How COLONIZED builds fifteen worlds from their lore: the procedural chain, step by step

Most procedural planets start from a random number. COLONIZED’s start from a canon: a star system written down before a single polygon existed, with the radius, density, air, rock, history and named places of every body. The generator’s job is to turn that canon into worlds you can walk on, and its first rule is that it may not invent what the canon already decided. On 12 October 2026 the chain closed with all fifteen bodies with a surface of the Aurin system: four planets, ten moons and a captured asteroid. This is how it works.

1. The lore, written as data

Everything that defines the universe lives as machine-readable files that the generator reads. They are the single source of truth: if the data and a hand-made product disagree, the data wins and the product is rebuilt.

Data set	What it defines
System registry	Orbits, epochs, types, spheres of influence, rotation and the “hero” features of the sky
Bodies	Per body: radius, density and gravity, air class and pressure, water fraction, vegetation, geological regime, protection level, whether weapons and extraction are allowed, rock types and resource fertility
Physics	Mean density by composition, from which gravity is computed: g = (4/3)·π·G·ρ·R
Atmospheres	Four air classes, a sky recipe per body (scattering, aerosols, ozone), haze and clouds
Rock	24 rock classes with their tint, 28 minable materials and 59 deposit models
Places	One definition for each named place of the lore, with the rule that finds where it goes

Every product the chain writes is signed with the hash of every source and of the code that made it. If a datum or a script changes, the product is marked as no longer current and is rebuilt on its own. Nothing is fixed by hand on the result: when something looks wrong, the fix goes into the generator.

2. The relief: real data and physics, never noise

The house rule of the generator is short: never invent relief.

• Planets. The large-scale terrain comes from a real elevation model of the Earth, NOAA’s ETOPO global relief model. The generator moves the pole, spins it, mirrors it and sets its own sea level, so that no planet is a recognisable Earth. On top of that, a regional layer of finer real elevation data covers a window around each region.
• Moons and the asteroid. Their relief comes from the physics of impacts: crater populations with maria, rays, terraces and ejecta, plus lunar terrain models for the fine detail.
• What is forbidden. Turning up a noise dial to make mountains, using fractal noise as relief, or retouching a product by hand. If the chain hits a limit, the limit is measured and removed from the system.

3. A chain of about 68 steps per body

Each body goes through the same chain, step by step, each with its own checks. Grouped, the order is this:

Stage	What happens
Geography and climate	The large terrain, tectonic provinces, mountain ranges, climate, erosion, arid regions, craters and poles
Fine relief	Real elevation detail by region, its own erosion, and relief adapted to the places of the lore
Rock and colour	Lithology, tone, ground patches and the palette of each world
Places and formations	The named places of the canon, large formations, and the planet assembled
Biome and dressing	Biome families, vegetation, sky, scattering of rocks and plants, the mesh and the air
Water and resources	Resources by geology, water, seas and coasts
Engine check	The body reloaded in the editor and checked as seen from space
Content	Places, deposits, scenery and the seeding of the ground, each with its gate
Closing	Dynamic weather, a playability gate and the far-distance relief

A whole-universe command runs the chains of all fifteen bodies through a GPU queue, one editor per body, retries transient failures and writes a summary. The products of one body range from 24 MB of space textures for Ashkar to 463 MB for Ithera.

4. Biomes that follow the lore

Five biome families dress the worlds, and each body takes the one its lore implies:

• Tropical continental: Ithera, Melvara and the savannas of Ormek.
• Fossil desert: Kharsis, with canyons, mesas and salt flats.
• Geothermal boreal: Kaldrek, with tundra, moss and fumaroles.
• Regolith: the lifeless moons.
• Icy regolith: Renvar, built from the dust of a dead moon.

5. Weather of its own

The closing stage adds dynamic weather per body, driven by each world’s climate law: rain, snow, dust, fog and wind, with ground that gets wet or snowy, and dust events only on bodies with a surface. Weather is part of the current build; seasons of the year and weather effects on survival are not.

6. What is still under review

The generation is finished; the owner’s visual review is not. It runs in rounds, body by body, with fixes made in a review branch and regenerated by the chain: on a single day in October that meant ground that changes tone with slope and wetness, rocks that sit in the soil and a plan to make the terrain cheaper to draw. That day is in the devlog of 13 October. How much of each world can be played in each alpha wave will be listed in the alpha notes.

Why build worlds this way

A random seed gives you infinite planets that are all a little the same. A canon gives you fifteen that each have a reason to exist: a planet whose survey got its name wrong, a moon that orbits faster than its mass allows, an asteroid with a refuelling station on it. The data behind every one of them is public in the Aurin system in numbers, the canon is in the guide to the Aurin system, and how the whole system fits inside Unreal Engine 5 is in how to simulate a solar system at scale.