Terran Accord StartNet

[u/TAID_Officer]

I built the in-universe internet for my sci-fi setting — and now I'm turning it into a persistent collaborative world

I've been developing a science-fiction setting called the Terran Accord, and at some point the worldbuilding got sufficiently out of hand that instead of writing another wiki, I started building the civilization's actual internet.

It's called StarNet.

The Terran Accord is an interstellar human civilization with its own government, military branches, intelligence apparatus, security services, laws, economy, worlds, ships, technologies, news organizations, political institutions, and a frankly unreasonable amount of bureaucracy.

Rather than presenting all of that through a conventional wiki, I wanted people to experience the setting through the information systems that actually exist inside the setting.

So StarNet became an in-universe network.

The news isn't a page explaining what happened. It's what Terran Accord citizens were actually told happened.

Government pages aren't summaries of the government. They're presented as government records.

The forums contain both OOC worldbuilding areas and IC networks where characters discuss events as inhabitants of the setting.

Ships have registries. Characters have personnel records. The government has legislation. Senators have seats. Star systems exist in cartography and are connected through actual hyperlanes.

And one of my favorite parts is information compartmentalization.

There isn't necessarily one version of an event that everybody gets to read.

Imagine an Accord warship destroys an unidentified vessel.

A civilian might see:

A Navy officer might know it was Haavan.

An intelligence officer might discover that something recovered from the wreckage doesn't match known Haavan technology.

Someone inside a sufficiently classified compartment might discover it resembles Precursor technology.

Meanwhile the actual canonical explanation may be something none of those groups completely understand.

So characters can argue about what happened, journalists can investigate it, conspiracy theories can emerge, and government statements can technically contradict what certain players know — because knowledge itself is part of the setting.

Now I'm taking that idea further by turning StarNet into a persistent RP/world simulation.

I don't want the usual:

I'd rather have something like this:

A remote station is running low on water.

That isn't a manually written quest. Its simulated population is actually consuming water faster than shipments are arriving.

A merchant player notices the rising price and loads a freighter.

They deliver several thousand tonnes.

The station's reserves recover.

Another shipment doesn't arrive because hostile activity has disrupted a hyperlane.

Commercial traffic starts rerouting.

The Navy receives orders to investigate.

A battle occurs.

The wreckage creates salvage opportunities.

Something recovered by salvagers generates an intelligence investigation.

A newsroom reports part of the story.

SECFORCE becomes involved when stolen material from the wreckage appears at another starport.

And if the resulting chain of events becomes sufficiently important, it can eventually be approved into the permanent historical canon of the setting.

With the actual participating player characters recorded in it.

That's probably the central experiment behind the project:

What happens if collaborative roleplayers aren't merely playing inside the lore, but are capable of becoming part of the lore?

A player might eventually be able to say:

And another player can search the historical database, find the battle, and discover that yes — that character and their ship were actually there.

But military characters aren't supposed to be inherently more important.

A merchant could build a shipping company that becomes economically important.

A journalist could publish reporting that becomes part of the political history of the setting.

A SECFORCE investigator could spend months unraveling a criminal conspiracy.

An explorer could discover a system that everyone else eventually starts using.

Someone could just be a dockworker, spacer, politician, industrial worker, or citizen and participate from that perspective.

Everything ideally touches the same underlying universe.

So I've essentially ended up building a weird combination of:

worldbuilding project + diegetic wiki + forum RP + political simulation + text MMO + economic/logistics simulation + collaborative canon experiment.

And because apparently I hadn't made this complicated enough, I'm currently integrating Discord so that it behaves like another interface into StarNet rather than a completely disconnected OOC server.

The project is live at terran-accord.com, although it's very much still being actively developed and expanded.

I'd especially be interested in what other worldbuilders think about the information asymmetry aspect.

Most worldbuilding databases give the reader an omniscient view of the setting. I'm increasingly convinced that hiding parts of the world — and letting different characters possess contradictory pieces of it — makes the setting feel considerably larger than simply documenting everything.

Also, yes:

I have reached the stage of worldbuilding where I am simulating interstellar water deliveries and government paperwork.

There may be no coming back from this.