Compiled from Relay bulletins, merchant accounts, and Navigator transit logs. Circa Era VII, year 148 post-Dissolution.
Most inhabited worlds have settled into variations of the same pattern: cooperative, post-scarcity, locally governed. A minority have not. These are the deviated worlds. They are grouped below by the character of their deviation, though some resist classification.
Solan was a moderate colony during the First Federation — roughly two million people, agricultural surplus, a single large city on the northern coast. It maintained contact with three neighboring systems through the Relay and received regular sail traffic during the Second Federation.
The last confirmed sail visit to Solan was in year 89 post-Dissolution. The crew reported functioning infrastructure but a population that had declined to an estimated four hundred thousand. They attributed the decline to a combination of crop failure, reduced genetic diversity, and the breakdown of a medical system that nobody had the expertise to maintain.
The Relay node in the Solan system is still active. It has not forwarded a personal message in over sixty years. Automated systems — weather satellites, geological monitors — continue to broadcast. Nobody is reading them.
Kettar deviated through conflict. The population during the Second Federation was approximately fifteen million across two continents. At some point during the Long Silence, a territorial dispute escalated into organized warfare. The weapons were not sophisticated — chemical propellants, crude explosives — but they were used consistently for what appears to have been at least a century.
The last Relay message from Kettar was a broadcast, not addressed to anyone. It contained a recording of someone reading a list of names. The recording is seventeen hours long. It was sent in year 112.
No sail ship has visited Kettar since. The Relay node remains active.
Hwa is the most thoroughly documented digital world. The transition occurred during the late Second Federation, before the Dissolution. The entire population — roughly three hundred thousand at the time — migrated into a purpose-built computational substrate housed in a geothermal installation on the planet’s surface. The installation is self-maintaining and has no external dependencies.
The inhabitants of Hwa do not respond to Relay messages. They are not believed to be dead. The installation’s power consumption has remained constant for over two centuries, which is consistent with ongoing computation at a population-relevant scale.
Whether what exists inside the substrate should be considered the continuation of the people who entered it is a question that different people answer differently. The Relay node continues to accept messages addressed to Hwa. They sit in the buffer indefinitely.
Tenra attempted a partial digital transition — a significant portion of the population uploaded, while the remainder stayed on the surface to maintain the installation and preserve the physical infrastructure. The arrangement lasted roughly forty years before the maintenance population began to decline. The last surface-side Relay message was sent in year 94.
The installation’s power consumption is stable. The digital population, if it persists, has not communicated with the surface or through the Relay since the transition was completed. The surface is believed to be uninhabited.
Innel is a collective world. The population did not upload — they remained biological — but the individual inhabitants appear to have undergone some form of neural integration. Sail visitors during the early post-Dissolution years described the population as “moving together” and “speaking in unison” when they spoke at all.
The visitors also reported that the inhabitants were not hostile. They fed the crew, repaired the ship, and answered questions, though the answers came from multiple people simultaneously and often did not address what was asked. The crew left after two days. They did not return.
No Relay messages have originated from Innel. The node accepts inbound traffic normally.
Verath is listed here on the basis of a single Navigator account. The Navigator, Sol-SP-441A, reported a world where the population had removed themselves from physical infrastructure entirely and was living in what the Navigator described as “garden conditions” — no constructed shelters, no tools, no clothing. The Navigator did not land and could not confirm whether this was a cultural choice or a cognitive one.
The account is uncorroborated. Verath is not on any Relay routing table. Its coordinates exist only in the Navigator’s log.
The Relay does not distinguish between a silent world and a dead one. A node can be active for decades after the population it serves has gone. The distinction, when it can be made, is made by the next ship to arrive.
There is no consensus on whether the deviated worlds represent failure, adaptation, or something else. The post-scarcity majority is not a standard against which all worlds should be measured, though it is the only one we have.