You're Caelani, a member of the Thieves' Guild coming back from a job when an unexpected incident and an innocent desire to help catapults you into danger. My entry for Bucky's Year's End contest. This is my first story in a realistic fantasy setting. That seems to be the most popular here so I'll write more like this if the feedback is good.

It's a stable society with equal rights and democracy where people are happy and have everything they need. The real reason I settled it was because it contained both edible plants and useful animals, so they all have farms and ranches. If you were born on that planet you'd be perfectly suited to it due to the modifications and better off and healthier than people in many countries on Earth today. (And better off than ALL people on Earth at the time the game is set.) I got a higher score in the game I posted about below even though half my people died and the rest were living under the thumb of an alien theoracy in smog choked cities. The score doesn't mean much. The only catch to all this is the water recycling plants, I'm sure somewhere down the line they'd break down no matter how self sufficiently they're set up. But that might just mean everyone has to dust the ancient ship off and set out again for a new home...

Although sometimes it's possible to have very bad luck. This planet was better in most ways than the last one, and it was the FIRST planet so I arrived with 100% in everything: The colonists begin constructing a settlement with the aid of the seedship's construction robots. The planet's native inhabitants keep the newcomers under careful guard, but also help them by setting up temporary shelters and clearning the land. They can leave the ship wearing minimal breathing gear and heated suits to survive the near-absolute-zero temperatures, but breathing gear failures lead to 30 colonists asphyxiating, and 212 more die when one of their shelters shatters in the extreme cold. The low gravity makes the work somewhat more difficult than it would have been on Earth, and 31 colonists are killed when partially-completed buildings collapse. They build their settlement on top of the ice covering the planet's surface, which they mine for water, but water shortages kill 19 colonists. The planet's plant life is extremely poisonous to humans, and 163 colonists die before they can clear it away from their settlement. "clearning the land" And I might have found a bug here: Although parts of the cultural database are missing, it still contains a clear picture of human civilation's history and cultures. The losses sustained by the colonists make it more difficult for them to preserve their culture. The growing human community retains a strong sense of its identity and history. The entire cultural database is there, and the last two sentences contradict themselves. Though one thing I always liked about the game is the way any of the info in the summary you get could be used to base a story on. After the disastrous colonisation, we helped get the natives up from the bronze age to an industrial society, but it was a planet spanning culture they had and we have to live under their theocracy and separate in our own community.

A trick to this game that makes it a little pointless is that if you have all your databases intact, you can do fine with a completely lousy planet. So you can almost always take one of the first planets you find before you have time to get any bad random events. Planet Morlock Atmosphere: Marginal Gravity: Very low Temperature: Cold Water: Trace Resources: None Features: Insulated caves Edible plants Useful animals Morlock's impossibly slender alien plants reach kilometres into a pale blue sky. The colonists live in towering stone-walled cities with buildings sealed against the planet's harsh environment, gathered around water production plants. The cities are built around parliament buildings, where assemblies of citizens rule for the good of all. In the first city stands a monument to the seedship AI that guided humanity to its new home. Planets visited: 2 Score Planet atmosphere: 250 Planet gravity: 0 Planet temperature: 250 Planet water: 0 Planet resources: 0 Survivors after landing: 1000 Survivors after settlement construction: 1000 Final technology level (Neolithic): 600 Final culture (Egalitarian Republic): 2000 Surviving scientific database × 10: 280 Surviving cultural database × 10: 1000 Total: 6380

The way it handles governments is dumb. There should be moral choices, or it should let you at least make a decision on what sort of beliefs the colonists have when you start out. My colonists can genetically engineer their descendents, but if they don't bring a high school level government textbook along they can't figure out what a "republic" or "equality" is or why they should want them.

Reading this meant a lot to me so I just wanted to say thank you. And as a matter of fact, right after I saw it I had an idea for a ghost story that I think will be a thousand times more interesting than the one I first came up with.