The idea for Iridium Moons started somewhere in 2021 as a Space Opera inspired by Cyberpunk 2077, the new Dune movie, and Boardwalk Empire. At that time, it was intended as a setting for a pen and paper roleplaying game in the style of Traveller or Stars Without Number. When I started picking up videogame development as a new hobby in 2024, making some kind of game set in the world of Iridium Moons was immediately one of the first options. Having a world that is meant to be described to players in a few evocative sentences is a very different thing from having a world that is well suited for actually building interactable 3D environments, though. Pen and paper games and videogames also lend themselves to different types of stories that can be told in engaging ways, and so while it is still basically the same universe that is retaining the same name (because it's a great name and these are hard to find), it just felt right to create a new star sector for this game, set probably a few centuries earlier in history. Instead of 12 planets, I feel I can cover all the environments I am really interested in on just four. And of the 14 different alien species, I intend to use only seven. That just makes thing way more easier on me when it comes to creating environment assets and character models. But it also allows me to greatly simplify my original network of factions and conflicting interests to something that can be easier communicated through in-game text, instead of the players in a campaign being in a constant conversation with the gamemaster in a pen and paper campaign.
The Known Space of the Iridium Moons setting is a much smaller place than most other Space Operas, but it is still a massive place. The total combined population of all known inhabited plants is around 100 billion people, of which the vast majority is living on the about one dozen homeworlds of the various different species. Only a very small number of colonized planets have populations greater than in the low tens of millions, and while there might be well over a hundred colony worlds, these barely amount to more than a drop in the bucket compared to the much larger populations of the homeworlds. In the eyes of the people from the homeworlds, most colonies are isolated small countries at best. While hyperspace drives make travel between different star system possible, travelling to another world typically takes at least several weeks and often months. While this is generally not an issue for huge cargo freighters hauling rare industrial metals from remote mining outposts to the factories and shipyards at the homeworlds, the only common type of passengers on these long journeys are settlers hired by big mining companies starting new opperations, which typically is intended as a one-way trip. And while faster-than-light travel is possible, direct communication between star systems is not. As such, the giant freighters delivering new supplies and picking up cargoes of precious metal are often the only connection many colony worlds have with the rest of Known Space.
Iridium Moons is set in one particularly remote corner of Known Space whose time of industrial importance has already come and gone. 300 years ago, over a hundred million people have been settled in the star cluster centered around four fully habitable planets, to work in or provide food and other services to support the giant mines digging for Iridium, Palladium, and Rhodium. These rare elements are rarely found in significant concentrations anywhere in the universe, and as such the huge demand for these materials for the production of fusion ractors, hyperspace drives, and gravity generators makes it economically worthwhile to mine any major deposits, even if it takes transporting millions of people across hundreds of lightyears. But once most of the main deposists in the region had been exhausted, governments and companies from the homeworlds lost interest in further supporting and subsidizing these colonies, and as fewer shipments of valuable metals were shipped out, fewer deliveries of new supplies arrived. Many people chose to either return to the home planets their great-grandparents had arrived from or sign up for new contracts in the newly opend mines in neighboring star sectors. But for many people, these planets were the only world they, their parents, and their grandparents had ever known, and the four colonies of the star cluster still have a population of nearly 80 million people from seven diferent species.
Once governments and major companies started pulling their money out of the region, they were selling off any local infrastructure and industrial equipment to the highest bidder. Since most people in the colonies had been government employees or living in towns that were entirely owned by a single company, food, housing, and most services had been provided by their employers, and very few people had any significant amounts of cash on hand. The notable exception to this were criminals, who were now sweeping up almost any property of value at a bargain price. With government oversight from the homeworlds completely disappearing in a matter of just a few years, mining operations could continue at much lower wages than was previously legal, generating a much more modest but still considerable income for the new owners who became insanely rich compared to the rapidly dropping living standards of the rest of the remaining civilizations. It didn't take long for these new oligarchs to build themselves palaces and style themselves with titles to elevate themselves to the nobility of what were now their worlds.
Many people moved out of the major cities to take up a life of farming, and within the span of just one generation it became hard for those born into this new world to believe that their ancestors had travelled the stars. With fewer imports of advanced electronics, large parts of the population are limited to technologies at the level of the late 20th century in their daily life, and the marvels of an interstellar civilization are mostly limited to the remaining main spaceports where gigantic freighters still come to land once or twice per months to pick up new shipments of metals from the refineries.
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