"History is just violence in fancier clothes."
Welcome to the Cluster a fractured galaxy born from catastrophe, reconnected by alien megastructures, and teetering on the edge of war. In Armournaut, you play as a mercenary pilot caught between superpowers, corporations, and mysteries older than humanity itself. From the ashes of Old Earth to the carnage of the Frontier, this setting spans hundreds of habitable worlds, each shaped by isolation, ideology, and ambition.
Learn how humanity scattered, survived, and spread again across the stars and how the rise of Armournauts has turned elite warriors into private empires. The Temple, Venti Republic, and Lunar Union: three great superpowers locked in a cold war that grows hotter by the year. Discover the Pillars alien structures that bend time and space and the strange materials they eject into the void.
If you’re looking for an accessible gateway into the game’s lore before diving into deeper topics like Regions, Sophontology, or the Starmap, this is the place to begin.
For an overview of the game lore, click here
Humanity fled to the stars far more than it conquered them. The Scattering, miraculous, inscrutable resulted in a lucky smearing of peoples across the cluster. Survivors clawed their way back from oblivion by leeching off the corpse of old earth: the Pillars, vast menhir that stitched civilization back together. Now three bloated superpowers squabble over scraps while the Frontier dangles like fresh meat. Mercenaries fight the wars, corporations bankroll the peace and the next great collapse is being shorted. Welcome to 2821.
The Temple Sphere grinds minds into the great work, the Venti Republic drowns dissent in criptoscrip and The Lunar Union swallows worlds whole under the banner of "unity." The Core pretends it's neutral, bloodless and blameless. While Jambles is where the superpowers test their weapons and soldiers on one another. The Frontier is a gold rush for the desperate and the greedy.
Cartographers image the burgeoning mass of humanity as best they can from within it. The bloated Superpowers steadily metastasise while the great body of the cluster ails and fails. Tap a planet, See who owns it or who wants to own it. Navigate the stars like a mercenary, a smuggler, or a tourist looking to see the sights.
Corridor space chews up ships that stray too far while cycler stations sell oxygen at a markup and Jaunt beds trade years for light-years. The unlucky travellers wake to find their contracts sold to the highest bidder and the lucky stay put because a sailor learns all too late that the sea takes as much as it gives.
Seize the day while you can because the board bids on tomorrow. Highland, Zhànchē, McCool, Seaside Manufacturing, Corvus Engramics serving these brands pays far better than serving any flag.
Laws are for people who can't afford lawyers. The Saulchus Combine deals in man's menagerie of friends no mater how dangerous or illicit. The Relay Rats risk it all smuggling under the noses of the Superpowers. The New Monaco Mob organises crime, same as it ever was.
War is too important to leave to governments. The 13th Ward Gallowglass fights for scripture and the republic. Rex Panthera kills without witnesses. The Farimba Extremophiles wear living armor and old grudges. Seaside's fleet bombards with unparalleled and extreme prejudice. The Lunar Irregular Corp functions as the jackboot internship for all those unfortunate enough to be born outside the Union.
All known intelligent life traces its origins to Old Earth, however sapience is not exclusive to humanity. Anthro-divergent and speciated persons, for example, were created through human genetic engineering. Androids are largely organic, artificially created beings indistinguishable from humans in appearance yet far stronger, durable, and flexible. Artificial Intelligences range from predictable, reliable language models to deluded and malevolent entities. As for the Pillars… they remain a mystery.
War, industry and leisure require the endless production of specialised vehicles. Countless factories make motorbikes, cars, trucks, planes, helicopters, aerostats, tanks, jets, ships, submarines, shuttles, landers, walkers, crawlers, haulers and space craft. Armournauts prize one vehicle above all the Mobile Ordinance Armour (MOA), versatile and deadly it has fought on every world and heaped fortunes at the feet of the most skilled pilots.
Money is dead but not forgotten, like a phoenix it has returned in a new from, untraceable and unbound by any government. Don't get to excited taxmen these days wear power armour.
The Venti Republic is a patchwork of cutthroat states. Prosperity here means everyone for themselves and success is measured by how much you can hoard. Central authority is wrestled back and forth between the powerful at the cost of everyone else.
The Temple is a machine obsessed with escaping reality. Ruled by a thought-caste, it sacrifices freedom and individuality to chase a digital utopia where humanity’s flaws can be "fixed" through code. Progress is everything, and dissent is little more than a bug to be erased.
The Lunar Union is a bloated democracy clinging to its fragile utopian dreams. Parity is enforced at gunpoint, with a militarized culture propping up a system that rewards conformity. They call it equality, but it’s really just control wrapped in good intentions.
Dyophidianism worships this paradox through its Twin Snake Gods: Astagon who envenoms with cruel wisdom, and Myggerron who kisses with sweet deceit. What appears as religious tolerance is simply another divine trick. All beliefs feed the gods, even denial. Their followers range from Yilanic Channelers to Ophite cardinals draped in serpentine finery. Every scripture contradicts itself on purpose, the mark of the truly devout of course is ones ability to parse the truth between the words.
The Enazcans chase visions through starvation & pain. Whether they were saved or enslaved by their angelic ancestors matters little to the enazcan of today. Their children belong to the tribe, their bodies become living shrines and their warbands move like single organisms across battlefields. When their bone adorned fighters emerge prayers follow one way or another.
Storians gamble with fate, offering tragedies and triumphs to their silent Galactic Maestro. Their oracles interpret dreams as insight from past lives whilst their warriors fight like actors who've already rehearsed the script. On Holidayman Day, they hang their sorrows on solstice branches like, trading biscuits for presents.
Some seek utopia, others chase personal transcendence through genetic asceticism and all share one creed: existence is a torment to be inured. When a Gene Flagellant takes the field they're testing how much agony they can withstand.
The Xanthic Cloistered Scholars
These digital alchemists pursue the esoteric through quantum hermeticism and AI necromancy, resurrecting dead scholars as chatbot oracles. Their VR sanctums buzz with equations that might gleam insight into the universe or the addled minds of these self dubbed “scholars”
The universe is broken and many believe that the Pillars prove it. Fringe theories claims Pillarite is reality's cancer, seditious matter where physics becomes merely a suggestion. Isn't such a thing worthy of worship?
The Temple's machine orthodoxy, the Venti's cutthroat markets and the Lunar Union's enforced equality. Their fleets patrol trade lanes, their policies dictate survival. Even Armournauts dance to their tune, knowing one contract might mean glory while the next means disappearance. Cross them wisely and serve them carefully. In their game, mercenaries are expensive pawns.
Thousands of fractured governments, each clinging to their slice of rock and ideology. Too weak to challenge the Superpowers but fierce enough to bleed them for inches. Most conflicts die in atmosphere but some spill into the vacuum; especially in places like the Jambles where planetary armies and hired guns collide over borders drawn in primal tribal conflict.
The Core Worlds stand apart from the Superpowers, governing thousands of colonies with independent militaries and cultures. Their peace is fragile and their wars are catastrophic. Seven major conflicts in recent memory with countless proxy battles. When Core nations clash, Armournauts flock like vultures and the Superpowers watch closely.
This is where ideologies go to die in failed revolutions and unending troubles. There are no laws here except what guns enforce and no rulers except for who is currently pointing their gun at you. Mercenaries and pirates hide in impoverished communities or the unexplored wildernesses.
On the frontier, colonies trade in the only currencies that matter: food, water, and protection. This means they're sitting on stockpiles of worthless cryptoscrip all ready to be handed to any Armournaut who can crush their obstacles. Who doesn't love a chance to rewrite your fate in someone else's blood?
Generations born in the low gravity their bones too fragile for any world's pull. From Sophia Station, they extend citizenship to displaced spacers, enforce frontier law, and deploy zero-g specialists where normal troops would falter. Their democracy shines rare in the darkness. Their enforcers need Armournauts for the dirty work gravity demands.
The Triemirate's trade network once dominated the Jambles until one of their own turned against them. Now they scavenge their ruins, fund frontier expansion, and whisper deals with superpowers. Their android Emira watch over their people while Armournauts brave death traps on dead worlds all for relics of a civilization that bought low by the arch-traitor.
They ripped their independence from the Temple, creating two distinct cultures: the gravity-bound Golvakil and the spacer Asuvakil. Both honour the twin snake god and span much of the cluster from the temples sphere to the frontier. For an Armournaut, a Vakil contract offers top credit and a surefire way to earn a Temple kill-order. Choose your side, but know the crosshairs come standard.
Constitutional monarchy, Venti alliances and Pragmatism over pride. Now These reformed Yscenic colonies thrive where their cousins decay, using Armournauts as shields against Yscenic fanaticism.
A dying empire's last gasp. The Yscenics worship dead Earth bloodlines while their world rots beneath them. Caste systems, Genetic purity obsessions, Criminaloids born into chains and a thousand other violations that make up their culture of cruelty. Once mighty, now fascist fossils propped up by mercenaries and fear and yet every year more systems rebel and every day their grip weakens. Armournauts take their credits but sleep with sidearms nobody wants to be the last hired gun standing when this house of cards collapses.
The casino that became a superpower, born from orbital desperation, forged in Adria's wars, now the cluster's gilded temple to fortune. Media empires shape narratives here, universities mint elites and markets speculate on everything. Every dirty coin in the frontier traces back to these glittering rings eventually.
The Ethical Governance Movement wants to replace politicians with cold, perfect AIs from simple policy calculators to full apparitional minds that pivot economies in microseconds. Their activists smuggle governance cores into corrupt legislatures. Their model cities on Idris and Pestralia shine like beacons, held as examples of the prosperity afforded removing people from power. Armournauts take contracts on both sides, because someone always bleeds when utopia gets built.
Groupe Galactique Syndicaliste
GGS turns entire worlds into picket lines, 13 million members has allowed them to mobilise unparalleled influence. On the Frontier, their hired Armournauts protect organisers and kickback at corporate thugs.
These environmentalists guard fragile biomes like holy ground, building sustainable colonies as blueprints to demonstrate the future they envision. Corporations find them more trouble than most pirates as their protests in the lawless frontier become highly destructive.
For over a century, they've fought for those whose bones would snap under a planet's pull. As orbital slums swell, OWL's battle expands proving that life between stars shouldn't mean life without dignity.
Defending speciated humans from bigots and bio-fascists. Selvori warriors, vacuum-adapted colonists, anyone cast as something "other" by birth or choice.
They are the silent passengers of the age. The Sleepers abandon purpose, entering jaunt beds with no intent to wake. Drifting through corridor space, they become ghosts, in a galaxy hurtling toward war and profit.
Hiram Iskaniel's purity crusade spreads like a virus, preaching anti-AI dogma and genetic "righting." Banned in civilized space, it festers in the Jambles' and the frontier cracks, where the Moralis Militia enforces ideology with tribal ferocity. outlawed yet their numbers swell a tide of frightened souls clinging to "human" as the galaxy changes without them.
WAA hates the notion of humanity‘s obsolescence. They find the megacorps all to eager to the replace them with machines or with workers so spineless they might as well be machines.
The stars are their birth right. Since the Scattering, these flotilla descendants have continued the endless transition transience. While settled worlds rise and fall, nomads endure mining asteroids, trading secrets, and drifting through corridors older than human civilization.
When Gystlia died in fire and orbital debris, its survivors took to the stars in ornate war galleys, turning vengeance into religion. Now their Loinken bands roam as raiders and mercenaries, governed by Gyorick arbitrators, and guided by fortress-born Synod. Two truths define them: absolute loyalty to kin and absolute hatred for the GELF.
The Zyrgyzoi emerged from their comet-wracked plant with one lesson: weakness invites destruction. Now their tribute fleets deliver either wealth or annihilation, often on the same trade route. Cross them and expect orbital strikes that erase generations, or Ally with them enjoy protection more reliable than gravity. They remember every slight and every betrayal.
Bonded to living GELF suits from infancy, each of the O is a perfect predator capable of surviving vacuum, poison, or entire platoons. They speak only when paid tribute and fight only for themselves. Transgressors find themselves mulch, enriching the soil of the alien gardens. The Cluster's powers leave their groves untouched and intelligent Armournauts do the same.
This Syn-born cult sees the Scattering as divine wrath and Earth as their stolen birthright. Now they rip habitats from their Lagrange moorings, forging a new ark fleet from salvaged hulls. They will need countless more if they are to make the pilgrimage to old earth. Their Armournauts wage holy war across the cluster.
The Phoenix Court fans Averi revivalism across the cluster, influential in wealth and terror in equal measure. Their magnates trade in cloning secrets while their covert armies carve a path for Magnasanti's return. That sealed orbital is a throne waiting for its empress to wake. When she does, the whole cluster will kneel or burn.
These ideological extremists worship pre-Plenum traditions with calling for a new Lunar Union. For Armournauts who value credits over conscience, Stragovi contracts offer premium pay and a near-certain death sentence.
Their dronesteader allies harbour Guild agents in their bunkers that bristle with autonomous weapons. Viewed by the cluster at large to be pirates, insurgents and worst of all… bankers.
Looming large against the history of violence these individuals have become revered and despised in equal measure. The mercenary class stands to inherit the cluster after the coming war.
Far from asleep at the wheel which is arguably worse. The politicians well aware of a cluster's worth of crime, corruption and cruelty steer the ship even deeper into these troubled waters. A storm brews and too few call for a safer heading.
Opium of the masses, and who can blame them with a Cluster so filled with pain a strife. Isn't better to forget and feel like things are good, isn't their meaning in that?