Every colonist has one of twelve personality archetypes, a wealth tier, a job on a ten-rung ladder, and a personal shift — day, evening or night — so the colony is awake and working around the clock. They sleep, eat, commute and take their leisure where it suits them; they age, couple up, and eventually retire. New colonists come from exactly two places: the colony's Foundry, which grows them from its own resources, and the ten sleeper freighters in orbit, woken one shuttle mission at a time. There is no immigration.
What they want — across ten categories from nourishment and connection to culture, nature and faith — is what pulls the economy forward. Wants create demand; demand opens businesses; businesses need resources you mine, refine, manufacture or import. As colonists grow wealthier they aspire to higher-tier experiences that are hungrier for power and materials, and the whole colony has to climb to meet them.
You place the civic backbone directly: power, life support, clinics, schools. Everything else you found as districts — give an area a character, and the colony fills it to demand, resource availability and profit: several coffee shops, competing gyms, the occasional business that fails and closes. It grows with you rather than only because of you.
The planet itself is generated from a seed and different every game: nine biomes, herds and flocks, megafauna, rivers, lakes, weather and wind. It was alive before you arrived, and it stays that way.
