building/location.
(Personal Favorite Trope) Technology left by an extinct civilization
Bonus if it's in space and it's a instantaneous transportation portal / wormhole.
Apertures ( Love, Death, & Robots S01E07 - Beyond The Aquila Rift) - A network of portals left behind by a civilization long gone. The program on which they operate on isn't fully deciphered, making traversal through them prone to error.
Mass relays (Mass effect) - Known to be an ancient portal left behind by the previous most prominent civilization that is now extinct, mass relays are primarily used by members of the Galactic council, making it easy to travel from one allied system to another.
Protomolecules / Ring Gates (The Expanse) - A sort parasitic technology left behind by a now extinct civilization, eventually it was revealed that protomolecules "studies" its host, and eventually builds a ring gate by expanding from the infected host. Entry through the ring gates will also lead to the "ring network", a central portal through which you can travel to the other ring gates.
Basically everything left behind by the Dwemer in The Elder Scrolls. They had an advanced civilization, masters of their craft and creating bits of technology using science far ahead of other civilizations at the time before their race mysteriously disappeared one day.
And not like they vanished over time either. They pushed their technology and tried to do god-bullshit, ended up deleting their entire civilization. Now there are just empty halls with automatons and squatters.
They weren't deleted.
Dwemer, like Altmer, had as a central core concept of their version of the Nine Divines the idea that all life exists as a form of punishment for gods that dispersed their power into Nirn.
Their faith has as it's endpoint the "uncreation" of all life back into the Gods that dissolved themselves into the plane to create it and become central concepts that govern it.
That's what the Dwemer tried to do, they attempted to uncreate themselves back into whatever God had basically killed itself to create them.
They partially succeeded, becoming the "Golden Skin" that covered Numidium, the artificial God they had been attempting to build. It was just a framework but their sacrifice completed it.. except for it's energy source. That was later created by Tiber Septim by ripping out the soul of his battlemage Jagar Tharn and using it in a massive soul gem called The Mantella to animate Numidium. He controlled Numidium with an object known as the "Totem of Tiber Septim" and used it to conquer Tamriel for The Cyrodillic Empire. Numidium was destroyed toward the end of Tiber Septim's conquest of Tamriel, and so far as anyone is aware the Dwemer are still a part of it.
*It should be noted that the "Skin of Numidium" idea has intentionally never been confirmed in canon and is one of several possibilities based on the deliberately hazy and apocrypha-riddled lore of the setting. It remains one of the biggest unsolved mysteries of the setting, even if certain creatives that have been involved with the series lean towards one theory over another. Dialogue in Elder Scrolls 3 with the last known surviving Dwemer leaves it wide open to interpretation.
As someone who's fascinated by anything surrounding the Dwemers, yeah, there's no official explanation as to their disappearance. The canonical lore surrounding them ends at them creating Numidium, and suddenly disappearing during the Battle of Red Mountain. I doubt Bethesda will ever give us a clear answer on that one.
Also they were horrible and complete assholes. Forced the entire Snow Elves race into slavery, removing their eyes which led to them devolving into the Falmers, after the Snow Elves fled to them for help to hide from the Nords that invaded Skyrim.
They didn't remove their eyes in a strict sense, if I remember correctly they sheltered the snow elves and offefed them food which they had laced with a specific plant which over time dimished their eyesight to nothing.
Still evil but more manipulative evil rather than brutal evil in this case
Some Dwemer ruins, especially those invaded by Falmers, have rooms with torture racks that show clear signs of having been used at some point. An NPC even mentions that during one of the Thieves Guild quests in Skyrim.
I like maybe due to super science that they may have all suddenly understood CHIM and realized they were in a video game and the sudden realization deleted them from existence in TES. This is a real TES lore possibility btw
CHIM is when you realize the Godhead but do not Zero-Sum. If the Dwemer did in fact realize the Godhead, then it seems none of them achieved CHIM, likely due to how the Godhead directly contradicts the Dwemer's scientific worldview
The Dwemer played a trick. It was a nasty trick and a complete disregard for Lorkhan’s Laws. Now their halls are filled with scavengers. These beggars and plate pickers. They’re raiding the pantry, drinking the wine and eating the food. Absolute disgrace.
I'd like to chime in and mention that they aren't necesssarily far ahead of every other civlization anymore, the Imperials had a space station somehow.
You can sort of treat it like a book series. There isn’t really a single bad book in the entire series. Not every one is spectacular, but the quality of the entire series is actually kind of scary. Where in a series like Star Wars or Star Trek you get books where stories don’t make sense or the characters are wildly written everything is crazy consistent in the Halo books so it’s almost worth just reading the entire thing even if you don’t want to play the games.
Theres also about a gazillion more Star Wars and Star Trek books printed so I think it's best to disclaim that while Halo books are still very consistent you'll still find a ratio with some "bad" books in the collection
For sure, though I’d say the average peaks way higher granted because there’s a smaller volume of content to choose from. As a fan I just think it’s marvelous to not have to worry about quality and consistency in a series.
I finished listening to every Halo novel available on audible last year and I definitely recommend them all. They all give you pretty much everything you need to know about the story and they're all written insanely well. They're actually re-recording the first 3 novels with narration from the game voice actors and some lore corrections soon, keep an eye out for Halo: The Master Chief Omnibus which releases on Nov 10th
shit, I knew I was forgetting something. Although you could argue that that the show's old starships aren't really from an extinct civilization but are empire's tech.
Yeah, you're right. The Foundation is less there for like ancient alien tech but I guess there are also old advanced robotics uncovered from former human civilizations.
A giant megastructure made billions of years ago built by ancestors that "created" humanity, an ark for their species after the rebellious AI system attacked them.
I fucking love how this fucking reveal is just fucking Halo on a diet. The thing is called the Ark. Its a megastructure that kills, the AI system that rebelled is essentially Mendicant Bias.
It's the best worst movie I've seen. My god we need more.
Focus (and everything it allows you to see)- Horizon.
Aloy found the focus, a piece of technology left by the "ancients" (the realworld humans in the present day's future). This allowed her to read ancient texts and discover how the old world ended and why she is the only person capable of saving the new world
Also all of the Faro machines. Technically the Cauldron machines don't count since they were created by a creation of the old ones, but they had no input in the design
it becomes even funnier when you realise that the Focus, regardless how cool it is in game. lorewise its just the equivalent of a smartphone or tablet.
Just like real life billionaires, Ted Faro was also mostly just riding on the skill and talent of the people he employed (such as dr. Elisabet Sobeck) rather than any brilliance of his own
Contact (at least the film version). The species she meets have been around for billions of years but even they didn't build the wormhole transit system. They found it from an even older species that either died out or went somewhere else.
It has MacGuyver, Kratos, and Jason Momoa As A Badass Warrior Dude In An Ancient Underwater City Called Atlantis (weird that’s happened twice). Also some other dudes, but eh.
It's good. The first movie give the setup. Then the series pick up with new actors and went to the episodic format like Star Trek. There are some nice sci-fi tropes mixed in every so often. Nice to explore the world building. It take till the mid season to fully establish what the show is, when it gets into it's flow.
Watch the movie first like u/EPZO said. It’s a really good balance between serial and episodic for the first 5 seasons. After that the scope kind of narrows, but the show is still solid. You’ll want to watch at least the first 2 seasons of Stargate Atlantis too, but if you get hooked on the show you won’t need anyone to tell you that!
Exactly. 3 examples are about stargates, and the stargate is not mentioned ;-)
But id doesn't get bonus point for space, most stargates sits on the surface.
You can find these scattered throughout the galaxy in Stellaris, ranging from the minor (the hulls of old vessels, ancient mining probes, etc.) to titanic feats of galactic engineering like Gateways connecting up the galaxy, Dyson Sphere's, and Matter Decompressors around black holes
You can even collect minor artifacts from extinct civilisations to search for scientific breakthroughs among them
A lot of things in subnautica but especially the alien arches, a network of portals to allow the precursors easier travel, both between their facilities and to the outside
You are simultaneously one of the first astronauts among your species and the first archaeologist who can translate the writings of the ancient people who left their scientific findings on your planet and the other planets in your solar system before your people evolved sentience.
There is a massive mystery that is introduced to you early in the game and you have to dig through the records of the people who left things behind to find out what happened to them and what is happening to you.
It's maybe my favorite video game of all time.
If you have seen the recent film, Project Hail Mary, then Outer Wilds might scratch that same itch.
Ender Portals from Minecraft. Portals to a place suspended in a space-like void known as the End, created by an unknown ancient civilisation that pre-dated Steve and Alex
Yeah, in Minecraft itself it's mainly scattered and up to the player to find and decide. Some of the other games are canon to the main "story" and are more lore-focused though.
Basically there IS lore, but it is deliberately vague and scattered in some aspects with the intent that the player can make their own story and conclusions.
One could say, for an IRL example, that the many highways and roads of the Roman Empire could count as such, since medieval peoples utilized these systems, and they're still used to some extent today.
There aren’t really any known, factual extinct civilizations on Earth. The ancient Romans continue to exist as a subset of modern Italians, Ancient Aztec and Mayan civilizations have descendants in modern Central and South America, and Celts, Norse, Egyptian, etc all have modern descendants. If Altlantis/Lemuria/whatever were factual then they could apply, but we would also need surviving technology from them.
Yeah, and even with the Romans it wasn’t like their empire just vanished overnight. Many institutions were coopted or copied by the various Germanic groups that took over ruler ship in Western Europe. It wasn’t like they displaced the populace or structure living there, but the parts of those tribes that took over became the new ruling class. Life for those under them only gradually changed. Duke and count existed as medieval titles of nobility because they were Roman military positions that the Germanic ruling class took over, which morphed into hereditary titles.
That plus half the other half of the empire didn't collapse and lasted another millennia. The Byzantines were a continuation of the Roman Empire's institutions.
Similarly, the European colonization of the Americas was made a lot easier because native tribes had worked the land for thousands of years. Their work while more easily considered “natural” by the colonizers directly made the continents easier to live on. Resulting in a lot of myths about lost tribes of jews and secret white people who’d left behind a garden of Eden.
That's understandable, OP. Always been more of a PC guy myself, never really did have the money for consoles.
I did have the good fortune to play Halo CE and Halo 2 on PC growing up, for what it's worth. Can't exactly blame you for not being into it anymore either, times change and so do we.
I played this as a kid, never solved a single puzzle, but it was neat. Then when I visited my cousins, they were excited to show me the ending (I think it was a cinematic?) - without much context, it felt deep but I don't remember a lick of it.
Standard template constructs from Warhammer 40k
Due to innovation being seen as heresy in modern 40k, and the general regression of technology over the years, stc’s carry with them incredibly advanced technology from the dark age of technology.
The Star Forge in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Built over 20,000 years before the game takes place, by a race that once ruled most of the known galaxy. It was a giant factory that used raw materials from a star, mixed with some space magic, to create a near endless supply of warships to control the galaxy. By the time of the main game, its creators have been completely forgotten about and now only survive on a single planet in the middle of nowhere.
Cortical stacks (and digital human freight, DHF) were developed following the discovery of an exotic metal left behind by an ancient alien species, allowing human lived experience to extend beyond the death of organic bodies.
A trip to Antarctica leads to the main characters discovering an alien city and the existence of a race that inhabited Earth billions of years before us.
The Jardaan (Mass Effect: Andromeda) - A gone or extinct species who's Remnant technologies litter the entire Heleus Cluster of the Andromeda Galaxy. Through gameplay you encounter a fairly staggering array of machines, terraforming tech, and the entire Angara species were created by them. From their Dyson Spheres, instantaneous methods of transport, and their ability to create an otherwise advanced species they rank among the Leviathans and Protheans from the mainline Mass Effect series in technological advancement.
As for what happened to them, we don't know, only that at some point before the Andromeda Initiative arrived in the Heleus Cluster an explosion happened on one of their research planets that caused an anomaly known as the Scourge to spread through the entire cluster which makes travel, even at light speed, extremely difficult if not outright deadly. The Meridian dyson sphere control center was cast adrift at this time and the Jardaan themselves either left the Cluster or were killed by their own creations, no one knows, but considering their advancement levels it's most likely the former.
Unfortunately, we'll never see the answer as the game was largely a flop and BioWare is a shell of its former self.
As someone who kind of enjoyed Andromeda for the gameplay, but forgot half the lore in it due to disillusionment with the codex being so... boring.
Thank you.
Hopefully, Andromeda will get it's due one day. It introduced a lot of fun stuff that was hampered by the lack of an overall vision for the storytelling and how it fit into the universe.
The king of this trope is Forbidden Planet. They discover a planet that seems deserted and natural on the surface but discover that below the surface is a sprawling vast city. The underground city is so old that the surface also used to be city but its been so long that its all eroded back into nature.
Turns out the civilization that lived here became too advanced for their own good. They developed wifi that could connect right into their minds and machines that could generate anything that their mind could think of. One night the people of this world went to sleep but the machines their minds were connected to didnt. When the people slept their conscious mind was no longer assessible so the machines went deeper into the Id and began creating monsters. Overnight the civilization was overrun by Monsters from the Id and went extinct. Leaving their machines running and waiting in the dark.
There’s a ton of examples in Homeworld but I think emergence is the best for it, they don’t find a planet or some relay they find a ship and it’s the oldest thing in the universe
Stellaris
There are numerous precursor civilizations by the time of the games start in 2200. The Cybrex, Yuht, Zroni and others
Each leaving behind artifacts. Although most stuff doesn’t show up on the in game. You just read about them in events. Upon recovering enough artifacts you can visit the precursors home system.
The Lamorn in Metroid Prime 4. You spend the game exploring their desolate homeworld and are given psionic messages from them asking you to help keep their memories alive in the form of a special tree.
Except they’re not exactly extinct, through the discovery of a special energy they accidentally mutated many of their kind into Grievers.
The Webway portal from Warhammer 40K, yes the user and current owner is Eldar, but the original creator was the now extinct Old Ones, you could also argue that the Imperium of Man's technology is also ancient tech left by ancient humans, but the current human is still their descendant, plus Big E is technically still a human from the stone age era, so not EXTINCT extinct
Ancient Roman concrete was unusually durable, it was bit of a mystery why. In 2023 it was found out that a specific lime mixture makes the concrete self-heal.
The Precursors of Star Control II left amazing technology including the player character’s capital ship as well as the enemy dreadnought (and the bomb needed to destroy it and win the game)
Exertians (SETI) - advanced civilization that learned how to mine energy from the core of their planet. Right before they died, they sent out beacons that warns whoever discovered them to not do what they did.
In the game, the players would discover them offering high risk high reward missions that by the end of the game could either boost them to first place or cut 1/3 of their points I think (which is a thematic way of saying "you forgot the warning, stoopid.").
The protomolecule is an infectious agent of extrasolar origin, first discovered on Phoebe by the Martian Congressional Republic in 0 XTE. It has the ability to radically alter infected life forms and utilize their biomass in various ways.
The whole story (the TV adapted portion at least) revolves around people trying to exploit it for their own gain and it going haywire. Interesting thing is that the protomolecule itself doesn't seem "evil" it looks like a technology that isn't understood. As a character in the story explains it, trying to use the protomolecule the way humans did in the series was like trying to use a microwave as a storage box.
Later, we also get a jumpgate like structure that allows teleportation like effects within a certain weight limit made by the protomolecule.
anyway, Afaik, it going haywire is caused by an extradimensional race that gets "hurt" every time the ring gates are used. The race are named "dark gods", and they are the creators of the void bullets that Holden and Miller's ghost used to shut down the protomolecules on Ilus. They are the ones responsible for the regular errors that happened every few times the ring gates are used, which the protagonists used to kill Marco Inaros in the final season.
Be ready for some major changes to some of the characters. Obviously Alex is still alive since IRL, his actor was a creep and got himself wrote out of the story. , and it’s a 30 year time jump in the series.
There’s a few book characters not in the series that make an appearance but they have very little influence, and you kinda understand their role after a few chapters.
Yeah the way I understood it is that our universes and the places in between kinda live... within them the same way colonies of bacteria live inside us. Once we start giving them indigestion they start with the antibiotics...
In Outer Wilds you are a member of the your species space program and while basically everything your people made is just made of wood and a bit of metal (including your space ship) there are remnants of an extinct civilization called the Nomai all around the solar system.
Do not read further if you want to play the game yourself, because it is a exploration puzzle game, that exclusively relies on you not knowing what to do and where to go (if you have finished the game once, after hours of figuring out what to do, you could do so again on a fresh save in about 20 minutes).
This includes large settlements and ruins on multiple planets, anti gravity elevators that were also used to excavate ore in mining sites, massive warp towers that teleport you between two locations, a large gravity cannon that is used to launch and recall shuttles, an orbital cannon that shoots a probe with so much energy that it destroys itself upon firing, a space station orbiting the sun with the with the intention to cause a super nova, a massive crashed ship that uses a warp drive to teleport to provided coordinates and lastly a device inside the hollowed out core of a planet, that sends memories back in time, essentially creating a time loop for everyone connected to it.
Gurren Lagann! Kind of, I think. The humans once were very strong and were squished back into their home planet. The deal was that the old leader would keep the count of humans on the surface low or else kaboom. Well, a rebellion starts and then a chain of stealing cool robots from the bad guys or discovering lost legacies. All those robots were from ancient humans or the 13th dimensional weenies.
The whole "left behind by some dead race" thing always hits way harder than any current alien tech cause it comes with a built in mystery nobody can solve. Like the relays and the rings in the Expanse just sit there doing their thing without any instruction manual and you're just supposed to trust the thing that might eat you. It also makes you wonder what we're leaving behind for whatever comes after us which is some existential bullshit if you think about it too long. Honestly the space portal version is peak sci-fi and I'll never get tired of it.
right, maybe i should've made that clear that the game used the whole "the extinct protheans left all these tech" as a red herring for the game's big surprise.
Iconian Portals (Star Trek) - since the TNG episode "Contagion", there have been appearances of these mysterious portals said to transport the people of the mysterious Iconian Empire anywhere they wished. Most of the original story to Star Trek Online deals with more Iconian Portals being discovered and realizing the Iconians aren't as dead as they once thought.
The City and Killy's Graviton Beam Emitter (Blame!) - The City is, and I'm not joking, one of the single largest things in all of fiction with only the Xeelee Gate, the Visitor from Don't Look Outside, the Super Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, and maybe the Planet Factory from Hitchhikers Guide being bigger. The City was originally commissioned by the precursor humans thousands of years ago and robots with the ability to manifest construction material began building it. At some point the precursor humans all died with their descendants losing access to their technology and wouldn't you know it? No one told the robots to stop. So they just kept going. If you click that link above you'll see that The City is basically a Dyson Sphere matryoshka doll that extends from the sun all the way out to the goddamn Oort Cloud. At one point the main character of Blame! comes across an open area on a layer he's never been to before that is speculated to have the same surface area of the planet Jupiter. For reference, Jupiter is 23,713,907,537 square miles, or 6.1419x1010 square kilometers, 120 times that of our planet.
As for the Graviton Beam Emitter, it's a man portable wave motion gun and it's big claim to fame is that it's precursor tech that NO ONE else in the entire setting of the series has ever seen before, knows how to reproduce, or even knows how it works.
I remember watching the S3 mid-season finale of The Expanse that had already been operating on a pretty large scale and then the thing happens and it immediately catapulted a show I already loved into the "this is the best scifi show I've ever seen" category :D
In the case of The Expanse the protomolecule resurrected part of a dead species so technically they were never truly extinct.
The same can apply to Doom the movie (based on the game franchise) where exploring Mars unlocked part of our own ancient history (Humans fled from Mars to Earth) which then kills us in the same way, again.
In Star Trek the Next Generation: Picard lives part of a life of an extinct species in the episode Inner Light. It was the last message of the species and a memory/time capsule for whoever came upon it. One of the best legacies left by an extinct race I can think of.
Much in the same vein as ultimately discovering we're descendants of the Engineers in Alien, Doom explains that the ancient ruins of a species we're investigating turns out to be our ancestors. So that is another similar plot. Sharing the same fate as our ancestors is the correlating moral lesson. We're always doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past after we forget about them.
You can find evidence of the Ancients all over the main area, from the Towers to ruins to the Great Eagle Statues to even portals once you reach Sunreach. These Towers, BTW hold bosses that drop even more tech remnants, being the Key Spheres required to complete the game.
Guardians in Elite Dangerous. Elite Dangerous is an online space sim set in a 1:1 scale version of the Milky Way. Meaning there are over 400 billions stars in the game that you can visit.
Among those star systems you can find ancient ruins of an extinct race known as the Guardians. They went extinct roughly 1-2 million years ago due to the AI they created which still remain active at the ruin sites. Their technology has since been reverse engineered and integrated into human technology with the most common use being a way to boost hyperspace travel distances.
The Guardians were also in a prolonged war with another alien race known as the Thargoids who are still alive and active in the galaxy. The second human war with them just recently wrapped up in the game and human/guardian hybrid technology was very effective against the Thargoids.
There are other ancient civilizations in the game/lore but not much has been revealed about them just yet. There is a rare commodity called Soontill Relics which players can haul as cargo and there is evidence that life once existed on Mars before we colonized and terraformed it.
The Webway in Warhammer. And most of the tech in this verse, actually. “We found this dope ancient techno artifact, we have no idea how it works. We’re gonna press this button and see what happens”
The entire landscape of the Forbidden Lands, where MH:Wilds takes place, is littered with ancient relics and ruins of a highly advanced civilisation. The different locations you hunt in are connected through underground infrastructure like a power grid, and each function(ed) as different parts of a defense network for a large city in the heart of the mountains.
For example, the desert area you start the game in has(/had) large defensive installations that would charged the air with high voltage when monsters draw near, and the flooded forest area grew on top of the outflow of an aqueduct system. The season/inclemency system the game uses actually stems from the power cycles of the underground grid and the automated mechanisms the city once used, tho ofc the player only finds that out later.
The coolest part about that lore are the apex predators of these regions, which all evolved to specifically take advantage of the old tech lying around, and the inclemencies they create! In the gif you can see a Rey Dau, which utilizes capacitor esque scales on its back to collect electric charge from the artificial thunder- and sandstorms, which they then channel between their horns to discharge it at prey or foes. I love MH for stuff like this, they create a railgun dragon and still manage to make it make sense in universe and connect it with the environments in insanely cool ways, both gameplay and lore-wise
The other big thing the ancient Wyverians did was genetically engineering monsters, essentially creating hollowed out battery-fed zombie monsters to protect them against the other hostile dragons, which of course could never have backfired and destroyed their civilisation :)) Essentially reverse-engineering an Elder Dragon God and stuffing it in the power source for your whole country probably didn't help either, mightve been the final nail in the coffin (tho i think we haven't seen the full extent of that blunder yet, I hope we will in the DLC)
the worldbuilding is so well done, every tiny detail is beautifully designed and feeds back into the fights of the monsters themselves, including most recently a giant goopy gluesniffer dragon that broke into the ancient armory and ate an actual railgun, which you can then break off it's back to use against it. Oh my gog it's so hype moments and aura
Play MH Wilds guys, it even runs on sub $2k PCs now😭
Oldest civilizations found them on the outskirts of their star systems, and were able to researcha nd replicate them, then prolifirate technology to other races when they found them
Both “technology” and “extinct” are very debatably applied here, but in the Fifth Element it’s implied that Earth’s moon is the remains of Mr Shadow, a sentient ball of evil, when they last almost managed to reach the Earth in a 5000 year cycle of attempted destruction. The nature of Mr Shadow leaves it unclear to what degree the physical manifestation of evil is biological, technological, or even simply geological, as it shows elements of all of these properties. Since the effect the Fifth Element weapon has on Mr Shadow is also unclear, humanity’s knowledge of the composition of “our” moon doesn’t confirm or deny any possibilities, since a sufficient weapon could easily turn a biological or technological body into calcified carbon.
Whether Mr Shadow represents an extinct civilization is much more a philosophical question than a scientific one. If they are purely evil embodied then evil does continue to exist, but if they are from an intergalactic civilization that itself embodies evil, it’s possible, even likely, that the physical forms that threaten the Earth were dispatched hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years ago by a long dead civilization.
Dragon technology left behind by dragons, who have been extinct for more than 500 years (I don't remember exact dates). The tech has been used in multiple regions across the game
Khaenri'ah technology, still researched/used in "modern day" timeline
Hyperborean technology, first introduced in Snezhnaya (afaik) with world quests built around it
I'm deep into writing my own scifi series with a few different versions of this, though only one is relevant to the story. The whole thing takes place in one star system called Eos. Humanity has lived there for over twelve thousand years. Their "home" word Orias has a binary paired planet called Anteros that is tidal locked (and essentially looks like a bigger moon) and is home to another humanoid species. By then the humans have no idea how or why they ended up there, only that the earliest generations spoke about "The First Warmth" very far away. But imagine if for the entirety of human history, we looked up to see not a desolate moon, but (essentially looks the same as because I didn't want to completely slap science in the face) a moon with atmosphere and city lights and visible presence. Everything would change.
Now, in order to facilitate this world ending up this way I created (name pending change) The Five Elders, or the five earliest species through the galaxy that were the first to establish interstellar/galactic civilizations. There were originally over a dozen, but when a war breaks out with tech on that scale they almost completely wiped each other out. Little remains known about them by book 1, most deny they ever existed. Until an artifact shows up that completely disregards physics as an optional restraint. Anyway one of these elder species transported a generation colony fleet from their original route to the system that is home to the Vaelen. Humanities greater fate remains unknown for most of the series. Five monolithic pyramids spent a system year terraforming Orias on a massive scale.
Now inagine this developing species, they see Orias as a huge object in their sky at all times. They see these ships that they don't have any concept of and come to the logical conclusion (from their limited understanding) that"Obviously, the gods are creating life again. They're doing it right before our eyes!" Which has all kinds of implications 12k years down the road.
Then one day one very unlucky crew stumbled across something that puts them on the radar of every major faction in the system while they scramble to escape a system wide drag net and eventually forces way behind their understanding.
An intelligent species who (probably) traveled world from world searching for a home. Some Lamorn were born with psychic powers.
After landing in the planet Viewros, the Lamorn reach a technological boom, with weather machines, Advances AI, a Master Teleporter capable of taking anyone to anywhere (habitable) and the Memory Tree, an mysterious mechinal/biological tree capable of sharing their intelligence with all living species.
After some time. The Psychic Lamorn wished to shared their powers with the Non-psychic Lamorn so they created crystals capable of giving them the same powers.
But a Tragedy happen, using the "Green Energy" an unknown essence of the planet to enhance all Nature, it reacted horribly with the Psychic Crystals turning all Artificial Psychic Lamorn to feral beast called Grievers
The remaining Psychich Lamorn tried to undo the transformation but failed, eventually relying to finding someone to save them or save their legacy.
When Samus and GF Soldiers get teleported all Lamorn are probably dead, as the recording show that the Lamorn left to find her prophecized savior with one left on Viewros waiting eventually dying of old age after centuries.
Viewros is now inhabited by the natural Fauna and the Grievers with the old technology still working by themselves.
Palworld! Most if not all the technology you can craft is from schematics from an ancient race that perished long long ago due to spoiler reasons (also I want you to know you beat me to this post, i opened reddit make an "Ancient Technology" post and saw yours!)
Dinotopia: The World Beneath! A lost Victorian era adventurer stranded on an inaccessible island where intelligent Dinosaurs and humans coexist finds a way into the subterranean world beneath the island and discovers an ancient lost civilization that had its own robotic 'stutter' dinosaurs powered by the sun. Fantastic read, highly recommend the whole series, although I would start with the first one. They're all worth it!
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u/Kumorrii Sep 07 '26
Basically everything left behind by the Dwemer in The Elder Scrolls. They had an advanced civilization, masters of their craft and creating bits of technology using science far ahead of other civilizations at the time before their race mysteriously disappeared one day.