The Zenith and the Nadir: the two factions of COLONIZED

You sign once, and for good. Aboard the Arca Custodia, every recruit of Year 47 E.A. reads two enlistment records before choosing a house. One ends with the right to decide who uses the light. The other ends with the claim that whatever gets thrown away still has an owner.

The Zenith and the Nadir are the two factions of COLONIZED. They were born from the same colony fleet and split over a single question: how to make sure the death of their home never happens again. The Zenith answer with order, hierarchy and progress at any cost; the Nadir, with community, balance and roots. Since Year 12 E.A. they have kept a cold peace. In Year 47 E.A., the present of the game, that peace is cracking, and both houses are recruiting.

This guide follows the canon of the Aurin system as the Codex records it, and points to the chapters of The Aurin Chronicle, the serialised novel of COLONIZED, where each house appears. What you can play in each alpha wave will be listed in the alpha notes.

The two factions side by side

	The Zenith	The Nadir
Spanish name	Los Cenit	Los Nadir
Formal name	La Cátedra de los Arquitectos	La Concesión
Motto	“La luz se gana” (light is earned)	“Lo que nadie quiso” (what nobody wanted)
Philosophy	Absolute vertical progress: exploit, optimise, ascend	Roots and balance: conserve, adapt, endure
Government	The Cátedra de Ascensión, which issues decrees called Axioms	The Círculo del Fondeadero, a rotating assembly that decrees Verses
Station	El Pináculo, at Delvar, the L4 point of Ithera’s orbit	El Fondeadero, at Trasvar, the L5 point
Colour in the game’s interface	Solar gold	Abyssal blue
Look of their gear	Polished white, lacquered black and gold, spotless	Oxidised copper, industrial grey and olive green, patched
Emblem	An ascending pyramidal arrow cutting two horizontal lines	An inverted geometric anchor embracing a core
Economy	A regulated auction with a faction tax	Free barter without taxes
Holiday	Día del Primer Salto, the anniversary of leaving Solmera	The Fondeo, the anniversary of the Armistice

One fleet, one war

Solmera’s star was dying. To get out, its civilisation built the Flota Aura: arks, mobile shipyards and refineries that crossed the void between galaxies for centuries, every part standardised by the MMU, the Unified Manufacturing Matrix. The fleet reached the Aurin system in Year 0 E.A. and broke apart in Year 1.

In that war the Arca Aurora took fire from both sides in Ithera’s orbit and came down. The furrow it left on the planet is still called La Cicatriz. Whose shot was decisive has never been established, and neither house will own the wound.

Eleven years later, the Ithera Armistice (Year 12 E.A.) demilitarised Ithera under the five Global Guilds and placed each station at a symmetric point of its orbit: one sixty degrees ahead of the planet, the other sixty degrees behind. The cold peace started there.

The Zenith: light is earned

The first survey of the system marked Ormek as a forbidden world, and the Zenith went down anyway. They found air under the cloud veil and raised the Colector Solar Prima, which now powers half the system. Their enlistment record opens with that.

They read the fall of Solmera as a lesson to correct: never again depend on one system, one world or one generation of technology. They are the engineers, officers and bioengineers of the old fleet, governed by the Cátedra de Ascensión, a scientific council and military junta in one whose decrees are called Axioms. The Arquitectos design and guard the MMU’s high-tier blueprints. The Guardia Vertical is army and police at once. The Ascendidos wear their cybernetic or genetic enhancements where everyone can see them.

Rank is earned with measurable results, never with seniority, and “sentimental” is an insult. Their strongholds are Kharsis, Kravane and Ormek. On the Día del Primer Salto they parade machinery. Of the Nadir they say: “the ones who stood watching their sun go out because they were afraid to touch the switch”.

The Nadir: what nobody wanted

For almost nothing, the Nadir bought the one thing in the inner system the Cátedra did not want: Cinera, a black moon without metal. They turned it into El Tizón, the best listening post in Aurin, with a permanent line of sight over the Zenith’s Colector. Their name comes from that deal.

They are the fleet’s field engineers, biologists, cargo pilots and hydroponic farmers: its working class. They refuse to repeat what, in their eyes, killed their first home: growth without limit until collapse. The Círculo del Fondeadero governs them, a rotating assembly where nobody presides for more than one cycle and decisions, called Verses, come out of consensus. The Guardabosques watch over Ithera. The Flotilla Libre is a volunteer militia with no single command. The Descarnados, a radical fringe the Círculo tolerates and disowns in public, sabotage what the Zenith build.

Nobody owns a resource; they hold it while they need it. “Optimal” is a suspect word. Once a year, at the Fondeo, El Fondeadero switches off every light it does not need for an hour, to remember the dark they crossed. They see the Zenith as people who mistake the trauma of Solmera for permission to repeat it, faster.

What they still share

A grandmother in La Cicatriz can have grandchildren in both houses. They share the MMU, so their ships and weapons come from the same base designs and differ only in the finish. They trade in the same currency, the Solmera Credits. They respect the Armistice because they have to. And neither can do without the five Global Guilds, the neutral organisations born among the survivors of the Arca Aurora, which we cover in the five Global Guilds.

The canon has a line for it: “They are not two peoples. They are one crew split by a question.”

How a house is chosen

The choice happens aboard the Arca Custodia, the administrative sister ship of the Arca Aurora, anchored at a neutral point equidistant from the two stations. Its intelligence, CUSTODIA, predates the war and takes no side. A recruit gets a transit suit with no faction markings and three simulated dilemmas, the ones that divide the houses: what to do with a deposit that is running out, with a settler injured beyond an easy repair and with two technicians who ask for a tie-breaking vote. CUSTODIA gives no figures. Then two holographic envoys appear, one from the Guardia Vertical and one from the Flotilla Libre, and the recruit chooses. The losing envoy takes its leave with cold courtesy: “The door does not close completely. It is only left ajar.”

The epilogue of the Chronicle, Choose Your House, takes place in that room, and the full entry is Arca Custodia and CUSTODIA.

Cracks on both sides

Commander Ysolde Kray, head of the garrison at El Pináculo, signs the Kaldrek extraction quotas with misgivings. Leaked Axioms circulate that speed up extraction at the risk of collapsing a whole deposit, and one of them reached the Refinería Yermo on Kharsis.

At El Vivero they complain that “the Círculo votes while the patient gets worse”. When a Descarnado proposes sabotaging a Zenith platform on Kaldrek, the Círculo neither authorises it nor stops it, and somebody has to choose between handing over the cargo and turning the saboteur in. The canon is written so that a player on either side has to make choices that leave nobody clean.

The two houses 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 shows each house from the inside:

Chapter	When and where	The houses on stage
No Prior Record	Year 47, day 222 · Arca Custodia	A sleeper wakes to two envoys, one from each house, and three questions
Unnumbered Axiom	Day 222 · El Pináculo	The Cátedra at work: the Chancellor gives Commander Kray an order with no number
What Nobody Wanted	Day 224 · El Fondeadero	The Nadir station from its docks, where Tejedora Sable Vunn prices everything
Red Ribbon	Day 225 · El Fondeadero	Buyers from both houses at an auction in the dark
Lelo	Day 226 · El Pináculo	La Cúspide, at the top of the Zenith station
Choose Your House	Day 238 · Arca Custodia	CUSTODIA, its three questions and the choice every recruit faces

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

In the game today

When you start COLONIZED you enlist aboard the Arca Custodia, the fleet’s administrative ship, and choose a side. In the current build that choice is permanent on the server and applies to every settler on your account. Each faction has five ranks, Recluta, Operativo, Veterano, Comandante and Leyenda, which each house names in its own way. In the game’s generated system, the two stations already watch Ithera from its L4 and L5 points; visiting them is not promised. Faction warfare, sieges and conquest are still in design and are not promised either.

The full entries are in the Codex: the Zenith, the Nadir, El Pináculo, El Fondeadero, the Ithera Armistice the Arca Custodia and the timeline. The war that split them, and the wreck it left, are in the fall of the Arca Aurora.