Both Fleet and Merchant have a distinct race of aliens in it that have these wild mazelike structures as their home, whereas their home planes are infinite and are similar (merchant takes place in one).
The race is known as the Labyr, and each group of them acts sort of like a single organism that's devoted to one purpose. These groups are linked together tenuously by more of a decentralized power known as the Concords. Labyr are perfectly happy to just fulfill their one purpose forever (and over a geometrically infinite scope), however.
The race has spread throughout parts of the dodecaverse along cadaceal threads. It's maybe implied in the eldritch library lore (as one of the *many* conflicting lore sources) that the library is one such iteration of their race, with that particular site being the accumulation of books.
Basically anywhere langer{} is being used, the Labyr are going to show up.
They spread across flat and homogeneous dimensions, achieving mathematical infinity and twisting connections to form their kind of quasi hivemind. They're definitely individuals but aren't particularly devoted to anything other than their singular purpose or twisting spaces together.
In the case of Fleet, they're co-occupying the Zenith universe with humans and their purpose is encircling Planetary bodies and twisting them into efficient means of resource production that they can then send to their civilizations elsewhere in the dodecaverse. Like humans, they find hyperbolic universes *particularly* useful for resource collection.
In the case of Metchant, which has minimal lore, this universe is one of theirs and you play as one of them. Their purpose here is establishing trade networks or something. Merchant/The wheel is probably one of those human slave colonies, where they're using your society as the substrate for an LLM
Drillr and Omega seem to fit into this lore, along with Automaton and other space games.
It's worth pointing out that this universe has probably the highest-tech version of humanity in the dodecaverse, for a couple reasons:
The universe here is very similar to the parent one, so the technology transferred over a lot better.
There's been a couple thousand years of improvement on the old technological principles.
This civilization is actively populating the dodecaverse still, in fact that's the purpose of this universe before it also goes hyperbolic.
The sheer technological superiority of the human civilization here can't be understated -- they perfected the Automaton issues that led to genocidal Tangles and they have better ways of traversing the dodecaverse as well. They also lack the resource scarcity issues that the Cygnus pentad group have. Given this, the Labyr take on way more of a horror aesthetic as they're able to *domesticate* a human group that's orders of magnitudes more advanced than most sci-fi settings.
The humans in this universe have a solid understanding of sentience, which is pretty rare, and this is what's allowed them to fix the Automaton problem.
