The Aurin system: a guide to the planets and moons of COLONIZED

Seen from Ithera at noon, Aurin is a disc just under one degree across in an emerald sky. The moon Melvara goes round the planet in about half an hour, where its measured mass says it should take more than a week, and nobody in the system works out its path from masses any more: they look it up in a table.

Aurin is the star of COLONIZED: a yellow-white G1V dwarf, about 130,000 km in radius and 5,900 K, in the Parhelion galaxy. Around it orbit four habitable planets (Ormek, Kharsis, Ithera and Kaldrek), ten moons, a captured asteroid (Ashkar) and three bands of debris and ice. It is the only habitable system the colony fleet that left Solmera could reach before its propulsion and life support ran out.

This guide follows the canon of the universe, the same one the Codex records with the source of every figure, and points to the chapters of The Aurin Chronicle, the serialised novel of COLONIZED, set in each place. What you can play in each alpha wave will be listed in the alpha notes.

The system in one table

Every figure below, with derived escape velocities, light delays and a distance calculator, is also in a citable dataset: the Aurin system in numbers.

In the canon, distances are compressed: one astronomical unit of the lore is 15 million km. Years are in standard 24-hour days.

Position	Body	Distance from Aurin	In lore units	Year	Satellites and notes
I	Ormek	6 million km	about 0.4	50.6 days	Pyra, Cinera; the Colector Solar Prima
II	Kharsis	10.5 million km	about 0.7	117 days	Kravane, Kharun, Erran, and the captured Ashkar
—	Cementerio de Aura	12.75 million km	about 0.85	157 days	Wreckage of the war; eccentric and inclined
III	Ithera	15 million km	1.0	200 days	Melvara, Tirane, Selvane; demilitarised
—	Delvar and Trasvar	Ithera’s orbit	1.0	200 days	Trojans at L4 and L5: anchors of El Pináculo and El Fondeadero
IV	Kaldrek	28.5 million km	about 1.9	524 days	Renvar, Ordrek and the Rings
—	Outer ice belt	45 million km	about 3	1,039 days	Unnamed; the edge of practical exploration

The four planets

Planet	Radius	Gravity	Air	Day	Character
Ormek	6,050 km	8.88 m/s²	Breathable, 95 kPa	6 h	Hot, under a global veil of high cloud; golden savannas and red deserts
Kharsis	6,300 km	8.98 m/s²	Breathable, 70 kPa, 26 % oxygen	4 h	Arid: canyons, mesas, dunes and salt flats; no oceans
Ithera	6,000 km	9.23 m/s²	Breathable, 101.3 kPa	5 h	Temperate, 71 % ocean, the richest native biosphere
Kaldrek	6,400 km	10.2 m/s²	Breathable, 120 kPa	6 h	Cold, glaciers and tundra; geothermal valleys; rings

Ormek was marked as a forbidden world by the settlers’ first survey. The Zenith went down anyway, found air and raised the Colector Solar Prima, which powers half the system. A veil of cirrostratus, 14 to 22 km high, reflects the light and paints halos and false suns in the sky.

Kharsis is arid and habitable: canyons, mesas and oases over fossil water, with thin, oxygen-rich air, “like being halfway up a mountain”. It is Zenith territory, with a strong presence of The Forge, and home to places such as the Garganta de Sil and the Fosa Ámbar.

Ithera is the temperate world, with oceans, continents, jungles and wetlands, and air that carries spores. It is where the Arca Aurora fell in the war of Year 1, leaving La Cicatriz, and it has been demilitarised since the Armistice of Year 12, under the protection of the five Global Guilds. Its noon sky is emerald: “the only sky in the system that does not look designed by an engineer”.

Kaldrek is cold and, against appearances, the most fertile: alien boreal forests and moss meadows grow in valleys heated for millions of years by the tides of its moons. Its rings light the night. Both factions hold positions on its surface.

The moons and Ashkar

Body	Orbits	Radius	Gravity	Atmosphere	One line
Selvane	Ithera	500 km	0.419 m/s²	Tenuous	Once had water and lost it; black sky, petrified dunes
Melvara	Ithera	1,950 km	1.91 m/s²	Breathable, 72 kPa	“The” moon of Ithera; a sea world and the costliest legal question in the system
Tirane	Ithera	1,500 km	1.38 m/s²	Tenuous	Puerto Aurora, built by 31 people in four months; a sanctuary by custom
Kravane	Kharsis	1,150 km	1.06 m/s²	Tenuous	The Fundición Alta smelts in vacuum
Kharun	Kharsis	780 km	0.698 m/s²	Tenuous	Tidally locked; its far side is “of no operational interest”
Erran	Kharsis	1,000 km	0.867 m/s²	Thin, 0.654 kPa	“The Wanderer”: the only moon with thin air and seasons
Renvar	Kaldrek	400 km	0.212 m/s²	Tenuous	Made of the dust of a dead moon, grain by grain
Ordrek	Kaldrek	750 km	0.692 m/s²	Tenuous	“The one that was always there”
Pyra	Ormek	420 km	0.388 m/s²	Tenuous	“The anvil”: a Zenith forge and shipyard
Cinera	Ormek	620 km	0.399 m/s²	Tenuous	Darker than charcoal; home of the Nadir’s El Tizón
Ashkar	Kharsis	45 km	0.034 m/s²	None	A captured asteroid that tumbles; the cheapest deposit to reach

The three bands

• The Cementerio de Aura. The wreckage of the battles of Year 1, between Kharsis and Ithera, on an eccentric, inclined orbit of 157 days. Emergency lights still blink in it, and salvage from before the war cannot be reproduced with today’s technology.
• The Rings of Kaldrek. From 1.25 to 3.9 planetary radii, the remains of Mornane, a moon that died millions of years ago. The war only embedded scrap in them, but for decades they were taken for war scrap: the mistake was about what they were made of, not whether they were there. The Pathfinders corrected it in Year 47.
• The outer ice belt. A band with no name, 45 million km out, and the practical limit of exploration.

Four kinds of air

The canon sorts every world into four classes: breathable (no suit needed), thin (helmet and oxygen; air you cannot breathe, but with wind and weather), tenuous (a very thin atmosphere fed by some local source; full spacesuit) and airless. All four planets and the moon Melvara are breathable; Erran is thin; the rest of the moons are tenuous, and Ashkar has none.

The mysteries the settlers argue about

• The Phase Table. The moons of Aurin orbit in hours, where Kepler’s laws with their measured masses would ask for days. Nobody calculates their trajectories from masses: they consult the Phase Table, an empirical clock measured by the Pathfinders. “The three schools do not argue about gravity; they argue about the clock.”
• The names. The first survey of the system named every body from afar, with suffixes that encoded a guess: -era for a candidate with a biosphere, -ek for a world too hostile to land on. It got Ithera right, marked Ormek and Kaldrek as forbidden, and was proved wrong on the first descent.
• Melvara. Nobody agrees on whether it is a moon or a world, and the answer decides who may build there. Nobody has fired a shot over it yet.

Aurin in the Chronicle

The Aurin Chronicle is the novel of COLONIZED, published free in the Codex. Book One, Holding, is complete: a prologue, thirteen chapters and an epilogue, set between days 221 and 238 of Year 47 E.A., with one chapter in Year 1. It crosses the system without adding a single place to the map:

Chapter	Place	What you see of it
Holding	Cementerio de Aura	The band of wreckage between Kharsis and Ithera, where a fragment marked AU-C7 has been turning for 46 years
No Prior Record	Arca Custodia	The neutral ship, equidistant from the two stations, where every recruit is registered
Unnumbered Axiom	El Pináculo, Delvar (L4)	The top of the Zenith station, sixty degrees ahead of Ithera
One Alive	La Cicatriz, Ithera	The crash site of the Arca Aurora and the seats of the five guilds, with Melvara rising in the west
The Wall	El Bastión, La Cicatriz	The Vanguard’s fortress, built on the Aurora’s old bridge
What Nobody Wanted	El Fondeadero, Trasvar (L5)	The Nadir station, sixty degrees behind, seen from its docks and its barter board
Measured, Not Derived	El Faro Roto, La Cicatriz	The Pathfinders’ tower and the Phase Table
Dock Seven	Tirane, Puerto Aurora	The port built for the Arca Aurora, a sanctuary by custom
Twelve Minutes	Arca Aurora, Ithera orbit	The ark that fell and made La Cicatriz, forty-six years before the present

The novel adds characters and events of its own; the figures in this guide are the canon’s. Start from the Chronicle index, or read our spoiler-free guide to Book One first.

In the game today

The worlds of Aurin are built from these data by the game’s generator. In the current build the planets are spherical worlds you walk on, from the ground to the edge of space, with zero gravity once you leave the atmosphere. The fifteen bodies with a surface (four planets, ten moons and Ashkar) have been generated from their lore, with terrain from real elevation data and physics (impacts, craters, erosion) rather than noise, and with weather of their own: rain, snow, dust, fog and wind. They are still going through a visual review, body by body, and the two faction stations already sit at Ithera’s L4 and L5 points. How much of each world can be played in each alpha wave will be listed in the alpha notes. We explain how the system fits inside the engine in how to simulate a solar system at scale, and how each world is generated from its lore in this step-by-step look at the chain.

Each body has its own entry in the Codex: start with Ithera, Kaldrek or the Phase Table.