they don't blame the exploitation of the environment, but rather insufficient control over the ecosystems in the "useless land" outside their city-states--and only radical fringe movements like Kyakenadak believe that the solution is to further relinquish control over these systems.
Which is no doubt why the Climate Control System is such an attractive idea on the Kyanah homeworld, and why Ikun's attempts to suppress its spread in the name of Project Hope ultimately failed. After all, a global network of interconnected control nodes that use sophisticated algorithms and biotechnology to manipulate ecosystems through carefully controlled higher-order affects in highly complex systems is probably the most Kyanah way imaginable to solve a climate crisis. Especially as, due to the general lack of large-scale political organization (itself a consequence of their social structures, and the reason why they have city-states and not countries) it is not a top-down global effort, but an inherently competitive techno-political game where each city-state is seeking to optimize its own environment and maximize its own share of resources...many thinkers believe that such adversarial games are a crucial part of morally optimizing all systems.
Individual relationship with nature
Even on an individual level, rather than an institutional one, it can't be denied that the Kyanah have an interesting relationship with nature. Few would be inclined to say that wild nature is beautiful in any way; most Kyanah just wouldn't get why it would be considered aesthetically pleasing. As far as plantlife goes, they're much more likely to see the beauty in a swathe of intricate farmland, where every plant was intentionally put where it is with some deliberate, higher purpose in mind.
Further, there is no evidence that being in, or being exposed to, nature, has any direct effect on their mental health. Conversely, living in cities doesn't appear to mentally harm them at all. Of course it's difficult to say for sure, since all land on their planet is either city-states or virtually uninhabited wilderness with no one there, but even within city-states, higher population density has barely any correlation with mental health, as long as packs have enough space to store themselves and their stuff (which, as discussed, can be a lot less than an equivalently sized group of humans, since they don't have any semblance of privacy or personal space inside their packs).
Plenty do go out into the wilderness, but if you look closely, there tends to be an extrinsic motivation...they're almost inevitably looking for something, or going somewhere, or fleeing something. The idea of leaving such a comforting and well-controlled environment as a city, just for the sake of it, would surely seem quite alien. there is, in many ways, almost an instinctive small degree of comfort from being in an orderly and controlled space that they can tell was designed for them and not some random place that was not designed for anyone at all.
Even inside the cities...well believe it or not, many cities actually have parks or urban wilds but the latter is generally some enclave unintentionally created in the process of pushing pack the agricultural frontier, that they just haven't started using yet, and the former is not generally an attempt to bring nature into the cities, closer to the masses, but more a sort of attempt to terraform a little corner of the world. Such areas are rarely intended to look naturalistic at all, but rather to sculpt the terrain and paint a picture with plants and follies. Everything is made to look carefully crafted and deliberately placed. Occasionally you can find other bits of greenery scattered throughout city-states, but little of that is nature--greenhouses and botanic gardens to study and understand plants, here and there, rooftop gardens laid out to feed more livestock and clean the air in their cities, even the odd game reserve cultivated to give a challenging hunt right in the middle of the city.
Attitudes towards the hunt
Though that being said, many Kyanah cultures do have a bit of an odd and controversial relationship with hunting, despite being obligate carnivores. You'd think they'd be uniformly reverent towards the hunt and admire hunters, but actually no. Because that is, after all, one of the least efficient ways ways to acquire the meat they need to survive, it cannot compare to the power of a factory farm or bioreactor. And any pack that hunts for sustenance is, in some small way, arguably wronging itself and inhibiting the smooth operation of an instance of the most sacred and important kind of system. Many Kyanah packs still hunt, of course, and some animals can be wild-caught somewhat efficiently--there are plenty of industrial operations in the hinterlands to harvest wild wingbeasts, akin to human harvesting of wild-caught fish on Earth.
No political movement to ban the hunt would get very far, since millions of packs in thousands of city-states do enjoy the taste of wild game and the thrill of the chase. But some say it's a selfish indulgence and associate it with the idle rich. Curiously, gamifying it and making a sport or adversarial competition out of it is one way to actually reduce such criticisms, since few are going to seriously argue that fun is inherently bad, or that adversarial games aren't an important aspect of society and a key means of optimizing systems. So the average Kyanah is going to be less likely to look down on sport hunters than subsistence hunters.
Road to Hope
Re: Road to Hope
Nobody:
Absolutely nobody:
Me:
Absolutely nobody:
Me:
Re: Road to Hope
Redid the old biome map with more accuracy!
In my last post I ran the numbers for an oceanless world that isn't a lifeless husk and concluded it was possible. Now I've redone the pitiful attempt at a biome map from last spring, with better meteorology and planetary science. And I've even created some color swatches--mostly by color picking random pixels from analagous Earth biomes and editing them (mostly raising the albedo and making them slightly more dull and washed out) which will be very useful to procedurally generate the world.
THE BIOMES:
Wet desert. Usually occurs in basins in the intertropical convergence zone, where low elevation leads to temperatures too high for most plantlife, but rain still falls due to the ITCZ. Alien analogs of lichens are the only primary producers here. Typical daytime temperature: 68-73C, rainfall 30-45cm/year.
Arid desert. A normal arid desert, with rainfall normally 1-10cm/year, but with daytime temperatures reaching 70 or even 75C in the summer, and falling to about 50 in the winter. Without oceans to create monsoon zones, arid deserts occupy the entire subtropical zone in an unbroken belt. Due to the Hadley Cell being narrower--a consequence of the 15.75 hour day--they swing closer to the equator, but are also broader due to the planetary conditions, terminating near Earth's subtropical deserts.
Semi-Arid Desert: Generally a transition zone flanking arid deserts, with rainfall between 10 to 20 cm, daytime summer temperatures averaging around 55C, and falling to 35 in the winter. Towards the equator, it will transition into perennial plains of the tropical variety, and towards the poles, into seasonal plains, or, rarely, more temperate perennial plains. Vegetation is not uncommon here, but does not form a full ground cover, even in the wet seasons.
Flood Scrubland: Conventionally occurs in the tropics, and known for some of the highest rainfall on the planet, around 40 to 60 cm per year, and temperatures usually in the low 60s (Celsius!) year round with little seasonal variation. This rainfall tends to lead to seasonal flooding, hence the name. Structured plants--mainly endoskeleton plants--are the dominant vegetation.
Perennial Plains. Defined by year-round vegetation cover of structured plants--which may include both endo- and exo-skeleton plants, but tends towards the latter at higher latitudes. Usually 30 to 40 cm of rain per year. Tropical variants occur amongst flood scrubland in the ICTZ at similar temperatures. Temperate variants--usually reaching 50C in the summer and 30C in the winter--can sometimes be seen in the Ferrel Cells in place of seasonal plains, and cold variants often occur in the subpolar cells, around 50 to 60 degrees, as part of the transition from seasonal plains to boreal scrubland; these subpolar ones often reach 40C in the summer and 25C in the winter.
Seasonal Plains. Vegetation cover is high during wet seasons and low during dry seasons in these temperate areas ("temperate" being by Kyanah standards! specifically, 20 to 30 cm of rainfall per year and temperatures ranging from 35C in the winter to 55C in the summer). In the interim between seasons, massive multicolored fungal blooms can often be seen breaking down the dying vegetation. Structured plant cover is mostly exoskeleton plants.
Boreal Scrubland. Cool and wet subpolar, with 20 to 40 cm of rain per year, usually reaching 40C in the summer and 20C in the winter. Exoskeleton plants dominate, and tend to occur in some of the highest biomass densities anywhere on the planet, even beating flood scrublands. In the summer, the sun barely sets; in the winter, there are only a few hours of light per day. It is here where the Kyanah are originally from.
Boreal Savanna. Cold and moderately dry, part of the polar cell. Usually rainfall will be 15-25 cm per year, with summer temperatures barely cracking 30C and winter temperatures at the north pole falling to a few degrees above freezing--sometimes frost and even snow flurries can be seen at the North Pole. The sun doesn't rise at all in the winter, and doesn't set at all in the summer.
Polar Barrens. Cold and very dry, rainfall below 10 cm per year and summer temperatures reaching around 25C in the summer but falling to a few degrees below freezing during the long polar night. Plants on the Kyanah homeworld are largely not well adapted to freezing water, so are scarce here. This is only found near the South Pole, situated on a high planum. In the north, the Great Polar Basin allows boreal savanna to advance right up to the pole.
Chaos Terrain. Since there are no plate tectonics, this (along with impact craters, and boundaries between basins and planums) form some of the only terrain with a serious elevation gradient. But these are not tectonic mountains. Instead they are like the Martian chaos terrain, with outgassing in the crust creating uplifting and subsidience, leading to jumbled ridges, mesas, and pits that are a pain to traverse, but not as high and majestic as Earth's tectonic mountains, and thus rarely create significant wind shadows or climate disruptions.
Riparian Web. Normally, the terrain and rainfall levels aren't conducive to river systems. However, the gradients of chaos terrain, combined with some of the wettest climates, allows such systems to try and form...only for their hopes and dreams to be dashed when they reach some godforsaken endless flat planitia and have nowhere to go, creating structures like Earth's Okovango Delta instead. They are rare, but quite well liked by the Kyanah.
CHANGES FROM LAST MAP:
* Made biome gradients less arbitrary and more dependent on atmospheric cells
* Due to the planetary rotation period, there are now FOUR cells per hemisphere: Hadley (0-25), Ferrel (25-50), Subpolar (50-70), and Polar (70+). Subpolar is cool and wet (by the standards of the Kyanah homeworld); polar is cold and somewhat dry. The Subpolar cell is about as strong as our Polar cell; the actual Polar cell is very weak.
* Oasis density is mostly determined by climate instead of the other way around, and wind shadows have largely been removed.
* In general, biomes are almost entirely dependent on latitude bands, even more so than on Earth. This reflects the lack of oceans, continents, and tectonic mountains to get in the way.
* Fundamentally redefined and (and renamed) restructured chaos terrain
* Shrank and restructured riparian graphs
* Buffed deserts (duh)
* Swapped placement of boreal savannas and scrubland due to polar cells likely being dry
In my last post I ran the numbers for an oceanless world that isn't a lifeless husk and concluded it was possible. Now I've redone the pitiful attempt at a biome map from last spring, with better meteorology and planetary science. And I've even created some color swatches--mostly by color picking random pixels from analagous Earth biomes and editing them (mostly raising the albedo and making them slightly more dull and washed out) which will be very useful to procedurally generate the world.
THE BIOMES:
Wet desert. Usually occurs in basins in the intertropical convergence zone, where low elevation leads to temperatures too high for most plantlife, but rain still falls due to the ITCZ. Alien analogs of lichens are the only primary producers here. Typical daytime temperature: 68-73C, rainfall 30-45cm/year.
Arid desert. A normal arid desert, with rainfall normally 1-10cm/year, but with daytime temperatures reaching 70 or even 75C in the summer, and falling to about 50 in the winter. Without oceans to create monsoon zones, arid deserts occupy the entire subtropical zone in an unbroken belt. Due to the Hadley Cell being narrower--a consequence of the 15.75 hour day--they swing closer to the equator, but are also broader due to the planetary conditions, terminating near Earth's subtropical deserts.
Semi-Arid Desert: Generally a transition zone flanking arid deserts, with rainfall between 10 to 20 cm, daytime summer temperatures averaging around 55C, and falling to 35 in the winter. Towards the equator, it will transition into perennial plains of the tropical variety, and towards the poles, into seasonal plains, or, rarely, more temperate perennial plains. Vegetation is not uncommon here, but does not form a full ground cover, even in the wet seasons.
Flood Scrubland: Conventionally occurs in the tropics, and known for some of the highest rainfall on the planet, around 40 to 60 cm per year, and temperatures usually in the low 60s (Celsius!) year round with little seasonal variation. This rainfall tends to lead to seasonal flooding, hence the name. Structured plants--mainly endoskeleton plants--are the dominant vegetation.
Perennial Plains. Defined by year-round vegetation cover of structured plants--which may include both endo- and exo-skeleton plants, but tends towards the latter at higher latitudes. Usually 30 to 40 cm of rain per year. Tropical variants occur amongst flood scrubland in the ICTZ at similar temperatures. Temperate variants--usually reaching 50C in the summer and 30C in the winter--can sometimes be seen in the Ferrel Cells in place of seasonal plains, and cold variants often occur in the subpolar cells, around 50 to 60 degrees, as part of the transition from seasonal plains to boreal scrubland; these subpolar ones often reach 40C in the summer and 25C in the winter.
Seasonal Plains. Vegetation cover is high during wet seasons and low during dry seasons in these temperate areas ("temperate" being by Kyanah standards! specifically, 20 to 30 cm of rainfall per year and temperatures ranging from 35C in the winter to 55C in the summer). In the interim between seasons, massive multicolored fungal blooms can often be seen breaking down the dying vegetation. Structured plant cover is mostly exoskeleton plants.
Boreal Scrubland. Cool and wet subpolar, with 20 to 40 cm of rain per year, usually reaching 40C in the summer and 20C in the winter. Exoskeleton plants dominate, and tend to occur in some of the highest biomass densities anywhere on the planet, even beating flood scrublands. In the summer, the sun barely sets; in the winter, there are only a few hours of light per day. It is here where the Kyanah are originally from.
Boreal Savanna. Cold and moderately dry, part of the polar cell. Usually rainfall will be 15-25 cm per year, with summer temperatures barely cracking 30C and winter temperatures at the north pole falling to a few degrees above freezing--sometimes frost and even snow flurries can be seen at the North Pole. The sun doesn't rise at all in the winter, and doesn't set at all in the summer.
Polar Barrens. Cold and very dry, rainfall below 10 cm per year and summer temperatures reaching around 25C in the summer but falling to a few degrees below freezing during the long polar night. Plants on the Kyanah homeworld are largely not well adapted to freezing water, so are scarce here. This is only found near the South Pole, situated on a high planum. In the north, the Great Polar Basin allows boreal savanna to advance right up to the pole.
Chaos Terrain. Since there are no plate tectonics, this (along with impact craters, and boundaries between basins and planums) form some of the only terrain with a serious elevation gradient. But these are not tectonic mountains. Instead they are like the Martian chaos terrain, with outgassing in the crust creating uplifting and subsidience, leading to jumbled ridges, mesas, and pits that are a pain to traverse, but not as high and majestic as Earth's tectonic mountains, and thus rarely create significant wind shadows or climate disruptions.
Riparian Web. Normally, the terrain and rainfall levels aren't conducive to river systems. However, the gradients of chaos terrain, combined with some of the wettest climates, allows such systems to try and form...only for their hopes and dreams to be dashed when they reach some godforsaken endless flat planitia and have nowhere to go, creating structures like Earth's Okovango Delta instead. They are rare, but quite well liked by the Kyanah.
CHANGES FROM LAST MAP:
* Made biome gradients less arbitrary and more dependent on atmospheric cells
* Due to the planetary rotation period, there are now FOUR cells per hemisphere: Hadley (0-25), Ferrel (25-50), Subpolar (50-70), and Polar (70+). Subpolar is cool and wet (by the standards of the Kyanah homeworld); polar is cold and somewhat dry. The Subpolar cell is about as strong as our Polar cell; the actual Polar cell is very weak.
* Oasis density is mostly determined by climate instead of the other way around, and wind shadows have largely been removed.
* In general, biomes are almost entirely dependent on latitude bands, even more so than on Earth. This reflects the lack of oceans, continents, and tectonic mountains to get in the way.
* Fundamentally redefined and (and renamed) restructured chaos terrain
* Shrank and restructured riparian graphs
* Buffed deserts (duh)
* Swapped placement of boreal savannas and scrubland due to polar cells likely being dry
Re: Road to Hope
Very provisional! Needs clouds,better biome blending, and probably sub-pixel features like cities and oases and farmland. Some bad pixels need to be fixed in the biome map. Maybe a bump map too? Oh and the atmosphere. And I gotta look at some of the biome textures closely, I do *not* like the semi-arid deserts and boreal scrubland.
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Re: Road to Hope
Nice.
Re: Road to Hope
Okay it is weeks later, but i spent all night writing about the leisure activities of scaly blue (mostly) aliens, so i will share it. I figured it was high time I think a little about what the Kyanah in Ikun are doing when they aren't working, sleeping, shipping off to invade Earth, eating, etc. And hopefully, perhaps, shed a bit more light onto who they really are.
Kyanah tend to engage in leisure exclusively with their packs, especially when doing stuff that is a group effort, or occurs outside the home. They'd absolutely see it as a form of infidelity for someone to go off and do fun stuff without their pack. And when they do, as a pack, engage recreationally with other packs, they keep a slightly cold and distant attitude and don't really try and act chatty or get to know the other pack. If anything, it would be seen as quite rude.
Tazgan are a pretty common venue. Some would translate it roughly to gymnasium (not to be confused with qunetiok, where packs and potentially even packless can rent a small room and exercise equipment to work out). The idea behind tazgan is to serve as a venue for recreational netud (roughly game, but in the game-theoretic sense, not the human colloquial sense, though there is considerable overlap) which can include actual, physical sports, gambling, board games, or e-sports (which can ofc be done at home, but sometimes you wanna game on a wall-sized screen or a holo field or a full VR set and don't have one of those at home because you're not that rich). Many of these disparate types of netud are stacked under one complex, especially in super-tazgan and hyper-tazgan, of which there are several chains in Ikun.
Knowing why they're basically crammed a gym, casino, and a gaming hall under the same roof of course depends on knowing that the Kyanah have basically built them as one-stop shops to play adversarial zero-sum games. As a species whose identity is heavily centered around systematic optimization, their packs, and systematically optimizing their packs, adversarial zero-sum games seem to have a broad appeal in many cultures solely because they are adversarial zero-sum games, not because they're a vessel for socializing or even proving themselves to others. Doing well at such games indicates to a pack that they are strongly cohesive--and cohesion is a psychological need for them, it replaces self-actualization on their hierarchy of needs--and thus properly in love, since they are inherently competing as packs and not individuals. In fact, they don't even register individual competition as netud, even if two members of a pack appear to be playing a game against each other, Kyanah minds interpret this as playing a game with rather than against each other, either that or practicing for a "real" netud (which skilled players will often do, to test their strategies amongst themselves before playing other packs).
Many ikoin relationships are centered around tazgan establishments--ikoin are the closest thing the Kyanah have to friendship, but they aren't friendship, there's no emotional component and precious little social component. It's basically just a recurring transactional interaction between two packs (never two individuals, or a pack and an individual), that isn't a simple exchange of goods and services for money. And since many Kyanah like netud, and netud by definition need two packs to play them, many ikoin form for this reason. But the games aren't a backdrop for chitchat or a way to get to know each other better (try to socialize like a human, and at best they'll react with cold indifference and at worst they'll get uncomfortable, ghost you, and maybe if you try to be a real social butterfly, complain to tazgan staff who will warn you to stop harassing other customers...the way they see it, ikoin arrangements have a prearranged domain and trying to go beyond that is seen as an attempt to screw the other pack over in some way.) It's literally just, one pack wants to play A, another pack wants to play B, so they agree to play A and B, and neither wants or expects anything else out of the other.
Tazgan are also a place where newly accreting packs often go, for the Kyanah equivalent of courtship. The idea is to see how an accreting pack will (or won't) function as a unit in an adversarial game, and thus give its members information on its compatibility, or lack thereof.
Tazgan are also the main nexus for the professional sports scene in Ikun and many other city-states in the region. Since netud--and thus competitive sports in general--are pack versus pack, sports teams aren't a familiar concept to the Kyanah, since their main social unit already functions as a team, and there aren't really leagues or anything like that either. The main pipeline for packs going pro is to dominate the field in some netud at a public tazgan --> get invited to join elite, invite-only tazgan, often with high membership fees, and compete against other strong local players --> draw the attention of sponsors for their pack --> make enough money to play tazgan for a living, compete in expositions or travel to face off against foreign packs, and so on and so forth. In small city-states or obscure netud, packs may have to go international--err...inter-city--first and then attract sponsors, but Ikun is big enough to have a solid domestic semi-pro scene. But it's all very pack-based in just about any sport or game.
Kyanah tend to engage in leisure exclusively with their packs, especially when doing stuff that is a group effort, or occurs outside the home. They'd absolutely see it as a form of infidelity for someone to go off and do fun stuff without their pack. And when they do, as a pack, engage recreationally with other packs, they keep a slightly cold and distant attitude and don't really try and act chatty or get to know the other pack. If anything, it would be seen as quite rude.
Tazgan are a pretty common venue. Some would translate it roughly to gymnasium (not to be confused with qunetiok, where packs and potentially even packless can rent a small room and exercise equipment to work out). The idea behind tazgan is to serve as a venue for recreational netud (roughly game, but in the game-theoretic sense, not the human colloquial sense, though there is considerable overlap) which can include actual, physical sports, gambling, board games, or e-sports (which can ofc be done at home, but sometimes you wanna game on a wall-sized screen or a holo field or a full VR set and don't have one of those at home because you're not that rich). Many of these disparate types of netud are stacked under one complex, especially in super-tazgan and hyper-tazgan, of which there are several chains in Ikun.
Knowing why they're basically crammed a gym, casino, and a gaming hall under the same roof of course depends on knowing that the Kyanah have basically built them as one-stop shops to play adversarial zero-sum games. As a species whose identity is heavily centered around systematic optimization, their packs, and systematically optimizing their packs, adversarial zero-sum games seem to have a broad appeal in many cultures solely because they are adversarial zero-sum games, not because they're a vessel for socializing or even proving themselves to others. Doing well at such games indicates to a pack that they are strongly cohesive--and cohesion is a psychological need for them, it replaces self-actualization on their hierarchy of needs--and thus properly in love, since they are inherently competing as packs and not individuals. In fact, they don't even register individual competition as netud, even if two members of a pack appear to be playing a game against each other, Kyanah minds interpret this as playing a game with rather than against each other, either that or practicing for a "real" netud (which skilled players will often do, to test their strategies amongst themselves before playing other packs).
Many ikoin relationships are centered around tazgan establishments--ikoin are the closest thing the Kyanah have to friendship, but they aren't friendship, there's no emotional component and precious little social component. It's basically just a recurring transactional interaction between two packs (never two individuals, or a pack and an individual), that isn't a simple exchange of goods and services for money. And since many Kyanah like netud, and netud by definition need two packs to play them, many ikoin form for this reason. But the games aren't a backdrop for chitchat or a way to get to know each other better (try to socialize like a human, and at best they'll react with cold indifference and at worst they'll get uncomfortable, ghost you, and maybe if you try to be a real social butterfly, complain to tazgan staff who will warn you to stop harassing other customers...the way they see it, ikoin arrangements have a prearranged domain and trying to go beyond that is seen as an attempt to screw the other pack over in some way.) It's literally just, one pack wants to play A, another pack wants to play B, so they agree to play A and B, and neither wants or expects anything else out of the other.
Tazgan are also a place where newly accreting packs often go, for the Kyanah equivalent of courtship. The idea is to see how an accreting pack will (or won't) function as a unit in an adversarial game, and thus give its members information on its compatibility, or lack thereof.
Tazgan are also the main nexus for the professional sports scene in Ikun and many other city-states in the region. Since netud--and thus competitive sports in general--are pack versus pack, sports teams aren't a familiar concept to the Kyanah, since their main social unit already functions as a team, and there aren't really leagues or anything like that either. The main pipeline for packs going pro is to dominate the field in some netud at a public tazgan --> get invited to join elite, invite-only tazgan, often with high membership fees, and compete against other strong local players --> draw the attention of sponsors for their pack --> make enough money to play tazgan for a living, compete in expositions or travel to face off against foreign packs, and so on and so forth. In small city-states or obscure netud, packs may have to go international--err...inter-city--first and then attract sponsors, but Ikun is big enough to have a solid domestic semi-pro scene. But it's all very pack-based in just about any sport or game.
Re: Road to Hope
Skilled players (a "player" being, of course, a pack, not an individual Kyanah) often do draw paying spectators to tazgan, especially elite tazgan. This allows very high-ranked players to often have their membership fees discounted or waived. They can also compete in exhibitions at the koretraghez (essentially, an exhibition center), which can draw even bigger crowds for some netud. These are usually physical sports, but organized board and video game championships are sometimes but not always played out in the same venues.
Often seen here, but not at tazgan, are also the famous "nene" (a cutesy name for an adversarial zero-sum game of war) where you can have just about every combination of entities you can imagine battling it out in the arena. Packs fighting other packs, packs fighting animals, packs fighting autonomous robots designed to be difficult but not impossible to "kill", animals fighting other animals, animals fighting robots, robots fighting each other with no limitations. Naturally, untrained randos at public tazgans don't really do this shit, it's mostly unique to the exhibitions, where the randos just spectate.
This isn't ancient Rome, nene are rarely fatal...for Kyanah at least. Most Kyanah vs Kyanah nene are and have always been unarmed or scripted, or at least done with blunted weapons and stopped at first blood...killing skilled athletes is wasteful and bad (for business, but also just bad in general). Unarmed nene are basically just the Kyanah equivalent of martial arts. They are broadly categorized into forms focusing on teeth and claws, forms focusing on blunt force, and forms where anything goes. Naturally, as they are pack vs pack, and packs are not always the same size, many tend to employ either pack size classes, or else a handicapping system that awards more points to smaller packs.
Kyanah vs. animal nene, likewise, have someone standing by to shoot the animals if things get out of hand--though then the sportspack often forfeits the right to take home the meat. Animal vs. animal, while usually fatal for at least one animal, has seen a push for greater restraint and less lethal matches. This is not motivated by animal welfare in the human sense, but by the reality that many scientific and technical staff are spending the equivalent of millions of dollars per head to breed or genetically engineer, raise, and train the perfect animals, and when half of them die on their first nene, and almost all die within a few fights, this is a tremendous waste of resources, and thus morally bad.
Genetically engineering animals to be controllable via a direct computer link to their brain, an emerging technology pioneered in the context of advanced agriculture, has seen some use in high-tech koretraghez in Ikun, as it increases athlete safety in the Kyanah vs. animal setting, and in the animal vs. animal setting, allows for fights between animals that wouldn't ordinarily fight each other. This direct BCI control means that all muscle movements can be controlled manually or even by AI, which has led to what is called rudnet, essentially turning animal fights into a twisted e-sport where both animals' movements are being controlled by Kyanah packs on computers--or by sophisticated engines. This is most popular in the Far South, but has been catching on in Ikun. In any case, whenever there's an internet node trying to figure out whether animal X can beat animal Y, someone will probably be along in short order to post video evidence.
Koretraghez aren't just for violent events, or even adversarial zero-sum games in general (it's the tazgan that are exclusively for adversarial zero-sum games). Plenty of other things are exhibited here, including concerts (unsurprisingly, any musical ensemble is a pack, or perhaps several packs for super complex pieces), or dramatic readings of story-threads. These tend to attract audiences just as large as any nene or netud, with many thousands of packs watching.
A story-thread is, of course, the main form of Kyanah story-telling. Each member of the pack is responsible for telling one thread of a multi-threaded story, representing one part of the pack whom the story is about. These threads don’t follow each other sequentially, but instead each one has its own individual continuity, and they all wrap around each other like threads in a piece of rope, hence the name.
Good story-threads created by authors are often written down and sold, but also very well-known ones may be lived by packs in dramatic readings. Sometimes these are classics, other times readings of the hottest new story-threads. Often this is accompanied by special effects and pyrotechnics, or even--in modern times--holograms that can depict just about anything relevant. Story-threads conventionally tend to be somewhat shorter than human novels, but can still go on for roughly 1-5 hours for a professional reading, with massive epics about large packs trending towards the high end, and as such can take up most of an off-day for the spectators, when you factor in getting there, getting to their great cushions, etc.
Sometimes dramatic readings can be witnessed in bookstores, but they're usually a smaller and more niche type of affair than the ones in the stadium-sized koretraghez...and they probably won't have pyrotechnics.
In any case, such establishments are often busier than human stadiums, there's usually something going on for at least part of the standard business hours, on most days.
Often seen here, but not at tazgan, are also the famous "nene" (a cutesy name for an adversarial zero-sum game of war) where you can have just about every combination of entities you can imagine battling it out in the arena. Packs fighting other packs, packs fighting animals, packs fighting autonomous robots designed to be difficult but not impossible to "kill", animals fighting other animals, animals fighting robots, robots fighting each other with no limitations. Naturally, untrained randos at public tazgans don't really do this shit, it's mostly unique to the exhibitions, where the randos just spectate.
This isn't ancient Rome, nene are rarely fatal...for Kyanah at least. Most Kyanah vs Kyanah nene are and have always been unarmed or scripted, or at least done with blunted weapons and stopped at first blood...killing skilled athletes is wasteful and bad (for business, but also just bad in general). Unarmed nene are basically just the Kyanah equivalent of martial arts. They are broadly categorized into forms focusing on teeth and claws, forms focusing on blunt force, and forms where anything goes. Naturally, as they are pack vs pack, and packs are not always the same size, many tend to employ either pack size classes, or else a handicapping system that awards more points to smaller packs.
Kyanah vs. animal nene, likewise, have someone standing by to shoot the animals if things get out of hand--though then the sportspack often forfeits the right to take home the meat. Animal vs. animal, while usually fatal for at least one animal, has seen a push for greater restraint and less lethal matches. This is not motivated by animal welfare in the human sense, but by the reality that many scientific and technical staff are spending the equivalent of millions of dollars per head to breed or genetically engineer, raise, and train the perfect animals, and when half of them die on their first nene, and almost all die within a few fights, this is a tremendous waste of resources, and thus morally bad.
Genetically engineering animals to be controllable via a direct computer link to their brain, an emerging technology pioneered in the context of advanced agriculture, has seen some use in high-tech koretraghez in Ikun, as it increases athlete safety in the Kyanah vs. animal setting, and in the animal vs. animal setting, allows for fights between animals that wouldn't ordinarily fight each other. This direct BCI control means that all muscle movements can be controlled manually or even by AI, which has led to what is called rudnet, essentially turning animal fights into a twisted e-sport where both animals' movements are being controlled by Kyanah packs on computers--or by sophisticated engines. This is most popular in the Far South, but has been catching on in Ikun. In any case, whenever there's an internet node trying to figure out whether animal X can beat animal Y, someone will probably be along in short order to post video evidence.
Koretraghez aren't just for violent events, or even adversarial zero-sum games in general (it's the tazgan that are exclusively for adversarial zero-sum games). Plenty of other things are exhibited here, including concerts (unsurprisingly, any musical ensemble is a pack, or perhaps several packs for super complex pieces), or dramatic readings of story-threads. These tend to attract audiences just as large as any nene or netud, with many thousands of packs watching.
A story-thread is, of course, the main form of Kyanah story-telling. Each member of the pack is responsible for telling one thread of a multi-threaded story, representing one part of the pack whom the story is about. These threads don’t follow each other sequentially, but instead each one has its own individual continuity, and they all wrap around each other like threads in a piece of rope, hence the name.
Good story-threads created by authors are often written down and sold, but also very well-known ones may be lived by packs in dramatic readings. Sometimes these are classics, other times readings of the hottest new story-threads. Often this is accompanied by special effects and pyrotechnics, or even--in modern times--holograms that can depict just about anything relevant. Story-threads conventionally tend to be somewhat shorter than human novels, but can still go on for roughly 1-5 hours for a professional reading, with massive epics about large packs trending towards the high end, and as such can take up most of an off-day for the spectators, when you factor in getting there, getting to their great cushions, etc.
Sometimes dramatic readings can be witnessed in bookstores, but they're usually a smaller and more niche type of affair than the ones in the stadium-sized koretraghez...and they probably won't have pyrotechnics.
In any case, such establishments are often busier than human stadiums, there's usually something going on for at least part of the standard business hours, on most days.
Re: Road to Hope
Some Kyanah do like shopping and/or collecting things. They aren't that different from humans in that regard, except for--to some extent--what they like shopping for and collecting, though even in that there is some overlap. Even though online shipping and drone delivery apps have damaged the industry, there are plenty of active shopping centers in Ikun, especially in the nodes where the Edge highways and the Tar (the Zizgran Crater's maglev heavy rail) converge. It probably helps that the vast, vast majority of Kyanah live near oases in city-states, so most of the population is able to get to any point in their home "country" pretty quickly. Many shopping centers are in tall buildings, not sprawling strip malls, since space is always at an extreme premium, any expansion of the urban frontier without expanding the agricultural frontier eats away at the arable land and food supply.
Museums and art galleries also exist, this is another one of the common Kyanah pastimes in Ikun that are more relatable to humans. Notably there is the Zizgran Heritage Museum in District 4, with thousands of items from ancient and modern Ikun, showcasing millennia of history in the Zizgran Crater, and the Toruzqin (literally tech tree) in District 19, a technology and engineering collection arranged in a literal tech tree format, which is no doubt instinctively appealing to Kyanah minds as their higher brain functions are entirely built from molecular trees.
Ikun also has the Nangor-pack Graph in District 15, created several decades ago by the tech billionaire Nangor-pack from their personal collection and maintained by a trust after their deaths. Expensive to enter, eclectic, and at first glance a random mix of historic artifacts, rocks and minerals, plants and animals, and artworks, but it's all organized into nodes that are connected by edges according to some obscure ontological relations. Nobody knows exactly why everything is structured the way it is, except the curators (and, presumably, the deceased Nangor-pack) but internet sleuths have gradually cracked large subgraphs, especially with the help of AI.
The Boneyards are a bit of a ways out since they are in empty land beyond Ikun's borders, but many packs bring the bodies of their deceased packmates and pets (it's not like anyone else, even blood relatives, would care about some other pack...) out here to lay them to rest and desiccate in open air and build cairns next to them to draw the attention of their favorite gods--sometimes they'll neatly stack the bones--which tend to be vaguely glassy-looking with greenish or brownish tints, not white like human bones--or work them into the cairn, and some cairns can get pretty large and elaborate. Since it's outside of Ikun's borders, police won't stop packs from going inside to take a peek, and occasionally artistically-minded packs do exactly that. Though this isn't as popular as normal art galleries, since it's tens of kilometers away from the city center.
Kyanah seem not to get any of the psychological benefits that humans get from being out in nature, but do get an equivalent boost from being in environments that are conspicuously controlled and made for them, like their cities. Space is also at an extreme premium in city-states, so parks as humans would know them aren't really a thing in Ikun. The closest thing they have to parks are intentionally not set up as natural spaces so much as mini terraforming projects of plants and follies and manmade (Kyanah-made?) terrain, more a mix of art and engineering than a natural space. Something designed and controlled, after all, is more aesthetic than a bunch of random nature ever could be. Rarer still are the botanical gardens–more to scientifically study and collect as many plants as possible in as small an area as possible than to chill and walk through. But they do exist, often attached to universities and government or corporate research labs, and many do sell tickets to the public. Usually the plants are arranged in a graph-based structure for easy reference by those who study them.
If anything, farmland is more likely to be appreciated aesthetically by the Kyanah than nature is. It has signs of control and intent, it's physically a lot closer to the average pack than unoptimized nature, and to be fair, it can often be quite intricate and patterned, as highly complex polycultures are often used to reduce maintenance costs in keeping the land arable long-term (natural arable land is very rare, it must be created and maintained at great expense), and squeeze every calorie for their livestock out of every square meter. There are some plots of aesthetic farmland that strike a balance between looking good to draw in tourists and max productivity, in the neighboring city-state of Katezeku, but not so much in Ikun or the other Craterzone city-states. That being said, Kyanah do go out into nature beyond the borders of their city-states sometimes, but it is usually because they are looking for something. That something may be wild game and eggs, or the signature plate-like fungi that are more common on the planet than stalk-and-cap mushrooms seen on Earth. Of course they're obligate carnivores, they aren't eating the fungi...but a couple of species of the other kind of fungi
have been introduced to the Zizgran Planitia. Some can also be made into alcohol, the typical Kyanah process involves microbes that break down proteins rather than starches. As multicolored fungal blooms are quite common and widespread in the Zizgran Planitia at the end of the wet season and the beginning of the dry season, many packs from Ikun drive out of the crater during the right season to look for them.
Tourism, while it does exist, is not as big as in many human societies. This can probably be blamed on city-states dominating geopolitics. It makes long-range travel a tedious matter of acquiring visas, especially when, since there are thousands of city-states, most don't even have direct bilateral relations with each other. It's not crazy for a Kyanah to spend their whole life without leaving the city they hatched in, as going to another city is like going to another country for humans. Then again, Ikun's language doesn't seem to have a specific word for wanderlust, so perhaps they tend to have less interest in such things than humans anyway, at least on average.
As obligate carnivores, it perhaps isn't surprising that many Kyanah do like hunting for fun, whether it's slaughtering local game just outside their cities, or big game safaris in the boreal scrubland. What is surprising is that it's quite controversial and not really venerated at all. And it's not because they give a shit about the animals. But since resource efficiency is one of the two axiomatic moral goods, and factory farming always beats hunting in terms of meat per unit area, subsistence hunting can, in Kyanah eyes, ironically never be as just and righteous as intensive factory farming. Does that mean it's banned? No, at least not in Ikun, and not in most city-states--it's simply seen as a fun activity that doesn't make any systems less intricate.
But there is a real debate on the moral implications of subsistence hunting, whether it's an acceptable indulgence or a decadent pastime of the idle rich. Some aspects of Kyanah society with certain political leanings tend to rail against it, in similar proportions to, say, human vegans. (Nobody in mainstream Kyanah society, of course, complains about factory farming. There is also some industrialized hunting in the empty lands between city-states, mostly harvesting wingbeasts and collecting eggs out of their rookeries on an industrial scale. somewhat similar to humans traveling into the oceans to harvest wild-caught fish. That isn't really what anyone is talking about when they diss hunting, obviously.) Weirdly, trophy hunting has fewer moral controversies in Kyanah eyes than subsistence hunting. The main purpose of such an activity isn't procuring food, so calories per unit area are irrelevant. Its purpose is seen as boosting pack cohesion (by having fun and bonding together) and potentially providing a premise for netud that are (often) also fun, and a key ingredient of societal optimization.
Of course, subsistence hunting can be fun in the same way, but can be seen as self-destructive to the pack doing it, since it is leaving whether they eat or not up to RNG. and as the pack unit is a very important subsystem of the great cosmic graph, packs behaving self-destructively is a Bad Thing...not because it hurts them, but because it interferes with the complexity of systems, another reason why some Kyanah don't approve of subsistence hunting. Indeed, the lines between insanity and abuse and self-harm kind of blur due to pack atomicity. In any case, Kyanah often use their advanced technology to spice up recreational hunting. The same computer control of animals in agriculture and nene exhibitions is also sometimes used to make hunts both more challenging and safer, as the animals will be directly controlled by safari staff or even AI, boosting its intelligence and making it more difficult to track and kill, while also eliminating the probability of a rogue animal killing the pack who is hunting it.
There is actually a game reserve right in Ikun, on the island in the middle of Ikun's oasis--the central peak of the Zizgran Impact Crater, technically part of District 18. This has been carefully engineered to provide challenging hunts, not to be natural per se. Still many progressives say it's a waste of space and would rather see it torn down for more concrete jungles and arable land.
Museums and art galleries also exist, this is another one of the common Kyanah pastimes in Ikun that are more relatable to humans. Notably there is the Zizgran Heritage Museum in District 4, with thousands of items from ancient and modern Ikun, showcasing millennia of history in the Zizgran Crater, and the Toruzqin (literally tech tree) in District 19, a technology and engineering collection arranged in a literal tech tree format, which is no doubt instinctively appealing to Kyanah minds as their higher brain functions are entirely built from molecular trees.
Ikun also has the Nangor-pack Graph in District 15, created several decades ago by the tech billionaire Nangor-pack from their personal collection and maintained by a trust after their deaths. Expensive to enter, eclectic, and at first glance a random mix of historic artifacts, rocks and minerals, plants and animals, and artworks, but it's all organized into nodes that are connected by edges according to some obscure ontological relations. Nobody knows exactly why everything is structured the way it is, except the curators (and, presumably, the deceased Nangor-pack) but internet sleuths have gradually cracked large subgraphs, especially with the help of AI.
The Boneyards are a bit of a ways out since they are in empty land beyond Ikun's borders, but many packs bring the bodies of their deceased packmates and pets (it's not like anyone else, even blood relatives, would care about some other pack...) out here to lay them to rest and desiccate in open air and build cairns next to them to draw the attention of their favorite gods--sometimes they'll neatly stack the bones--which tend to be vaguely glassy-looking with greenish or brownish tints, not white like human bones--or work them into the cairn, and some cairns can get pretty large and elaborate. Since it's outside of Ikun's borders, police won't stop packs from going inside to take a peek, and occasionally artistically-minded packs do exactly that. Though this isn't as popular as normal art galleries, since it's tens of kilometers away from the city center.
Kyanah seem not to get any of the psychological benefits that humans get from being out in nature, but do get an equivalent boost from being in environments that are conspicuously controlled and made for them, like their cities. Space is also at an extreme premium in city-states, so parks as humans would know them aren't really a thing in Ikun. The closest thing they have to parks are intentionally not set up as natural spaces so much as mini terraforming projects of plants and follies and manmade (Kyanah-made?) terrain, more a mix of art and engineering than a natural space. Something designed and controlled, after all, is more aesthetic than a bunch of random nature ever could be. Rarer still are the botanical gardens–more to scientifically study and collect as many plants as possible in as small an area as possible than to chill and walk through. But they do exist, often attached to universities and government or corporate research labs, and many do sell tickets to the public. Usually the plants are arranged in a graph-based structure for easy reference by those who study them.
If anything, farmland is more likely to be appreciated aesthetically by the Kyanah than nature is. It has signs of control and intent, it's physically a lot closer to the average pack than unoptimized nature, and to be fair, it can often be quite intricate and patterned, as highly complex polycultures are often used to reduce maintenance costs in keeping the land arable long-term (natural arable land is very rare, it must be created and maintained at great expense), and squeeze every calorie for their livestock out of every square meter. There are some plots of aesthetic farmland that strike a balance between looking good to draw in tourists and max productivity, in the neighboring city-state of Katezeku, but not so much in Ikun or the other Craterzone city-states. That being said, Kyanah do go out into nature beyond the borders of their city-states sometimes, but it is usually because they are looking for something. That something may be wild game and eggs, or the signature plate-like fungi that are more common on the planet than stalk-and-cap mushrooms seen on Earth. Of course they're obligate carnivores, they aren't eating the fungi...but a couple of species of the other kind of fungi
have been introduced to the Zizgran Planitia. Some can also be made into alcohol, the typical Kyanah process involves microbes that break down proteins rather than starches. As multicolored fungal blooms are quite common and widespread in the Zizgran Planitia at the end of the wet season and the beginning of the dry season, many packs from Ikun drive out of the crater during the right season to look for them.Tourism, while it does exist, is not as big as in many human societies. This can probably be blamed on city-states dominating geopolitics. It makes long-range travel a tedious matter of acquiring visas, especially when, since there are thousands of city-states, most don't even have direct bilateral relations with each other. It's not crazy for a Kyanah to spend their whole life without leaving the city they hatched in, as going to another city is like going to another country for humans. Then again, Ikun's language doesn't seem to have a specific word for wanderlust, so perhaps they tend to have less interest in such things than humans anyway, at least on average.
As obligate carnivores, it perhaps isn't surprising that many Kyanah do like hunting for fun, whether it's slaughtering local game just outside their cities, or big game safaris in the boreal scrubland. What is surprising is that it's quite controversial and not really venerated at all. And it's not because they give a shit about the animals. But since resource efficiency is one of the two axiomatic moral goods, and factory farming always beats hunting in terms of meat per unit area, subsistence hunting can, in Kyanah eyes, ironically never be as just and righteous as intensive factory farming. Does that mean it's banned? No, at least not in Ikun, and not in most city-states--it's simply seen as a fun activity that doesn't make any systems less intricate.
But there is a real debate on the moral implications of subsistence hunting, whether it's an acceptable indulgence or a decadent pastime of the idle rich. Some aspects of Kyanah society with certain political leanings tend to rail against it, in similar proportions to, say, human vegans. (Nobody in mainstream Kyanah society, of course, complains about factory farming. There is also some industrialized hunting in the empty lands between city-states, mostly harvesting wingbeasts and collecting eggs out of their rookeries on an industrial scale. somewhat similar to humans traveling into the oceans to harvest wild-caught fish. That isn't really what anyone is talking about when they diss hunting, obviously.) Weirdly, trophy hunting has fewer moral controversies in Kyanah eyes than subsistence hunting. The main purpose of such an activity isn't procuring food, so calories per unit area are irrelevant. Its purpose is seen as boosting pack cohesion (by having fun and bonding together) and potentially providing a premise for netud that are (often) also fun, and a key ingredient of societal optimization.
Of course, subsistence hunting can be fun in the same way, but can be seen as self-destructive to the pack doing it, since it is leaving whether they eat or not up to RNG. and as the pack unit is a very important subsystem of the great cosmic graph, packs behaving self-destructively is a Bad Thing...not because it hurts them, but because it interferes with the complexity of systems, another reason why some Kyanah don't approve of subsistence hunting. Indeed, the lines between insanity and abuse and self-harm kind of blur due to pack atomicity. In any case, Kyanah often use their advanced technology to spice up recreational hunting. The same computer control of animals in agriculture and nene exhibitions is also sometimes used to make hunts both more challenging and safer, as the animals will be directly controlled by safari staff or even AI, boosting its intelligence and making it more difficult to track and kill, while also eliminating the probability of a rogue animal killing the pack who is hunting it.
There is actually a game reserve right in Ikun, on the island in the middle of Ikun's oasis--the central peak of the Zizgran Impact Crater, technically part of District 18. This has been carefully engineered to provide challenging hunts, not to be natural per se. Still many progressives say it's a waste of space and would rather see it torn down for more concrete jungles and arable land.
Re: Road to Hope
Computers have been in Kyanah households for a long time--longer than one would expect, since they started with mechanical computers and never gave up on them. The internet, has also been a fixture of society for quite a few decades, though internet structure and culture are drastically different from on Earth. It has still proven to be a vast source of entertainment, information, and infotainment for Kyanah across the world, as well as providing their equivalent of blogs, forums, and wikis. However, due to the whole species being unable to agree on a single tech stack and protocol set, there are actually 21 semi-incompatible internets, each with its own culture, memes, and netiquette that make little sense to "foreign" netizens, but 96% of the global population has access to at least one.
However, due to the structure of the internet and Kyanah social structures in general, traffic has never really consolidated into a handful of massive nodes controlled by a few entities (though there are "chains" and "franchises" of related nodes). Instead, Kyanah who have an online presence (as opposed to passively browsing) just create and maintain their own personal nodes instead of putting their online profile on someone else's node. (And yes, packs usually share an account and online presence--so it's totally normal for the same "user" to randomly change their writing style or even beliefs and values on a dime with no explanation.) Sometimes packs with a personal node just use it to scribble whatever comes to mind or make an online scrapbook for themselves, others try to create a serious resource or entertainment source that others will use, and professional packs often essentially use their node as their resume.
Those who curate an intricate and high-quality node are known as "node operators". Most just do it for fun, but some make money off it (through adverts mostly, just like the human internet) and a handful of packs become popular enough to be professional node operators. Some nodes can be edited by others, which would seem to allow for lively communities centered around forums and wikis.
However, with Kyanah netiquette, this does not come to pass. Because packs are the only social unit they really care about, they fundamentally don't see what humans would call "social media" as *social* at all. Their word for the concept literally doesn't even contain the word "social". They are just coexisting in the same (virtual) place because they all happen to want to construct a system there, but that's no excuse to socialize (and indeed, lengthy chitchat online that doesn't involve the rest of the pack would probably, surprise surprise, be construed as infidelity...from a human perspective, it's *terrifyingly* easy to constantly cheat by complete accident on a Kyanah pack, but with Kyanah, it happens, well, only about as often human cheating).
With the equivalent of forums, what they see themselves as doing is collaboratively building a massive story-thread of sorts, with wikis, it's like building a large information structure. In Net Zone 1, where Ikun is, and most other internets, it's like taking a stone, stacking it on a pre-existing pile, and moving on. You find the most relevant node for what you want to say, you say it, and the next time you want to say something, you find the most relevant node for that. Large numbers of repeated "contributions" will be seen as a nuisance, not bolstering the "community", and others may spam responses to "Get a node", as in, "go post this crap on your own node and stop hogging someone else's". Though it can also be seen as praise, as in "this is high-quality, you should make your own node to post this". You need to know the context to tell. * Ofc, in spite of everything, there's still plenty of trolling, shitposting, spam, memes, and inane garbage to sift through. Again, perhaps, a similarity to humans.
Video games are, of course, available to most Kyanah and quite popular. What seems to really get the attention of gamers, more than nice graphics, are interesting and unusual AI, so naturally most innovations in the video game industry have been directed here. While game landscapes are stereotypically rather barren, they are often filled with extremely sophisticated and diverse enemies and other entities that are extremely capable of maximizing their in-game resources and surviving whatever players and other entities throw at them; instead of having absurdly high stats, bosses are simply as smart or smarter than the players themselves, and controlling so much of the landscape and resources, that they require superior items or numbers to beat.
Procedurally-generated AI is a common feature of Kyanah games, ensuring that every entity behaves in a unique manner. Anomalous randomly-generated bosses have sometimes survived in multiplayer servers for years despite the best efforts of thousands of packs to destroy them. Hardcore Kyanah gamers, who are often just as hyper-dedicated as their human counterparts, have been known to go as far as renting supercomputer clusters and running millions of simulations to find a winning strategy against a particularly annoying enemy. * Not every popular video game is a netud, an adversarial zero-sum game. In fact, Sign of Death, one of the most popular ones in Ikun, is a multi-agent semi-adversarial game where packs traverse a vast, empty, wireframe-looking landscape, detecting sophisticated patterns to predict where and when resources will drop from the sky so you can collect them, while battling enemies with random abilities and "personalities" that periodically spawn--more than 200 quadrillion types are possible, with more every update ("in Sign of Death, mobs farm you" is unironically accurate). There is room for cooperative behavior and alliances, which do occasionally form.
Of course, every public lobby is flat-out unplayable for new players since everyone is using Stockfish-like engines running on high-tech computing clusters to TAS the hell out of every objective, to the point that many say the *real* game is coding better and better engines. If that's not your pack's thing, it's best to stick to private lobbies or singleplayer (well, single-pack, in any case), or play smaller games, or video games that actually stick to the netud format, where using engines is actually frowned upon.
However, due to the structure of the internet and Kyanah social structures in general, traffic has never really consolidated into a handful of massive nodes controlled by a few entities (though there are "chains" and "franchises" of related nodes). Instead, Kyanah who have an online presence (as opposed to passively browsing) just create and maintain their own personal nodes instead of putting their online profile on someone else's node. (And yes, packs usually share an account and online presence--so it's totally normal for the same "user" to randomly change their writing style or even beliefs and values on a dime with no explanation.) Sometimes packs with a personal node just use it to scribble whatever comes to mind or make an online scrapbook for themselves, others try to create a serious resource or entertainment source that others will use, and professional packs often essentially use their node as their resume.
Those who curate an intricate and high-quality node are known as "node operators". Most just do it for fun, but some make money off it (through adverts mostly, just like the human internet) and a handful of packs become popular enough to be professional node operators. Some nodes can be edited by others, which would seem to allow for lively communities centered around forums and wikis.
However, with Kyanah netiquette, this does not come to pass. Because packs are the only social unit they really care about, they fundamentally don't see what humans would call "social media" as *social* at all. Their word for the concept literally doesn't even contain the word "social". They are just coexisting in the same (virtual) place because they all happen to want to construct a system there, but that's no excuse to socialize (and indeed, lengthy chitchat online that doesn't involve the rest of the pack would probably, surprise surprise, be construed as infidelity...from a human perspective, it's *terrifyingly* easy to constantly cheat by complete accident on a Kyanah pack, but with Kyanah, it happens, well, only about as often human cheating).
With the equivalent of forums, what they see themselves as doing is collaboratively building a massive story-thread of sorts, with wikis, it's like building a large information structure. In Net Zone 1, where Ikun is, and most other internets, it's like taking a stone, stacking it on a pre-existing pile, and moving on. You find the most relevant node for what you want to say, you say it, and the next time you want to say something, you find the most relevant node for that. Large numbers of repeated "contributions" will be seen as a nuisance, not bolstering the "community", and others may spam responses to "Get a node", as in, "go post this crap on your own node and stop hogging someone else's". Though it can also be seen as praise, as in "this is high-quality, you should make your own node to post this". You need to know the context to tell. * Ofc, in spite of everything, there's still plenty of trolling, shitposting, spam, memes, and inane garbage to sift through. Again, perhaps, a similarity to humans.
Video games are, of course, available to most Kyanah and quite popular. What seems to really get the attention of gamers, more than nice graphics, are interesting and unusual AI, so naturally most innovations in the video game industry have been directed here. While game landscapes are stereotypically rather barren, they are often filled with extremely sophisticated and diverse enemies and other entities that are extremely capable of maximizing their in-game resources and surviving whatever players and other entities throw at them; instead of having absurdly high stats, bosses are simply as smart or smarter than the players themselves, and controlling so much of the landscape and resources, that they require superior items or numbers to beat.
Procedurally-generated AI is a common feature of Kyanah games, ensuring that every entity behaves in a unique manner. Anomalous randomly-generated bosses have sometimes survived in multiplayer servers for years despite the best efforts of thousands of packs to destroy them. Hardcore Kyanah gamers, who are often just as hyper-dedicated as their human counterparts, have been known to go as far as renting supercomputer clusters and running millions of simulations to find a winning strategy against a particularly annoying enemy. * Not every popular video game is a netud, an adversarial zero-sum game. In fact, Sign of Death, one of the most popular ones in Ikun, is a multi-agent semi-adversarial game where packs traverse a vast, empty, wireframe-looking landscape, detecting sophisticated patterns to predict where and when resources will drop from the sky so you can collect them, while battling enemies with random abilities and "personalities" that periodically spawn--more than 200 quadrillion types are possible, with more every update ("in Sign of Death, mobs farm you" is unironically accurate). There is room for cooperative behavior and alliances, which do occasionally form.
Of course, every public lobby is flat-out unplayable for new players since everyone is using Stockfish-like engines running on high-tech computing clusters to TAS the hell out of every objective, to the point that many say the *real* game is coding better and better engines. If that's not your pack's thing, it's best to stick to private lobbies or singleplayer (well, single-pack, in any case), or play smaller games, or video games that actually stick to the netud format, where using engines is actually frowned upon.
Re: Road to Hope
Speaking of netud, there are various other examples that are often seen in tazgan and elsewhere.
One of the most popular board-games on the planet is neten-tyak (something like "figurine war"), with probably around a billion Kyanah (almost 5% of the population) at least know the rules (probably a lot fewer actively play "real" games, i.e. pack vs pack though), so it's easy to find other players at a tazgan, or online. It is turn-based, deterministic, and perfect information with a variety of pieces with different capabilities, pitting one pack against another.
Each individual within a pack controls a specific subset of the pieces and they can choose their order of play however they want, but it must remain consistent throughout the game. The board is not actually a square grid at all, but a graph, which can be any symmetric, planar, and connected undirected graph, usually with about 120 to 200 nodes on each side. Players often have their own favorite physical boards, but online play is usually randomized, and very high level tournaments may have a "map" custom built by neutral experts and tournament officials. Structure varies, but most contain the road, a linear section near the center of the board, the mesh, a dense area with many connections between nodes on the sides of the board, and the maze, a sparsely connected, labyrinth like area deep in each side's territory.
There are different pieces with different levels of power, but without a grid layout, moving in a specific "direction" doesn't make sense, instead they have two attributes: speed and strength. Speed is just how many consecutive edges they can traverse in one turn, strength is how many points they contribute to an invasion (more on those later). There are 8 canonical piece types. Iron, gold, and stone soldiers are stronger but slower, faster but weaker, and intermediate, respectively. Iron, gold, and stone knights a direct upgrade over their soldier equivalents in both attributes, but retain the same relative balance, and are less numerous than soldiers. The general has the speed of a gold knight plus one and the strength of an iron knight plus one, making it the most powerful piece by far, but each member of a pack only gets one. All seven of these cannot travel through a node occupied by the enemy, and cannot move to an occupied node without winning an invasion. The final piece type, the spy, is the fastest but also weakest, however it can pass through nodes occupied by the enemy.
In the first phase, players take turns placing their pieces, but can only place them on their own half of the board. The actual number and type of pieces each player can put on the board is dependent on the size of their pack. Once this is done, they can move their pieces in the second phase. Multiple pieces can occupy one node only if they belong to the same player, but can freely move through nodes held by themselves or other players in their pack as if they were unoccupied. A player may, in their turn, move any number of their pieces to the same destination node, as long as they can all legally reach that node.
If that node is occupied by the enemy, then instead of moving there, they initiate an "invasion" of that node using the combined "strength" of every piece they are moving (the purpose of the strength attribute). If the attack strength exceeds the combined strength of the defending pieces, then all defending pieces are removed, and the attacker must remove some combination of pieces whose strength is at least equal to the strength of the defenders, and may then move all remaining pieces involved in the invasionto the invaded node. If the invasion fails, all attacking pieces are removed and the defender must remove pieces equal to at least the strength of the attacker from the defending node. If one side doesn't have a combination of pieces equal to exactly the amount of strength they must remove, they must remove as many pieces as necessary to exceed that amount. The win condition is to enter the "fortress", a marked node with the highest minimum distance from the enemy camp, where players cannot place their own pieces directly, so it is possible to enter with any nonzero amount of strength.
Running out of time is also a loss condition in timed games. Players must move on their turn, in their established order of play; there is no skipping moves, though it can often be possible to skip in practice by moving a piece around a graph cycle. If one player in a pack runs out of pieces, they are skipped in the order of play and the rest continue playing. It is possible to draw if both sides run out of pieces, repeat moves, or if no invasions happen for a set amount of turns. If all players on one side but not the other run out of pieces, then there are no legal moves and the game cannot continue, so it is also a draw, unless it is the other pack's turn and someone (regardless of the order of play) can immediately enter the enemy fortress; in that case it is a win for the side that still has pieces.
The size of each individual's army is balanced based on the number of members in the pack, bigger packs get fewer pieces per Kyanah. It is of course legal for a player to consult their packmates for advice on their move, though serious games are timed and a player's packmates are likely to be busy calculating their own moves. Some packs with children (who are generally not placed in the order of play for their hatch-pack) will consult with them instead to avoid distracting their packmates. So even in serious tournaments, there's a lot of whispering going on. Of course, there's nothing stopping a pack, or even two Kyanah in a pack, from simply playing amongst themselves, but as stated, they don't really see that as a competitive game, it's more either idle leisure that happens to involve a neten-tyak board, or practicing their moves for a "real" game. In any case, top engines can effortlessly destroy any Kyanah pack, even with considerable odds, but don't play 100% perfectly.
***************
For those who are of the gambling persuasion, dice and playing cards have been invented by Kyanah civilization, and packs can come to a tazgan to bet on such games as well. But one of the more interesting and high-level games of chance is Karutkak, which is actually a family of games with fairly similar rules, but slight variations.
The premise is that the players must negotiate over what odds to play a single-shot game of chance at. If they mutually agree on the odds (whether that be 50-50, 75-25 for one player, 25-75 for the other player, or anything else) then a simple game will be played (usually with a single roll of a row of dice) and the winner takes all. However, the negotiation is timed, and if the players don't successfully agree on odds before the timer runs out for a round, then the house takes all.
The strategy and game theory is quite complex, especially as players generally aren't just playing a single round, and will thus gradually "leak" information about their pack's personality and risk tolerance to their opponent. Logistically, negotiation usually takes the form of moving a token up and down a slider, signifying what odds they are offering to play at.
In low-stakes games, there may be something like three dice to negotiate over and thirty seconds per round; for high rollers and professionals, you may see more like a dozen dice and two or three minutes per round.
Multi-player variants also exist, allowing for emergent behaviors like teaming and even more complex dynamics that are not easy to model, even with computers.
One of the most popular board-games on the planet is neten-tyak (something like "figurine war"), with probably around a billion Kyanah (almost 5% of the population) at least know the rules (probably a lot fewer actively play "real" games, i.e. pack vs pack though), so it's easy to find other players at a tazgan, or online. It is turn-based, deterministic, and perfect information with a variety of pieces with different capabilities, pitting one pack against another.
Each individual within a pack controls a specific subset of the pieces and they can choose their order of play however they want, but it must remain consistent throughout the game. The board is not actually a square grid at all, but a graph, which can be any symmetric, planar, and connected undirected graph, usually with about 120 to 200 nodes on each side. Players often have their own favorite physical boards, but online play is usually randomized, and very high level tournaments may have a "map" custom built by neutral experts and tournament officials. Structure varies, but most contain the road, a linear section near the center of the board, the mesh, a dense area with many connections between nodes on the sides of the board, and the maze, a sparsely connected, labyrinth like area deep in each side's territory.
There are different pieces with different levels of power, but without a grid layout, moving in a specific "direction" doesn't make sense, instead they have two attributes: speed and strength. Speed is just how many consecutive edges they can traverse in one turn, strength is how many points they contribute to an invasion (more on those later). There are 8 canonical piece types. Iron, gold, and stone soldiers are stronger but slower, faster but weaker, and intermediate, respectively. Iron, gold, and stone knights a direct upgrade over their soldier equivalents in both attributes, but retain the same relative balance, and are less numerous than soldiers. The general has the speed of a gold knight plus one and the strength of an iron knight plus one, making it the most powerful piece by far, but each member of a pack only gets one. All seven of these cannot travel through a node occupied by the enemy, and cannot move to an occupied node without winning an invasion. The final piece type, the spy, is the fastest but also weakest, however it can pass through nodes occupied by the enemy.
In the first phase, players take turns placing their pieces, but can only place them on their own half of the board. The actual number and type of pieces each player can put on the board is dependent on the size of their pack. Once this is done, they can move their pieces in the second phase. Multiple pieces can occupy one node only if they belong to the same player, but can freely move through nodes held by themselves or other players in their pack as if they were unoccupied. A player may, in their turn, move any number of their pieces to the same destination node, as long as they can all legally reach that node.
If that node is occupied by the enemy, then instead of moving there, they initiate an "invasion" of that node using the combined "strength" of every piece they are moving (the purpose of the strength attribute). If the attack strength exceeds the combined strength of the defending pieces, then all defending pieces are removed, and the attacker must remove some combination of pieces whose strength is at least equal to the strength of the defenders, and may then move all remaining pieces involved in the invasionto the invaded node. If the invasion fails, all attacking pieces are removed and the defender must remove pieces equal to at least the strength of the attacker from the defending node. If one side doesn't have a combination of pieces equal to exactly the amount of strength they must remove, they must remove as many pieces as necessary to exceed that amount. The win condition is to enter the "fortress", a marked node with the highest minimum distance from the enemy camp, where players cannot place their own pieces directly, so it is possible to enter with any nonzero amount of strength.
Running out of time is also a loss condition in timed games. Players must move on their turn, in their established order of play; there is no skipping moves, though it can often be possible to skip in practice by moving a piece around a graph cycle. If one player in a pack runs out of pieces, they are skipped in the order of play and the rest continue playing. It is possible to draw if both sides run out of pieces, repeat moves, or if no invasions happen for a set amount of turns. If all players on one side but not the other run out of pieces, then there are no legal moves and the game cannot continue, so it is also a draw, unless it is the other pack's turn and someone (regardless of the order of play) can immediately enter the enemy fortress; in that case it is a win for the side that still has pieces.
The size of each individual's army is balanced based on the number of members in the pack, bigger packs get fewer pieces per Kyanah. It is of course legal for a player to consult their packmates for advice on their move, though serious games are timed and a player's packmates are likely to be busy calculating their own moves. Some packs with children (who are generally not placed in the order of play for their hatch-pack) will consult with them instead to avoid distracting their packmates. So even in serious tournaments, there's a lot of whispering going on. Of course, there's nothing stopping a pack, or even two Kyanah in a pack, from simply playing amongst themselves, but as stated, they don't really see that as a competitive game, it's more either idle leisure that happens to involve a neten-tyak board, or practicing their moves for a "real" game. In any case, top engines can effortlessly destroy any Kyanah pack, even with considerable odds, but don't play 100% perfectly.
***************
For those who are of the gambling persuasion, dice and playing cards have been invented by Kyanah civilization, and packs can come to a tazgan to bet on such games as well. But one of the more interesting and high-level games of chance is Karutkak, which is actually a family of games with fairly similar rules, but slight variations.
The premise is that the players must negotiate over what odds to play a single-shot game of chance at. If they mutually agree on the odds (whether that be 50-50, 75-25 for one player, 25-75 for the other player, or anything else) then a simple game will be played (usually with a single roll of a row of dice) and the winner takes all. However, the negotiation is timed, and if the players don't successfully agree on odds before the timer runs out for a round, then the house takes all.
The strategy and game theory is quite complex, especially as players generally aren't just playing a single round, and will thus gradually "leak" information about their pack's personality and risk tolerance to their opponent. Logistically, negotiation usually takes the form of moving a token up and down a slider, signifying what odds they are offering to play at.
In low-stakes games, there may be something like three dice to negotiate over and thirty seconds per round; for high rollers and professionals, you may see more like a dozen dice and two or three minutes per round.
Multi-player variants also exist, allowing for emergent behaviors like teaming and even more complex dynamics that are not easy to model, even with computers.
Re: Road to Hope
This goes more into the lore.
This goes more into the technical aspects.
This goes more into the technical aspects.
Re: Road to Hope
Road to Hope is so ridiculously sprawling, and I'm working on a detailed treatment of Fight for Hope which makes me wonder if it could perhaps stand alone, with flashbacks to the Kyanah homeworld when needed....