FOUR FORCES.
FOUR FUTURES.

• Start with four separate baselines: recognisable Humans using Human-made equipment; Gaia as Earth's organic living world; alien vascular flesh called Corruption; manufactured geometric Machines called Caretakers.
• Corruption's incursion on Earth originates at the crashed city-sized alien prison mothership. Its spread moves outward from that source; do not make every organism or machine an offshoot of the ship.
• The mothership held the primordial prisoner; it did not create Corruption at the crash. The Caretakers transported it and remain an independent manufactured faction, not another form of the same flesh.
• Keep materials legible. Humans use fabric, conventional metal, concrete and recognisable technology. Gaia uses fur, feathers, skin, bark, roots and organic protective evolution. Corruption uses alien muscle, vascular strands and membranes. Caretakers use fabricated metal, ceramic, joints and machinery.
• Baseline Gaia has no metallic armour, manufactured joints or cyan Machine lights. Baseline Caretakers have no flesh, organs, animal anatomy or living bark. Damage does not reveal a hidden shared biomass.
• All six faction pairings remain hostile, and Human enclaves fight one another. Gaia's resistance and renewal can destroy occupied routes and works through the organic responses of Earth's living world. Its consciousness, will and coordination remain unresolved.
• Show faction baseline art separately from alteration studies. Any body changed by another faction must be explicitly identified as an exceptional captured, infested, reconstructed or colonised case.
• Origin, anatomy, current control and allegiance remain separate in those exceptional cases. Material mixing does not establish a new faction or automatically recruit a host to its captor.
• Hostile processes differ: Corruption assimilates; Caretakers physically reconstruct selected captives; Humans retask accessible equipment or constrain samples; Gaia attacks, grows and colonises through local ecological processes.
• The incursion source is a history and direction of spread, not a universal control cable. Do not invent a mandatory physical tether, a fixed distance limit, shared omniscience or a promise that destroying the mothership switches every infestation off.
• Observation and withdrawal remain tactical and costly. Clear faction silhouettes must not imply safety, predictable allegiance for every individual or guaranteed escape.
• Specific units, social arrangements, conversion mechanisms, battlefields and systems remain proposals. No playable combat, universal infection mechanic, final geography or exact mothership dimensions are established.
• Selected names remain Humans, Gaia, Corruption and Caretakers. Transport origin, destination and crash cause remain unknown; ancient and self-designated names are left for later lore.

The current author direction updates earlier world and faction references. The detailed proposals explore that foundation and do not establish implemented game behaviour.