January 2022 Challenge: The Lands of the Living

[Diamond]

This a 'super-Earth', a terrestrial planet that is significantly larger than ours. A lot of the science is probably suspect here, but meh. Like gravity - in reality it'd probably be much higher than Earth-standard, but I've hand-waved that away because reasons.

A trio of colony ships, off course and lost and running low on supply and hope, landed here and quickly found that they were trapped - the planet is extremely poor in mineral content. Very little useable metal - very very little. So little in fact, that they were unable to effect the significant repairs needed to get spaceworthy again. Over time, their geneticists started to figure out ways to adapt the native plants (some of which are incredibly hard and durable) to fill many of the functions that metal would normally serve. But by this time, the new societies had started to regress, to forget their former mission, and settle into life on this world.

Now, a thousand years later, Old Earth is a legend. The planet is covered with cold deserts in the north and south, with a (relatively speaking) thin band of habitable land spanning the Equator - the so-called Lands of the Living. All else is Death. As the planet is so huge though, this habitable band is quite wide north to south, probably around a thousand miles or more. The region on the map is where the colonists originally landed. There are many more areas of civilization, but this is considered to contain the oldest cultures.

### Latest WIP ###