Some lore would go a long way towards figuring out the different layout drafts, and adding more interesting things to find in the complex. I think the lore should probably be context-specific other than the story you get at the outset. As an infinite game I don't want to introduce lore from playing, as that kinda necessitates a game goal or otherwise causes the game to "complete". Lore is instead a kind of easter egg to find in rooms that aren't normal book rooms.
Given the sci-fi theme that's developed, I'm thinking the game takes place on a planet that was set aside to honor the sci-fi genre and its many books. So it's a kind of massive library, with the daily quotes being a kind of homage that kinda eventually turned into some kind of cult.
The people that lived and worked there were immortal and made it their goal to study the books under their care and write things about them. Over time this kinda morphed to them making corrections to the book so they were more canonically accurate and their output content was better. This then shifted eventually to them rewriting the books in novel languages and being trapped / barricading themselves in their rooms.
It turns out that this entire project was actually a Labyr creation, an attempt at harvesting the essence of human science fiction and distributing it into something approaching their own languages. The planet sits very close to an activable iron star -- these block the use of high technology so are not really useful for humanity but are also a good deterrent against the Labyr, so the fact that the Labyr control this one is surprising and also terrifying as it would ultimately give them the concentrated knowledge of how humanity keeps defeating them.
The project used physical books to avoid the technological/em issues of high-tech ones. Also handwritten content. Its supposed purpose was inspiring and giving ideas to those fighting the Labyr. So like a big think tank in some ways. It might make more sense then that they infiltrated and eventually destroyed it.
The city uses bionanos, since though they're way weaker than normal ones, they too are safe from the iron star.
As you touch English words on a book they disappear and your Nanos interact with the bionanos of the page and push letters to you which then allow you to interact with the quote Scrolls as well.
this sorta implies the books and content are written by means of bionanos, which makes a lot of sense. Would also explain transport -- they can reorganize their data at smaller levels and then transports of them can meet up with high-tech ships outside the iron star range for transcription.
so physical books displaying via means of bionanos means they have a kind of decentralized storage, which is also useful information -- better than having hard storage somewhere for backups which doesn't fit into the lore. It also explains how books can be changed to fix typos or whatever, as well as the eventual babelization of them.
Your team was sent to find out what happened to the place -- the content it put out at the end was completely nonsensical and then dropped off completely.
Everyone in the entire complex is missing but there's no newflesh records and also no dead bodies, so it's kinda a huge mystery.
I think what happened is before the Labyr could collect their harvest of their fully domesticated humans they transferred themselves to the bionanos. So the whole letters / quotes thing is a way to communicate with them eventually. Maybe as you transfer letters around they're able sl to use them to speak, though their brains are kinda muddled via them being integrated with the bionanos and the whole Labyr domestication process.
I've worked on this a bit, would like to codify it up somewhat.
Out of your team only you survived -- I mean everyone else made it back to the newflesh node so they technically survived too. You're the only one on the planet though.
The reason for this is that you had bionano precursors in your blood so that transition was easier on your body. The reason for *THAT* is because hundreds of years ago you helped people test the use of bionanos, in exchange for passage on the Long Chimera.
The Long Chimera was an arkship project that found a habitable hyperbolic universe out of reach of the Labyr. The caveat being that its passengers would spend *years* in chimera to reach it. However before it was fully at capacity the Labyr found it and harvested it -- some of the core nodes escaped and went on their set route but the rest were reduced to the stone age, and there's a whole story there in my head.
In any case, one of your first goals is getting to a Communication Tower (and I guess spending wildcards to activate it) so you can communicate back with your ship.
Another goal is opening up the far side spaceport -- the district directly opposite from the iron sun.
Another major goal is getting the Goop machines working again -- as a bionano entity you have to occasionally eat Goop, which is very inefficient, and the Goop machines are down in most districts. If you starve you respawn at whatever newflesh node you're hooked into, which those are paired with functional Goop complexes.
While the world is mostly rooms full of books, it originally housed a gigantic population -- like if my notes hold up there's somewhere in the ballpark of 100 trillion rooms (obviously less because of other rooms and things that occupy building space, but still an absurd population).
A lot of the infrastructure for this is contained within the building itself, with some caveats:
Every few buildings needs a Biotower that grows food and processes it into Goop.
These buildings also need a Power source, which is a set of collectors that face the Iron Sun, those on the far side would instead pull from this grid.
Most entertainment is provided by VR, however the use of bionanos and biological digital storage complicates this a lot and prevents local solutions. So while there will be shared stations here and there, most of the intense VR is going to happen in dedicated facilities, which handles the machines, the Goop inputs, and the storage required for shared spaces, as well as connecting it to other towers for shared virtual spaces across the planet.
Fusion facilities convert Hydrogen to anything else that's needed. It tends to make sense to do this locally, particularly since the planet is very rich in water and so hydrogen can be electrolyzed and put into these facilities very easily.
Water facilities gather water from the edges of the district and funnel it either into the biotowers or the fusion facilities. Each district is surrounded by large lakes at artificial terrain lows, so there's a consistent supply of water. There are various handwavy mechanisms that keep Districts from flooding, like offscreen infrastructure (dams, etc). The whole society is incredibly advanced (the planet itself isnt 100% natural), so this isn't a stretch in any capacity.
Well I lost a bunch of stuff from the Whitelisting thing, but to sum up:
new districts being built
a look at post-scarcity society
Some viewing into the universe function (money, etc) as a whole.
I can probably recreate it. I really need to put this Lore into context anyway, like obviously I want to push as much of it as possible into the world but it needs to be formatted better and I'm not sure where any of it goes just yet.
